Monday, October 23, 2006

Road Trip!

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Who doesn’t love a road trip? The wind, the road, the car, wide open empty spaces? Ya gotta’ love it.

Iranians are mostly afraid of the desert. “You will die there,” they say. They prefer to stay away from Dasht-e Kavir with its infamous sand storms that were in large part responsible for the failed Carter-era hostage rescue attempt. Iranians call them baad gir gerd-baad: whirling wind or tornado. (In the Atlantic Monthly, I read that Iranians call them “haboob,” but a google search seems to reveal that haboob is an Arabic word for the high altitude clouds of sand that are caused by the desert thunderstorms.)

Okay, so the point is, we did not die. We saw wild camels, heard jackals, wandered off into the dunes, stayed at an oasis, ate the best dates in the world, met Moses – or at least a man who looked just like we imagine Moses to look – had great food, and saw some of the villages that dotted the famous silk route.

We also had three cameras on our trip, but still no pics. Tantalizing, isn’t it? Our two digital cameras failed. We are depending on the cheap film camera for our images. Wish us luck.


References:
Great photo of Dasht-e Kavir at NASA

The Desert One Debacle

Definition of Haboob

See a great picture of a haboob
(Well at least it was great when I visited the site)

Nice article about the names of wind: They Call the Wind Maria

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

it's gerd-bad not badgir.Badgir is the kind of house that you see in deserts.There are lots of them in Yazd.

Kamran and Tori said...

Thanks Hossein! At least that mistake was not quite as bad as when I called a stamp a chicken or celery a knife....

Anonymous said...

Japanese has the same kind of traps with emphasis on certain parts of the word (who said Japanese doesn't have accents? ;-)

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