Middle East 2009

The situation is still exactly the same after a few hours. Im drinking Efes on the Syrian side of the border, and Don is sitting in between the countries waiting for his visa. I kinda hope he will get it soon, getting wasted on this side of the border.. Well, at least the bus trip to Palmyra through half of Syria will be easy..

As a side note, we have totally got used to the heat. Yesterday we were chatting on the bus from Cizre how cool and nice the weather had been, and then we realized it was 38 degrees outside. Today its probably also something a bit over 40C, and Im feeling pretty comfortable sitting outside sipping my beer.. Seems like the old good rule of getting used to one degree per one day is still valid.

I passed the border to Syria easily with my prearranged visa, but Don was not quite that lucky. For an American getting a Syrian visa beforehand is much more difficult and expensive, so he relied on getting the visa on the border.

Now Im sipping a cold Efes beer in a cafe on the other side of the border while Don is sitting behind the border fence waiting for his visa application to be approved. Eventually it will, but that will probably take a few hours.. And its hot in here :)

Just some more thougths about Iraq: The country really surprised me. We knew beforehand that this area of Iraq would be safe and the people really hospitable, but we didn't expect it to be like it was. All totally random people we met were really friendly and helpful, and they wasted hours of their time just to help us with some little thing.

Having no common language did not prevent that, we could understand each other with some effort and surprisingly many people also spoke basic or even really good English. By the way, after all of these years not needing Swedish for anything it was a surprise to find ourself being in Iraq and Swedish being the only common language with many people :)

Also, in many ways Iraq was way more advanced than I had thought it would be. The cities were mostly in at least decent condition and all the normal modern technological things were available. The people didn't seem that poor at all, I guess they are actually doing pretty decently financially compared to many other countries even in Europe.

At any point I didn't see safety as an issue. I have to admit I was a little worried passing through the suburbs of Mosul even though I knew the road should be relatively safe, but we really didn't have any problems there either. In the cities I felt they were maybe the most safest ones I have visited for long time. The normal everyday crime like robberies and pickpocketing of almost all big cities doesn't seem to be an issue in there, nobody touches the belongings of each other.

Much more than anything else I was afraid of the traffic in there, just like I will probably be in the other Middle East countries. That will be the biggest risk for us, as lanes and speed limits seem to be only recommendations and guess do they have safety belts? no. Well, they wouldn't probably even help if crashing at 160kmh..

One day I definitily want to see Baghdad, Mosul and all those other really historical and supposedly still beatiful cities, but that won't be possible in years. Probably in ten years or something those areas of Iraq have calmed down enough to be possible to visit. We met a few casual people coming from Baghdad, can't say anything negative about them.

To sum it up, people said we would have to be mad to visit Iraq, and total lunatics to do it in July. The later I agree at least partially, temperatures were horrendous first before we got used to them, and still hot after that. But, I'm really happy we did visit there. The experience was great and changed our views of the country a lot. The only thing I regret is that we never got a chance to swim in Tigris then :)

Note: There's now also a video clip of the Armenian church in Diyarbakir posted.

Hmph, we are obviously stuck in Nusaybin now, only 200 meters from the Syrian border. The border is only open like 09-16, so we have to sit here until tomorrow.

The good news are that we got a decent hotel room, bargained the price down to 30 liras from 60 and the city is not even closely as bad as Lonely Planet described it. It actually doesn't even have the normal shady border town feeling, it is just a small town in middle of nowhere. In decent condition and not a scary-feeling. I guess western-looking people are not that common sight in here either, once again I feel like we are from Mars or something with kids staring etc.. But in here that just helps to get really happy and helpful service :)

After searching an hour for a post office for stamps and sending our post cards we took a taxi towards the Turkish border. For 100 USD the taxi wasnt too cheap once again, but it got us to the border in about two hours. Passing through the suburbs of Mosul didnt cause any problems this time either.

On the border we jumped into a Turkish taxi, which would take us over the border for 20 Turkish Liras each. Now we have been spending maybe two hours in that taxi so far, and are closing in to the Turkish passport control.

Turkish customs x-rayed all the luggage in the car, and we got a special interrogation. Especially they seemed to be interested in Don, as an American citizen.. They were just asking about our jobs, what we were doing in Iraq etc. The "tourism" answer gave us the familiar "you are lunatics" faces again.. :)

Probably we will be sitting on this border for an another hour or so. Then a bus towards Nusaybin and crossing border to Syria, we are kinda hoping to get there today.

Obviously it's totally impossible to find post cards in Iraq. With a local guy (one more random guy who just wanted to help us for an hour, for nothing) we went through maybe 20 shops and everywhere we got the same result: Either there was no postcards at all, or then they were representing something like Iran or just some random forests..

We ended up making our own postcards then. We selected a few pictures taken yesterday and the day before in Erbil, added "Erbil, Iraq" text and printed them in a photolab. So, now we have postcards. The next problem will be finding stamps, I guess it's time to go hunting for them now.

Tomorrow we will start moving towards Palmyra, Syria for some ancient Roman ruins etc. The area between Mosul and the Syrian border is totally unsafe, so we will have to return the same route we came here to Turkey and then enter Syria from there at Nusaybin.

Today seems to be one of those days you really get nothing done. We woke up around noon, although Don had been up an hour or two earlier in the morning also. Washed the rest of the laundry, went to pick up those washed by the laundry place, ate something.. Just basically hanging around, nothing special.

