TISL 2006

Our second trip to the Middle East with Iran as a definitive highlight.

We were gone for four months and started in Istanbul from where we crossed the Anatolian plateau to reach the Iranian border.

After 5 weeks in Iran, we crossed to eastern Turkey and then Syria, visiting Lebanon on the way.

We returned to Turkey to make our way back to Istanbul with a detour to Cappadocia.

Full map of all TISL 2006 pages

Other Things

Thinking of our next destination: Italy and Portugal come to mind, or maybe the time has finally come for a US road trip…

Translate & Share

What's this?
Version française
Deutsche Version

Introduction

(thomas;2006)

Yes, we do like the Middle East:-). Since about five years we had wanted to go to Iran. (Alas, getting Iranian visas is not exactly straightforward: when we tried first in 2003, we gave up after a few weeks after we realised that the Iranian embassy in London was bent on making this as difficult as humanly possible, even for German or French nationals - this time we used an Iran-based agency which made the whole process almost painless. They were definitely worth the small fee we had to pay.)

And then there was of course Vero's urge to visit the famous Lebanese cedars which we had seen neither during our short 2003 trip to Lebanon nor last year (we didn't go to Lebanon in 2005 at all because this was very shortly after Rafik Hariri's assassination).

The cedars of Lebanon.Anyway, we decided to return to the region for the spring of 2006. Sure, there are so many other beautiful places on Earth but these won't run away… we think. In the event, having been to Lebanon before the troubles with Israel erupted was not a bad idea. The place will be off-limits now for a good while; what's more, during our time in Lebanon we learned quite a few things about the sinister power Hezbollah wields over Lebanese politics and society - and by extension over Israel.

Check the mails we sent from the road
Browse through our selection of photos
Or retrace our route on this map showing our itinerary.

Finally, we have a full site map of all TISL 2006 pages; the other sections have local maps (see Blog Map and Photos Map and index pages (see Blog Index and Photos Index).