Qanats are one of the great quiet inventions of human history, and the Persian ones are the best. A qanat is an underground channel that carries water from an aquifer in the foothills to a village in the desert, using nothing but gravity, with a line of vertical shafts every few dozen metres to let the diggers in and out and to let air in. The technique appeared in Iran about three thousand years ago, and in the dry plateaus of the interior it made agriculture and cities possible. UNESCO listed eleven Persian qanats in 2016, including the Qanat of Baladeh.
The qanats of the Gonabad area in Razavi Khorasan are among the most remarkable. Hundreds of kilometres from any great river, the people of this region dug tunnels deep into the hillsides, some of them tens of kilometres long, with mother wells reaching down hundreds of metres. The work was done by hand, by specialists called muqannis, who handed down their skills through families and had their own guild. A qanat needs constant care, and the system depends on a social arrangement, with rules for sharing the water and for repairing the channels.
On the surface a qanat looks like a line of small mounds, the spoil heaps around each shaft, stretching in a row across the plain. Where the water emerges, the landscape turns green with fields, orchards and poplars, and the contrast with the dun desert behind is striking. The villages in the area grow pistachios, saffron, barberries and cereals, and the local sweets and dried fruits are worth a taste.
The roads here are long and open, crossing a high desert plateau with big skies. Surfaces are generally fair on the main roads and poor on the minor ones, and distances are great. Summers are extremely hot, with temperatures that can top forty degrees, and winters are cold. Spring and autumn are the best seasons. Traffic is light, but trucks are common on the main roads.
Gonabad, thirty-seven kilometres away, has forty-three thousand people, and is the place for fuel and food. Fill up there, because services in the desert are far apart, and carry water and spare supplies.