Getting there: costs and durations

As I said before, getting to Bandar Abbas via plane is the easiest, yet most expensive way.

My one-way return ticket from Bandar Abbas to Tehran cost me 480'000 Rials (devide by 9250 to get dollars) which is almost $52. Very high for a domestic flight.
It took 1 hour 50 minutes and the flight was booked 2 days earlier. I was flying with iran air.

www.iranair.com might provide you with some information, but unfortunately I have yet to discover a *working* air travel website that does not come up with some kind of SQL error when I try to find a flight. Don't waste your time on Iranian Airlines' websites. Instead, do it the old fashioned way: Go to a Travel Agency and ask for flights going to Bandar Abbas. Trust me, it saves you more time.

Trains;
We wanted to travel with train. So we went online to www.rajatrains.com
On this website, everything works as it should. You could find availability of seats, travel routes, and even book a ticket, provided you have one of two cards mentioned on their websites: Saman Bank Card (www.samanbank.com) or Parsian Bank Card (www.pec.ir). Bear in mind that your credit cards don't work in Iran ! If you absolutely need to take money from your visa card, you may do so if you go to central bank of Melli and they will do it, it might take some time though.

In the agency that we got out tickets, we were told that there are three rations of tickets !
Certain number of seats are available to travel agencies for sales, certain number of seats are available to buy in person, in the train station, and few others exist as online purchase. While your travel agency could not sell you any tickets, you may still be able to go online and buy them via above cards. Still, you could go to train station and buy tickets in person.

Two trains are available for Bandar Abbas;

Normal train
Ghazal Train

Normal train ticket from Tehran to Bandar Abbas is around 90'000 rials, Ghazal train costs around 220'000 rials. Normal train goes everyday, and every cabin has 6 seats/beds while Ghazal has 4 and goes every other day. We could not find anything 2 days earlier except Ghazal, so we travelled with that.

From Tehran it left on schedule, 15:40, however the arrival time of 9:50 was a bit off. We got to Bandar Abbas at 11:40 ! Train was clean and bought off a chinese company 5 month ago. Prices for water/juice/chips/food on the train was equal to your average grocery store/restaurant. So I wouldn't recommend packing lots of food with you before travelling with Raja trains.



Busses;
Tehran has a few bus terminals, Arjantin, Tehran Pars and Azadi. Azadi being the largest, and therefore all destinations are supported, Arjantin is in mid town, and has busses going to most major cities. There are two major bus operators. Seir O Safar and another one !

Seir-o-Safar: 88732535, 88734669, 88743417-8

Seir-o-Safar (West): 66058484

Seir-o-Safar (East): 77865696

Taavoni No. 16: 66054060

Taavoni No. 3: 5557843

Taavoni No. 8: 77523851

I got above numbers from a websearch, not sure if any of them work, you can always have an Iranian call 118 (information) and ask for the number. Or just travel to one of the terminals and ask around. If you go a couple of hours earlier, chances are that you can definitely find some bus going to the destination. In other towns, especially the smaller ones, you might only find one bus per day that goes to Bandar Abbas. Sometimes, you need to take a bus that would take you to a larger town before you can find a bus that takes you to Bandar Abbas.

Busses to Bandar Abbas would be 90'000 rials or less, kind of the same price as the train, while travelling a lot slower ! This should be your absolute last resort. I do NOT recommend taking a bus when you have to travel more than 500 km. It is extremely tedious.