Subject: Post: From the border we changed to another taxi, and for 30 dollars a Kurdish guy drove us to the city of Dohuk. In Dohuk we looked around a while for a hotel and after finding one decided to stay there. We talked for a while with the hotel owner and his friend who spoke decent English, getting good tips about what to do and what are the local habits etc, and then left walking around the city for a while.<p>Right now we are sitting in a net cafe, just to quickly update this blog and check out our emails etc. No time for deeper descriptions now, but.. Just some points noticed so far:<p> - Kurdish region should be safe, and it truly feels like it. So far I have only been getting good vibes of this, the local people are really helpful even though they rarely speak any English. Even the Kurdish soldiers stopping us at a checkpoint between the border and Dohuk were just relaxed and smiling. I feel much more safe in here than in the southeast Turkey. Of course Mosul, Baghdad etc would probably be a different story and seeing the "Mosil 40km" or something road signs was a bit disturbing... Staying on the right side of the internal border anyway.<p> - Another interesting point about safety is that crime seems to be almost nonexistent, at least stealing. In the southeast Turkey we had to be really careful. Here we were changing money on the street, and the money changer guy literally had a plastic bag of dollars in front of him. Probably tens of thousands. The same goes with camera shops etc, they keep all the stuff on street and nobody is stealing them.<p> - The country is expensive. Food is cheap, but as the only method of transportation between the cities are taxis, traveling around costs quite a lot. To Erbil it would be around 50 dollars roundtrip per person. There are no international ATMs in the country, so we might actually be forced not to go to Erbil because we would risk running out of dollars.<p> - As I just noticed in middle of the previous sentence, the electricity supply is unreliable. Electricity is randomly going on and off. Also, neither DNA or Sonera phones have any coverage here. There are some local operators though, but obviously they don't allow roaming.<p> - The Kurdistan nature at this time of year is not as beautiful as it is on pictures, but it still looks nice and there are mountains everywhere. Just that now sun has burned everything and it's not as green as it could be.<p>- Everything being written in Arabic is a bit annoying. I did learn the numbers already, but being able to read also would be handy. Well, there's one good thing about traveling with a linguistic and it's this.. Don has way better idea of Arabic already.<p> Now back out, and tomorrow morning we will be swimming in Tigris.. Pictures coming when we have decent net connection, eg. when we are out of Iraq. The connections seem to be really bad in here. Latitude: Longitude: Security Code:
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