Subject: Post: We woke up early and walked to the bus ticket office, grabbing some breakfast on the way. After waiting the for an hour or two, a minibus came to pick us up. We were already a bit worried of having to spend the following 5 hours on that minibus, but luckily this was not the case. The minibus just took us outside the city, where we changed bus to a normal tourist class couch.<p>On that we rode southeast, and the terrain changed to more mountainous while our bus crawled the bumpy roads towards the border town of Cizre next to the Syrian and Iraqi borders. They even served tea and refreshments on the bus, not too bad for a five hours ride costing less than 9 euros.<p>After arriving to Cizre we found a taxi to cross the border to the Iraqi Kurdistan with, and bargained the price down a bit to 40 US dollars. It is not possible to cross the border by foot, you have to use a taxi and the taxi driver will take care of all the paperwork involved. The Kurdish taxi driver drove like crazy, and in an hour we were on the border, crossing Tigris river on the way.<p>Turkish side of the border was kinda normal,just the usual passport stampings etc. While we arrived to the Iraqi border, our taxi driver spoke for a while with a Kurdish border official, who then came to ask us where we were going and was it work related.We answered Dohuk and Tourism, and the guy laughingly told us to go see a doctor. That obviously had a double meaning, as we then actually had to see a doctor in the next room. He just quickly measured our possible fever, nothing else.. Swine flu precautions.<p>Then we were offered some tea, while we waited for our turn to be questioned and have our passports stamped. Our turn came, the same office we had mentioned earlier just welcomed us to Kurdistan without any further questions. Then we were clear to go in. The "Republic of Iraq - Kurdistan Reqion" passport stamp is quite cool to have, by the way.<p>Probably we will be spending a few days in here, and as the net connections will be limited, the blog might be a bit quiet. This autonomous area of Kurdistan should be perfectly safe, and our Kurdish visas don't even permit entry to the areas controlled by the Iraqi government. Not that we would want to, they are way too dangerous to even consider traveling there.<p>No photos of the border btw, sorry.. Didn't feel like photographing there :) Latitude: Longitude: Security Code:
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