The real face of Iran

[Rasputin]

Iran is in the news for all the wrong reasons, but what's it like to go on holiday there? Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler gets a different perspective

The car swerved into the side of the road and a portly man levered himself out from the driver's seat and steamed across the pavement towards me, like the Titanic on a pressing engagement with an iceberg. I was in Iran and I was about to be kidnapped.

'I am a guide, I speak English,' announced Ahmad Pourseyedi as he grabbed my arm, 'come, we will go to the Fin Gardens.'

There was no arguing. The fact that I had arrived in Kashan half an hour earlier and was on my way out to dinner only allowed me to put off the inevitable for 12 hours. The next morning I belonged to Ahmad. In fact I had become part of Ahmad's family. At each of the beautiful traditional homes for which Kashan will, one day, be justifiably famous, the ticket seller was expected, no commanded, to offer me the family discount.

It was a typically Iranian encounter. I cannot remember the last country I visited where there was such an overwhelming urge to make you feel welcome, to roll out the Persian carpet, to include you in the family gathering. That night, in the Khan-e Tabatabei, a fine old house where the central courtyard became a restaurant for the evening, the family at the next table introduced themselves. 'You are by yourself, why don't you join us?'

When I told another chatty group that I lived in Melbourne, I was reminded that the best thing Australia ever did to foster better relations with the Islamic Republic was not to win a football match. In late 1997 Iran drew with Australia in a World Cup preliminary in Melbourne, thus ensuring a place for Iran in the 1998 World Cup. Repeatedly the mere mention of the word 'Melbourne' brings a smile to an Iranian face.

This is what life is like on the Axis of Evil.

I arrive in a shiny Emirates Airbus from Dubai, sipping a glass of wine which I assume, wrongly, will be the last alcohol I'll see for a couple of weeks. I grab my bag off the carousel, my passport is stamped, I clear customs and I'm in Iran. I have made absolutely no plans, not even booked a hotel for tonight. I'm just going to cruise into the city and see what happens. The three young women at Tehran Airport's tourist desk have their hair discreetly covered, but otherwise we could have been at Heathrow or JFK. Clearly tourists don't turn up every day, certainly not ones without a hotel booking. They joke about not doing this too often, comment that they don't know the hotel I've pulled out of my guidebook, phone through to book me a room and finally wish me a pleasant stay in Iran. It's the first of many contacts I'll have with the opposite sex in Iran and a firm reminder that this is not the Arab world. The very idea that you might be asking a woman to book a hotel in Saudi Arabia is inconceivable.

I sling my bag in the back of a taxi and head out into Tehran's terrible traffic. It's not just the volume, it's also the crazily exuberant driving style and the often-battered vehicles challenging for their space in the jam. It seemed bad on my first visit to Tehran, way back in 1972, but it's far worse now.

I've got a special affection for Iran's national car, the Paykan or 'Arrow'. Thirty five years ago, I was a young engineer with the Rootes Group car manufacturers in Coventry. I worked on the old Hillman Hunter, a project known in-house as Arrow. Rootes, which was taken over by Chrysler just before I joined them and bankrupted not long after I left, managed to sell not just the car but a whole car manufacturing plant to the Iranians during the Shah's era and in a remarkably short time the sturdy Paykan flooded the Iranian market.

In Britain, production of the old Hillmans and their assorted clones ground to a halt decades ago, but in Iran they just kept rolling off the assembly line. By the 1990s, the old Paykan was years out of date - a clunky, polluting, unsafe menace compared to modern vehicles. Every year the government announced that Paykan production was about to end and a year later they were still there. Now it finally looks like the Paykan era is about to finish, but there are so many out there they will remain the most popular car for many years.

The next morning I stroll a couple of blocks east from my hotel to the 'Den of US Espionage'. The former US embassy was seized by the revolutionary Iranians in 1979, held for 444 days and contributed substantially to Jimmy Carter's re-election defeat. Today it's occupied by a hardline militia group and the wall around the compound is decorated with anti-American slogans and murals including a painting of a skull-faced Statue of Liberty. I've got a contact at the British embassy, let's call him Graham, and after checking my emails at an internet cafe across the road, I zigzag through the concrete barriers and enter the fortified embassy compound.

'We're the American Embassy proxy,' Graham explains. 'If there was an American Embassy they'd be stoning them and chanting "death to America" outside their walls. Unfortunately we stand in for them. Of course the protests are well organised. The police could easily stop them completely and as it is they always move in before things get too heavy. Although we did have 80 windows broken last week.' Despite all of which, there is a long visa applications queue.

Before I arrived in Tehran I'd made an Iranian contact through a university course in Australia and I've got an invite to a party this evening. It's in a classy area of Tehran and dress wise, once we're indoors and the doors are closed, things are very different. The men look the same, but the women suddenly ditch the scarves and appear in jeans, T-shirts. Hair and bare arms, never seen on the street, suddenly appear. This could easily be a party in the West. There's even a bar ... and booze. 'Where does the beer come from?' I ask Mansoor. 'One of the religious militia groups,' he explains. 'This one has the monopoly on beer imports from Turkey. They'll bring in a container of 'arms' which is actually Efes beer,' he continues, handing me another cold can.

I'm being so charmed in so many different directions by the people I've met in Tehran it brings me up short when an Irish woman explains in colourful detail what a hassle the men can be and how she has put a great deal of effort into learning Farsi insults to hurl back at men who come on to her. 'Telling them "I'd rather sleep with your sister", works pretty well,' she explains. This doesn't sound like particularly good advice. Perhaps like me she's had a few too many cans of Efes tonight. It's 2am by the time the taxi drops me off at my hotel and I have trouble walking an absolutely straight line up the stairs to my room.

