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Last August I was one of five Persians and four Westerners - three women and six men - who set off to recce a route by jeep through the deserts, mountains and 'emptylands' of north and north-east Iran. Zohreh Majidian wanted a new, remote trip for her company, Magic Carpet Travel. Abbas Jaffari, Iran-Iraq war veteran, desert survival lecturer and one of Iran's most renowned mountaineers, was going to take us to the parts other guides don't reach. Ferhad and Morteza drove the two jeeps loaded with camping kit. Iran was a chic, Tehrani friend of Zohreh's. Nick, Michael, Sophie and I were a mix of photographers, writers and above all, journey guinea-pigs.

Eight days of travelling. From Mashad, towards the Turkmenistan border, through Kurdish and Turkmen tribal areas, to the shores of the Caspian, up into the Alborz mountains, onto the slopes of Mount Damarvand, and back into Tehran. And afterwards, I was left with a straight flush of surreal, striking, disconnected impressions and memories.

Michael's impression of a camel was good. Very good. Doubled over, he shuffled around the campsite, kicking up sand in the moonlight. He crooked one arm out before him, fingers and thumb opening and closing, the other arm he bent into a 'hump' on his back. But it was the horrible coughs and gurgles that gave Abbas the final clue in this game of charades.

The rules of Anglo-Persian charades were simple. Played in English, confined to films and of those, only to Hollywood blockbusters ("...banned, of course, but everybody's seen pirated videos here," explained Zohrhe), classics ("...we saw them before the Revolution") or war movies ("...the guys were soldiers, they know them all"). Saving Private Ryan had been an easy guessed success, as had Titanic. Moby Dick had caused problems for everybody.

We were in the corner of Iran between the Caspian's eastern shore and the Turkmenistan border. Late that afternoon we'd driven off into a flat, scrubby land. Flat? As, and textured like, an infinite sheet of orange-tinged vellum in the setting sun. Only Abbas knew what landmark we were heading for to set up camp. Then we'd all seen it - a low, quarter of a kilometer wide table of sand. We ground up onto its top, putting us maybe a meter above the land around us. In the centre was a still, heavy pool of dark water with a tiny muddy island in its centre. In the silence after the jeeps' engines were cut, we heard a rhythmic plopping and farting. Boils of dark gloop, a mix of oil, water, sulphur and gas, burst up in the island's centre.

Abbas waved his hand at the pool. "Worth the journey, yes? It's a natural oil well - you find them in Iran but almost nobody knows of them." Marco Polo did. In his Travels he describes a “spring from which gushes a stream of oil of such abundance that a hundred camels may load there at once.” Our pool was less fecund, and less pure - a lit cigarette thrown into its diluted liquid would have fizzled out rather than set light to a disaster movie scaled conflagration - but it was an oil well none the less.

And the sandy 'stage' surrounding the pool was ideal for charades. Abbas, watching Michael gurning and pacing in the lamplight, cried; "I know this! I got it!" He frowned, plucking through two languages for inspiration. "He is shotar...a camel...so, 'Laurrnce-e Sahara.' Peter O'Toole! 'Lawrence of Arabie.'" He was right.

We drove 1,700 kilometres through Iran's northern deserts, wastelands and mountains. Most of it off road, in punishing heat. In the emptiness and heat haze a distant donkey would attenuate into a wire-legged giraffe. An encampment of tents become rocks, rocks become Arabian nights palaces.

From the shade of a solitary tree, where we'd pulled the jeeps in for a mid-morning cup of tea, I spotted a shepherd in the emptiness below. His flock had coalesced around him, pressed as tight as a bulky, beige Axminster carpet in the heat. The shepherd wore a kheleh - a heavy felt and canvas, square shouldered cloak, as stiff as chipboard. Fending off his guard dogs with a barrage of stones, I strolled down to talk with him, pressing my stop-start Farsi into appropriately rural conversation. "Garm! - hot weather. Hast ab ziot? - is there enough water around here? Kohjast khuneh shoma? - Where's your house?" He gestured into the valley. I pressed on with questions about gorg - wolves, baraf - snow, and so forth. Abufas endured this pidgin Persian patiently for quite some time before, with unnecessary hesitation, he pointed out: "I speak English, not very good, but some. I study to be a teacher, but there are not jobs up here, so I look the village sheep some time." He rapped his knuckles on the kheleh; "This belong the village - good with the sun, rain, cold - who is look the sheep, he use it."

Iran isn't big on beach culture. Being, as it is, a bit Victorian about exposed flesh and water. But at Bandar-e Torkaman on the Caspian's shore there is a resort. A couple of rows of plank and canvas, family-sized beach huts, a diminutive, rickety, 4-seater Ferris wheel and a stall selling ersatz Coke. It's quite a draw for Tehranis. Half a kilometer apart two long board walks wind their way out into the lukewarm waters. One for men and one for women. At the end of each there's a platform, with sacking walled changing cubicles, steps down into the brine, and running far out to sea a staked canvas curtain to paddle behind out of sight of the opposite sex.

Nick and I went to swim, as did Zohreh and Sophie. A policeman accompanied us two men down to our platform, a policewoman the two women to theirs. Both fearing, perhaps, that once in our respective swimming areas we'd make an Olympian freestyle burst across the no-mans water to effect an immoral tryst.

