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“The drinks service is now closing,” announced the steward. He somehow resisted add-libbing an ironic “forever”; BA 103 was starting its descent towards Tehran, capital of the Islamic - and alcohol-free - Republic of Iran.

Preparing for landing at Tehran evidently meant not only upright seatbacks but upright values too, not only fastened seatbelts but fastened buttons as well. For female passengers, it required gathering illicit hair beneath head scarves and concealing the dresses, bangles and jewellery of the corrupting West beneath roupushes, the regulation women's coats of the Islamic revolution - and the sartorial equivalent of a bucket of cold water. Copies of Harpers & Queen and Hello!, deemed pornographic in Iran, lay abandoned upon the seats as we disembarked.

Such has been the standard intro to Iran ever since Ayatollah Khomeini's 17-year-old revolution radically recreated a society that many in the West view as impossibly restrictive and retrograde. Not that many westerners had actually experienced the country at first hand; until recently, Iran regarded western visitors as little more than undesirable cultural contaminants.

Now, however, Iran is experiencing something of a thaw, causing it to open its doors to tourism; wide enough that visitors booked with registered tour groups are being granted visas almost as a formality (but not yet so far that attempts at independent travel are encouraged). Suddenly, there seems more to Iran than bearded fanatics crying death to Rushdie and calling down destruction on the Great Satan. As the image of hard-line pariah state begins to soften, so the extraordinary architectural, cultural and scenic wealth of this country half the size of India is once more beginning to be appreciated.

In an attempt to engineer a rapprochement with the West, much of the more virulent rhetoric - most memorably, the floor-painted Stars and Stripes alongside the invitation to Step on America - has disappeared from the country's streets. The feared baseej or volunteer guardians of the revolution, the vengeful God squaddies who once roamed the country correcting any lapses in behaviour - women revealing traces of sexually inflammatory hair, unmarried couples holding hands, private parties where alcohol was suspected of being consumed - have had their teeth drawn. The police state has become a nanny state, perhaps a hectoring, interfering nanny of a state but one without quite the fist of her predecessor. Moreover, it seems clear that the authorities have been directed to lay off the tourists. Modern Iran seems more interested in taking reservations and bookings rather than hostages - although there was an uncomfortable moment outside the airport when we all wondered whether coming here in the first place had all been a ghastly mistake.

At first sight, it was the classic image of Iranian, anti-western militancy. The huge, highly exercised crowd barring our exit from the airport reminded us of the scenes at Khomeini's funeral in 1989. Then we realised that this lot were all bearing gladioli and most of them were perched upon each others' shoulders wielding flash cameras in anticipation of the appearance of loved ones - more like a Morrissey concert than a mob intent on blood-letting. As Brits make queues, it seems, so Iranians make emotionally charged chaos.

“English?” queried an intimidating face in the crowd as I shouldered laboriously past. I nodded uncertainly, although his next question - “And how is Queen Elizabeth?” - put me at ease. Well enough, by all accounts, I told him. When he finished our brief conversation with the expression ‘By your leave’, it took me a moment to understand he was asking permission to move on - although the surrounding crush meant we were going nowhere. In Iran, things are clearly not always what they seem.

In the days that followed, this would be demonstrated at every turn; the ubiquitous wall murals of stern ayatollahs and young martyrs wearing red bandannas - alongside Disney-style paintings of Snow White and the Six Dwarves (had Dopey been hauled off for questioning?); encounters with white turbaned mullahs, revolutionary guards - as well as English-speaking taxi drivers who demonstrated an impressive, pre-revolutionary knowledge of specialist subjects such as the nightlife around Coventry, where many of them had once worked.

It is estimated (solid statistics are not forthcoming from the Pilgrimage and Tourism Affairs section of the splendidly named Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance) that between as few as 5,000 and 10,000 western tourists visited Iran in 1995. Even so, this paltry number did their bit to reinforce what is set to become the standard Iran coach itinerary; south from Tehran to the inspiring river bridges and blue domes of Isfahan, Iran's Oxford. Then on to Darius' beautifully preserved ruins at Persepolis, the nearby garden city of Shiraz before swinging east to Bam, the world's largest surviving mud and brick citadel by an oasis in the semi-desert towards Pakistan.

If this is Iran's heartland, an awesome steppeland punctuated by the ruined caravanserais of the ancient silk routes and the improbable green bloom of occasional cities, havens of rose gardens and labyrinthine bazaars, then it is by no means the only Iran, as I found when I joined a tour group heading north. As we crested the Al-Borz mountains, the great treeless heights that provide Tehranis with their winter skiing (segregated slopes, of course), we corkscrewed down into a rapidly greening lushness fringing the Caspian Sea. Suddenly, we were in thick dank forest, the Iranian 'jangal' and home to rare, unverified sightings of the country's last few lions.

Along the coast, cattle hacked among the paddy fields and the ruins of the maize harvest. Granaries were perched on breezeblocks to protect them from the wet, and gimcrack homes, like mildewed cricket pavilions, straggled along the roadside. The shore was littered with derelict beach umbrellas and walkways, rusted skeletons clothed in the last scraps of salt-rotted canvas. Patterns of light bulb sockets, which had once spelt out illuminated names above the entrances to casinos, discos and bowling alleys along the Shah's riviera coast, showed smashed and broken now, the premises within reborn as dingy government offices or army storerooms.

At Chalus, the glass elevator, trendy in the 70s, still creaked between floors of the former Hyatt Regency, now the dilapidated Enghelab Hotel. The bar and its bollard seats had all been left high and dry in the middle of an emptied swimming pool. A series of Heath Robinsonesque water pipes snaked across the bottom before being plumbed into the upturned head of an old watering can, converting the pool into an Islamically acceptable - if currently non-operational - fountain.

