Truck-drivers who write poetry, hassle-free bazaars, strangers who share their picnics: they play by different rules in Iran. Francis Spufford steps off the edge of the known world . . .

Paintings of Khomeini still survey the road junctions in Iran. From billboards in the middle of roundabouts, from walls at street corners, from icons suspended where the arcades cross in the heart of a bazaar, the ayatollah gazes down. The famous features are just as you remember them from the 1980s news bulletins - the eyebrows, the nose, the beard, the turban and the scholar's linens, all in black and white - and his expression is still as hard for an outsider to interpret. There is certainly no tolerance for human weakness in that face, and yet it seems constantly on the verge of amusement. The lips curl towards an ironical half-smile; one brow rises, almost incredulous, as if the had grown so used to humanity's failure to live up to God's demands that he now finds the spectable entertaining, in a grim, withering way. His eyes are phenomenally weary.

When, as a traveller, your raises your eyes from the smoggy expressways of Tehran and find Khomeini presiding over the next intersection, you know you've left the global village. The cubic jumble of concrete buildings could be the modern architecture of any 50 cities eastward from Athens, and the honking cars, confusingly, are mostly Hillman Hunters, built under license locally. The banners saying 'Down with the Great Satan' have gone - in the lobby of one hotel, an instrumental version of "I Like to Be in America" from West Side Story plinks away cheerfully. But even with the Islamic Republic wrestling with change and the new majority in Parliament this spring for the reform agenda of President Khatami, this is still elsewhere. You're still outside the envelope of the familiar world, where cuisines and furniture change from place to place byut the manners underneath are pretty much the same. Here, different rules apply. The Khomeini portraits are official art. You get a more informal insight into the Iranian psyche from the decorations on the procession of Mercedes trucks that lug goods over the arid mountain between the cities.

Iranian truck-drivers don't go for Day-Glo colours or the automotive caddis-larva effect of a Filipino jeepney. They favour stencils, naive paintings of roses, and calligraphy on the sign-board above the cab, where there's just room for a burst of eloquence that you can read as the truck dopplers by in the next lane. Each delivers a message. "O King of all good things,' sighs a blue behemoth loaded with melons, "I am so tired of being alone!" in the rear-view mirror a dirty orange juggernaut carrying marble looms up, pulls out, overtakes, and delivers a different slant on male loneliness, in the form of a black stencil on its bumper of a woman pulled her veil up to her mouth. Is this an image of virtue? Or sex? Or both? It's rather disturbing, although not as much as the truck with two long-lashed female eyes painted above its brake lights. "God is the true owner of everything,' reproves a maroon leviathan with a cargo of conscripts. "All that we are given, we hold in trust."

Poetry, theology, telegraphic cries from the heart. One sequence takes you to the core of Shi'a Islam. "Ya Ali," cries a signboard: "Oh Al!" And then Ya Zakhra, Ya Hosayn, Ya Abul Fas, Ya Zeinab . . . These are the names of the Shi'a holy family: Zakhra was the Prophet's daughter, Ali her husband. Shi'ites believe that their descendants, with the blood of Mohammed flowing in their veins, should have been the rulers and guardians of Islam, instead, the leadership went to the Sunni calipths, and the history of the family was an epic of grief and lost battles, enacted every year in Iran in passion plays. But the bloodline survived to give medieval Shi'ites 12 mystical imams, like Kings in hiding; and seyyeds, descendants of the Prophet, walk the street of Iran. Iranians are immensely proud that, as they see it, they family of the Arabian prophet could find refuge only with them, the civilized Persians. Each scholar in their midst wearing the black turban of a seyyed is like the sign of a promise kept. Khomeini was one, of course. So, significantly, is President Khatami, the gentle intellectual elected by Iranians in 1997 to rein in the power of the clergy. "The people of my house are like the ark of Noah," goes one saying of the Prophet. "He who climbs aboard is saved." The lorry-drivers, whose 18-tonne vehicles mourn deaths that occurred over 1,300 years ago, are declaring that they hold onto the ark. They're on board. They're safe.

