Where in the world is John Henzell?

It was thanks to the vagaries of Iranian immigration policy that I got to be threatened by a sword-wielding (if somewhat camp-looking) gladiator.

And that the official two-person expedition by the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club to scale the highest peak in the Middle East ended with us in two different countries, establishing that Mt Damavand was more than 6000m above (Dead) Sea level.

But all that was in the future.

When the day I flew from Dushanbe in Tajikistan to Tehran turned spectacularly pear-shaped by me being refused entry and deported from Iran, I was still a little disorientated when I turned up on the Dubai Marina doorstep of my hospitable but perplexed friends Suze and Pete.

The deportation was galling but would not have been a big deal if not for Wendy, another climber from the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club who was about to fly to Tehran the next day to join me. So Plan B was to see if I could convince the Iranian embassy in Abu Dhabi to let me in so I could join her the next day rather than having her arrive alone in a country to which she’d never previously travelled.

A sharp rebuff from the embassy — “We will have to send this application to Tehran but you should know within three weeks” — saw me owing Wendy a dozen cans of cider by way of compensation and searching for Plan C instead.

And that’s how I ended up in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Of all the nations within a short flight of the Dhabs, this was the one I’d most wanted to get to before I left the region so I booked a cheap flight and landed in Amman, arriving on Independence Day when the populace were buying Jordanian flags to celebrate their independence from British rule.

Early on the morning after I arrived, I travelled to Petra, an ancient city which was the capital of the Nabatean empire 2000 years ago but which was overtaken by the Romans, fell into disuse and then effectively was unknown to the outside world until about 200 years ago.

Now it’s one of the world’s most impressive sights.

My introduction was via the Petra by Night tour, where you walk down the Siq — the canyon which restricted access to the city — by candlelight.

It was a full moon night too, which reduced the dependence on candles.

Then the Treasury, an iconic structure which is the first major monument seen on arrival at the site, came into view.

I went back in early the following day before the tour buses arrived. I thought the most enjoyable part of it is seeing people emerge from the Siq and see the Treasury.

It was still relatively cool so I made my way up via a mountain path to the High Place, where sacrifices were once made to appease whatever god the Nabateans believed in.

A special groove had been cut to channel the blood from the sacrifice.

(I suspect the choice of species involved operates on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy)

The views over the main valley of Petra justified the trip on their own.

The tourist vendors took a pretty laidback approach to their task. Sometimes literally.

But it was a nice change from the remorseless hassle of places like India or Morocco or Bali.

I headed down the far side, taking refuge from the heat in the middle of the day, using the thermal mass of the temple buildings.

A sandstorm rolled in as I walked down the collonaded street but I continued on to the Monastery, located up a side valley at the end of the site.

At the bottom of the route was a warning that it was dangerous without a guide. The only apparent danger I could see was to the locals’ earning capacity if tourists realised they didn’t need to hire a guide. The route itself was fine.

This vendor partway up to the monastery chose the edge of the cliff as his sleeping place, after a sisha session.

My guess is he isn’t a sleepwalker.

The monastery was worth the effort, particularly because of the cafe with oh-so-comfortable setees set up facing it…

I walked out at dusk, until I was called in by one of the Bedu and plied with tea once he’d completed the full maghreb — dusk– prayer.

He gently proselytised me about Islam, citing its benefits in good moral living and refusal of alcohol.

But I’d already promised myself a beer in the bar outside the entrance that’s set in a 2000-year-old cave.

By the time I arrived back at the Siq, the evening’s candlelight effort was underway again.

All this earned me a telling off from the head of security, who threatened me with jail. But it was worth it to see Petra by moonlight.

After a night (and the promised Cave Bar beer), I headed to Wadi Rum, where I joined a 4×4 tour in the world’s most decrepit LandCruiser.

After a tour of Arizona-style natural arches, sand dunes and some bizarre petroglyph-like rock formations, we arrived at the campsite set up to have a killer sunset view.

Then we headed into the Bedouin tent for dinner. Almost everyone slept inside the tent but I dragged my mattress out onto the dune to sleep under the stars. As ever, I woke up to find a series of animal tracks around me.

I moved on to an awesome 15th century village called Dana, located on the edge of the scarp leading down the Aqaba valley separating Jordan from Israel, then the next day five of us hiked down the wadi to an ancient copper-mining site that has been worked for 6000 years and was mentioned in the bible.

Towards the bottom of the valley, we began encountering Bedouin shepherds, who immediately invited us in for tea.

Unlike in the cities, we met the entire family rather than just the men.

The other four went back up to Dana with a car they’d arranged but I opted to hitch along the Dead Sea Highway.

Jordan’s proximity to Israel was usually apparent, notwithstanding the peace treaty between the two nations.

You can swim anywhere in the Dead Sea but most do so at the resorts on the northern end near Amman so they can use the freshwater showers to wash off the salt, because the water is nine times as saline as the sea.

The novelty value of bobbing a couple of inches higher and being unable to swim on your front lasted about 15 minutes before the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

But the most amusing part was learning on the beach here via text that Wendy made it to the top of Mt Damavand. The summit is about 5600m or so, but since I was currently more than 400m below sea level, our expedition had covered more than 6000m of height difference.

I headed back to Amman and for my last full day in Jordan, I went to Jerash, a town just north of the capital which has some of the world’s best-preserved Roman ruins.

And a local history group had created a centurion, gladiator and chariot experience to relive the old days.

But a childhood of being indoctrinated by Asterix and Obelix books meant I was incapable of taking the centurions seriously.

The gladiators were more impressive, in that Oxford Street way.

The chariot riding was a little cheesy but was done at a pace which showed that OSH hadn’t been consulted.

Then it was back for one last night in Amman before flying to Abu Dhabi then on to New York, assuming the American immigration officials were more amenable than their Iranian counterparts…

“No visa.”

The Iranian immigration officer was as gruff as he was direct.

“Can you tell me why?” I implored. “Am I not eligible for a visa? Or have decided I am a bad person? Do you know that Australians and New Zealanders, unlike Americans and Brits, can get visas on arrival?”

I silently cursed the Emirati habit of putting occupation on the UAE resident’s visa, so it was clear — in English and Arabic — that I was a journalist. Was it because I was on my second tourist visa in three months that they decided I wasn’t actually a genuine tourist?

But the only response was: “No visa.”

Then he told me I would have to get on the plane on its return flight to Dushanbe in Tajikistan. I was being deported.

“But why?”

No response, just a polite but firm insistence that I get on the plane. I didn’t have a return entry visa to Tajikistan so that was not shaping up as a very helpful option so instead I asked if there was a flight to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

There was, and two hours later I was enjoying the view over the wing of the Iranian Airways plane of Mt Damavand, a 5600m volcano that is the highest peak in the Middle East and which was the subject of my visit to Iran, the culmination of my get-fit trip to the ’stans to prepare myself for the CDT.

It was time to think up a Plan B…

For a day and a half, I was nowhere: stranded in no-man’s-land between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. And in a blizzard.

I’d already gone through the Kyrgyz border controls and, with a single-entry visa, couldn’t return.

The Kyrgyz post had been located sensibly in the shelter of the valley at the foot of the Pamirs but the Tajik equivalent is on the actual border, 20km further on just over the 4200m pass crossing the mountain range that divides the two countries.

Unknown to me at the time, Kyrgyzstan had been running out of fuel, one of few negative ramifications of the short and sharp uprising which had overturned the government. What it meant was traffic between the southern Kyrgyz capital of Osh and Murgab in the eastern Pamirs trickled to a halt. And what that meant for me was I was stranded in no man’s land.

My arrival early in the morning had coincided with height of the fuel shortage. Several vehicles went north into Kyrgyzstan that day but not a single one went south into Tajikistan.

The soldiers and police at the Kyrgyz border were friendly enough and we whiled away the boredom with games of the central Asian version of backgammon. But they were equally adamant I couldn’t stay there overnight.

Fortunately for me, there was a Kyrgyz family living a short distance away in no-man’s-land took me in while I waited for a ride.

The enforced stay provided a wonderful view of life within a traditional family.

Not least of which is how much work the women do. Here, one of the daughters was milking a nak — a female yak, although I suspect it was actually a dzhou — during one of the regular snow storms.

A 4×4 Lada packed to the rafters passed southbound early the next morning and then an English couple, Charlie and Nina, arrived, having been told by the border guards — bribed by me with a pack of Chinese cigarettes — that I was stranded here.

Charlie was a banker in the City and was made redundant in the global financial crisis and they figured that with the job situation looking so dire for the forseeable future, it was time to buy a 4×4 and do a mammoth figure-eight loop from London via central Asia, the subcontinent, Singapore and China.

