Middle East 2009

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No photos of the border btw, sorry.. Didn't feel like photographing there :)

There was a guy in the hotel who we spoke with for a while, he obviously was one of the rare people in here speaking proper English. The guy translated for us as we tried to find a way to continue our journey tomorrow, and finally he joined us in our search for a place to catch a bus tomorrow.

We found a bus ticket office where our bus will depart tomorrow, and after that the guy, Murat, took us touring the city a bit with his friend. We visited a really old mosque, ruins of an old Armenian church, got a good lesson about history of Diyarbakir and just sat down in a cafe sipping a cup of tea.

The city was a bit scary to walk around just like I had thought it would be, so sorry for the pictures taken on streets being kind of quick snapshots and nothing really artistic. I just didn't feel like using the camera too visibly. Having the local guy and his friend with us helped the situation considerably though :)

As a funny remark, there are many words in Turkish that are totally similar to Finland. For example, a plastic bag is called pussit. Don means womens underpants, so you can guess Don isn't too happy of saying out his name... :p

Either our hairy-handed pilot was not completely up to his task, or then there just was some heavy turbulence all over Turkey, but the flight was not exactly pleasant. The damn old duct tape fixed Boeing 737-500 probably added its own share to that. First we flew to Ankara, stopped there for a while and continued our flight to our destination Diyarbakir.

Stepping out of the plane in Diyarbakir was kinda a shock, although an expected one. If Istanbul was hot, Diyarbakir is like hell. The temperature is around 40 degrees at the moment, but unlike Istanbul the air is dry. That makes the climate a bit more tolerable.

We jumped into a taxi and headed to our hotel, and the next shock followed on the way. That one was a also pretty expected one though.. The driving style in here is totally fucking crazy. One guy hit a bus with his car and just continued on.. And our taxi driver wasnt paying much attention on traffic light colors either. I guess the traffic in the Middle East will be the most dangerous thing for us.

We arrived safely to the hotel anyway, and that surprised us positively. For 10 euros we have a western style toilet, shower, big beds and ESPECIALLY AIR CONDITIONING AND FRIDGE. There even seems to be WiFi available.. :P

Now off to get some food..

I've let Eerik take care of most of the documentation so far, with pictures and blogging and such, but I do have a few thoughts as well :D My impressions of Turkey have taken a fairly dramatic shift on this trip. In the beginning, the only Turks I had ever really seen or come in contact with were these 'handsomeprince' Turkish men who wanted nothing more in life than to meet and have sex with women. They generally were quite uneducated and horribly irritating. The few women I had met were quite vain and used as an excuse 'I'm a girl, that's what girls do' for nearly any superficiality imaginable.

But generalizing Turkey as consisting only of these types of people is a vast injustice, and simply untrue, as my experience this weekend has shown me. I'm glad I came here again. The people I met were just incredible, and particularly on Friday night, it was really quite special. We went to a local park on the hill, drinking some beers and just relaxing. There were about 30 of us in total, and everyone I hung out with was really fun and interesting. There was an amazing view over the Bosphorous, with some heat lightning from some clouds a bit of a distance away and some of the mosques lit up at night, and combined with the people, I didn't really want to leave :)

From the park we mostly split up around 11, the majority wanted to go dance and Eerik, me, Tor, and Zane (some CS friends of Eerik from Latvia who we will meet again in Good Times) preferred a quieter bar to just chat. We got a nargila and some beers and continued to have a blast.

We split up again around 2, Eerik and I thinking to just get one beer before heading back, but we stopped off at this one metal bar near our hostel. There was a really great live band playing, doing mostly Iron Maiden and classical metal covers, and we were persuaded to stay til the end.

All in all, a night to remember.

Saw a nowadays pretty rare sight in here, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 airplane. There are not too many of those still flying, the last ones were built in 1972. Seems like this one has been operating for the British military and been flying from Lyneham, Uk to Basra, Iraq.. I guess it's on the same route again and just refueling here :)

Link: G9-RAC on airliners.net

As a side note, the storm clouds are disappearing, so we might have decent flying weather..

