I didn’t originally plan to take day buses in Iran. I planned to travel from Tehran to Isfahan, then to Shiraz, Yazd and back to Tehran. These journeys are all good candidates for night buses. At around 7 hours each, they are just long enough for me to be able to get some decent sleep. Any less than 6-7 hours and a night bus just becomes frustrating for me.
But… the purpose of this article is actually to convince people to not take the night buses and stick to day buses instead. My argument is simple.
I spent nearly the entire journey on all my bus trips staring out the window, gawking at the scenery. Most of your time in the cities of Iran is spent visiting mosques, museums and old traditional houses and not admiring the scenery.
But the country side in Iran is really beautiful and one of the best ways to see it, is from the window of a bus. Of course to see anything at all, you need to be transiting during daylight hours.
The roads south from Tehran towards Isfahan and then Shiraz follow the Zagros Mountains. If you are from a flat country like I am, you will find the views particularly pleasing. One minute you can be staring out at flat arid plains and the next at craggy, hilly, rock formations or towering snow-capped mountains. I went through at the tail end of winter and the mountains were all snow-capped. In the peak of winter I suspect the snow might come right down to the lower roads.
This photo turned out amazingly well given that I took it while travelling at 70km/hr and from a bus window. Impeccable timing!
Taking photos from bus windows can be pretty tricky. There are two things I do to try to make the photos decent. Firstly, use a very short shutter speed. I use 1/1000 s to 1/1600 s when taking photos from a bus. I also take a lot of photos. A lot of the photos might not have time to properly auto focus or a passing vehicle may pass in front at the last second ruining the shot. So for every photo I show on this page, there are 10-20 others that I take and then discard.
An image that is quite familiar to me as an Australia. This mountain has been mined and just this remnant is left.
You will pass innumerable small towns and villages either located in the shadows of the mountains or out in the deserts. Both make great photos if you can get the settings right on your camera.
I am no geologist. But this rock formation might be volcanic in origin? Maybe a volcanic plug?
The Zagros Mountains will be the backdrop for a lot of your photos you take as you head south.
Departing Isfahan, the scenery was really awesome. Lots of interesting mountains and canyons.
I have seen so many ferris wheels in Iran! It seems that a lot of the towns, even the small ones, have an amusement park in them. The ferris wheels can be seen from some distance and I guess serves as an advertisement for the park.
A few kids playing in a vacant block not far out of Shiraz.
I really like these two photos, above and below. From this angle the mountains really tower over the town.
I am not sure what is going here. But it totally looks like a scene out of Breaking Bad. I am quite certain that inside the boot of the car in the distance there is either a briefcase of drugs, cash or a kidnapping victim /s.
Leave a reply