Besides the adventure, it was a wise call because some of their colleagues who stayed to search for work are still unemployed, more than a year later.

As they put it in their blog, NoJobWillTravel.co.uk: “Nestled in a rocky, snow covered valley at the base of the 4,282m Kizyl-Art Pass, the Kyrgyz border post feels like the remotest border point on earth. Certainly not a place we’re expecting to see foreigners.

“Having stamped us out of the country, though, the border officials tell us there’s an Australian” – I travel on my Australian passport – “hiker stuck in no-man’s land a kilometre on, waiting for a lift.

“We try to imagine what sort of tourist would knowingly find himself stranded within the 21km of no-man’s land between the two isolated borders…

“As we pull up to a solitary Kyrgyz farmhouse, an excited, bearded and bespectacled Westerner, in walking boots and a big jacket, springs from the house and walks towards us. No wonder John’s surprised to see us, he’s been here for a day and a half waiting for a lift of any description – the fuel shortage in southern Kyrgyzstan has decimated nearly all the border traffic.

” ‘You need a lift? Hop in!’ Soon John plus rucksack are loaded into the back of the car.”

And very grateful I was too, as only a day and a half in no-man’s-land can engender.

We drove on to the Tajik border, located in a series of former fuel tanks and shipping containers in as godforsaken a site as it would be possible to imagine. I had a mild altitude headache just from being there for the two hours or so of border formalities and couldn’t imagine being stationed there.

That pass proved to be mild. Another was at 4655m — a little lower than the summit of Mont Blanc or 900m higher than Aoraki Mount Cook — and all helped to make this highway the one with the highest average height.

The scenery had a stark beauty to it. Almost nothing grew here and after an hour or so along the crumbling highway, built for the Soviet military in the 1930s and 1940s and seemingly not maintained since, we arrived at the lakeside village of Karakol.

The lake, created by a meteorite, was frozen over and the town seemed to be too.

Just beyond in a site even more remote some poor soldier was stationed at a watchtower keeping eye on the border with China. This area had been the scene of the Great Game, a jostling match between imperial interests because this is where the Soviet, British and Chinese geographical spheres of influence intersected.

We changed money. Two US$100 notes produced this embarrassing wodge of Tajik notes.

After a night in the regional capital, Murgab, I went up to a hot springs while Charlie and Nina continued to Khorog.

I’d hoped to do some yurt to yurt hiking but a late and snowy spring left me about a fortnight too early because the nomads had not moved to their summer grazing in the high country.

But I got to sleep in a yurt, under a sky of swirling stars which I could see through the hole in the top of the yurt.

This was a slightly touristy yurt rather than the genuine variety as used seasonally in the high country.

The radiators kind of give that away, channeling hot water from the hot springs to provide a yurt with central heating.

By the time I returned to Murgab, the fuel shortage had been resolved so I booked a seat in a share taxi to the western Pamiri capital, Khorog. When I saw my mode of transport was going to be the mid-1970s Soviet-era automotive awesomeness that is a UAZ 3741, I had an inkling this was going to be very authentic, very local and very uncomfortable.

That initial impression was confirmed when the door creaked open and I discovered there as many trussed-up live sheep on board as passengers.

My pack was hoisted into the back, coming to rest on the topmost of eight of the live sheep’s less fortunate brethren, which had been slaughtered and skinned then ready to transport to the market at Khorog.

When we reached the first police checkpoint, instead of gathering our passports the driver got his knife out and cut off a chunk of mutton and took that in instead. And it seemed to work because we were on the road again in a flash.

Khorog had a nice and prosperous feel to it, which was a stark contrast to how it had been when it backed the wrong side in the brutal six-year civil war that wracked Tajikistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This chaikarna — teahouse — beside the river had been built in the local park where 15 years earlier, the economy had become so bad that money was abandoned in favour of a system of barter and local people ripped up the park to grow food.

After a day, I headed down to the fortnightly market at Ishkashim, which was held across the river in Afghanistan but could be reached without the need of a visa.

The drive along the Panj river that forms the boundaries between Tajikistan and Afghanistan was awesome. At first there seemed to be a millennium of difference between the two sides, with the Tajik one having a road and electricity and the Afghan one having little more than a donkey track.

But as we drove along, the Tajik side deteriorated and we ran into NGO-funded road crews turning the Afghan track into one fit for vehicles.

The next morning, I wandered over to the Afghan Bazaar, flanked by a mix of Tajik and Afghan soldiers who were mostly tooled up ready for bad stuff to happen.

The market was a fascinating mix of two cultures, even if Rambo movies are entirely cross cultural.

This was where the Persian and Indo-European worlds mixed with the Turkic and Eurasian ones, genetically and linguistically.

A coterie of Tajik women ran a chai and plov stall in the market but refused to charge me.

At this point, I had in cash on me about 10 years worth of their annual fiscal income.

I ran into Charlie and Nina again and scored another lift from them, this time heading up the Wakhan corridor, a valley split between Tajikistan and Afghanistan which was a Great Game solution designed to ease the tensions between the three great imperial nations at the point where British, Russian and Chinese interests met.

The people in this region are mostly Ismaili, a tolerant third strand of Islam compared to Sunni and Shia.

The Aga Khan, the Ismaili spiritual leader, had played a big part in this region and supported a series of homestays like this one.

This was classic Pamiri architecture. The reception room has five pillars — representing both the five main prophets and the five tenets of the faith — and the roof had four layers to represent the elements of earth, water, fire and air.

Our host was the grandson of a noted sufi, or mystic, and took us on a tour of the rebuilt home of his famous ancestor, including playing traditional instruments.

There had been new snow overnight but we pushed on, a little worried about the 4300m pass we had to cross.

But a quirk of geography and climate meant that although there was substantial snow here at 3400m, it was entirely dry nearly 1000m higher.

The valleys on the Afghan side were often kept perfectly, as you’d expect from an entirely autonomous subsistence farming operation.

There were still mines here from when this was the front line of the Cold War between Western and Soviet interests.

Another NGO was clearing the mines on the Tajik side, although the opiate trafficking from Afghanistan through Tajikistan to Europe took advantage of what was a pretty porous border.

And there were relics of the Afghan wars.

On what we thought was going to be our last day on the Afghan border, Charlie got down on one knee and proposed to Nina.

After 11 months on the road, they actually not only tolerated but actively enjoyed each other’s company, so marriage ought to be a breeze.

We toasted the engagement with Baltica Nine (anyone who has been to central Asia will know what this means!) then we all went back to the room we all shared, it being five days since our last shower… Yep, romance is alive and well.

There are two roads between the Pamirs and Dushanbe, the capital. One is really terrible and the other is even worse.

The terrible one was closed by landslides so we had to take the even worse one, which was clearly not long for this world.

The Pamiri part of Tajikistan had sided with the rebels in the ultimately unsuccessful civil war so the central government has been treating them like second class citizens ever since.

And I flew to Iran, getting an excellent view of Mt Damavand, the 5600m volcano which is the Middle East’s highest peak.

I was supposed to climb it. Supposed to…

The crucial moment in the spring uprising that overturned Kyrgyzstan’s government was when the police and the army realised that they liked shooting their own citizens a lot less than they liked the breathtakingly kleptocratic regime they were supposed to be defending.

Or so it was explained to me on a warm spring day on the one-month anniversary as I sat outside the battered gates of the Kyrgyz parliament, in front of an impromptu martyrs’ memorial which had bedecked the security fence and past which a steady procession of citizens walked and remembered.

A month earlier, I’d been sitting at my desk in the newsroom in Abu Dhabi. At first, I overheard the BBC World Service broadcast mentioning riots in Kyrgyzstan and didn’t pay a lot of attention to it but within a matter of hours, the broadcaster was reporting that the government had been overturned and Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev had fled.

Since I was headed to Kyrgyzstan, I began paying rather more attention, especially when Bakiyev retreated to his regional stronghold in Osh, in the southern half of the geomorphically divided country, and maintained his claim to power.

This was sounding like a a protracted battle between the northern and southern factions of the country but eventually Bakiyev blinked and took the offer of safe passage out of the country in return for renouncing his premiership.

By the time I arrived via a share taxi from Almaty, there was at first no sign of any violence. But then I noticed the burned-out building on the main square.

Closer examination suggested that this might not have been an accident…

Across the road was the museum, which had on the door the names of the 80-plus people who’d died in the short and sharp revolution.

Just outside was a little circle of rocks, a photo and some flowers showing where one of those names had died.

Two minutes walk away was the Parliament, where the gates still showed the scars of being rammed with a truck by the angry crowd.

