4th – Touring Tehran

The hotel serves breakfast at 0630-0930 but we (me and my roommate) agreed that sleep was more important. The alarm was set to 1100 giving us a bit more than 5 hours of much needed sleep.

At 1200 we met with the rest of the group with our tour leader and two local guides. We are 16 people; 3 women – 2 of them Norwegian – and me being the youngest (one is 38 the rest are in their 40s/50s/60s) which is a bit of a surprise to me. There are usually a few people younger than me on these climbs and the average age is usually much lower. But everybody seems to have quite a bit of experience climbing and trekking so I doubt there will be any issues.

We left the hotel around 1330 in the heat but had access to busses with AC. We started with having lunch near a closed bazaar (Friday is weekend and it was also being renovated) and afterwards we went to see Golestan Palace. Some of the rooms were very peculiar as there were mirrors all over the place, mostly as small pieces, making it very bright and diamond like (and not like actual mirrors where you kept seeing yourself). Unfortunately you were not allowed to photograph these.

It was a bit weird walking through a completely empty bazaar.

The building we had lunch was old and a former bank.

Golestan Palace.

From there we continued to an open bazaar with all the fascinating booths and chaos you’d expect. We rounded it off by visiting a nearby mosque before going for dinner at a Persian restaurant.

Spices at the bazaar.

Saffron. Lots of it.

This is how I'd imagined a bazaar.

The mosque, just as beautifully decorated as the palace.

And plenty of bling indoors, too!

We returned to the hotel at around 2100 and started packing for the coming days. Tomorrow we will leave around 0700-0715 to go on a 2-day trip to climb Tochal, a small warm-up summit of 3933m. Coming back down we will pass by the hotel, pick up our pre-packed large bags and continue towards Damavand for our “main” climb. Weather-wise I suspect we don’t have to worry too much about freezing or heavy rainfalls.

The day was obviously hot but it never felt as bad as I had expected. Due to the weekend there were barely anyone out so the first half of the day out felt like we had most of the place to ourselves. Getting closer to late afternoon and evening traffic started picking up and the number of people out on the streets increased significantly.