Gaz is a town on the northern edge of the Isfahan plain, close to Shahin Shahr, and most riders pass through it on the way to or from Isfahan itself, about twenty kilometres to the south. The name makes Iranians smile, because gaz is also the word for Isfahan's beloved nougat, a soft white sweet studded with pistachios and made with a resin from the tamarisk shrub. Whatever the etymology, buying a box from one of the confectioners in the region is close to compulsory.
The landscape here is high, dry and flat, about fifteen hundred metres above sea level, with brown mountains rising on the horizon and farmland where water allows. That water, for most of history, came through qanats, the hand-dug underground channels that carry groundwater from aquifers at the mountain foot down to the fields, sometimes over many kilometres. The Persian qanat system is on the UNESCO list as a group of eleven examples, and one of them, the Mozd Abad qanat, is in this part of the Isfahan region. From the road you can sometimes spot the lines of shafts, little craters of excavated earth marching across the plain.
Isfahan is the big reward. Its Naqsh-e Jahan Square, also called Meidan Emam, was laid out by Shah Abbas I in the early seventeenth century as the centrepiece of his new capital, and it remains one of the largest and most beautiful city squares on earth, surrounded by the Shah Mosque, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, the Ali Qapu palace and the entrance to the bazaar. The old bridges over the Zayandeh River, Si-o-se Pol and Khaju, are where the city comes to stroll in the evening, though the river itself has often been dry in recent years.
The riding between Gaz and Isfahan is urban highway: wide, busy and fast, with aggressive lane changes and a lot of motorbikes. Fuel is plentiful in Gaz, Dowlatabad and the surrounding towns, and there are plenty of kebab shops and bakeries selling fresh flatbread. The heat in summer is dry and strong, and in winter the plateau gets surprisingly cold at night, so pack for both ends of the thermometer. Ride into Isfahan in the late afternoon and you will arrive just as the square comes to life.