Water features everywhere in Iran, flowing along street edges in the open drains known as jubes, cascading down channels in gardens and parks, sprinkling in fountains and in pools in the open courtyards of traditional old houses. It's also dispensed with remarkable civic generosity. In museums, parks, mosques - even along every length of street - there's usually a public refrigerated water dispenser, an Iranian version of a drinking fountain. In the big cities piped water is safe to drink and a happy consequence of this ready availability of cold drinking water is that Iran is not afflicted with the litter of empty plastic mineral water bottles which plagues so many developing countries.

[Rasputin]

In Yazd, 450 miles south of Tehran, the water channels may be hidden from view, but examples of its other traditional architectural feature are very evident. Any worthwhile old home is topped by what looks like a cross between a stylish chimney and a lookout tower. They're badgirs, wind towers cunningly designed to catch a passing breeze and funnel it down over a pool of water in the house to provide a surprisingly effective form of natural air-conditioning. Restoring and reopening traditional old badgir-equipped houses as hotels and restaurants has become a local craze. I stay at the handsome Malek-o Tojjar, a fine example of one of these old houses. That afternoon, sipping tea in the courtyard cafe and reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi's novel about a reading group dipping into forbidden western literature, I'm invited over to join a real reading group. The four Yazd university students, three of them female, are keen to practise their English and talk about the English language books they're studying.

Young couples openly hold hands, women shake hands with you, talk to you and smile at you. In Saudi Arabia not only is there virtually no opportunity to talk to a Saudi woman, even if you did you'd see no more than her eyes, and possibly not even those.

Despite (or because of?) their modest attire, Iranian women are always eyeing you up. It's all shy smiles and seductive glances. Photographing the passing traffic in front of a mosque that evening a woman, passengering behind her boyfriend on a motorcycle, tosses me a wink and a wave; later that evening three old ladies chorus 'hello' from their watermelon feast in an old city back alley.

Dinner tonight is at the Silk Road, another photogenic hotel in a renovated old house. Once again the courtyard centres around a pool, the architecture is beautiful, the evening light glows, the badgir rises up as a backdrop. Some of the guests and diners sit at tables, some of the tables at knee height, others at a normal level. Others, like me, lounge back on wide, carpeted, sofa-like affairs, sitting cross-legged and sideways, leaning back against the armrest. When your meal is served it's arrayed in front of you, in the centre of the 'sofa'. If there are two of you then you face each other. The sofa is wide enough to accommodate four. I'm served some tea and sweets, but no food emerges from the kitchen until well after 9pm. The Iranians clearly rival the Spanish when it comes to eating late. It's no problem because simply watching what's going on is a delight. There's a buzz of happy activity, families, individuals, a handful of tourists, but mostly Iranians. Occasionally people climb upstairs for the view and we can see them silhouetted on the flat-topped roof. Lots of people smile over at me, stop to exchange a few words, enquire about my impressions of Iran or offer a 'welcome' if nothing more.

Next stop is Esfahan. This single city alone could justify a trip to Iran, but it's hard to decide whether the prime attraction is the magnificent sweep of the Imam Square, with its perimeter of shopping arcades and its breathtaking blue-tiled mosques, or the gentle curve of the Zayandeh River with its multi-arched bridges.

One of my favourite photographs from the trip my wife Maureen and I made across Asia in 1972 is of Maureen sitting on the river edge with the Khaju Bridge in the background. She is in an outfit, quite respectable, but which would have got her arrested by the Morality Police in 21st-century Iran. I wander down one side of the river, past couples strolling along holding hands. Later, a family asks me to pose with them in their photograph, standing on a teahouse balcony with the square as a backdrop. As the sun drops lower and the temperature cools, the square is full of evening activity. Once again that Persian passion for spreading out a rug on any patch of grass and having a picnic comes into play.

The next day I start with the square, walking past the shops, dropping in to the Sheikh Lotfollah and Imam mosques and exploring the Ali Qapu Palace. The Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque is a jewel box, so intricate and detailed it's hard to believe it's a building, not something you can pick up and carry away. There's the trademark Persian blue and turquoise tilework, but it's also tiled in green-white-gold. In contrast, the Imam Mosque is the whole damn Tiffany's, big and slightly odd, the entrance forming the end of the square, facing straight down the plaza.

On the balcony of the Ali Qapu Palace, I meet a young Iranian-American couple. Hassan and Sanaz live in Los Angeles, a city with probably the biggest Iranian populations in the US. He left Iran when he was a child, before the revolution, and has never been back before. She left 18 years ago, after the revolution.

'I was expecting it to be much worse,' Sanaz admits. 'I think it's actually improved since I left but everybody complains,' Hassan continues. 'Of course people always want change. Last Thursday we went to Jaam-e Jam. It's a shopping centre in North Tehran, very popular with young people and on Thursday afternoon they come out to show off.'

'Young guys with rings in their eyebrows and girls clearly pushing it as far as they can, scarves falling off to show their hair, lots of makeup. I'd like to have taken some photographs, but they'd probably not want their sins recorded.'

On the way from Esfahan to Kashan there's a brief encounter with that other Iran, the one that features in the press and TV much more often than beautiful hotels and friendly people. 'It's a nuclear research centre,' my driver explains as we pass anti-aircraft gun emplacements and half-buried buildings.

Back in Tehran, I emerge from the bus station, check my guidebook and start to cross the road. Half way across the highway I'm hit, not by a car, bus or motorcycle, but once again by the realisation that Iran can be a surprisingly sophisticated country, well aware of the outside world and how they connect to it.

'Hey, Lonely Planet,' yells the cop directing the traffic and simultaneously pointing at my open guidebook. 'Which way you going, man?'