The days were starting to slip away from me in Mashhad. I had been travelling in 35-40° heat almost everyday for 6 weeks now and I was finding it very difficult to muster the energy or the enthusiasm to go out sightseeing during the heat of the day. In any case, many places in Mashhad were shut from about 1pm until 4 or 5pm to escape the heat also.
The one place in Mashhad that I really wanted to see was the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza. The shrine was only a 20min walk from Vali’s. But the problem was we were still in the holy month of Ramadan and the usual daily crowds of thousands of people had become daily crowds of TENS of thousands. The only solution seemed to be to visit the shrine late at night.
And so it was that late one night Simon, the Farsi-speaking Ulsterman, and I walked up to the shrine and managed to join a crowd of Shia pilgrims and make it all the way in to the inner sanctum where the gold lattice cage covers the holy tomb of Imam Reza.