The air conditioning in our previous hotel room was working really well. Even well enough to make the room resemble a fridge. I woke up in middle of the night, shivering under a blanket because the room temperature was like 10 degrees.. And at some point my bed broke literally in half when I turned around. Quality Iraqi hotels.. the hotel owner was just saying something about us being fat guys and laughing :p

Well, today we have another room, let's see how well this one works. It's not looking too good so far though, Don already broke the door handle.. Just by closing the door.

Seems like we are not the only foreign tourists in the city. So far we have met the American guy who spent last evening with us, two Russian girls in the Citadel today and seen a few other western-looking people. Probably most of them are working in here though..

Now we are on a quest to find some postcards. I guess some people in Finland would love to get a postcard from Iraq :)

In the morning we still were not too sure what should we do. After thinking and negotiating, not to mention counting our cash stash for a while we finally decided we would go to Erbil today, even if we risk running out of cash. And, that probably wouldn't be a problem as Don also had some cash and there even should be a working international ATM or two in Erbil nowadays.

Erbil is one of the oldest places in the world where people have been living, and we would regret skipping it so much that we just had to do it, even with the cash problems and the road there being a bit dangerous. The first records of people living in Erbil date back like 10000 years.

An hour or two of trying to find a taxi and the correct way to use it to pay decent price, we finally jumped onto a taxi towards Erbil. We agreed a price of 60 US dollars, that was exactly not cheap, but it was the best we could do under those conditions, meaning mostly our nonexistent Kurdish or Arabic skills.. A proper street price would have been 25000 Iraqi dinars per person, meaning about 40 USD for the two of us. Well, 10 USD per person, fuck it...

Our taxi cruised through the mountains south from Erbil, unfortunately closing in to the well known city of Mosul. The city that nowadays is being known as one of the most dangerous places on the earth and which enjoys multiple daily bomb explosions among all other violence. The taxi passed through the far suburbs of Mosul, about 20km from the downtown, luckily without any problems. With our heads still on the natural places we continued towards Erbil through a few Kurdish military checkpoints. Our passports were checked twice, but otherwise they did not pay much attention on us. Many people passing through have had their bags searched etc, but this time that was not the case.

An hour after Mosul we finally arrived to Erbil, 150 kilometers behind us since Dohuk. We jumped out the taxi and started looking for a hotel, which turned out to be quite a bit more challenging task we though we would be. We went through our list of maybe ten hotels, none of them had any space.

At the point where we were almost giving up and going to ask one of the ridiculously expensive 50 USD hotels of Erbil we visited one more random hotel. Surprisingly the hotel owner spoke good English, and explained to us that at this time of year all the people from Baghdad and other southern really hot cities come to Kurdistan to escape the worst heat and to spend their vacations here. At first he did not have any space either, but while we were chatting with another American tourist (the first traveler we have met while in Iraq) two guys left the hotel and we got a decent room upstairs.

Tomorrow we should be getting a better room, the hotel owner apologized the quality of this room.. Well, the room is perfectly fine for us, about the same as the one last night in Dohuk. 30 USD for the room, not cheap but we were kinda short of choise here.. Only squat toilets also, and Don has been suffering some stomach problems since yesterday. The Iraqi tap water is not the most friendly to our western stomaches :)

We took our stinking and dirty clothes to a laundry (which refused to wash underwear, so I guess we will be using the hotel bathroom for that tomorrow.), and climbed up the hill to the Citadel of Erbil. That place has been continuously inhabitated for the last 8000 years or something, nowadays it's just a ghost town in ruins though. According to Lonely Planet there is still one family living, to keep up the continuous inhabitation. We walked around for a while, seeing the magnificient view over Erbil and I chatted for a while with a young journalist from Baghdad. I guess he just wanted to practice his English :)

On the way down the hill we decided to visit outside the city to have a beer in one of the few restauraunts serving beer in here. We met a Kurdish guy living in the US who drove us there and searched the place for us. I just love the friendliness of these guys. They would give you even their mother or something just because they are proud of their country and culture and are happy of you coming to see it. The German beergarden was well hidden in a shady neighborhood a few kilometers from the downtown Erbil, was more than pricey (8 USD for a beer..) and almost all the customers were foreigners probably working here.

On the way back after a beer we picked up a few beers more in a shop and took a taxi back to the hostel, just to sit the rest of the evening chatting and drinking those while enjoying the frequent electricity blackouts. Walking through the neighbourhood I was really amazed of the situation. We were walking in a dark neighbourhood in the suburbs of an Iraqi city, and I felt there was no danger at all. Any crime seems to be totally unexistant in here. I would have never thought that before we came in here...

Last evening was spent just wandering around and randomly meeting a few local people. Just some more random points:

- The local people are kinda different from almost any other country. Yesterday Don wanted to buy a belt, and the shopkeeper just refused to take money for it. "Free for you". Many people who have been in here before have said you get to hear a lot of that. For the local people it's a honor to help a traveler or something, unlike in most cities where they just like to rip tourists off.

- Surviving with the Arabic letters still causes some trouble. Even menus are in Arabic, so ordering a pizza is not the easiest task to do. Luckily the local people are totally helpful in that also.. :)

- Our hotel kinda sucked. It was damn hot inside all night even though we had a really big and noisy fan in the room. There was air conditioning, but they were only running it for a while during the night.. And when they turned it on, the electricity went out. It kept doing that whole night, electricity going on and off..

- We should have enough cash to visit Erbil.. So we are heading that way now. In a few hours we should be in there, it's around 2 hours by a taxi.

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.

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:

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

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.