Salmiya

“You might see here landscapes you have never seen before.” My young friend Mojtaba, who had been waiting in vain for my return to Kashan in 2006, had emailed me pictures he had taken with other Westerners on trips to the desert and the Daryacheh Namak, the great salt lake northeast to the small desert city. That time, I couldn’t get a visa to Iran. I was still living in Kuwait and officers at the Iranian Embassy were not really friendly then. International tensions about Iran’s nuclear program, I had assumed. When traveling to Esfahan this year, I planned a stopover in Kashan. I didn’t meet Mojtaba, but made new friends. Hami and his twin sister Hoda took me to Dasht-e Kavir, and in fact, I saw breathtaking sceneries very much different from the desert in Kuwait. Dasht-e Kavir, the northern desert of Iran’s two major deserts (the other is Dasht-e Lut), is huge. It stretches about 800 km from west to east and is 350 km wide, making up altogether more than 77’000 square kilometers. We s...