Salaam to all our readers!

Our names are Tim and Suzan. Welcome to our illustrated and supplemented journal of a truly wonderful trip we took to Iran in November 2019. We hope you’ll enjoy our words and pictures, and in the process learn some things about Iran and perhaps unlearn some things you thought you knew that just aren’t true.

During the Fall of 2018, we were talking about travel and out of the blue Tim asked Suzan if she would be interested in going to Iran. To his delight and surprise, her immediate response was an enthusiastic, “Yes!”

The genesis of his question was Tim’s mild but longstanding interest in Western Asia, and his recollection of Yomadic.com, a website which he’d run across two or three years previously. Yomadic is two people, Nate Robert and Philippa Jane (he from Western Australia and she from New Zealand) who have been leading tours in Iran since 2012. Suzan’s interest had been inspired by a TED Talk on efforts to promote understanding between citizens of Israel and Iran.

After agreeing that travel to Iran was a shared dream, Tim contacted Yomadic and was assured that we, as US citizens, would be safe and welcome there. Citizens of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States are not allowed to travel on their own in Iran; they must be part of a guided tour. We had passports, but visas would have to be arranged. Doing so took several months. Due to lack of diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States, our visa was processed at the Iranian Interests section of the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, DC.

While our visa applications were being processed, we began to prepare ourselves by reading books about Iran, watching movies by Iranian directors, and watching videos.

We began speaking with friends about our travel plans. Most expressed shock and concern for our safety. However, one local couple had experience in Iran as Peace Corps volunteers in the late 1960s. They invited us to their home, prepared an Iranian-style dinner for us, and gave us the benefit of their knowledge of the Iranian people and their culture. Their deep fondness for the people of Iran was clear. Only one other US citizen expressed a positive response to our travel destination. He was the first TSA agent we encountered at the airport at the beginning of our trip. He saw our visas and smiled. “Oh, you’re going to Iran!” he remarked. “I’ve been there. It’s great! I loved it.”

Bit by bit everything, including drawn-out process of obtaining tourist visas, fell into place and we left our home in Virginia on November 3. After spending most of a week in Rome, visiting with friends and seeing some sights, we boarded an Emirates airliner for Dubai on the evening of November 9. From Dubai we caught another flight to Tehran, arriving on the morning of November 10.

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Here’s the page for our first day in Iran.