When the trucks have gone by, the hills are quite. Iran is huge, at least three times the size of France, but most of that area is taken up by the ridges and outriders of two enormous chains of mountains, the Elburz and the Zagros, baked by the heat of the summers and then abruptly buried by metres of snow in the short, harsh winters. In spring, the snowmelt gouges channels down the slopes and wildflowers accelerate from seed to bloom; then it's back to ochre dust again, and the heat hanging over the endless grey and ochre ranges, with their seams of loose rocks that look, from far away, like the rough skin of brazil nuts. Maybe because of the punishing cycle of the year, the mountains seem very ancient, cracked and pummeled by the millennia.

This is an antique land, like the one in Shelley's 'Ozymandias' where history leaves nothing of a boastful king but a broken statue; and it is not sort on Oxymandian moments itself. The monuments that travellers are once more coming to see in Iran, now that tourism is beginning to be possible again, have been comprehensively mocked by passing time. Cyrus the Great founded the Persian Empire around 559 BC and was buried in the middle of his great capital city of Pasargadae. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Now, the shortstone pyramid of his tomb stands by itself on a dusty brown plain given over to wheat fields. Pasargadae is a village at the end of a side road, and two farmers sit under a tree, eating their lunch, indifferent to kings. Alexander came this way; and when you're up in the mountains taking in the size of Asia, you wonder how he can possibly have imagined that to march his little column of soldiers across these immense switchbacks was to take possession of them.

The horizon is a hot, dun-coloured smear of haze - and that's wearing sunglasses. Without them, you get the full force of the light that bounces back up from the dry ground, and everything is white, uncomfortable, glare. Not surprisingly, Iranians follow the Mediterranean timetable for the day. They rise early, work in the morning, and nap after lunch until the temperature becomes bearable again. At dusk they go out for the paseo. It isn't called that, of course - I never discovered its name in Persian - but it is the same ritual promenade, to see and been seen, that happens at dusk in Spain and in southern Italy.

We began our Iranian journey in the southern city of Shiraz, once famous for its vineyards. At nightfall, along the boulevard built by Karim Khan Zand in the 18th century, crowds flow at a sauntering pace, chatting to friends, checking out the shop windows which, in some partial compensation for the plainness of the chador, offers Iranian women and amazing array of guilded, open-toed sandals and diamante stilettos. The dark is kind to Shiraz, which, like all Iranian cities, has been extensively mugged by speculative builders. (In Iran, you need a permit to put up a new building, but not to tear an old one down.) Coloured lights dangle from the trees,; the focus of the evening narrows to the bright pavements. There's vivacity in the air. Choreographed teams of bakers manufacture the bread for the city's supper in clay ovens. Iranians call them ' the photocopiers', because sheets of hot bread stack up on the griddles at front of the shp as quickly as pages in the out tray of a Xerox. It took a while to realize that, within the Islamic Republic's bounds of modesty, the promenaders were also engaged in the world's oldest recreation. Men had come out to look at women, and women had come out to look at men; never staring, for that would be rude, but flickering their gazes lightly over and past each other. This was the republic of glances, it seemed, a far more flirtatious place than I'd expected. Until three years ago, the morality police would have been out on the streets, running humiliating searches for nail varnish and screaming at tiny infractions of decorum, but since the election of President Khatami, they have scaled down their activities, to Iranians' almost universal relief.

At Gas Square, a monolith spouts perpetual flames up into the night sky in celebration of the big natural-gas field near the city. An ice-cream parlour, blazing with the white tiles and neon, dishes out scoops to young people who sit and eat outside, the girls clustered to one set of benches, the smaller group of boys on the other. It's very obviously the cool place to go in Shiraz if you're 15 or 16. If it wasn't for the chadors on the girls, the scene would have been completely familiar. And yet the veil plays a paradoxical part in the girls' independence. It is perceived as a kind of guarantee of the wearer's virtue, and when your virtue is guaranteed, you can do things. Since the revolution, and the passing of laws swaddling women up in black cloth horribly unsuited to the climate, even conservative families have felt it was safe for their daughters to go to university and to travel around freely. As a result, 50 per cent of Iranian students female, and late into the evenings there are women on the streets, walking along in ones and twos and threes, or sitting in parks reading books: not a sight you'd see elsewhere in the Muslim world. Older Iranians seem emotionally comfortable with the system. They see a natural distinction between requiring women to dress modestly and depriving them of freedom or education, as happens in neighboring Afghanistan under the Taliban. One man described the Taliban to me as "dangerous religious lunatics". But for young people, half a helping of autonomy is maddening. Many young women - and their loyal male friends - cordially detest the chador, and since two-thirds of the Iranian population are under 25, the influence of the young is growing. For the moment, their discontent rumbles on beneath the surface of Iranian life, but occasionally it breaks out onto the streets in events such as the student protests in the summer of 1999. These may be signs of greater upheavals to come. It's a prospect that deeply worries Iranian parents, who, unlike their children, remember the times when virtue was imposed by terror.

