IRANIAN ARRIVAL

We flew from Damascus to Tehran. The flight was far better than we had been led to believe. Iran Air has a fearsome reputation, which we found quite undeserved. We felt like royalty, compared to the treatment we had had on Aeroflot. We took off on time, the loos were clean, and we had a perfectly edible snack.

As instructed, at the luggage carousel, we looked around for our pilot friend. Then, amongst all the luggage, an unlikely item appeared - a brown envelope. Everyone looked at it curiously - what sort of person would put an envelope in the hold? About the third time it passed us, the light dawned. It must be our torches, confiscated by security in Damascus. It was!

It was 2 a.m. when we finally emerged from immigration, and there, waiting patiently, was our driver. No, thank you, he was quite used to planes arriving at ridiculous hours. And yes, the time change really was 1½ hours. Iran has to be the only country in the world to be on a really different time zone. We later found out it had to do with getting the sun overhead at noon, for religious purposes.

When we finally surfaced, we were far too late for breakfast. We staggered out into the streets, but it soon became obvious that Tehran wasn't just closed for the day, it was shut up, sealed like a drum. We had chosen a Friday in the holy month of Ramazaan, and that was as good a religious holiday as anyone could wish.

Fortunately my friend in Tehran had an acquaintance who had a nice garden that might amuse the Traveller, who is particularly fond of nice gardens. And so we found our way through several layers of security to a large park in the centre of Tehran, which turned out to house the British Embassy. The Ambassador, Sir Geoffrey Adams, was kindness itself, and not only showed us round the garden: but also suggested we should visit another large garden, on a hill above the city, to which the embassy had retired in the humid days of summer before air conditioning was invented. It was a large park, with cooling streams from the mountains high above:

Some of the buildings had been converted into a primary school for the benefit of the embassy staff; and some others now housed a German senior school. There was a certain bitter sweetness, that the British Embassy now hosted German scholars resident in Iran! A further sight was a crater where one of Saddam Hussein's SCUD rockets had landed in 1986, during the Iran-Iraq war. Did he really mean to hit a little piece of Britain?