In Bishkek and then later in Kyrgyzstan, I heard that the revolt was sparked when an already kleptocratic regime ramped it up by several notches, selling the utility companies to a Cypriot investment company when promptly raised heating prices by 60 per cent. Most people in the city have municipal heating for the five months of cold weather so they had no option.

Then they discovered the president’s son, who used his position to become the head of the local mafia and who took a cut on all imported items from Turkey and China, was behind the Cypriot shelf company.

That’s when the riots began. The army was sent to quell it but the protesters took over two army trucks full of weapons and ammunition, which might explain why the protest then moved to Bishkek and ramped up.

This store just off the main square was one connected to the son so it was looted and then set alight by the crowd.

The people were exceptionally friendly.

My first experience in the country (not counting the gorgeous Kyrgyz woman in short shorts who sat next to me on the bus) was the bus driver refusing to take my 60som (about $1) fare.

At the time, I was carrying all the money I’d need in Iran, where sanctions prevent the use of western bank and credit cards, so I estimated I had about 8-10 years of his salary in my pocket.

Then I went back to the state museum, which didn’t seem to have changed since the fall of the Soviet Union, other than they’d moved Lenin’s statue from the front to the back.

Lenin lived on in bronze. It felt like it’s not so much that they’re nostalgic for a return of the communist era so much as they haven’t found anything else to replace it. And it’d cost a fortune to make a new series of bronze effigies, and it would probably be of the current president who would be overturned by the time they were finished.

The top floor featured an awesome 1980s-era mural of Cowboy Ronald Reagan riding a Pershing missile.

Bishkek was nice enough but I pushed on to Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second city, which involved driving over a couple of 3000m-plus passes where the local nomad herders had set up their yurts.

Osh was located in the breadbasket of the Fergana valley. The main reason was to go to the bazaar, reputed to be one of the best in central Asia. And it was both interesting and very authentic, not to mention very photogenic.

In a riverside park near the bazaar, many of the soviet traits were still in full force, such as the chess players.

As in Bishkek, Lenin was still in situ. And as in Bishkek, it seemed that they simply hadn’t found something better to replace him.

With the red star, you’d swear it was still 1989.

The next day I took a share taxi to Gulcha, along the start of the Pamir military highway that was built in the 1930s to allow fast access to the region where the Great Game — as described in Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim — had been played at the crossroads of British, Soviet and Chinese territorial interests.

By chance, I arrived on Victory Day, celebrating the defeat of Germany in the Great Patriotic War, as the WWII is known here.

Almost the entire town had gathered at the sports field for the commemoration.

I spotted a sea of felt hats at one side, which on closer inspection proved to be Kyrgyz veterans of the great patriotic war.

They would all have to have been aged at least in their mid-eighties to have taken part.

A stirring martial tune — which I took to be the Kyrgyz national anthem, although I really have no idea — prompted some emotional responses from the veterans.

The younger Kyrgyz seemed to take it equally seriously.

The road quickly deteriorated then went over a couple of high passes to the town of Sary Tash, the last one in Kyrgyzstan on the Pamir Highway.

And it was the most godforsaken, frozen and windswept piece of tundra you would ever find.

I took a wander through the windswept and frozen town.

There were a bunch of bored kids taking turns to through rocks at a post, but my eyes were on the background.

This was the start of the Pamirs and tomorrow I was due to head into the range and into Tajikistan.

When I first arrived quietly at the semi-abandoned Soviet-era cosmological research station high in the Tien Shan mountains above Almaty, it was to the tune of a middle aged Kazakh woman berating her downcast Russian partner.

She halted her tirade when she realised my presence and he came over, introducing himself as Valentin amid a waft of vodka breath so strong it seemed in danger of spontaneous ignition.

I didn’t realise how emblematic this encounter was to be of my brief time at the old research station, to which I’d hiked while waiting for my Tajik visa to be issued by the consulate in Almaty.

The site was classically ex-Soviet, with lots of expensive infrastructure quietly rotting away.

Besides half a dozen empty observatory domes, there was this awesome piece of Dr Evil machinery. Really, who needs sharks with fricking laser beams when you have this in your arsenal?

Each time I came back to the main building where the accommodation was, she’d be berating him at high volume and he’d be taking it like a beaten dog but always reeking of vodka, even at breakfast at 8am.

And in a way it was like coming home. Not for that couple’s dysfunctional relationship but because Almaty was so familiar from my visit about six months before following an intended media familiarisation trip to Astana, Kazakhstan’s dire and soulless new capital city, which ended in mutiny and a hastily arranged flight to see the nation’s original capital.

Compared to the Dhabs, the climate was refreshing. The only way to tell the seasons in the UAE is to look at a thermometer but last time, Almaty had been bedecked in autumn colours and this time it was clear from the vibrant greens that the city had very recently emerged from under the lingering snow of winter.

At the war memorial, it was a few days away from the 65th anniversay of the end of the Great Patriotic War, as WWII is known in the former Soviet Union, so the town’s war memorial featured a series of pubescent guards with barrel-less pretend rifles, shoes with velcro tags and a couple of bored young women marching up and down in their street shoes

There was even the novelty of experiencing rain — the UAE is in the rain shadow of Saudi Arabia, so there was unlikely to be any more precipitation this year — and the city had a youthful buzz that I found deeply appealing.

On this spring morning, the fortune tellers at the market were doing a thriving business.

And on that previous visit, I had an equally alcoholic encounter with a traumatised Soviet war veteran from the Afghan invasion in the 1980s who gave me an equally vodka-laden breath — mixed with the other two components of the Central Asian breath syndrome: cigarettes and stale mutton fat — during the breakfast commute as I made my way to the airport.

This time I left behind the bickering couple, hiked down the mountain, collected my Tajik visa and took a share taxi towards Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital.

Step one: go from this…

to this…

In pretty much everywhere else I’ve worked – the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, so most definitely not an ideal world – leaving a job has been a relatively simple process.

Of course nothing is that simple in Abu Dhabi. In truth, the bureaucracy here is not that bad and enough IT hacks have coined it by providing government departments with expensive and over-engineered but ultimately functional systems that are able to handle most things.

I’d started going through the internal part of this process two weeks earlier, which involved an exit interview from a woman wearing a full burqa so I could only see her eyes.

Then I had to traipse around half a dozen admin offices within Abu Dhabi Media Company getting signatures to say I no longer had such things as laptops or Blackberries or company accommodation etc etc. Despite the fact I’d never had any of these things, I was actually surprised when their records agreed, removing the Sisyphean hurdle of returning something I’d never possessed in the first place.

Then I tried to close my bank account.

This should be simple. HSBC is an international banking group rather than some podunk outfit but it ended up being a two-day process that made the refinancing of Dubai World seem simple by comparison.

When I posted a message to that effect on Facebook, I received a flurry of salutary tales from others who had gone through this. Some quotes:

“Make sure you get an NOC (Non-objection certificate) from them or letter stating your account is closed! they told me they closed mine and ended up leaving my credit card ac open and charged me for the pleasure!”

“The longer I live here, the more convinced I am that we should just squirrel away our money in shoeboxes under our beds. It’s not as if I am earning any interest on my accounts, what with interest being un-Sharia-compliant and all. Funnily enough though, stupid fees such as Dh100 for a letter are perfectly Sharia compliant.”

“I’ve been trying to close my HSBC current account and car loan account for about six months. I’m temporarily ignoring its existance until forced to do otherwise.”

“After several days trying to close my account, I gave up. I changed mine to a free account and took everything out. And now just pretending it doesn’t exist.”

“I foolishly tried to close an account for a third person. From ‘No problem Sir, just bring documents A, B and C’ it went to ‘We will look for you and find you if the account is not closed in person’ when I brought in the documents they had first asked for. Can’t wait for their visit!”

After two days of negotiating the bureaucracy, I had a wodge of cash in my pocket and thought I was about to get the letter declaring that I had no liabilities. Here the word “thought” is clearly operative.

It’s not as though it’s not already mind-messingly complicated: the bank charges $55 to write a letter saying you’ve closed the account, which I needed  to get the clearance from work to get my final pay, which can’t go into the account because I’ve closed it, as explained in the $55 letter. And that’s the bit that’s both simplest and most logical. If Kafka was alive today, he would set all his works in the UAE bureaucracy.

(And when I said that in my Facebook update, another friend wrote: “John Henzell awoke to discover he had turned into a cockroach. It was a step up for him.”)

And the letter? There’s a three-day waiting list. But apparently there is a subclause covering customers who are about to go postal because after several toys were thrown out of the cot, I had my letter.

There was another departing ADMC employee, an Australian subeditor called Mick, at the bank at the same time. We greeted each other with the nod of the oppressed.