I was a little terrified myself when I entered Iran. "I know you were frightened," said a student to me later. "You think that we are all Hezbollah. But only one in 10 of use is like that!" This ought not to have been comforting, given that there are a lot more than nine people on any Iranian street, bit I had already discovered by then that Iran is, without any doubt at all, the warmest, politest, most hospitable country that I have ever been in - almost shamingly so. When we found out that we had forgotten the bread from our lunch at Pasargadae, the farmers under the trees gave us theirs. When we walked through the park on Friday afternoon, we were beckoned to join the picnicking families, which would not happen to two Iranians strolling along in Hyde Park. Our guide steered us away from unpleasant encounters so expertly that we were hardly aware of the potential for them. Students were eager to talk - to begin, right there and then, the 'dialogue of civilizations' that President Khatami has called for. Even people who weren't eager to make comparisons with foreign ways often found us the most entertaining thing that had happened all day. They didn't rule out the possibility that we might turn out to be, as advertised, spectacularly wicked, but that made it all the more interesting when we proved to be capable of civilised courtesies. In a place mere "Muslim" is sometimes used to mean "person", it was as if we had arrived from over the edge of the world. Iranians call Europeans "faranagi" - '"Franks", a word that has not changed since Europeans wore horned helmets and big blond beards. Our powers of fascination and repulsion can be glimpsed in the fact that Iranians call a peepshow, or a freakshow, a "kingdom of the Franks". The was important to the people who talked to us that we were there on their terms, observing their rules. Iranians have long resented foreigners who swan around ignoring local custom. But a guest is a different matter.

Iranian normality reigns in the Shiraz bazaar. The merchants of Shiraz are not geared up to fleece tourists who don't know the proper prices of things, so they treat all comers as savvy consumers who will speak up if they need something. We sat down on part of the stock of a carpet stall to admire the way light slanted down on the bazaar's long tunnel of spices, cochineal-dyed kilims and dubious Calvin Klein scarves. The owner came out, checked that we weren't buying, and went back to his accounts in the rear of the store. You can't imagine this hands-off policy in the souks of Morocco. It makes for unhassled enjoyment of the city's commercial heart, another gift from the Zand dynasty of the 18th century, which has been many times added to and rebuilt, but always retaining the deep shade of the arcades and the little court where you can comsumate your shopping by drinking a glass of tea by a green pool. All this was lovely, but I was disappointed that so little was left from the medieval glory days. I had wanted to see the inter-related parts of a great city, as you can seem them fitting together in the Renaissance cities of Italy, and instead all that was left was fragments, several hundred years younger than the time of Shiraz's greatness, when it sat astride the Asian trade routes and the poet Hafez sand about God and Shiraz wine.

Old Shiraz may have vanished under Tarmac, like Troy, but I had hopes of Isfahan, 400km to the north. Robert Byron, whose 1930s classic The Road to Oxiana is a kind of bitchy guide to the architecture of the region, made it sound as through Isfahan was substantially still the city it was when the Safavid Shahs of the 17th century made it their exquisite capital. We set off by Land Cruiser past the Qu'ran Gateway, which blesses travellers leaving Shiraz. A blessing seemed a good idea. On the highway leading up into the old mountains, we faced the real danger of a trip to Iran: not the hostility of the people, but their driving\. A common road sign implores people to drive between the white lines, but it does no good. Almost all the traffic lights in the country are set at flashing amber, but it does no good. The government mounts mangled car-wrecks on plinths, with blood-stained dummies hanging out of the windows, but it does no good. The view through the windscreen is like on a long journey is like an extended version of Police, Camera, Action. Motorbikes bearing whole families tootle head-down the wrong side of the road; cars leaving the motorway change their mind and reverse at speed back down the off-ramp. The only thing to do is gaze out of the window at the walled gardens Iranians build wherever they can. It doesn't matter where the setting is scrubland, desert or the wasteland of industry or half-built housing surrounding every town - if the quantum of water required to support a fruit tree is present, someone will have thrown up a rectangle of clay walls. A low door admits you from the dry world outside into a green space crammed with over-hanging boughs, and ripe red pomegranates. Our word "paradise" comes from the Persian pairidaeza, meaning "walled garden".

