Yes, I’m still over here in Iran.

After leaving Shiraz, I then wandered off to Pasargad, which used to be Cyrus the Great’s ceremonial home. At one time this place was truly impressive but there’s not much left at Pasargad now. It looked like it had gotten foreclosed upon too.

From there I went on to Esfahan, famous for its awe-inspiring and spiritually overwhelming architecture. Esfahan boasts churches, mosques and synagogues that are so awe-inspiring they would move even a rock to tears. I cried a lot in Esfahan.

When the Armenians were persecuted in Turkey during the 17th century, the Shah of Iran at that time invited them to settle in Esfahan and they did. And then the new immigrants built a magnificent church — which I just visited. OMG, it was breathtaking. Marble floors, paintings, murals, chandeliers, domed ceilings, sacred music, incense, vaulted alcoves, the whole nine yards. I would have been brought to my knees by the overwhelming majesty of it all — except of course that I gots bad knees.

I could have stayed in that church for hours — like I did at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It was both spiritually and architecturally magnificent. I wish that the inside of my brain looked like this.

But then I looked closer at some of the paintings nearest to eye-level — and they were all paintings of tortured martyrs! Yuck. They depicted scenes of lead being poured on saints’ heads, saints being boiled in oil, hung outside down from trees, having their eyes gouged out, intestines ripped out, heads squished in stocks, heads covered in sacks containing something obviously horrible (Snakes? Deadly insects? Wasps?), having boiling water poured on their genitals, saints’ chests being cut with scythes — and then of course there were the ten stations of the cross.

These Armenians must have led really hard lives.

Then I went off to the Armenian museum where I learned that on April 24, 1915, one-and-a-half million Armenians were systematically massacred by the Turkish military in a troop exercise as precisely planned and executed as a slaughterhouse producing beef.

Some of the remaining Armenians escaped to America but most of the survivors fled to Iran.

After visiting the Armenian church (and eating pomegranate and walnut stew, chicken kabobs and saffron ice cream for lunch), I then went off to visit a Jewish synagogue.

“In biblical times when the Jews were dragged off to Babylon,” I was told, “they were freed by Cyrus the Great, King of Persia — and many of the unshackled Jews then followed him back to Iran, where there is still a large Jewish community in Esfahan even today,” umpteen centuries later.

At the synagogue, the rabbi and his wife and daughter gave me a tour of the temple and a soccot tent out in its garden. That part was nice, sure, but the most moving moment was when the rabbi’s daughter held up both of her hands, palms outward, and blessed me. The traditional symbology of the Jewish Hamsa Hand came to life in the rabbi’s daughter’s palm. The gesture was so powerful and moving that I don’t even wanna talk about it.

After that, I went off to tour the mosques of Esfahan. Stunning. Before you die, you really should try to go there — or at least let me send you a post card of any one of those mosques. They are as humbling and inspiring as any cathedral in France.

So. While I’m on the subject of churches, mosques and synagogues, now might be a good time to talk about religion. “When religion turns into politics, something vital is lost,” someone once told me — I forget who.

When the so-called leaders of our countries prey upon all our human yearning for spirituality and convert it into hatred and anger, something terribly precious is lost — it is as if all the glory and honor and awe of the churches, mosques and synagogues of Esfahan (and the world) have been burned to the ground.

The greatest triumph of the world’s religions has been their ability to help mankind become better, to rise above itself, to become more evolved. And here in Iran, I’ve seen both sides of the religious coin — from the humility and piety of the true Christian, Muslim and Jew to the obsessive control freaks who have nothing better to do than to give ME grief about whether or not I’m wearing a headscarf. (The good news is that the headscarf is on its way out here in Iran. And also I hear that Iranians are rather pissed off that their oil money is being spent to fix the streets of Lebanon instead of to fix the streets of Iran. Sound familiar?)

And in America, our current so-called leaders — who always go about bragging that they are all so religious and spend all their time getting instructions from God — are too busy making war on foreigners to fix bridges in Minneapolis or levees in New Orleans or Iowa.

And in Israel, the so-called religious leaders there are too busy spending American taxpayers’ money on bombing Palestine, Lebanon and Syria to spend any more than the bare minimum on building schools in Tel Aviv and are currently spending no money at all on building schools in Gaza.

