We arrived about 10.30 am in Tehran on Friday. We decided to take a flight from Abadan as there were no train tickets available. I was a little nervous as i had read before that the airplanes used in Iran for domestic flights were old planes from Russia, which were not able to be maintained properly. About 2 years ago though, due to safety issues, these planes were made redundant and the planes used now, albeit still about 20 years old, are ex-American planes. ...

Managed to finally upload the photos of Hanabandan and the Wedding Party. I discovered that Ebi's laptop has a bunch of viruses on it and unfortunately it wiped all the photos I took in Isfahan and Aloni, so I have included some pictures of the sights we visited there, to give you an idea. Fortunately I found some other pictures on Ebi's camera of Aloni. Ebi and I are leaving on Friday to travel to Tehran, so hopefully I will be able to post any photos I take...

Not much has been happening in the last couple of days since we got back from our travels in Shiraz and Esfahan. Last night, Ebi and I met up with Khosro again and went for dinner with him in an area called Braim. Abadan, although it doesn't have any tourist areas, has quite a long history and connection to Britain, through the oil refinery business. This area has lots of housing which was built by the British in around the 1920's to house the workers of BP and ...

On Thursday morning (24th August) we left Isfahan and Ebi's uncle drove us to visit some of Ebi's mother's Bachtiari relatives in a village called Aloni, about 30 minutes drive from Lordeghan. I remembered some of them from the wedding. They were all happy to see us again and asked all about our trips to Shiraz and Isfahan, as well as of course, many more questions about me and the UK. We had lunch with them, which was the famous Bachtiari Kebab. This is piec...

Apologies for the late blog posting. We arrived home to Abadan last night after a long day travelling and I was too tired to write anything. We stayed in Isfahan for one night and I will talk about that visit here. Unfortunately, something has happened to my memory card in the camera and I cannot, for the moment, access the photos of Isfahan. I'll download and post some photos of the sites we visited from the internet. Early on Wednesday morning, after a long bu...