There were shooting stars overhead as we reached Isfahan. Or rather, as we reached Isfahan's orbital by-pass. First disappointment: since Robert Byron's time, it has grown from a city the size of Oxford to a conurbation the size of Birmingham, and the historic city centre along the Zaindeh River is dwarfed. Second disappointment: even in the central district, the jerrybuilders have done their worst. If Isfahan is the Florence of Iran, then it's a Florence where only the actual Renaissance churches and bridges across the Arno have been exempt from a tide of demolition. Third disappointment: the Abbasi Hotel, Iran's finest, which we'd looked forward to as a change from the pleasant but unremarkable airport-style hotels elsewhere, had been expanded from its original stunning setting in the courtyard of a caravanserai. A new wing had been added that looked like a student hall of residence, and new public rooms that were overwhipped confections of gold and pink glass - not in bad taste exactly, but in a Middle Eastern version of good taste too unironically sparkly to give much pleasure to farangi.

In the morning, things improved. The Abbasi's older function room - such as the dining hall, designed in the 1960s with the advice of the Empress Farah, turned out to have a coppery, Art Deco magnificence about them, embellished with good pastiches of traditional Persian paintings; and the nice old porter who showed us around claimed to have seen djinns in the guest rooms. Clearly, these mischievous spirits out of folklore behaved a lot like their European fairies. Apparently, they fear iron - you drive them off by waving a pair of scissors at them. "And what do they look like?" I asked. "They resembled, " he said, "the children of rabbits."

Out in the city, tucked away along the leafy avenues of the Safavid street plan, far more had survived than first appeared. To enjoy Iran to the full, you need to discard your Arabian Nights fantasies and allow the true beauties of the place to emerge from a background of ruination and concrete mixers. Across a dusty car park, for example, is the entrance to Isfahan's oldest treasure, the 9th-11th century "Mosjed-e Jame", or Friday Mosque. This is a masterpiece from the age before delicacy. Narrow bricks the colour of mud have been coaxed into galleries of multiple arches where the sunlight falls as parallel rays; they mount, with sublime solidity, to a dome the size of St. Paul's, built several hundred years before Brunelleschi rediscovered the dome in the West. It's like standing under a clay sky. Hiding in the greenery, invisible from the street, there's the Palace of Forty Columns, the Safavid shahs's delicate pavilion for public audiences. Really, there are only 20 columns, unbelievably slender pillars of red-brown wood holding up an inlaid canopy of faded stars. The other 20 are formed by the reflection in the long garden pool. It was there than in the 1620s, the English ambassador knelt on the platform and presented Charles I's compliments to Shah Abbas. He was presumably as amazed as I am now that beauty can obey such different rules of proportion from the familiar ones.

Best of all, at the very heart of the city, Isfahan preserves not just islands of isolated splendour, but splendour intact in one whole integrated and overwhelming cityscape. Naqshe-Jahan ("Picture of the World") Square, now renamed after Khomeini, was the centre of public life and the centre of commerce, and Isfahan's religious focus, for the great square fits money and worship and aristocratic pleasures together in deliberate visual harmony. The perimeter is made of arched, two storey arcade of shops, absolutely regular, arrowing into the distance like a demonstration of perspective in a Renaissance manual of geometry. Each side is interrupted by a symmetrically-placed building. One side has the pillar grandstand, another had the grand facade of Isfahan's monuments of religious art of the order of Chartres or the Sistine Chapel. The Sheikh Lotfollah's walls represent the zenith of the Safavid art of tilework, in which small details compose into a great design of curling vines - almost a subtle anticipation of William Morris - on a background of fawn glaze. On the multiple gateways and domes of the giant Shah Mosque, the local intricacies of the tiles fuse into shimmering, pointillist fields of turquoise and cobalt, - just like heaven, if heaven were all blue flowers.

