This ranks amour favourite stopovers on the road between Kerman and Yazd. Guests stay in cavernous, white-walled rooms in a renovated caravanserai dating from the Safavid period – part of a network created by Shah Abbas I four centuries ago to facilitate trade across his kingdom. The owners spent three years renovating the place, scrubbing the stonework with pumice stone and painstakingly restoring the carved doors, and the results are inspirational. A boutique hotel, however, this most certainly isn’t. You sleep on simple mattresses, spread over carpets in traditional raised rooms, screened from the communal corridors by curtains. The night skies are fabulous; star-gazing sessions with a telescope on the caravanserai’s roof terrace are a must.