Yazd: A Philosopher and a Psychic

We left Esfahan for Yazd, a desert oasis, and apparently very, very hot.  Oh good. 

The desert was very similar to the rest of the desert, though there were fewer military bases.  The atmosphere went a little odd too- the beards were bigger, the women were fewer, and those that were around were all chador-ed up. 

 

Yazd was excellent.  It was viciously hot, and made you behave oddly.  We only went out at night, and otherwise stayed in our phenomenally amazing, beautiful haveli hotel, good enough for any honeymoon, and ate incredibly good food sat on the rooftop with a small cat. 
 

The muezzin improved to the extent that you’d actually want to listen to for an extended period.  The city itself was very, very old.  The air felt old, and like it should smell of library books.  It was all made out of mud, with little narrow corridors to get lost down.  I liked it.  I could have lived there.

Despite my silly anxiety because of the conservative look to the place, people were amazingly friendly. 

We met a young Afghani, tall and gangly, who had moved to the area with his mum and sister when his father was killed in the Afghan war with Russia.  He had a very philosophical attitude to life.  He made me think about things. 

He had decided it was his fate for his dad to have been killed, and that without suffering there could be no concept of ‘paradise’, as paradise would exist on earth.  Without the religious overtones, this corresponds neatly to how I feel when not besotted by daft worries. 

He added as an afterthought: ‘I pray that all people will be happy, as no matter where everyone is from or what religion, we are all human.’  And then wandered off round the corner.  He was a very good man.

We met a psychic guide too, a little man sat on a bench in the town square.  He sat us down and told us in perfect English exactly what we were up to, with the bike and everything.  He told us our route perfectly, and knew where we had stayed along the way.  He knew of our arrival too, someone had told him in advance.  He was really nice, though we were slightly taken aback by our ‘averageness’- he could predict too much about us. 

We stayed a few nights in Yazd, I could easily have stayed longer.  We also extended our visa there very easily, for anyone who needs to know.  It took 4 hours, and the smiling moon-faced officer couldn’t have been friendlier.   He brought us a document to translate, on learning we were English.  We made a complete and total faff of it, but it was titled the ‘International Inception Cohorts Findings on Something Or Other’, and was written in incredibly technical medical spraff.  He had a doctorate in English translation, so was far more likely to be able to understand it than us.