Tag: Authentic travel in Iran
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Getting High & Low in Naiband, Part III
Our lesson on quest for “authentic travel”The morning after our rat-or-snake-infested stay in the village of Naiband, Saeideh wanted to just drive away and not pay for the room. I said we owe ourselves the experience of complaining and seeing where it takes us. We arrived at the home of the village chief Gholamreza Hassankhani and his wife Zahra in the…
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Getting High & Low in Naiband, Part II
The vanity of authentic travel: we want real experiences but not the discomfortsThe tourist wants authenticity, but not the discomforts of authenticity. So the tourist gets angry when she experiences the reality of village life in Iran. This is the lesson we learned in the village of Naiband (also spelled Nayband, Nay Band), after we fell in love with its architecture and the children who guided us…
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Getting High & Low in Naiband, Part I
We travel to connect to locals not hotel staffThe unprepared visitor who glances up at the cliff dwellings of Naiband is prone to spit out a bunch of superlatives. “Ali, it’s so beautiful. It’s just like those Moroccan towns in the movies,” Saeideh exclaimed as we pulled up from the highway to Kerman, tired and thirsty after hours of driving along the edge…