It’s time for our religious leaders to get out of politics, get their game on and start raising the spiritual bar — by example — instead. And it’s time for our political leaders to stop playing God.

Anyway, I’m currently writing this diatribe from an internet cafe in Esfahan — and have been here for HOURS. “I love the internet world,” I told the clerk there, “and hate the real world.” He just smiled — because he knew exactly what I was talking about. He was an Iranian nerd and an Iranian nerd is just like an American nerd And then it hit me. I’m a nerd too!

It took me all of 66 years and roaming all over the world for a decade to finally discover my true self-identity here In Iran!

I want to try to give you readers back home a sense of what it’s like here in Iran. Strangers come up to you on the street all the time, give you a big hug and say, “We love Americans.” People in Iran consider driving to be a sport — the Iranian version of bullfighting. 70% of the population is under 30. More people than you would expect speak English. And everywhere you look, there is something scenic going on.

There is so much to see and do in Iran. This place is a tourist paradise. “Iran never disappoints”.

After spending two weeks in the desert oasises of southern Iran, traveling up to the northern part of the country was like going from Arizona to San Francisco. Tabriz was so foggy and temperate that I kept looking around for cable cars, French bread and a big orange bridge. Having lived in Berkeley for most of my life, I felt right at home in Tabriz. You would too.

The one big difference between the Bay Area and northern Iran — aside from the fact that everyone here speaks Farsi — is that I couldn’t find any reliable internet connections in the north. Everywhere I went in Shiraz, Tehran and Esfahan, there were “Coffee Nets” — but not here. My kids must all think that I’m dead.

After I left San Francisco, er, Tabriz, everything changed once again and the landscape we drove through suddenly became like a clone of the English countryside — thatched-roof cottages and all. All those years of British occupation has still left its stamp on Iran.

And the Mongols have left their stamp too.

One place I went to was a troglodyte village up in the mountains that featured a four-star hotel dug into a cave. The village — not the four-star hotel — was built into the sides of a mountain as a hideout from the Mongols way back in the day. It was really funny to look up on the rocky cliff walls and see windows.

Next, came Iran’s version of the Swiss Alps and a border-crossing into Azerbaijan. At one point I actually found myself in the pine forests of the former USSR.

“Iran never disappoints.”

During all of my travels throughout Iran, every restaurant I stopped at had chicken kabobs on the menu but after the first couple of times, I wised up. While the pilaffs, stews, eggplant dishes, anti-pasta and soups in Iran are positively wonderful, every single chicken kabob that I’ve tasted here has been stringy, tough and DRY. “Chicken on the menu tonight AGAIN?” I’d complain — and then order the lamb-pomegranate-walnut stew instead.

But on the main street of the small northern country town of Fuman, I found a tiny family-owned restaurant that finally knew how to Do Chicken Right and I got so excited that I rushed off to the kitchen to demand to meet the chef! Boy was he surprised. But I got to see what his kitchen looked like and it was small. This was no Chez Pannise we’re talking about here but who cares. That chicken was good! So. The next time that you are in Fuman, be sure to eat at the Restaurant Pars on the main street, four blocks down from a plaster statue of some mythic queen driving a chariot. And tell them that Jane sent you.

But the highlight of my entire trip — aside from the food, the ancient mosques and all that Ozymandias stuff — was the Caspian Sea. Before coming to Iran, the only thing I knew about the Caspian Sea was its proximity to some infamous pipeline and its murky connections with Bush’s attacks on Afghanistan.

Sorry, guys, but I didn’t see no pipeline.

“The Caspian is 75 feet below sea level and has no outlet,” said the clerk at my hotel, “but the water from the Volga keeps pouring into it nonetheless.” Imagine a bathtub with a stopper covering its drain and its water tap turned on full-blast. That’s pretty much what the Caspian Sea is like. And there’s only a ten-foot high breakwater standing between the full force of the Caspian and my hotel room. And it’s raining. And the wind is raging off of roiling sea at approximately 60 miles an hour. Awesome!

