Sunday, April 30, 2006

Hamedan

I awoke when the sky brightened a little before 6am & realised that the area adjacent to my campsite was the city dump. I made a mental note to make every effort to camp before the Sun goes down to be able to scope a more suitable spot.

I made a good start & with a solid tail wind sailed up & down the dry hills sowed with a crop that I suppose was wheat or other grain as some of the villages had combine harvesters parked in yards.

I arrived in Hamedan in the early afternoon with the intention of tracking down a cheap cassette, seeing some of the sites & camping somewhere further along the road. However I was in a flexible mood & when an excited & cheerful group of 6 young people (3 boys & 3 girls) packed into a Paykan (Iranian national car, modeled on Hillman Hunter) I pulled over for a chat. I was immediately invited to stay the night with 2 of the 6, a couple (Somayeh & Mehdi) who'd just moved into their own place. It turned out that the reason for the excitement were the Kiwi stickers on my rear panniers. Mehdi was a big fan of New Zealand & was keen to meet a Kiwi. Unfortunately of the group only his wife Somayeh spoke English so communication was haphazard. They whisked me around, showing me a building site that was to contain a shrine/tomb of someone significant, a couple of modern memorials to some famous locals & to excavations of the ancient city underneath Hamedan that was once the summer capital of the Babylonian empire. There was a small museum which housed sophisticated man-made items from the 2nd century BC. The site was inhabited as long as 4000 years ago! Unfortunately the excavations were a work in progress & not much was known of the city, which seems odd for such a historically important place.

We then went to a bike shop to try & get a new cassette for me. The shop clearly wasn't used to dealing with much other that cheap mountain bikes & those for kids. With 20-20 hindsight I should have suggested that we find another store. As the shop mechanic made a mess of the job he was given. It took him ages to take off & put back on a cassette, even unnecessarily removing & disassembling the freewheel in the process. In the end I wasn't satisfied with the price they quoted for a replacement cassette so I kept the old worn one hoping it could take me to Mashhad.

I was then taken off to a department store where the girls all worked. My presence caused quite a stir, from which I judge that few foreigners make it to Hamedan.

It was unfortunate to have spent so much time at the bike shop & at not terribly interesting Hamedan sites as I missed out on some of the more interesting ones. I guess you can't see everything.

I had an interesting if a bit shocking conversation with Somayeh. I wanted to know her opinion on the big International political issue regarding Iran, the nuclear question. All other English speaking Iranians to whom I'd asked this had been against their government's position, in fact against their government in general. Somayeh didn't fall into this category, she wore a chador, an indication of being more conservative. She was a supporter of the current government & what's more felt that not only did Iran have the right a nuclear power generation system but also nuclear weapons. Her basis for this was Iran's many enemies. She cited Iraq as one & said that during the Iran-Iraq war during the 80s that Saddam Hussein had used a nuclear weapon given by the Americans on an Iranian city. I hoped that such political conviction based on clearly false information was not widespread amongst Iranians.

I cycled 102 km in 5 hours & 58 minutes
Total so far 3711 km in 52 days

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