An hour later, I met him again in the ADMC payroll office as we presented our account-closed letters. The crucial person who was supposed to work out our end-of-service payments was missing and had taken the day off, despite having earlier advised he would be there today.

Then we met again in the ADMC human resources office, where we tried to resolve the issue by talking to the eyeslit of the same burqa-clad woman who’d done my exit interview.

As she was attended to this, I whispered to Mick: “Who knew there were actually nine circles of Hell?”

He leaned across and replied: “And counting.”

* Sounds so much better than the more-accurate rebumification.

Despite our best efforts at denial, we had to accept that the aircon season had finally arrived in Abu Dhabi.

But that just meant it was the right time to head to the mountains, so a group that eventually numbered 17 people headed to Oman for a canyoning and via ferrata weekend.

We’d seen Snake Gorge back in January, when we did a via ferrata — or “iron way”, from the use of cables when the WWI frontier was in the Dolomites on the Italian-Austrian border — 100m above the bottom of the gorge.

The via ferrata was strenuous but awesome.

And the whole way, the view of the stunning canyon below made us vow to come back.

So last weekend, we did.

The gorge was fantastic, beginning with some slightly tricky descents when the water was not deep enough to jump into, but it didn’t take too long to get to the point where the pools were safely jumpable.

Often there was no other choice.

The gorge didn’t get much sun and temperatures were chilly, so the sun worshippers used sun-warmed rocks whenever they could.

The canyon became narrower and the jumps became bigger.

And Wendy decided to add a bouldering element.

Sometimes we jumped but other times we found natural slides, which were even more fun.

Then the gorge closed in once more, for what seemed to be an extended time.

This proved to be the highlight of the gorge, because we paddled through a constriction and then found…

…the unexpected vista that the walls of the canyon joined in an enormous limestone flow, creating a cave.

It even had stalagtites hanging from the roof.

Then we could see light at the end of the tunnel and swam out the far end.

But the gorge wasn’t quite done with us yet, and we faced a few more swimming sections.

Then we came upon a slightly awkward section down to a pool of indeterminate depth, which in a piece of unorthodox canyoning technique, we used a rope to keep each person in balance until they could reach a Thank God hold on the far side.

This became known as Arse Rope Technique, to which we’ve submitted a paper to the International Canyoning Federation to be included in all future training courses.

Or, as Rachel put it: “I am clearly a genius. Girl logic: use the arse!”

And it actually worked.

After this the gorge began to ease off in difficulty, and finally we changed from swimming and jumping to walking out to the village directly below, where we’d left our cars.

A picnic was deemed the perfect way to end the trip, done in a very UAE style involving barbecued kebabs and then a sisha session.

Late in the afternoon, we drove up towards the top of Wadi Bani Auf, briefly visited a village accessed via a slot canyon, then over the range towards Jebel Shams, Oman’s highest peak.

As in Yemen, the highest peak was off limits because it was the site of a military communications installation. So we had to make do with camping on a ridge maybe 200m lower but still at a perfect temperature for camping.

The locals don’t seem to harbour any particularly romantic notions about their high peaks, preferring the pragmatic approach of the unrestricted scanning available on the summit.

The following morning, we did a car shuffle with overfilled cars and started hiking what was known as the balcony route just below the crest of the largest canyon in the Middle East.

Back in the lawless tribal days when the ability to secure your village against enemies was the primary consideration for its location, there was a village located on the shelf just above the big alcove in the middle of the pic above.

We were told there were once 15 families there, who relocated to the plateau above once the tribalism was subverted by central government rule. (The district governors representing the government are called, and I’m not making this up, wallies.)

The villages used to have an express route to get to the plateau and avoiding the walk we’d just done.

This involved scaling the cliffline just above and to the right to the village.

The pic above and to the left shows their old start to the route, using the small insecure holds to the left of the log.

There was now a via ferrata on the route, which starts just to the right because the rock was sounder there.

Once the two routes joined and we did the climb which the Omani used to do without ropes, it was clear this was an entire different league to what we’d seen on Stairway to Heaven.

It was called the Sticks Route, because they’d jam sticks into the cracks to give a little more access on what to anyone else would be a very very serious rock climb.

With the via ferrata, and particularly the iron spikes used to create footholds, it was just on the tricky side of easy. The cable meant it was completely safe.

Without the via ferrata, a free ascent of this is just completely freaking insane.

If you fall here, as we used to say in the black humour of the hills, you’re relying solely on air friction.

After maybe 60m, we pulled over a small lip to a terrace with a path on it.

But we weren’t done yet.

After wandering along a ledge system, there was one final cliff of polished rock to reach safe ground.

Then it was time for a masala dosa at Rachel’s favourite cafe in Bahla before heading back to the Dhabs, sore, sunburned but brimming from a really fun weekend.

The Axis Of Evil Ski Tour. Part four: the rest of Iran.

From the first floor terrace of an Imam Square chaikarne in Esfahan, I could see half the world.

Or so goes the story about Esfahan, which was created by Shah Abbas the Great in the 16th Century to be the centrepiece of the Safavid dynasty’s new capital at a time when the Persian empire was ascendant.

The city was dubbed “Nesf-e-Jahan” (half the world), a reference both the intellectual, religious and architectural riches on offer in the square and also because it was the nexus between European and Asian cultures.

I’d arrived from Tehran before dawn and had to wait at the bus station until a more civilised hour, a much more pleasant prospect in Iran than almost anywhere else I’ve been and certainly streets ahead of any western city’s bus station.

I then made my way through a series of convoluted alleyways to Dibai House, run by a couple of arty Iranian women in a traditional courtyard-based home.

The house had been modernised but featured most of the important historic details, such as the twin knockers on the back door.

Given the nature of Iranian society, there was a thick knocker for men to use and a slighter and rounded knocker for women, allowing the occupants of the house to know the gender of the person calling which would determine whether a man or a woman should answer.

The homestay was just near the start of a 2km-long covered bazaar which stretched from the city’s biggest mosque to Imam Square, obviously based on what had originally been a meandering road from one to the other.

The bazaars were my favourite aspect of Iranian cities – always alive and vibrant and continuing to be the centre of the community (albeit selling cheap Chinese tat) rather than something dusty and preserved and tucked away in a museum.

Finally I reached Imam Square, I wandered along the arcades on the left hand side of the square (now full of slightly tawdry tourist shops) until I reached the portal of Sheikh Lotfallah Mosque.

The intricacy of its entrance arch beckoned me in.

There was an impressive S-shaped passageway with intricate and beautifully preserved tiling and then you turn a corner and… POW! You walk into the main dome room.

There’s little there other than an open space but unlike many similar monuments which are tatty remnants of past glory, this was in gobsmackingly perfect condition.

Just a couple of hundred metres further was the Imam Mosque, which was bigger and even more magnificent.

Superlatives kind of lose their impact when it comes to these things, as do attempts to photograph it. You just have to experience it in person.

I went there a couple of times that day. The first time I was there, a young man was leaning heavily on the Qiblah wall, the one facing Mecca and in the direction of which all prayers are made, and crying his eyes out.

But it wasn’t cripplingly sombre. The thing to do for visitors was to stand directly under the middle of the dome and sing or clap.

The other main feature of Esfahan are the series of elaborate bridges built over the Zayandeh River during the Safavid era. This was Si-o-Se bridge.

The 33-arch pedestrian structure was commissioned in 1602 specifically to honour one of the dynasty’s Georgian-born generals after a series of important victories.

It was also the site of the sole remaining chaikarne (teahouse) on the bridges.

All the others had been removed over the years but on a brisk but sunny spring day, this was the place to be seen.

Then I wandered back up to Ali Qapu, Shah Abbas’ palace on Imam Square.

I almost didn’t go in because it was covered in scaffolding and the decore seemed initially to be far inferior and more damaged than either of the two mosques.

But there were some atmospheric stairs going up from the reception rooms to the Shah’s private rooms on the sixth floor.

And then I encountered the music room, with alcoves in the shape of popular musical instruments of the day.

Every piece of it was a work of art.

If someone had told me beforehand that the Axis of Evil Ski Tour would have involved visiting sand dunes and wind towers, there is a good chance I would have laughed in their face.

But after heading south from the Alborz mountains, the range just north of Tehran that is home of most of the Iranian skifields, I’d been recommended going to Toudeshk, between Esfahan and Nain, where a family hosted travellers and provided a small-village experience.

So from Esfahan I took a savari, as Iranian share taxis are known. Entertainment was provided first by the driver’s attitude to in-flight service – he was pouring tea at 120kmh – and then, as we approached the town, by the dozens of manned anti-aircraft batteries pointing towards the sky.

This was the uranium-mining area of Iran and they were prepared for an Israeli attack.

I was visiting because of this guy, Abbas Jalali.