Nick and I actually bobbed around in the home of the sturgeon talking to a pod of college professors and engineers. They, above all, were fascinated by our ability to actually swim. They also debated earnestly over how polluted and radioactive they thought the Caspian's waters were. Something we mulled over an hour later when, modestly attired again, our team ordered plates of sturgeon steaks, a by-product of the caviar trade, in an island restaurant.

Our stop in the town of Bastan was to re-supply; buying bags of apples and pomegranates, dates and slabs of mutton. It was also a chance for a bit of urban culture, symbolising religion's civilizing of the wastelands. Entering the courtyard of the town's mosque, Zohreh pointed out the two door knockers. "You find them on houses too. A men's knocker and a women's knocker, with different sounds so the household know who should open the door." In the mausoleum of the Sufi poet Bastami, an airy, high apsis under a conical dome held a cabal of Sufis. Young men in cloaks and white robes gathered around Shab-Aldin Alishah, their teacher. He was a sleek, charismatic man, giving the impression of a trendy young Oxbridge professor entertaining the more precocious of his undergraduates.

We were couched on spread rugs, and two men picked up their instruments, the daf, a goat-skinned hand-drum with a jangle of metal rings hung from its frame, and the nei, a simple cane flute. A hypnotic susurration of music filled the hall...until an apoplectic, and more orthodox, guardian burst through a door, hammering on it with his fist and ordering quiet. Alikhan silenced the music with the air of someone triumphantly proving a philosophical postulation. He took the nei and held it up. "This is like a man - empty inside until understanding is breathed into it." He shot a look at the door closing behind the cranky tempered guardian.

Nick had come up with a joke, revenge perhaps for the renditions of There is Nothing Like a Dame, and so on. Waiting until Sophie was dozing in the back of the jeep, he'd suddenly shake her awake crying, "Road block! Road block!" Befuddled by heat and sleep, she'd twist and squirm to pull on her modesty bestowing chador and headscarf. It was like watching somebody in a straight jacket trying to push a duvet into its cover. "Oh, sorry," Nick would gloat when she was fully dust-sheeted between us, "it's only a couple of farmers carrying shovels, not soldiers at all." The road blocks we did pass in this sensitive border region had no interest in us at all, nor in our modesty.

Abbas brought the wastelands alive for us. Stopping the jeeps, he'd give the arm-wave of a superior conjurer, indicating an emptiness about to be filled. "See those earthen piles? Each one covers steps leading down to water, brought from the mountains in ghanat, underground channels dug by hand." He bumped us across the landscape to an abandoned caravanserai; "They're all exactly 24 kms apart, these stops, four hours for a man walking. Everything followed these routes - silk, spices, gold." We explored the gloomed, cool corridors and alcoves built into the thick walls around the courtyard. Filling them in out imagination with rugs and pack saddles and couched animals and merchants pulling on hookahs. In one dark hall a laser sharp sun beam speared through a hole in the roof and to the ground. Ferhad ran through it, shuffling his feet and sending a cloud of dust up into the light. The rising coils became, so nearly, the shape of a nebulous, arms-akimbo genie. Then fell and faded back into light and dark.

The previous winter, the snows on the heights of the Alborz mountains had been poor, and there was little snow melt water to irrigate the high pastures of the Kurdish transhumant tribes. So, this summer, the Zafranlou clans were finding water and grazing where they could. We camped amongst the goat-hair and canvas tents of one extended family, friends of Abbas, who had clustered around a brackish spring in a deep valley. Lines of sheep on the parallel paths across the scree slopes above us, moved back and forth like abbacus beads counting off the scarce blades of grass.

We were brought into the cool shadows of a tent and given glasses of tea and nuggets of karacaroot, sheep tainted whey and sugar 'nougat.' Down one side of the tent a loom held a half-woven grain bag, alive with the symbolism from the Kurds' ancestral home to the west of the Caspian. The women, overcome by immodesty, determined to dress up, disappeared. Coming from another tent we heard janglings and gigglings. Then our tent flap was thrown back and a radiant, glittering stream of girls and women and their babes in arms flowed in. They were keen to dance. Outside in the circle of tents, four young women began circling and squaring, arms above their heads, their entwined fingers snapping, beshkan - 'breaking' - like castanets Skipping and turning, they would suddenly crouch low, uttering a low passionate hissing. Shawls spun out, fringes whipped round, the 20 meters of fabric in each short skirt lost the fight against centrifugal force, necklaces of traded Russian and Indian gold coins clanked heavily. Men and women began singing, and I was pulled by the clan-chief, a powerful man with a tea-cosy hat, into the dance.

That night, swinging in my hammock, hung between the jeeps' roof-racks, I was lulled into and out of sleep by a cacophony of noise. Dogs barking, lambs bleating, a distant jackal yapping and then renewed barking from the camp dogs. A thunder of epic snores. But waking in the freezing dawn there was a silence. The Kurds' tents lay like upturned boats on a beach, and between then, noiselessly moved one of the dancing women, still in her best clothes, pulling a reluctant white donkey towards the water hole.

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