In Esfahan, Iran's most beautiful city, the bazaar has five kilometres of alleyways, selling everything from tea to tyres. Here, at dusk, the entrance that opens on to the main square is bathed in light.

From my vantage point, a tea shop on the roof of a shop, I could see the sun setting over the desert beyond the edge of the city in an explosion of colour.

A young boy on a bicycle looks back at me while cycling along a street in the desert city of Yazd.

The sight of foreigners walking along the street in Iran brought the inevitable stares, but they were always kind and gracious. Among the Iranians themselves, there seems to be genuine gentleness, as on a bus when an old man boarded, a young man quickly gave up his seat in an automatic show of respect.

Persepolis, near Shiraz in south-eastern Iran, is 2,500 years old, having been preserved in the dry desert air.

The rock looks like it was chiselled yesterday; the marks of tools are still visible. I wasn't prepared to see anything so astonishingly beautiful, and incredibly well-preserved. The site was used by the late Shah to stage a vast celebration in the mid-seventies, but now there are only a trickle of tourists how come out to see the pillars and sculptures.

In every Middle Eastern country there is a different way to drink tea. In Iran, the tea comes strong and hot, and the Iranians clinch a cube of sugar in the teeth to sweeten it.