We came back to the square at dawn, to see the sun come up and move the shadows of the arcades across the fountains. We came back at dusk, to watch the moon rise from behind the mountains back beyond the Christian quarter of the city, and the blue of the domes bleed away into the darkening sky. On the rooftops at the north end is a teahouse hung with photographs of notable ayatollahs and wrestlers, with a view that takes in the whole square. I sat there with a hookah and a glass of tea, replete with beauty and in full agreement with Robert Byron: Isfahan is one of the great cities of the world, made for the refreshment of mankind.

TOUR OPERATORS TO IRAN
COX & KINGS (020 7873 5001) offers an eight-night guided tour of Iran, including visits to Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz, from Lb 1295.
BRITISH MUSEUM TRAVELLER (020 7323 8895) organises an art, archeology and architecture tour, from 10-24 September, for Lb 1,999.
In Iran itself, visit PASARGAD TOURS (146 Africa Avenue, Tehran 19156; 00 98 21 205 8333; fax 205 8866) acts as a local agent for several operators, and can arrange journeys within the country. With a certain amount of persistence and ingenuity, independent travel in Iran is also possible: consult the Lonely Planet guide.
VISAS cost Lb 40 from the Iranian Embassy in London, and should be obtained as far in advance as possible.

WHEN TO GO
Summer is for masochists or business travellers with immovable appointments: the temperature tops 43 degrees Celsius in many parts of the country. Winter is cool, or even cold. The ideal times are April-May and September-November.

FOOD AND DRINK
The best Persian cooking is done at home. In hotels, only the rice, backed with butter and saffron, really gives you a glimpse of Iran's culinary splendours. The standard selection of beef and chicken kebabs hardly varies from place to place, and for some reason creme caramel is always on the menu too. But seize the occasional opportunity to eat the following: rice with herbs and broad beans; beef marinaded in yoghurt, aubergine and walnut halim or puree, delicious with hot Iranian breads; salads of shredded mint; fessenjan, a thick sauce of ground walnuts and pomegranate juice which is as alien to the Western palate in its sour-sweet richness as one of those Mexican stews that includes bitter chocolate, and rangenak, a sweet Shiraz pudding made with dates. No alcoholic drinks are available in Iran. Iranian non-alcoholic beer taste like flat shandy, and are no recommended. Instead, look out for watermelon juice, cherry juice, and sherbet. Coffee addicts should consider packing their own small jar of high-quality ground or instand: Iran is a tea-drinking nation and coffee is available in the form of tiny individual Nescafe sachets. Be appreciative if an Iranian buys you Nescafe: it is expensive.

SHOPPING
In Isfahan, miniature painting of traditional Iranian scenes. In Shiraz: kilims and carpets (caveat emptor) from the Fars provence. Everywhere: pistachios, metalwork and painted tiles. Nothing made of ceramics now, alas, seems to use the Safavid spectrum of blue glazes.

GENERAL BEHAVIOUR
It is an important part of Iranian good manners to conduct daily transactions (buying a ticket, asking the way) as little conversations. Unless you speak Farsi, you won't be able to join in, but say hello (salaam) and reply to the formal greeting salaam aleykum with aleykum salaam To express approval of something in the Persian way, say "Bah! Bah!" gutturally, on a rising note of excitement. For disapproval,, say "Ah! Ah!", also from the throat, with a sad, falling intonation. The attention you receive will almost all be curious and friendly, but use common sense and follow your guide's advice. Don't photograph people without asking their permission, and definitely don't photograph anything that could conceivably be military. Take specific advice before travelling in border areas, or staying in hotels far from the centre of Iranian cities. Don't show disrespect for the memory of Khomeini (sometimes referred to simply as "the imam"), or to the martyrs of Iran's eight-year war against Iraq - many Iranians lost a relative. Don't talk about Israel or Salman Rushdie. And don't give a cheery British thumbs-up to anyone, as its the equivalent of waving fingers at them.

