There's one thing you can always depend upon in Iran, and that is a helping hand. It is difficult to imagine the warmth of the people coexisting side by side with the base stupidity of religious fanaticism. But that's the rule in Persia: 99% of the people are warm andwonderful and kind and welcoming and suffer from the power of the remaining 1%. Even the Mollahs we met hanging out in a religious college in Shiraz were cool. They had nothing to prove, and proved it.We cannot count the times we were invited to dinner, lunch or to leave our hotel and spend the night as somebody's guest.

In Tabriz, not only was our camera confiscated: a major leak in the cooling system of East of Eden threatened to turn Persia into a permanent nightmare. Under the car in front of thewonderful Park Hotel a massive puddle of green anti-freeze grew like a monster in an old movie, andunder the hood I could not find the source. No broken pipes, no radiator leaks, no nothing. And the anti-freeze was coming directly out from within the motor itself. The whole thing stank of cracked joints and a faulty sealing and I had no way to fix it and the next day was a holiday and we were in shit big time.

The next morning I took the Range as slowly as possible down Ayatollah Khomeini street, pastMartyr's Square and hung a left on Palestine Boulevard(I'm not making any of this up) to the garage district which is part of every city in the world.

The place was closed like a tomb, and the only radiator guy I found knew as much about cooling systems as I did about sub-atomic particles and their influence on the pilgrimage to Mecca. And yet it was there that we met Davoud who spoke a little English and though we were quickly surrounded by a crowd Davoud and I were able to communicate.

In the crowd, by the way, was a black dressed Paseji who took one look at our car and decided that we were Canadian terrorists. Oy gevalt! Is everybody in this country a madman? But Davoud took me aside and said, "Canadians are not terrorists.Iranians are terrorists."

By this time, the sun was approaching its zenith and it was getting on lunch time and Davoud invited us to his place to eat. It was there that we met this delightful family who had suffered so much since the Islamic Revolution. Once in the house Marie-Do was invited to take off her chador and be like the other women in the family and we learnt their story.

Davoud's brother had been hanged by the revolution and Davoud had been imprisoned and tortured. Their one dream was to get the hell out of the country and go to Canada and in their minds they were already living there. It was cruel, because given his personal finances and professional experience, the Davoud family didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted for immigration to Canada.

The car is fine. Davoud's neighbour is a mechanic who fixed the leak, tightened the drive belts, re-weldedthe exhaust pipes and double checked the electrical wiring for 5 dollars.We wanted to invite Davoud and his wife, a nurse who had been kicked out of her work at the hospital for saying she wanted to go to Canada, and their daughter- a beautiful little girl who reminded me so much ofmy own little Cléa - to eat in a restaurant, but they would have nothing of it.

Instead they insisted we all go and picnic at the Al-Goly amusement park and so evening found us sitting by a lake and eating rice in vine leaves and then going on all the rides. We rentedlittle paddle boats and went out two by two, and I sat next to the little girl and she screamed out in English, "I'm frightened! Oh my God!" and half the fun was screaming and pretending to be frightened.

We took a little train through the scary tunnel where a big monster in plastic waited and didn't move as the train went by but we all screamed out. We were happy. Davoud and family had managed to forget for a few hours that they were living in a country which was formally fascist and I had the bitter-sweet pleasure of spending time with a little girl who reminded me of my daughter.

When the ride was over Davoud and I sat there side by side, smiles stretching from ear to ear. "Toronto", he said, and I saw that he was crying.There's nothing I can do to help Davoud get to Canada.I'm not even a resident there any more and I haven't got the $400,000 to get him into the country. I can't even publish the photos on the web I took of him and his family sitting on that little train, his daughter's arms raised in hysterical joy. It would be too dangerous for them.