We should learn to double check all the schedules. First, our flight to Diyarbakir doesn't depart around midday, it departs at 13.35. And, the bus from Istanbul to the airport didn't take more than half an hour today, as it is Sunday and there's basically no traffic compared to all other weekdays. So, we will be sitting here at the Sabiha Gökcen airport for at least 4 hours..

Well, a few euros got us a couple of hours of WiFi time, so at least we have internet connection here. The weather around here is pretty bad at the moment, dark storm clouds all over. The flight might be a bit unpleasant experience in that weather..

By the way, after this blog entry our network connectivity might be a bit limited so it might be quiet for a while. I have no idea if we will have network access in Diyarbakir..

After last nights heavy partying we woke up around midday today, feeling a bit hangoverish. Dons friend had promised to take us to Princess Islands today, so we jumped on a bus going to where she lives, to the Asian side of the city. An hour on a bus and another one on a ferry were spent, and we arrived to one of the islands.

Princess Islands are the place where many locals go to refresh during their free time. They are the closest place to the city where there are decent swimming beaches, and countless other outdoor activities are possible there. As cars are not allowed on the islands, walking around or taking a horse carriage is the way to move around there.

We climbed to top of the island, which exactly was not my idea of a hangover day. We ended up walking like twenty kilometers in total today, and in 36C degrees temperature that was not too easy. Anyway, I guess the view from the top paid back the effort spent climbing there.

Now we just arrived back to the hostel an hour ago totally tired, so I guess no pub crawling today. Don actually fell asleep already, and I will probably follow his example as we should wake up around seven or eight tomorrow and get ourself to the airport. Our flight to Diyarbakir departs around midday..

The evening was kinda cool. We went to Taksim square and met those friends, and our Turkish guy Alper took us to a park south from Taksim. It is forbidden to drink outside in Istanbul nowadays, or at least so have I understood. Anyway, we ended up drinking outside for a few hours and enjoying magnificent view over Bosphorus.

At midnight we headed to Taksim, and after having a short break in a nargila bar with the Latvian people me and Don finally headed to a local rock bar. Some heavy metal in Istanbul really didn't sound that bad. Unfortunately the bar had to close at four, and we just returned to our hostel to have a few beers in here. By the way, that's something new for me. I guess the law has changed in Turkey and the bars actually have to close at four. I have been spending so many nights in a bar in Turkey watching the sun raising... :)

Nothing really spectacular has happened today, at least so far. After the sleepless night yesterday and wandering around the city all the day I slept long today, waking up after midday.

Don had woken up an hour or two before and successfully hunted in the city, returning back to the hostel with two loaded Akbils. The Akbil is the payment device for the public transport of Istanbul, basically the same as the cards used in Finland. Physically it's a piece of plastic with a chip button attached. You load money onto it, and then you can pay for transport by touching the button in a bus or subway or whatever. They just seem a bit hard to come by, we were trying to buy them at least in ten places yesterday. Every single one was either out of them or closed or something :p

We walked around the city a bit, visited the top of Galata tower and a bazaar and returned back to the hostel after having a refreshing beer on a terrace. Seems like kebab will become our main food for the following weeks..

Tonight we should meet some friends and go to have a few beers together.. Just taking a shower first and then heading to Taksim square.

Mehmet ended up going to a couchsurfing meeting and Don was really tired, so we took a hostel in Taksim for tonight. The hostel was almost empty, so we got an empty 10 bed room just for own use. At least theres no complaining about space etc:)

Don passed out and I decided to join the CS meeting also, and at the moment Im sitting outside next to the Tophane mosque, smoking narquila waterpipe and drinking tea. As the air has now cooled down and I got a shower I finally again remember why I love Istanbul show much. The atmosphere and the humid warmness are something unbelievable.. :)