Where in the world is John Henzell?

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.

The Axis of Evil Ski Tour: Part One

“Moon Plaza? You want to stay there? Really? Oh my goodness. Nobody stays there.”

This reaction came from the Bahraini taxi driver taking me from the airport to the hotel recommended for me in Manama, the capital. And when we arrived, I could see why.

Moon Plaza is one of Manama’s most famous brothels and the recommendation was obviously a practical joke being played on me. But in its own way, it proved remarkably emblematic of my brief time in Bahrain.

It should be noted that I always suspected that there is almost no reason whatsoever to visit Bahrain as a tourist, and this trip soon proved my suspicions to be fairly well founded.

But it was impossible to fly directly to Erbil, in the northern Kurdish-administered sector of Iraq, and going via Manama was an alternative to going via Dubai.

Three factors swung the balance in favour of Bahrain. First, it would be a taste of Arabia After Oil, having visited Yemen (Arabia Without Oil) and obviously living in the Dhabs is the perfect example of what Arabia With Oil is all about. But 40 years before Abu Dhabi, Bahrain was the first nation to find oil and enjoy the riches that follow, but now their supplies have just about run out.

And it was another country to add to my list, a tally in which I was still about four nations shy of achieving the entirely arbitrary and climate-condemning goal of having been to as many countries as I am years of age.

And finally the local chapter of the Hash House Harriers was having its 2000th run and I wanted to see how other hashes operated.

Visitors continually remark that our Abu Dhabi Island hash was a very tame affair compared to others, which was fine by us because we considered ourselves to be a drinking club with a running problem. The traditional hash, I soon discovered, is most accurately described as a drinking club with serious psychological scarring from having boarded at English public schools.

The suggestion that I stay at the Moon Plaza came via the Bahrain hashmaster, which gave a taste of what as in store. Once the taxi driver’s prophetic warnings were shown to be if anything understated, I found an only slightly less dodgy hotel around the corner, which still offered bedding with odd stains and tears, a shower that included life forms unknown to science and, of course, a 24-hour p*rn channel as the default on the television.

The start of the 2000th run weekend coalesced with what Arabia Without Oil is like. According to the Bahrain PR stance, the island is a centre for business. What they don’t say is that a very large plank of their economy is Saudi s*x tourism, with Saudis driving over a 28km causeway to enjoy alcohol, nightclubs and hoookers.

The first event was that most famous of Islamic traditions: the pub crawl. About 90 of us dressed in matching T-shirts which would entitle us to drinks at each of about nine bars located around the old souq area of Manama.

I’d only ever gone to one Filipino bar in the Dhabs — after a particularly cr@ppy day at work, I’d resorted to the so-surreal-its-awesome Safari Bar, where Filipinas in short shorts and FMBs would belt out mainstream hits under a canopy of plastic leaves — but this one was so similar as to seem like a franchise.

From what those I was with said, it was Manama’s sole g@y bar, which seemed a little improbable but was supported the name — Wendy’s — and reputedly did not display its orientation until later in the evening.

Even the Dhabs had one (the barely-euphemistically named Colliseum bar, a name only a little more subtle than Brisbane’s old Cockatoo Bar, so named because every one of its patrons were deemed to have seen a c*ck or two) but the local hashers’ credibility was still a little dented by the Moon Plaza incident, so I still don’t know.

But there were exceptions. The third bar had bored-looking Russian women pretending to dance while Saudi guys “socialised” with Chinese hoookers.

Like the Safari Bar, this was surreal, but not quite so awesome.

The 2000th run the next day involved a chartered bus to take us to the site and almost as soon as we were seated, they started handing out beer.

The choice was Fosters or Fosters, the result of some sponsorship deal.

But it became a taste of things to follow. The run was sited in an agricultural area south of Manama, with the idea being that it would be similar in nature to the original run in the early 1970s.

The Abu Dhabi hash does not involve public drinking until after the run, at which point we’re at someone’s house or in somewhere tucked away from prying eyes.

Public drinking is illegal here in Bahrain, just as it is in the Dhabs. But here they don’t care, and after a 20-minute saunter past some camel and date farms, we had the first of what became three beer (and water) stops.

The run then headed through a palm plantation.

Some even insisted on running.

Our hash ends with the circle, where anyone who’s done anything stupid is made fun of and made to drink.

Here (as with most hashes) a block of ice is provided on which transgressors have to sit bare-assed if cited for offences against the hash.

All of this makes me certain that the original hashers were permanently scarred by having boarded at English public schools.

The next morning, I headed back to the airport for the flight to Erbil in northern Iraq.

The verdict on the Bahrain leg of the Axis of Evil ski trip? Not very evil, but not much snow either.