We leave Yazd and take a bus to get to the city of Kerman. We expect our next couchsurfing host to wait for us, but he is not at the station. We wait for him for half an hour until I try to call him, but I don’t get him on the phone. I try several times again but he doesn’t answer. I am writing new Couchsurfing requests because I do not know where else to go that late. Worst case, we have to go to a hotel.

Eventually, our host calls me and asks if his friend picked us up. We deny and do not know about a friend of him. He excused himself, a matter in the family forced him to leave the city and his friend should take care of us. We should not worry, he will soon come.

So, we wait another hour, then Amir Abbas shows up. He is a little disorganized, but nice, and we drive to his place to drop our stuff and have dinner. His parents cook for us a dish calles “Bademjan”, mainly cooked from eggplant, and I wonder again, when they were informed about strangers staying over in their house.

After we are full, we head to the city for a shisha place, since I mentioned, that I haven’t had any shisha in Iran, yet, which is quite odd.

We find a bar and it does not take long that a group of guys is sitting together with us, inviting us to tea and talking with us. For my surprise, they are no friends of Amir Abbas, but he enjoys the fame of being our host.

He brings us to an attraction of the city that looks especially pretty in the night. The Fathabad mansion and garden is beautifully illuminated and the water in the pond reflects the lights. Many people visit this place after the sun has set and families wander around and through the building.

The next day we drive to the music of Iraja Bastami outside of the city to a town called Rayen hosting a stunning castle. Amir Abbas invites the girl Mahan to join and it is obvious that he has a crush on her.

Castles in the desert are usually made of clay, since there are no stones or wood as material to be found. The clay is solid, except, once in a lifetime, there will come rain and the castle melts like an ice cube in the sun. Since many lifetimes have passed since the construction of the castles most of them look very much washed out.

After the dried out ruin we make our way to a wetter place. A little bit into the mountains there is a waterfall. Something, that is nothing exciting for us, is one of the main attractions in this area. The waterfall is not very big, but hundreds of people visit the valley, make picnic and selfies in front of the current.

Usually, the people that see us ask us four questions: Where are you from? What is your job? Are you married? Why not? This is the case here again.

One man is so excited that he insists to make a photo with me and he does not stop to hold my hand tight in a way that you would only hold a girl’s hand. It takes a while until he lets me leave again.

It is strange; many people only want to make pictures with me. Many people, on the other hand, only want to make pictures with Uwe. In the end, the sum is quite even.

There are not many foreign car brands in Iran. We see especially French cars like Peugeot and Renault. Amir Abbas tells us that even these cars are not real. The design was put on other cars.

The own brands are Pride and Samand and they are called “coffin on wheels”, because the quality is as low as the chance of survival of an accident in one of these cars.