Hotelnet: Tues 18:30

Tuesday, 05 October, 2010 18:30

Currently in Yazd, IR

Actually in the Silk Road Hotel as the Orient doesn't do wifi.

A reader enquires: LP=? [Some sort of computing-speak, no doubt - Ed]. LP is shorthand for the Lonely Planet Iran. More generically, any of the Lonely Planet series of books (as I have the one on India and hope it's works rather better for me).

I had my rear tyre changed by a bloke up the road for $3 this morning. You can't complain about that sort of price though he was a bit slap-dash. Not that I was about to complain as, where it took me nearly 4 hours to "break the bead" of the tyre, ie. get the rubber off the metal, last time I tried, he almost did it with his thumbs alone. Not the sort of man you want to argue with.

I followed the LP's loose description for the Towers of Silence (where Zoroastrians would leave the dead to be picked clean by vultures) and gave up and followed my instinct and found them several km away. The place looked closed and it was hot and they were high up so I took some outside snaps. S&P who I met last night got a taxi and got in and climbed up. No bodies they reported. Not since the 60s, apparently.

I then went for a spin round the mountains of yesterday. The haze was worse and there was a big black cloud over the top of them so it wasn't the most photogenic but there were some interesting little villages off the beaten track which I found so genuinely interesting (and continued to think about the styles of building etc.) that I forgot to take any photos.

Back to the ranch to discover that one of the disks in bandit (hosting this site) has failed rather badly. It, by itself, doesn't break anything, thanks to everything being mirrored but it leaves the machine and website one failure away from disaster. PCs, being PCs, despite the operating system you put on still have a brain-dead 30 year old piece of rubbish called a BIOS which will doubtless refuse to boot the box if I reboot it because the "first" disk is broken. Grrr.

The Frieslanders are off to Bam tomorrow then will cross into Pakistan the next day (Thursday) to avoid half-day closing of the border on Friday. Good luck!