I walked out onto the breakwater at dusk and it was almost like being on a levee in NOLA during a hurricane. I got that Katrina feeling right away. It was one of the most powerful and surreal moments of my life. Me against the elements!

Iran never disappoints.

But then reality set in and I realized that if I were to get swept away into the pounding surf of the Caspian, no one would ever know what happened to me — let alone be able to e-mail my family — and so I went back into the hotel.

Forget about the politics of Bush and Ahmadinejad and everything you’ve ever heard about Iran on Fox News. This country is amazing. You just GOTTA come here. I gotta join the Iran Chamber of Commerce! I gotta write a book about this place.

PS: The night manager of the Laleh Sar-ein Hotel in Sarein asked me to give his establishment a plug — so here it is. It really is a nice hotel. Plus it’s got internet. “Sarein is famous for its curative hot springs,” said the night manager, “plus it is right down the road from Iran’s most popular ski resort.” Then he gave me a DVD but I couldn’t get it to play.

By Jane Stillwater

“Beyond our ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”— Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet

Bob Augustine’s last encounter with Iran was on a Pan Am plane, a few days before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took control as architect of the country’s fundamentalist Islamic revolution. He remembers the panicked faces as plainclothes security men yanked passengers off the jet just before takeoff, and the sobs of relief when their pilot announced they had cleared Iranian airspace.

Thirty years later, the retired telecommunications executive from Bonita Springs, Fla., is back in the Axis of Evil — as a tourist.

An old map in hand and wife Jill by his side, Augustine is launching his eight-city Iranian odyssey with a mission to reconnect with the couple’s former Tehran neighbors. Also reaching out: hardliner president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is promoting foreign tourism as a “strategic bridge” at a time of escalating tensions between Iran and the West. And despite a State Department travel warning that U.S. citizens may be subject to harassment or arrest, a trickle of plucky Yankee tourists — about 1,600 so far this year — have been answering the call.

“There are many things that Americans justifiably find outrageous about the Iranian government,” acknowledges guidebook guru Rick Steves, whose one-hour travel special about his own May trip airs on PBS stations in January.

But the peripatetic author says he’s “never had so many preconceived notions torn apart,” and proclaims the Middle Eastern powerhouse and political lightning rod the most “surprising and fascinating” land he’s ever visited.

Their two-week swing by plane and bus through a country twice the size of Texas will take them from chaotic, lung-searing traffic in the capital, Tehran (population 12 million), to a one-room school in the mountain hamlet of Abyaneh (Lonely Planet’s population estimate: “a few old women, most of the time.”)

They’ll wander the 2,500-year-old ruins of Persepolis, cradle of the Persian Empire until it was sacked and burned by Alexander the Great, and watch men gather for prayers beneath arches of staggeringly intricate tiles in Isfahan, a UNESCO Heritage city that ancient Persians proudly dubbed “half the world.” They’ll savor pistachio ice cream in the convoluted alleys of Yazd, a Silk Road outpost that 13th-century visitor Marco Polo declared “good and noble,” and listen to the eerie strains of the ney, a wooden flute, at the shrine of a Sufi mystic in Mahan.

And amid one of the world’s most demonized regimes and bewildering societies, they will be greeted with two constants: “Welcome to Iran!” and smiles as wide as a cloudless desert sky.

‘Two very different worlds’

Now working in France, the young Iranian on the KLM flight from Amsterdam is returning home to Tehran for a family visit. She drains her glass of Chardonnay, waiting to tie a bright scarf on her head until she leaves the cabin. (Iran bans public alcohol consumption, and all women, including foreigners, are required to wear hijab, or head covering, and modest dress in public.) When an American tourist asks whether she’s worried airport inspectors will confiscate the Sex and the City DVDs stuffed into her carry-on, she shrugs.

“Iranians are like sugar in water. We can blend in to survive,” says Golsa Fouladinejad. “In Iran, we live in two very different worlds: public, and behind closed doors.”