He was an interesting character, being on the council for the local and regional councils, a schoolteacher who specialised in Koranic Arabic and theology and also a bit of a wheeler dealer in antiques.

He had a collection of 10,000 items and when we visited him on this night, he’d just bought this whirling Dervish outfit, which was estimated to be 400 years old.

During a particularly snowy winter 15 years ago, he’d been teaching at the high school in Toudeshk when one of his pupils told him a cyclist was in trouble outside. It proved to be an English traveller whose muscles had locked up in the cold, so he took him in until he was recovered.

Word passed around the cycling world, particularly because the 95km from Esfahan was the perfect distance for a solid day after visiting the city.

Over 10 years, he had people visit and never charged anything. As he told me: “Guests are a gift from God.”

Five years ago, his younger brothers Mohammed and Reza took over the job and began charging a very modest amount to stay at their home.

Reza took us on to what he called “the moving sands”.

A dune, to you and me.

The UAE’s Empty Quarter is pretty much the gold standard for dunes so it was hard to get too enthused.

But it was actually OK.

We walked up the sand while Reza’s children, Nima and Nasim, raced ahead.

Then we got home to another fantastic meal from Fatimeh.

This is the kind of experience I really wanted to see in Iran, rather than hotels and restaurants.

“What do you call this?” I asked, pointing at the meal.

Reza looked at me a little oddly and replied: “Spaghetti.”

“Ha! I was expecting a Farsi word,” I replied.

“Ah,” he said. “Yes: macaroni.”

After dinner we went to some of the other houses in the village.

Every family makes a rug – this was a traditional Nain style, for the town 35km away.

A rug roughly 3m by 4m takes one woman a year to make, which they sell for about US$4000.

But nobody I met actually had them in their homes, saying it was too expensive and they used the much cheaper factory-made ones instead.

It was a reminder that life is pretty bare out in the countryside in Iran.

Reza didn’t own a car and had to rent a Paykan to take us to the dunes. He and his wife and two children had to get by on a single motorcycle.

We visited his school the next morning, where I suspect his pupils were as gobsmacked to see us as we were to be there.

They were learning Koranic Arabic – a very narrowly used dialect so they could read the Koran in its original way rather in a Farsi translation.

That afternoon I headed to Yazd, an ancient city that once prospered on Silk Road commerce and had lavish merchants’ houses dotted around the old city, which was famous for its wind towers.

Dubai’s famous for its wind towers, although all but the most zealous Emirati will admit these were an idea borrowed from the Persians.

It works as a thermal siphon with a series of chimneys so that a breeze would come down the windward channel and the hot air inside would be expelled via the leeward side.

The idea was that it was a way to cool the home without compromising the all-too-important regional focus on privacy.

And it really worked. But not like Abu Dhabi’s Antarctic aircon.

The merchants’ homes showed how much wealth had once been here.

There was no surface water in the area so they used a system of qanats, or irrigation tunnels.

They would dig down 10m or so and then head in the direction of the mountains at a slope just steep enough for water to flow and would dig until they hit groundwater, the idea that the groundwater incline was steeper than the tunnel.

Temperatures in Yazd would hit 45-50degC in summer, so the areas used to access the qanat channels were often turned into majlises, or meeting rooms, where people could laze around in the hottest part of the day with the benefit of the chilled temperatures from the water.

The evenings were a beautiful time to wander the old streets.

After two nights in Yazd, I took one of the oddly-decorated but modern and comfortable buses to Shiraz for my final night in Iran.

I’d heard some unfavourable reports about the city (not least the absence of wine there) but thought it was worth having a look.

I headed to the citadel. The maidan – square – inside the citadel was full of trees, fountains and ponds.

And the locals found the 500-rial note didn’t work as well as a make-a-wish flick into the ponds as coins.

But the interiors were stunning, with hints of past decoration.

And the hammam wasn’t too shabby.

Fit for a shah, in fact.

It was fun to just wander around.

I ended up going into a koranic madrassa with a local guy who was trying to shake down tourists.

After the universal and open friendliness of Iran, this was my first occasion when I had to have my guard up.

But it wasn’t too hard to work out, based on his previous brethren I’d encountered everywhere from Kathmandu to Marakech to Bangkok.

(a) he looked like he walked out of a Michael Jackson music video, circa 1985

(b) he mentioned how he needed money, in this case to avoid being whipped for drinking whiskey.

(c) he quoted a price to visit the madrasa which was 10 times what I’d paid to go to the citadel.

By this time I gave up and walked out.

Towards dusk, I almost missed out on going to this mosque, built to house the remains of a brother of Imam Reza who had been murdered going to his aid hundreds of years ago.

I have to confess that after Esfahan, I was suffering from dome burn-out. But just inside in the walls were some cool graves, still tended with care.

And one of the things the faithful did was to polish the grill outside the mosque.

Then I wandered inside, half heartedly expected yet another dome, but then… Pow! Every possible square inch was covered in mirror.

This was on the walls.

Although I do remember thinking that if Liberace had taken the faith, this is the mosque where he would have prayed.

And I’m sure he’d wish his brother George was there.

From the disco mosque, as I’d started calling it, I wandered over to the tomb of Hafez, a 14th Century poet still revered as one of Persia’s finest.

His tomb was on the outskirts of the centre of Shiraz and was a huge destination to visit, particularly at dusk.

Iran was supposedly the remaining axis of evil, but how evil can a place be that reveres poets?

Dusk was an amazing time to be there.

It was full of people, generally groups of young men and of young women.

One of the things to do was the Taal-e Hafez: to go to his tomb, get a copy of his collected works and open a page at random and that was supposed for foretell your future.

This was my page, from a book borrowed by a young guy nearby.

Pity I can’t read Farsi! But I’ve called on friends who can and will learn my future. Hopefully this page doesn’t read: “Hafez asserts his right to be identified as the author of this work. Any reproduction or republication is forbidden by law.”

And then the next morning, I flew back to the UAE…

The Axis of Evil Ski Tour. Part Three: Iran

“And why do you want to go to Iran?”

I figured it was best not to mention the Axis of Evil Ski Tour to the soldier guarding the border between Iran and Iraq so instead I said that after all the media reports about Iran, I wanted to go to find out the truth for myself.

“You’re a journalist?”

A hesitated briefly, but “correspondent” is written on the UAE resident’s visa in my passport so I said: “Yes, but I’m a journalist in Abu Dhabi. This is a holiday.”

Then my inquisitor, a uniformed man aged in his late thirties with an AK47 machine gun casually leaning against the side of his desk, asked to see my camera and began flicking through the photographs.

I was secretly grateful he flicked back to my travels since arriving in Kurdish-administered Iraq and not the other way, which featured underdressed Filipinas fronting bands in a series of dodgy Bahrain pubs catering to Saudi s*x tourists, but then he found the family with whom I’d stayed in Halabja.

“Who is this?”

I hesitated again, knowing that my host’s Kurdish independence activities were a touchy subject, prompting him to ask: “You stayed with them and you don’t know who they are?”

But after a few more avenues of questions, some comments about not taking photographs on the border (well, duh) and the requisite flicking through my passport inspecting my visas for the UAE, Yemen, Oman, China, Kazakhstan, Iraq and the as-yet-unvalidated one for Iran, he was done and sent me on my way.

And all this was while I was still on the Iraqi side of the border, being grilled by Iraqi soldiers before I even encountered any Iranians!

I’d left Halajba early, expecting that as a journalist heading into Iran, the border process would be difficult. But I hadn’t expected the Iraqi side to be an obstacle.

However within a few minutes of reaching the hundreds of trucks parked in an inch of mud at outer gate of the Iraqi side of the border security zone, I’d been stopped by an Iraqi soldier and taken to his commanding officer’s office and – as detailed above – grilled about my reasons for going to Iran until he got bored and let me continue.

This time I got another 100m and was stopped by another Iraqi soldier who also took me away to see another head guy, for whom I had to wait for 20 minutes.

Finally a civilian in his fifties arrived and in excellent English he quizzed me about going to Iran and about how this is mostly a crossing for locals and that others – he cited an American – had been turned back.

Then he too flipped through my passport till he was bored with looking at my stamps and sent me to the Iraqi exit visa office, where my passport was stamped in a couple of minutes.

A final Iraqi soldier inspected my passport then I reached the 100m-long interborder area, which is ankle-deep mud on the single-lane road and beside it an elevated caged walkway to an Iranian soldier in a little booth.

After all the grilling on the Iraqi side, I was expecting a full inquisition here but instead all the soldier did was to call in another soldier with better English to make sure he didn’t transpose my name with my passport’s place of issue.

