Revolutionary Ride

On the Road in Search of the Real Iran

Lois Pryce

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781473669987
• eBook ISBN:
  9781857889291
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

'Warm, funny... It's had my whole family howling with laughter and shedding a few tears' - Shappi Khorsandi, Guardian 'A proper travelogue - a joyful, moving and stereotype-busting tale' - National Geographic Traveller, Books of the Year In 2011, at the height of tension between the British and Iranian governments, travel writer Lois Pryce found a note left on her motorcycle outside the Iranian Embassy in London: ... I wish that you will visit Iran so you will see for yourself about my country. WE ARE NOT TERRORISTS!!! Please come to my city, Shiraz. It is very famous as the friendliest city in Iran, it is the city of poetry and gardens and wine!!!
Your Persian friend,
Habib Intrigued, Lois decides to ignore the official warnings against travel (and the warnings of her friends and family) and sets off alone on a 3, 000 mile ride from Tabriz to Shiraz, to try to uncover the heart of this most complex and incongruous country. Along the way, she meets carpet sellers and drug addicts, war veterans and housewives, doctors and teachers - people living ordinary lives under the rule of an extraordinarily strict Islamic government. Revolutionary Ride is the story of a people and a country. Religious and hedonistic, practical and poetic, modern and rooted in tradition - and with a wild sense of humour and appreciation of beauty despite the comparative lack of freedom - this is real contemporary Iran. *Shortlisted for the Adventure Travel Book of the Year Award*'Within a few pages I'd recognised a kindred spirit' - Dervla Murphy, author of Full Tilt

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Lois Pryce
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• Epigraph
• 1. A Curious Invitation
• 2. ‘Go and Wake Up Your Luck’
• 3. Islamic Republic, Yes or No?
• 4. Following Freya
• 5. Iran Underground
• 6. Snow, Sea and the Shah
• 7. Riding the Revolutionary Road
• 8. Tehran: Politics, Pollution and Parties
• 9. All Different, All Relative: Iran’s Forgotten Explorer
• 10. I Fought the Law
• 11. The Rial Thing
• 12. Into the Wild
• 13. Dark Times in the Desert
• 14. Hotel Nish-Nush
• 15. Yazd: How Iran Lost Its Religion and Found Air Conditioning
• 16. Half a Million Martyrs
• 17. Persepolis: Empire and Excess
• 18. Shiraz: Poetry and Pomegranates
• 19. Neither East Nor West
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline of Significant Events
• Picture Section