It is interesting to see the things which people miss the most when they are travelling. We had hardly touched down at Tehran airport before people were starting to reminisce about gin and tonics and it wasn’t long after the discovery that Iranians are predominantly tea drinkers that the search for a good cup of coffee was underway.

It was rumoured that a couple of people had a coffee plunger in their luggage and shared a pre-breakfast cup each morning but for the rest of us it was a sort of pot luck with luck mostly being in short supply. The first time that our hotel featured what looked like an espresso machine there were loud cheers from some members of the group but their cheers turned to dismay when the coffee was found to be undrinkable.

Morning tea en route

Himself and Herself had an electric heater jug and each evening I joined them for a quick cup of tea while I unloaded my camera onto the digimate and cleared the photo card in readiness for the next day. This was a fun time when we could discuss (and try to work out) what we had seen during the day and have a quick preview of our photos before they were wiped from our cameras.

We were advised to drink only bottled water although the tap water throughout Iran was said to be drinkable. After a short, sudden bout of rum tummy I also took the precaution of cleaning my teeth in bottled water and had no more problems. Bottled water was always available on the bus and at mealtimes as well as in the fridges in our bedrooms.

Samover and coffee cups in a refurbished caravanserai

That was not the only thing to be found in some of the hotel fridges. In the place of freezer compartments some of the fridges had small safes. I was able to utilise the safe at the hotel in Tehran but at the next hotel we all found that the previous combinations had not been cleared, rendering the safes useless. However, the fridges at most of the hotels had key locks - a facility marred by the knowledge that, in order to check whether we had succumbed to the chocolate and nuts left there to tempt us, the hotel staff would have had to have a master key.

A teahouse

Soft drinks - the Iranian equivalent of Coke and Fanta - were offered at mealtimes and some people found that the local non-alcoholic beer was very palatable; I found it to be too sweet for my taste and stuck to water, not being game to try the yoghurt drink which came bottled on the drinks tray.

The main drink, however, was tea which was served after all meals, at the carpet viewings and by a woman who allowed us to visit her home in the troglodyte village of Kandovan, one of three ‘different’ villages which we visited.

Another view of a teahouse

Iran grows its own tea and I found it to be sweeter and less bitter than the tea I normally drink so it was easier to drink it black, as the Iranians do. (Milk in tea was not an option which the Iranians understood and it tended to come, hot, in a teacup if anyone asked for it.) The Iranian habit of holding a lump of sugar between the teeth and straining the tea through it was not to my taste and I didn’t try drinking it that way. I watched one woman drink her tea in that fashion and the sugar lump, which was small and made of very, very fine sugar crystals, melted and collapsed into her mouth almost immediately. It wouldn’t work with our coarser sugar lumps which were designed with a different purpose in mind … and I wondered what it would do to my teeth if I took up the habit.