The passport was stamped in about two minutes and I was into Iran. I changed my dinars for rials there from a friend of the soldier and there was a half-hearted attempt to search my pack. They didn’t even find my ski boots inside, which demonstrates how half-hearted it was.

As on the Iraqi side, the Iranian side of the border featured a huge muddy waiting area filled with dozens of trucks . A flock of taxi drivers descended on me, offering a trip to Sanandaj, the first big town in Iran, for 350,000rials (US$35). I ignored them and walked past to have lunch in a restaurant full of truck drivers whiling away the time while stuck in the inexorable border crossing process.

Understandably enough, my skis and my conspicuous foreignness proved to be quite a conversation starter and within minutes one of the truck drivers (the guy on the left in the photo above) approached me and said in halting English: “Please, my house. Marivan.”

This was my first example of Iranian hospitality and friendliness, and it turned out I wasn’t even into real Iran yet because after I politely declined and headed on, I encountered another security zone where my passport was given a cursory inspection by another soldier and then I wandered into the wilds of Iran.

Just beyond a share taxi took me to Marivan, a small town near the border, where I had another example of Iranian hospitality – the driver also made an offer of “Please, my house” and indicated his home up on the hill above town – but also my first lesson in the convoluted ways of Iranian finance.

The Iranian currency is the Rial and the exchange rate is almost exactly 10,000 to the US dollar. But the locals mostly don’t use the term Rials unless they’re dealing with tourists, preferring the term Toman instead, which represents 10 Rials. If a price is quoted, it’s always in Toman and not Rials so the price is 10 times what you think it is.

And then there’s the process of Ta’arof, the formalised code of mercantile politeness in which when you buy something, the vendor announces “Ghabeli nadari!” (It’s free!) to which the buyer is supposed to politely decline, pay the requested amount and then everyone is happy.

Except when it came to the taxi driver, another passenger had got out first, handed over a wad of notes and gestured to me. After the experience of Jebar and Mr X battling over paying for my minibus fare that morning, I assumed that when I came to pay and the taxi driver made a gesture universally recognisable as “It’s free!”, my fellow passenger had paid for me.

A sudden “Of course it’s not free, you imbecile” glare from the taxi driver and I was corrected.

Then I boarded a kind of bus called a mahmooly – it means “normal” in Farsi, although as you can see above “decrepit and tortuously slow” would be a more apposite definition – for the journey to Sanandaj, arriving at dusk.

In 10 hours since leaving Halabja, I’d managed to cover about 200km.

After an entertaining evening wandering amid the eclectic offerings of the local covered bazaar — the first of many in Iran — I caught the bus to Tehran. This took 10 hours for a supposed six-hour journey, enlivened only by seeing the spectacular malapropism on the “Have a safe tripe” road sign as I left a police checkpoint at the old Silk-Road city of Hamadan.

Early the next morning, I wandered down to the bazaar.

As in the Dhabs, industries tend to be clustered together and just before I entered the bazaar I encountered the flouro religious banners cluster. And inside, there was the wig section that was remarkably large for a nation in which women have to cover their hair at all times in public.

Parts of the bazaar were clearly very old, although the oldest part of it is only estimated at 200 years.

But other sections were built with lavish decoration. Within an hour or so of opening, though, every alleyway was heaving with people, which made for a both worrying and intriguing situation when a full-size fire engine attempted to make its way through the alleyways to the site of a reported fire.

Iran had a sense of a vibrancy that seemed to be missing in Kurdistan.

But it was an awesome people watching site. In public, all women have to cover their hair at all times in Iran but the angle of the hijab is like a barometer of their social conservatism.

The less conservative ones wore it right back in a gravity-defying position on the ponytail line.

Tehran had a nice, if wintery, feel to it. And after the Dhabs, it was just nice to be able to see mountains of any kind again.

Notwithstanding the traffic – one of my first words of Farsi I learnt was “achmakh”, which means crazy or stupid and is entirely justified as a traffic adjective – Tehran was a nice city in which to just wander around.

I waited until just before midday prayer time to visit the former United States embassy.

Or, as it’s officially called now, the United States Den Of Espionage.

And with some justification, since in 1952 Iran was the victim of the CIA’s first coup d’etat, to be followed by similar overturnings of democratically elected governments led by Sukarno in Indonesia and Allende in Chile, the latter on, ironically enough, September 11 in 1973.

In 1979, in response to such American meddling, the US embassy was over-run by a militant student’s group and the 53 American occupants held hostage for more than a year.

That was the last time the Americans had formal diplomatic relations with Iran, although obviously they got over that to secretly sell arms to it in the Iran Contra scandal during the Reagan era.

As with the screaming lie of blaming Iran for Halabja, finding hypocrisy and double-dealing in America’s interactions with Iran is about as challenging as shooting fish in a barrel.

But I digress.

The embassy is now home to a militant group that seeks to uphold the virtues of the Islamic republic.

I’d arrived to see the famous murals on the walls of the embassy, featured the famous skull/statue of liberty and quotes about “nest of spies” and the “wild wolf of zionism”.

But what I didn’t expect was that on the corner there was a kind of shop, the title of which was in Farsi but which, based on the contents, I imagine was called Jihadis R Us or Martyrs Superstore.

Inside were posters and books displayed under a wall covered with leaders and images of those who had died – it seemed many were from the Iran-Iraq war that lasted from 1980 to 1988.

There were some intensely and universally human stories depicted: of men weeping over the body of a slain colleague. Of disinterred finger bones with a wedding ring visible.

It was sobering to see how many of those captured in death were still too young to grow beards.

Others, such as the commander tying a Farsi-enscribed green and red headband on a beaming young soldier, were a little more unsettling.

And near the door, it was possible to buy the jihadi headbands, as part of a display with prayer beads and a photo of Imam Khomeini.

I’d timed my visit to the dhuhr (midday) prayer time because I’d heard that previous visitors had got into trouble photographing the murals and I figured this way the particularly devout would be otherwise distracted.

Among the images were depictions of news images from the failed bid to rescue the hostages, which turned to custard when an American Herc and a helicopter collided at the secret landing zone outside of Tehran.

A group of passing Iranian students took my pic at the famous death’s head depiction of the statue of liberty.

Then I took a pic with them, only later realising one had a book with a Nazi symbol on the cover.

Really, wtf is up with that?

Then as I was about to take a pic of the best of the murals, a rant that mentioned both the great satan and the wild wolf of zionism, a guard saw me and I had to leave.

Anyway, despite this narrative’s focus so far on peculiar boozy rituals, crimes against humanity and jihadi superstores, it was time to inject an actual skiing component into the Axis Of Evil Ski Tour.

Although to tell the full story, of the three countries cited as the Axis of Evil in Dubya’s first state of the union address after 9/11, Iran was the last remaining one of the trio to retain the tag.

Iraq of course was, er, rehabilitated via a regime-changing US invasion and even North Korea had been publically absolved of the AoE tag in what I suspect was some backroom deal between diplomats from DC and Pyongyang.

Leaving aside whether there can be an axis involving only one party, the term was actually penned by Bush speechwriter David Frum and the original version was the Axis of Hatred but was then altered to its present form.
Libya, Syria and Cuba were then described by the US’s UN ambassador John Bolton as “Beyond the Axis of Evil”.

And after the fall of Saddam, incoming secretary of state Condoleeza Rice linked Iran and North Korea with Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe and Myanmar in 2005 as the Outposts of Tyranny, presumably because it sounds a lot better than the Hexagram of Evil.

And of course others made fun of the term, with the Axis of Weasels used to denegrate countries that refused to join the US-led Coalition of the Willing, which was in turn derided as the Coalition of the Drilling for the supposedly unstated intention to liberate Iraqi oil rather than its people.

And Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld got called the Asses of Evil for their part, then Bush and Blair were dubbed the Axis of Feeble when it started turning to custard (clearly one of Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”) and the entire debacle was blamed on the Axles of Evil: the fuel-guzzling SUVs beloved by Americans. (And, to be fair, Emiratis)

But one thing was clear: none of those countries had skiing as good as Iran, so on a cool Tehran morning, I staked a place in a savari – a shared taxi – bound for the skifield of Dizin, with my skis resting on my shoulder because they wouldn’t fit in the boot.

The road was spectacular, once it left the dreary suburbs of Tehran and headed up a huge valley and through a series of tunnels to a massive hydro lake.

This was a Friday — the second day of the Iranian weekend — so every Tehrani and their tent had also driven up this road to stake their place beside the river to have a barbecue.

The savari (it helped when I stopped trying to make it rhyme with “safari” and adopted the local pronunciation of “savaREE”) only took me to the turnoff, 10km before the dead-end valley of Dizin.

