Iran - Andrew Burke [263]
Orientation
Bam’s bus terminal is in the south of the city near Arg Sq and unless you’re packing light you’ll need a taxi to get you to any of the lodgings. Once in town, Bam is easy enough to walk around, though taxis make much more sense in summer. What remains of the ancient Arg-e Bam is about 2km north of the centre of town, which is Imam Khomeini Sq. The new bazaar should be finished by the time you arrive, though in earthquake-proof concrete it’s unlikely to have the same atmosphere as before.
The Arg-e Jadid free-trade zone is about 14km east of Bam.
Information
Arg-e Bam Reconstruction Headquarters (Arg St)
Bank Sepah (Shahid Sadoqi St) Bank manager changes cash 10am to 12.30pm only, with IR17,000 commission.
Jonub-e Shahr Coffeenet (Pasdaran St; internet per hr IR14,000; 8am-2pm & 4-9pm) Look out for a building with a green and red façade, the coffeenet is on the first floor.
Post office (Shahid Sadoqi St)
Telephone office (Shahid Sadoqi St)
Dangers & Annoyances
A Japanese traveller was abducted from the street in Bam by drug smugglers in September 2007 (Click here). Check the latest situation with other travellers and on the Thorn Tree (www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree) before you arrive.
Arg-e Bam
The ancient mud city of Bam is the largest adobe structure on earth and, until the 2003 earthquake, it was one of the jewels in Iran’s tourism crown. The site has been occupied for almost 2000 years and post-earthquake analysis has revealed the walls were first built using Sassanian-style mud-bricks. Bam was a staging post on the trade routes between India and Pakistan at one end and the Persian Gulf and Europe at the other. Visitors, including Marco Polo, were awestruck by the city’s 38 towers, huge mud walls and fairy-tale citadel – the Arg-e Bam (admission free; 24).
Today the Arg is the largest adobe building project on earth. Teams of Iranian and foreign archaeologists, architects and engineers are working to first understand how and when the Arg was built, and then to rebuild it using mainly traditional methods. As team leader Nima Naderi explained, it’s a dauntingly complex job.
‘We cannot look at the Arg as a single structure,’ he told us. ‘Every building is different, built at different times using different materials. We must try to rebuild each building using materials as close as possible to those they were originally built with.’ In the laboratory opposite the collapsed gate tower, engineers are working to develop a range of mud bricks in line with the differing sizes and densities used in the original buildings. At the same time they are experimenting with different compositions of mud, straw and palm mulch to determine which is the strongest and most flexible.
About 150 people are working on the Arg and its reconstruction is scheduled to take 15 years. But with less than 1000 bricks being made each day, and countless millions being required, Nima’s statement that ‘the project has no deadline’ seems more realistic.
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A town born of dust is reborn Andrew Burke
When I arrived in Bam on 27 December 2003 to report on the earthquake that had just devastated the city, it was like stepping into a scene from hell. The quake, measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale, had reduced this ancient city of mud-brick homes to dust and rubble. Death was everywhere.
Those Bamis who had survived were in a state of shock. ‘After this house collapsed,’ one old man told me, pointing to a pile of rubble that was once his home, ‘five people were dug out without any injury. But 15 or 16 members of my [extended] family are dead.’
A few metres away, a woman wailed as another body was carted past in a blanket and loaded onto a pink suburban bus, to be taken to the cemetery. As I followed the bus through a gridlock of people trying desperately to escape the carnage, the horror was summed up in a single image. Four large men sat crying