RULES FOR MEN AND WOMEN
Attitudes have moderated since the days of Khomeini, when women could be flogged for flouting dress codes, and in the light of the reformers' success in the Parliamentary elections in February, may yet be liberalised even further. But for the time being, women travellers to Iran must observe oppressive restrictions on the way they dress and behave in public if they are not to incur trouble from the basij, or morality police. These restrictions apply even if you're skiing or trekking, and if you're flying Iran Air, you must observe them from the moment you board the plane. Men and women may also find themselves segregated in some building or on some forms of public transport.
DRESS: The rules of modesty apply everywhere outside the privacy of hotel rooms. It isn't necessary for women to wear a chador (a vast semi-circular piece of cloth that conceals both head and body, with a slit for the eyes, which you hold in place with teeth - so no talking), except to visit mosques, where they are usually provided. You must however, wear a hejab, or scarf, pinned under your chin to conceal you head, neck, throat, exposing only your face and perhaps a little hair. This should be a subdued colour, and only discretely patterned, but no longer has to be black. In hot weather you will want a clean one each day, so its worth taking several hejabs. Opt for fine cotton scarfs as they can easily be made by hemming square metres of dark-coloured lawn. Girls aged about seven upward are expected to wear them, too. Women must also wear long-sleeves at all times, and a roupush or manteau - a dark-coloured, shapeless coat that reaches below the knee - and trousers or an ankle length-skirt. Your feet must also be covered, so if you wear sandals, make sure to wear socks or opaque tights. Makeup should be discrete and jewellery concealed. Men, unfairly, can wear anything except shorts.
BEHAVIOUR: Men and women must not hold hands or touch each other in public, even when married, so avoid any show of physical affection. Women do not shake hands with men, so suppress the urge to extend your hand, even if all around are shaking hands. In a mixed group of people, speak first to Iranian members of your own sex. If you are a man, do nothing that could be interpreted as crowding an Iranian women physically; do not offer to shake hands no matter how professional the context, as it implies an intimacy which would lower her in the eyes of observers. Women should show the same physical reserve toward Iranian men.
HOTELS: Until recently, hotels would not allow men and women to share a room unless they had the same name. This rule has been relaxed, but it's as well for you both to wear wedding rings (whether or not you're actually married) to avoid awkward questions. Some unscrupulous hotels put Western women in rooms without curtains in the hopes of glimpsing your unveiled form from outside. If this happens, complain and demand a property furnished room. They Lonely Planet guide also advises you to keep your door barricaded as well as locked to deter unexpected visits from staff who have 'got the wrong room.'

ISFAHAN TIPS: At the Abbasi Hotel (00 98 31 226011; fax 226008), it is worth asking to be given a room in the older part of the building. The Safavid Suite, at US$205 per night for double occupancy, (plus 19 per cent tax and service) is the best in the hotel but is usually booked far in advance. The comfortable teahouse in the Abbasi courtyard puts on night-time performances of Persian poetry for guests but there is also the less touristic experience available in the teahouses beneath Isfahan's bridges, where the water laps beside the tables, or at the Gheysarrieh Teahouse overlooking the central square. (Entrace immediately left of the bazaar.)

FURTHER READING: Apart from Lonely Planet (Lb 11.99) there is also a useful little guide to Iran (Lb. 8.95) in the Culture Shock series. Penguin publishes a paperback of Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana(Lb. 8.99). As a literary evocation of Isfahan, James Buchan's 1999 novel, A Good Place to Die (Harvill, Lb. 10.99) is magnificent, but probably not the most tactful book to take with you. Roy Mottahedeh's The Mantle of the Prophet if you can find it in a library, is a beautifully written exploration of the thought-world behind the Islamic Revolution. In Robin Wright's The Last Great Revolution (AA Knopf, $27.50) the veteran US political reporter surveys the changing scene in present day Iran.

Carved into the stone walls of Persepolis in southern Iran is the Rosetta Stone of early horsemanship. The Parade of Nations shows the tributes paid to the Persian kings two and a half millennia ago. Above all, horses: chariot ponies, racehorses, brood mares, cavalry chargers and hunting steeds. Images as sharp as lithic photographs.

Louise Firouz, an American who has lived in Iran for the past 43 years, has 'translated' the ancient stone images into the flesh and blood of Iran 's modern horses. On early travels in the Alborz mountains she rediscovered the lost Caspian breed, the chariot power of kings. Now she breeds and trains Turkmens, the root stock of the world's hottest- blooded horses.

A Karen Blixen figure, at home among the luxury of Tehrani embassy parties or sitting on rugs in a Kurdish nomadic camp, Louise stayed on after the Islamic Revolution. Today she lives alone in the far north of Iran , among the Turkmen tribes of Mazandaran province, surrounded by her dogs and horses.