Those public and private worlds collide constantly, and foreign visitors are often on the fault lines. In Isfahan, a shopkeeper’s dinner invitation includes a session in front of the family’s illegal satellite TV, beaming the latest Hollywood soaps and news from CNN. On one of Tehran’s pristine subway cars, a teenager sports a sweatshirt emblazoned with “United States of America, Washington, D.C.” It’s not far from the former U.S. Embassy, where a wall mural still shows a skull-faced Statue of Liberty and this week’s anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the compound by militant Iranian students was marked by the burning of U.S. and Israeli flags.

London artist Lorna Tresidder, like several others came to Iran expecting a Third World country. She says she has been “gobsmacked” by the modern highways, litter-free streets and engaging, well-informed people.

But while it’s tough to find an Iranian who supports the U.S. government, many are highly critical of their own.

At the Shiraz tomb of Hafez, a 14th-century poet whom most Iranians can quote by heart, a pilgrim with a spiky haircut straight out of There’s Something About Mary shows off his cellphone with a popular rap video. The stars: a jiving Ahmadinejad and Khomeini. In Isfahan, a carpet shop salesman steers a tourist off the street and into his shop — not to extol the virtues of hand-woven tribal designs, but to whisper his anger at Iran’s skyrocketing inflation rate (nearing an estimated 30% a year) and what he complains is a growing disconnect between oil revenues and average workers. And in Yazd, a stronghold of the country’s pre-Islamic faith, Zoroastrianism, a popular souvenir is a pendant depicting the ancient Zoroastrian symbol of a winged man — a symbol that some young Iranians wear as a silent protest against the country’s fundamentalist regime.

Mood swings at a sports event

It was billed as a brief stop at a crumbling ghost town between Isfahan and Shiraz, the garden-filled city that has been the heart of Persian culture for more than two millennia. But within minutes of the tour bus’s arrival at the hilltop redoubt of Izadkhast, it’s clear that the morning agenda will be tossed to the winds.

Nearby residents have gathered for a yearly sports award ceremony, men and boys on one side and a sea of women in head-to-toe black chadors on the other. Then, as the entranced tourists raise their cameras and angle for a better view, the tenor changes.

New York investment banker Rex Visher, 26, recounts the scene: “Please respect our culture and our privacy. No photos,” a stony-faced local tells him. A police car suddenly materializes, lights flashing.

And when the man learns Visher is from America, the mood shifts yet again. Visher exchanges e-mail addresses and poses for the villager’s own photo as Visher’s fellow travelers are besieged with autograph requests.

“Tell us,” the now-genial man asks Visher. “What is one piece of advice you would give the Iranian people?”

The chattering crowd falls quiet and leans in for his answer: “Stay kind, and be positive.”

Camels and cab fare

On the tour’s last night in Iran, the group gathers for a farewell dinner in the chichi North Tehran neighborhood of Darband, snuggled against the steep slopes of the Elburz Mountains. Over platters of kebabs and rice (mainstays of practically every restaurant menu in the country), they recall the highlights from a trip of a lifetime that most of their friends thought they’d been crazy to attempt.

Dubliner John Feeney, whose own tin whistle had harmonized with traditional Iranian instruments in teahouses along the way, remembers the camels. Moseying home to a 400-year-old desert caravanserai, one of hundreds of inns that once sheltered Silk Road traders, they reminded the middle-aged banker of cows in the Irish Midlands — commonalities, he says, that can unite even disparate cultures.

Bart Van Gestel, a 24-year-old from Antwerp, Belgium, marvels at the Iranian who befriended him on his flight to Tehran. Arranging a taxi after their middle-of-the-night arrival, the man accompanied him to his hotel and insisted on paying the fare. The explanation was one the Belgian would hear repeated often: “You are a guest in our country.”

Forthe Augustines, the journey has brought them full circle.

Bob’s 30-year-old map had delivered them to the doorstep of their former apartment, where they’d lived while he worked on government projects for the country’s previous ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Their old landlord answered the knock, and tears flowed as the onetime friends and neighbors made up for decades of lost time.

As Jill gossiped with the landlord’s grown daughters, they reminded her of long-ago picnics and swimming lessons. And they reminisced about something else: a sapling Jill had planted in the family’s front yard. Towering nearly three stories above them, the tree was a symbol, too.

“All of us have planted seeds on this trip,” says Jill. “Governments come, and governments go, but there is always room to talk.”