It is one of the charms of travelling in Iran that tour itineraries, especially in the little-known north west, are less cast in concrete than adrift on a sea of uncertainty. At the village of Hend-Khaleh (which translates, intriguingly, as Indian Aunty), deep in the Anzali marshes, a boatman hailed us with a theatrical relish.

“You must see the last of the water lilies,” he insisted, and we climbed aboard, arranging to rendezvous with Hassan, our bus driver, at the nearby port of Bandar-e Anzali. As the boat emerged from the reed channels, the sky above the marshes exploded with startled snipe and duck. Blue flashes of kingfisher winged past. The boatman wielded a machete, and handed out sun hats fashioned from the pads of waterlilies above occasional, pink flowers. Rounding a bend, we narrowly missing a water-skiing resident of Bandar-e Anzali, a port clinging to a precarious rim of land between marsh and sea. Water levels in the Caspian have been rising dramatically of late, and many of the addresses in this seedy, dystopic Venice had already been abandoned to the flood while others had upgraded their perimeter walls, removing the garden gate and bricking up the gap to protect what had recently become island homes.

That afternoon, 70-year-old Hassan regaled us with stories from his lorry-driving life. In the days of the Shah, he had sometimes driven from Tehran to the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas and back - a 3000-kilometre journey - in 48 hours to collect beef from Brazil and Argentina. He had driven cargoes of oranges and rice, wood and coal from the Caspian hinterland to Austria, Germany and Bulgaria.

“And Romania,” he remembered, “where girls would spend the night in the cab with me for a single pack of cigarettes.” Shortly after this admission (and possibly because of it), he stopped for one of his regular mosque breaks, much as his British counterpart might pull in at a Little Chef, at the border town of Astara. Then, as the road pulled away from the shore, the barbed-wire fence line that separated us and the Iranian province of Azerbaijan from the former Soviet republic of the same name appeared out of the jangal to our right, keeping us company into the mountains.

We spent that night in the mountain town of Ardebil before pushing on early the next day through a savage landscape of mountain and steppe that baked in the summer, froze hard in winter, and was experiencing showers and fitful sunshine when we passed through in September. We stopped in the mountain spa town of Sarain, where a number of pools had been built to contain the town's natural hot water springs. The group split according to gender (predictably, no communal bathing here), and the men found themselves within the confines of what resembled a great, rather ramshackle lido containing piping hot, river-toned water that exuded a whiff of sulphur.

I lay in the water, scalding nicely, and watched a fellow bather emerge from the depths and dry himself below more mad murals - Tom taking out Jerry with a kalashnikov.

It was only once the bather had almost finished dressing that he realised I'd been soaking with a mullah. Evidently, even this did not compare with the sights that the women in the group had experienced, bathing with Iranian females who were nothing like the submissive creatures that their public demeanour had suggested.

“It was a cackling, big-bosomed madhouse, complete with drums and singing,” they reported. It was also, evidently, a relief to get out of the roupushes and headscarves. Several of the women in the group were finding the dress code profoundly restrictive. The roupushes were hot, they were ungainly. By the end of the tour, they tended to resemble Jackson Pollocks crafted not from paint but food since even eating had to somehow be conducted from within the folds of these voluminous raincoats.

Nomads' tents littered the steppe beyond Sarain, resembling overgrown tortoises. As we drew up at the roadside, a family beckoned us over, invited us in and sat us upon the floor. We were sitting beneath a structure of wooden ribs that had been pulled downwards and secured to create a dome covered in a quilt of animal hides. Lutfullah, the father, told us that they would soon be heading towards the low-lying Moghan plain after passing the summer on the slopes of nearby Sabalan mountain.

But evidently, they were a modern breed of nomad; on an agreed day, a relative would turn up with his truck to transport the family down to Moghan.

“And if it gets too cold,” explained Lutfullah, “we can always use a friend's house in Ardebil.”

Lutfullah offered to kill the goat in our honour, but we had to get on to Tabriz. Besides, few of us were up to eating an animal we had stroked on the way into the tent.

It was along the Caspian and in Azerbaijan that we ate the best and most varied food in all Iran. The Caspian provided wonderful herb leaf salads, beans in dill, and dips including olives in a walnut paste. Tabriz, a dour city peopled by Turkish speakers who had harder countenances than their Iranian counterparts, was relieved by its food; delicious white beetroot drenched in butter and served from street stalls; and abgusht or dizi, a stew that the diner grinds into a brothy paste in a pestle and mortar prior to eating. The fact that our teeth could have achieved the same effect perfectly well did nothing to spoil the fun of this particular ritual.

The next day, we drove out to Kandovan, a mountain village set among bizarre rock formations; chimneys and pillars that resembled petrified fir trees above homes hollowed from the soft rock. Keen to impress, a villager showed us into a simple surgery that had recently been installed in one of the old rock rooms, and then led us to the village library in another rock room.

Here, I sat by the window and thumbed through Allah's Day, published by the Society for the Improvement of Children's Thoughts and Attitudes. It was a collection of children's drawings that showed bloody demonstrations against the Shah, and young martyrs dying for the country in the war with Iraq. Art classes had taught blood and dismemberment to these children shockingly well. I looked out at the view from the library window. Among the walnut trees, villagers were gathered around an ancient threshing machine that whooped and gurgled with overfed indigestion as they forced the barley harvest into it. A river ran down the valley; a few donkeys stood idly by.

For a moment, I wondered why the children hadn't been encouraged to draw such sights until I remembered that this was Iran, and Iran is like that; shocking, fascinating and about as alien as you can get, the purest of travel experiences in an increasingly uniform world.

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