I’d barely got my bag and skis out of the car when a crew of young Iranians pulled over unsolicited and squeezed me into their tiny Saipa, a rebadged Kia Pride built locally, to enjoy a high-speed journey with Farsi hiphop playing at volume 11. (The Iranian hiphop was actually pretty good)

They wanted to have their pix taken with my skis and then with me, but didn’t seem to actually go skiing themselves.

Part of the appeal of the Iranian ski resorts is that it’s a far less regulated environment than the cities or towns. Or, as one young Tehrani put to me, “The mullahs don’t shred, bro”. It was clearly a line he’d got from somewhere else since it was the only fluent English sentence I ever heard him say.

In the cities, women always had their hair covered and generally wore manteaus or similarly baggy figure-disguising clothing. On the skifield, women could wear figure-hugging pants allowing men to whom they were neither married nor related to assess how callipygous they were. The horror…

Possibly because the mullahs (the priests in Shia Iranian custom) don’t apparently shred, they also don’t invest in the latest lift equipment.

The skiing at Dizin, the country’s largest and most famous skifield, was a little like finding yourself as an extra in an early James Bond movie, in the Sean Connery era before Roger Moore’s flabby and middle-aged take on 007.

Lifts involved three gondola lines comprised of crude brightly-coloured fibreglass bubbles called ouefs, dating to before the Islamic revolution in 1979, and high-powered pomas that were the nearest encounter I’ve had yet to spontaneous bowel surgery.

But there were also a new line of lift towers under construction, hinting at a modern makeover.

Perhaps because just being here was enough of an escape, the skiing didn’t seem to be the main focus.

The skill, the equipment and, to my fashion-challenged eyes at least, the clothing were a long way from being the current fashions in other parts of the world.

But I was skiing on 10-year-old skis and wearing my functional-but-ugly mountaineering gear so what would I know? At least I was the only one on Tele gear.

Apart from a 90-minute session at Ski Dubai on midsummer’s day when it was 47degC outside and then a year earlier skiing up the Kahiltna Glacier on Denali, North America’s highest peak, I hadn’t really skied since 2007 so I took to the groomed slopes to get my tele mojo back.

The snow on the piste was remarkbly dry and cold, less springy than I’d been expecting for the end of February.

I exemplified all the usual sins of not being aggressive enough with the front foot or putting enough weight forward, but slowly the principles came back.

But each time I took a lift up, I’d look across to the southern slopes and see untracked snow.

It had been four days since the last snowfall. At home on the South Island Kiwi skifields, by the time Joe Public got on the skifield, the runs would be half shredded by the ski patrol and then by the lifties.

There would then be an Oklahoma-style land rush on to get the rest and by 11.30pm, there wouldn’t be an unshredded square metre of new snow to be found anywhere.

It was one of the reasons why most of my skiing back home was in the back country.

So I figured the snow here must have been sun-altered into breakable crust, the skiers’ nemesis, but decided it was worth traversing into it and having a look.

And guess what? It was pristine powder.

Thanks to the north-facing slope, freezing temperatures and the time of year, it didn’t get the sun and so the snow was still in pristine condtion.

I’d carve turns in 20cm-deep powder that, frankly, flattered my abilities and the whole time had a huge grin on my face because I had all this to myself.

Even the disembowelling pomas were worth it to ski this stuff.

I’d spoken to a trio of Kiwi climbers at the hotel the previous night and they had hinted at the Iranian ski mentality, saying they’d been threatened with arrest if they skied out of bounds.

The Tehranis would only ski the piste, which left the powder for me.

My quads were screaming after few hours of teleing and then whimpering an hour after that so I called it an afternoon and headed back to Tehran.

Back in Tehran at the awesome Hotel Firouzeh, I ran into a cool Kiwi couple based out of Dubai, Alex and Johnny, and ended up heading to dinner with them at an Iranian restaurant that provides not just traditional food but traditional music to go with it.

I can now state that traditional music involves a man playing some kind of stringed instrument with a spoon and series of men in shiny suits and Elvis quiffs singing passionately in Farsi.

But it was an awesome venue, in an old hammam.

We had an early night — relatively, by Tehran standards — because all three of us were chartering a taxi to ski at the other big Tehrani skifield, Shemshak, the next day.

A big storm had rolled in overnight and caused downpours in Tehran and, we assumed, deep freshies at Shemshak.

The road was in reasonable condition and drove through an even more stunning gorge. The roadside icefall suggested Iran’s desert image was not always accurate.

It was still snowing when we arrived, in thick flakes with geometric patterns, a kind I’d first seen in Antarctica and only rarely encountered since then.

But the claim of 15cm — six inches — of fresh snow showed that the marketing people of Iranian skifields lie just as vociferously as their brethren everywhere else in the world.

In truth it was about 5cm, or two inches.

Johnny and Alex took the chair up — the intransigence of the lifties meant it did to the backs of our thighs what the poma had tried to do at Dizin — and we found an untracked slope.

That was the good news.
The bad news was that Shemshak had much less of a base than Dizin had, so the 5cm of new snow was over a lumping base consisting of snow and vegetation and rocks.

This was demonstrably not flattering to my technique!

But the plus side was that although the field was much smaller than Dizin, it was much steeper and the local skiers showed a Dizin-like resistance to skiing off piste.

In keeping with the more challenging slopes, there were also better skiers here so we had to work harder to cut fresh tracks, heading what seemed to be out of bounds way off to a ridge on the right.

Although after a few runs, it too was tracked out.

But not everyone was there for the skiing.

“I’m going to the snow. I know, I’ll wear my ridiculously high heels!”

And then we just had the standard hour-long battle with Tehran’s achmakh traffic to get back to our hotel…

The Axis of Evil Ski Tour: Part Two

The difference between southern Iraq and the Kurdish-administered region of the country along a crescent of the northeast can be summed up in one word: Peshmerga.

This was the Kurdish separatist militia which ruled the mountainous region of the country, although the full extent of how much life there was defined by them only became apparent towards the end of my brief time in Iraq.

The presence of the Peshmerga — the name is comprised of the Kurdish words Pesh (front) and Marga (death) to mean “those who face death” and has been around since the Ottoman days — is the reason why this area had been spared the Sunni-Shia sectarian violence seen in the south.

That’s not to say that everything in this region was all rainbows and candycanes. There was a strong suspicion that a ruthless quelling of dissent was the reason it was peaceful and it didn’t take long to find hints that bad stuff was not too far from the surface.

The Erbil Sheraton, for example, was surrounded by a wall that on the outside was covered with colourful murals expounding human rights for children and on the inside was covered in ivy but which was still very obviously a blast-protection wall to counter suicide bombers.

Getting from the outside to the inside meant being searched thoroughly by big people with big guns.

My first taste of the peshmerga was when I left Erbil, an uninspiring town dominated by a citadel built on a rognon and which serves as the capital of Kurdish-administered Iraq, to take a shared taxi towards the Iranian border.

This involved cramming into an early 1980s-era Toyota Crown or Nissan Cedric and setting out on the crumbling highway with the driver passing everything he can via a series of death-defying overtaking moves.

Every 10-20km, there would be a Peshmerga military checkpoint where either (a) the bored soldier with an AK47 will wave you on without looking, or (b) he’ll look inside and spot the obvious foreigner and you’ll be taken to the commanding officer’s cabin where he’ll flip through your passport looking at all your stamps until he gets bored and waves you on. This is karmic payback if you’ve done some interesting travelling.

Each time, I’d slink back to the share taxi where the other passengers were quietly fuming. I’d offer a lame: “Ana asif…” (”I’m sorry” in Arabic) and rejoin the road to find ourselves back behind all the traffic that we’d risked life and limb to pass on the previous leg.

The only exception to this was as we skirted the town of Kirkuk, the only dodgy town in Kurdish-administered Iraq because it had a mostly Arab population, because most of the Kurds abandoned it after Saddam brutally put down the Peshmerga uprising that followed the first Gulf War in 1991.

The checkpoint here was much more serious, with blast-protection walls around the vehicle inspection bays and a series of sandbag-protected emplacements bristling with weapons.

And, as I emerged from the share taxi to show my passport, this one was staffed by American soldiers. They took their job a lot more seriously than their Peshmerga equivalents, although they too spent their time flicking through the stamps in the passport.

“There’s been a lot of Australians through here,” one of them said. (I travel on my Australian passport)
“Yeh, there’s a kangaroo festival on.”
“Really?”
“No, not really.”
My taxi skirted the northern outliers of Kirkuk and headed towards the safe and secure town of Sulimani, where they were building a fortified checkpoint with blast walls and gun emplacements. I couldn’t enjoying the irony that right next door was a fun park with a ferris wheel and similar rides.