'Welcome to Central Asia,' is Louise's standard greeting to those who make it as far as her small stud farm. She's right. Standing by the stables, I was looking towards the border with Turkmenistan. I'd ridden with Louise in Iran three years previously and she'd invited me back to help recce the long-distance trips she wanted to run as a new business venture. 'We'll try the mountains and forests to the east,' she suggested. 'It could be tough the first time as we'll be doing 160 kilometres in four days, but you'll have a good horse, and we'll have fun.' When Louise suggests 'tough' you sort of wish that the Islamic Republic wasn't quite so proscriptive against carrying a hip flask. In consolation, I'd packed a box of Nurofen along with my boots and hat. Turkmen tribesmen, Ibrahim and Mohamed. We spent an evening stuffing raincoats, water bottles and hunks of meat into our saddlebags. A packhorse would carry tents, sleeping bags and horsefeed. We saddled up at dawn the next morning. I swung up onto Korush, a game Bam gelding. The others mounted Turkmen horses. Nosebags were hung from our saddle pommels. And we rode out.

All the animals had the easy paces of horses bred for travelling in the arid heat of the 'empty lands'. A long morning's jog across the steppes, passing the grazing sheep and camels of the Turkmen villages, ended in a steep climb into the highlands. We rode off the stubble and grass of the flat country, into primeval broad-leaved woodland. 'There are bear, wolves and Asian leopard in here,' said Alex, 'and plenty of wild boar.' We could see the signs. A rotten log torn apart by grub- foraging bears, tracks in the dust, the greasy mud of a boar's wallow, like a porcine Jacuzzi.

We camped on the first night by the tiny Kurdish summer village of Khojeh Saleh. A spring, an orchard and a huddle of small stone houses. As we sat on a terrace roof, eating walnuts and sipping sweet tea, the villagers discussed routes for the coming days. 'There's a path below Bayli,' an old man gestured at a distant peak. 'Behind, you'll find good grazing, and lower down there's a place to camp, with plenty of firewood and water.'

Pasture and a safe place to sleep, fire and water - the horse traveller's needs since long before the time of Darius I and Alexander the Great. Each day took us further into the rich texture of the wild country around us, as if we were riding deep into the ochred, crimsoned and azured weft and warp of the carpets being loomed by the village women; the horses brought us contact with the Kurds and Turkmens who still measured time by the metronome of hoof beats, and distance by hours in the saddle.

On the last night of the ride we camped in a clearing by a stream. We'd bought a pony-load of hay in the high pastures that afternoon. Ibrahim, a wolfish grin slashing his face under his pirate's bandanna, had crowed over how cheap horse fodder was in this land of plenty. To him, the trip had the pleasant tang of his ancestors' raiding parties. In the dusk he'd ridden off again, to the nearest village, Zaou, clutching a shopping list in his teeth.

'He can't read,' Louise had instructed me, 'so draw a couple of chickens, dead ones; potatoes, some sugar - can you draw sugar? - and a melon.'

Waiting for supper, Alex and I plunged into the icy stream to bathe and then lay on our saddle felts, toasting in the heat of a huge fire. The flames threw shadows across the piles of saddles and rugs. There was the sharp smell of black tea and wood smoke. The sound of the tethered horses chewing over the sheaves of hay. It was as if the Parade of Nations had settled down to camp for the night. As if we had ridden through 2,500 years of history in four days.

Lonely planet's Tony and Maureen Wheeler answer your travel questions.

Q Six of us, all women, are planning to join an extended horse trek in Iran in April next year. Our main concern is personal safety in the "back blocks". I am the instigator, so I feel particularly responsible. The optional addition is archaeological sites around Isfahan and Shiraz. I might add we will be in the hands of an experienced local, so at least we won't get lost. Any advice?

Nelly Gelich,Ingleside, NSW 2101

A Revolution, the Ayatollah, Salman Rushdie's fatwah and other events have all combined to convince people that Iran should not be on their "must do"list. In fact it's a fascinating country with a great deal to see.

Isfahan and Shiraz are certainly right at the top of the list. The main square in Isfahan, with its beautiful blue and gold tiled mosques and madrassas (religious schools), is simply wonderful while the adjacent bazaar is huge and everything a mysterious Middle East bazaar should be.

As for safety, you should certainly respect local sensibilities. That said, an article by a female visitor in the October/November 1999 issue of the British magazine Wanderlust was headed " Iran is probably the safest country in the world for women travellers". This may be an exaggeration but our guidebook to Iran also contains a number of positive comments from women travellers about safety in Iran .