The Wheel and Axle

Golestan Palace
Tehran, Iran
22 September 2017

A UNESCO World Heritage site, the Golestan Palace complex includes palaces, museums, halls, fountains, and lush greenery. With a history within Tehran’s citadel going back to the 1500s, the palace later became the seat of the Qajar dynasty. The palace was rebuilt in 1865 and stands proud to this day.

With our limited time in Tehran, we chose to enter only specific buildings in the vast complex. The Main Hall is a spectacular palace, filled with relics and artifacts from Persia, India, and Europe from a few hundred years ago. Other than the Main Hall, we went inside the museum in Shams-ol-Emareh (Edifice of the Sun), with its clock tower standing tall between twin symmetric towers and with its highly-polished mirror “walls” that reflect the sunlight beautifully.

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Touring Tehran
Tehran, Iran
22 September 2017

My friend Bj won two AirAsia tickets for Tehran through an online contest. He asked me to join him, and of course, how could I say no to an opportunity to visit Persia, a land where ancient civilizations flourished and where history was sure to be palpable in the air?

Now of course people were concerned that we were off to Iran, and it would be a lie to say that we ourselves had no initial apprehensions. However, our friend Jeff had ventured into Persia (alone!) last year, and he had nothing but praises for his visit. Armed with visas which we processed via the embassy in Makati, we were off to the land of the Persians.

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En route to Tehran, we had a layover in Kuala Lumpur. This was actually my second time transitting through Kuala Lumpur this year, the first time being on the way to Yangon last February.

Whereas last time I had an entire overnight to see some places in the city, this time we had roughly five hours before we needed to check-in for our next flight. The great thing is, the KLIA Ekspres can bring you from the airport to the city proper within half an hour, where the connecting KL Sentral train can then bring you to the famed Batu Caves in another twenty to thirty minutes. Dammit, I wish we had such efficient train systems in the Philippines.

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Or, as we prefer it, the Pearl of the Orient.

But that’s semantics.

We are, after all, truly the shining treasure of this part of the world.

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Time for a de-stress. 👍🏻 It’s a bit rainy, but it’s still beautiful. Let’s see what the next few days have in store for us. First stop: Villa Sarna, just outside Ubud.

This is an unofficial Philippines tourism ad by Creatives of Manila.

It’s way better than some of the more recent botched efforts by the official channels, eh?

 The Philippines: definitely still more fun. Definitely hard to not fall in love with us.

So as I recently wrote, I made a resolution way back to travel more, and in 2015, I did.

I created this video at the start of this year to highlight my travels last year and to spur me on to do more in 2016 and beyond.

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