Soon after, we passed a convoy of supporters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the main parties that grew from the Peshmerga militia, all of whom were flying what had been the Peshmerga flag but which was now adopted as the Kurdish national flag.

The Iraqi flag was only ever displayed on government offices and even then not always and often half-heartedly.

There are 25-30m Kurds spread over Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, and the openly cited aim is to have them living in a separate nation, a prospect opposed vehemently by the central governments of the other three nations.

Saddam had opposed it pretty vehemently too, and that was the reason why I took a detour from the road to Iran and headed up a dead end valley to the town of Halabja.

If not for the strikingly modern building on the outskirts of this modest town, there would be little to distinquish Halabja from others nestled among the mountains that form the border between Iraq and Iran.

But the building explained why I was visiting. Halabja had the unpleasant reputation for being the Kurdish Hiroshima, from the day 22 years ago when Saddam Hussein ordered the use of chemical weapons on his own people, killing 5000 instantly and causing thousands more to flee to the mountains.

I’ve never been to either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or to Auschwitz or the Cambodian killing fields but I made a point of visiting this town, which has the grim notoriety of being the world’s worst chemical weapons attack on a civilian population.

And, in keeping with my usual way of doing things, I inadvertently walked in the exit door of the Halabja Memorial, immediately encountering a man adjusting a LCD television to play a DVD to a group of visitors, showing footage shot by the first journalists to visit the town after the bombing.

The images were arresting.

The most evocative was of a man in traditional Kurdish dress still cradling a baby in his arms where he fell, face down and anonymous, in the street. Another was of a pickup in the process of fleeing the town but it stopped, the driver and the women and children in the back all dead.

The attack had been ordered by Saddam in retaliation against the Kurdish peshmerga taking over the town in the latter stages of the Iran-Iraq war but it was carried out by his defence and interior minister Ali Hassan al-Majid, who earned the grim sobriquet of Chemical Ali for his efforts. He was hanged for this and other activities a few weeks before I arrived.

By all accounts, they used a cocktail of chemical weapons. The sarin gas – a nerve agent 500 times more lethal than cyanide and which was also used in the Tokyo subway attack– had the most immediate affect, killing instantly.

But there was mustard gas too, which left horrific burns and led to a subsequent death toll and birth defects persisting years after the actual bombing.

The videographer had also gone to hospital wards to which the survivors had fled, showing some of the blank-eyed survivors recounting what happened.

One was a tousle-haired youth, who even though he was speaking in Sorani, the local Kurdish dialect, was clearly finding it hard to comprehend what had happened.

The man operating the DVD gestured to the screen and back at himself. “That’s me,” he indicated. Later he handed me a card, in which he was identified as a “Halabja survivor”.

Later again, another person at the memorial handed me a copy of the DVD, while others tracked down English versions of the brochures describing what happened. The inescapable impression was that they wanted this to be known as far and wide as possible.

When I finally went into the doughnut-shaped memorial through the correct entrance, there was an initial room of photographs depicting Halabja in the decades before 1988, with everyday images of football teams, fetes and events like the arrival of the first locally-owned truck.

Then it was straight into a display of full-scale models recreating some of the sights captured in the DVD, including the Kurdish man cradling the baby.

Then there was another room with photo after photo after photo of the dead, signs of blood having streamed from their noses and mouths in the final moments of life. Everything living in the area was dead, including pets. Birds had dropped from the sky after encountering the gas.

At the centre of the circular memorial was a round room with black granite walls inscribed with the names of the estimated 5000 dead.

There I met a man taking his two daughters through the memorial. They were Iraqi but not Kurdish, he explained.

Then I went into a room where tea was served by other memorial workers, one of whom was Hersh Mohammed Yunis.

He said he’d been four and a half years old at the time, was rescued by Iranian journalists and he pointed to his right eye, which still deformed from the after-effects of the attack.

In halting English, Hersh said his uncle from Australia was visiting and urged me to wait. So I did.

About half an hour later, two guys walked up to me, one of whom introduced himself in a broad Aussie accent.

I’ll call him Mr X, for reasons that will become more obvious later.

The other was his uncle – a term I was beginning to realise was a fairly loose one which was used to mean “in some way related” – an abundantly moustached man by the name of Jebar.

Mr X now lived in Brisbane, having been 13 at the time of the attack, which he said began with conventional bombs for a day, from which he and his family sheltered in the basement of their home.

Then on the second day, the chemical weapons were used.

His father had gone outside and came back in with blood streaming from his nose, then they all sat with damp cloths over their mouths until dark, when they fled into the mountains towards Iran.

But because of his family’s involvement with the Kurdish secessionist movement, Iran was no safe haven.

His two older brothers were arrested there and executed.

Mr X eventually made his way to Turkey and then was accepted as a refugee in Australia, to which he moved in 1996.

This was his second visit back, making the journey with his wife, another Kurdish refugee, and their 20-month-old son.

Halabja, he explained, was a complete ghost town for three years and 90 per cent of the buildings had been destroyed.

It was only in 1991, after Saddam Hussein was kicked out of Kuwait and lost effective control of the Kurdish region of the country, that the town was reoccupied.

Now the population was about 60,000, double what it had been in 1988.

Jebar was passionately involved in local politics – the Iraqi general election was less than two weeks away – and was supporting the anti-corruption Gorran (Change) party, which was challenging the two main Peshmerga militia factions which dominate Kurdish politics.

I didn’t ask about Mr X’s experiences in Turkey, which has an equally ruthless reputation for quashing its Kurdish population’s aspirations for independence, but given his experiences at the hands of the governments of Iran and Iraq, he was pretty cynical about politics.

That cynicism was entirely understandable, particularly when it came to the western world’s shameful response.

At that time, still two years before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam was still in the US’s good books.

This was based on the all-too familiar principle that the enemy of your enemy – in this case Iran, the occupation of the American embassy in Tehran having taken place less than 10 years earlier – is your ally.

After using chemical weapons on Halabja, Saddam’s Baathist government blamed Iran for the attack.

The US State Department publicly backed that view, despite having lots of evidence, released later through the freedom of information applications, to show that the Baathists were responsible.

And in a bit of breathtaking chutzpah after the September 11 attacks, the US cited the case of Halabja as proof of Saddam’s chemical weapons capability.

Who wouldn’t be cynical?

Then Jebar asked, through Mr X, if I would be his guest at his house. With what I suspect was indecent haste, I said yes.

He then drove into town and bought the ingredients for dinner (dropped off at home to be prepared by his wife, of course), revealing the fairly decrepit infrastructure of the town. This was part of the reason why Gorran was popular, because apart from the memorial (completed within months of Saddam being toppled in 2003) precious little of the money pledged for Halabja had reached the town.

On the anniversay of the attack in 2006, the locals had torched the memorial in protest of what they claimed were the Kurdish politicians’ exploitation of the 1988 attack without helping the living.

Jebar, it soon proved, was Halabja’s most gifted networker.

We drove to get petrol, Jebar introducing me to others as his Kurdish family who had come to visit.

“Welcome back,” a man said to me, except he got a blank look because he said it in Sorani and I had no idea what he had said.
Jebar explained that I didn’t speak Kurdish.

We then went to the cemetery above the town.

A sign outside the entrance forbade entry by any Baathist party member.

This was the site of several of the mass graves where the victims of the attack were buried.

Then we returned to Jebar’s home, where his mother kissed my shoulders as an honoured guest.

All the stories I’d heard about incredible hospitality by the Kurds were clearly true.

A sumptuous dinner was then presented and there was more talk and backgammon into the night.

Jebar had four children ranging in age from about two to ten. The Kurds were very physically demonstrative with their children, frequently sweeping them up in their arms for hugs and kisses.

Whenever he did this with his two-year-old, all I could think of was picturing him in the context of the Kurdish man depicted at the memorial who had died cradling his child.

In the morning, I left for Iran, with Jebar and Mr X both fighting for the honour of paying the $1.50 minibus fare to Saeed Sadiq. (I knew by now there was no point even trying to pretend to pay)

Jebar won, adding more money so the driver would take me directly to the place where the taxis left for the border.

Mr X said he could never go back to Iran until the regime changed.

I thought he was referring to Ahmadinejad, who was in the process of making his usual stupid but populist iterations doubting the September 11 attacks, the holocaust and Israel’s right to exist.

But then Mr X explained that at the time his two older brothers were executed, the order to do so had been signed by Mousavi, the then prime minister who last year ran as a reformist presidential candidate against Ahmadinejad.

We swapped the usual phone and email details and made a vague commitment to meet when I was next in Brisbane but then he took my notepad back and crossed out his surname, saying he had been active in pro-Kurdish activities.

“In case your notepad is searched by the Iranians at the border,” he explained.