Country Archives: Iraq

Left Malbworaan after a hearty breakfast and with 6 liters of ice-cold water. I still felt somewhat weak, though, and cycling the 70km to Dohuk didn’t seem very realistic.

After maybe 20 kilometers I was stopped by a man waiting on the road-side with his little daughter. He invited me over to his house for lunch, in Mahad, a village just 2 kilometers down the road. I refused at first. He insisted, and insisted even more when he heard I was from Germany – his sons work in Munich. I still refused, though. Then he mentioned he was Yezidi, and that flipped the switch for me and I agreed to have a short rest at his place.
I stayed for maybe 2 hours and was fed with a full-blown lunch – salad and rice and chicken. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel well anymore at this point and couldn’t enjoy the food as much as I would have liked to.

Now who are the Yezidis? As far as I know, they are a long-misunderstood and long-hunted Muslim sect, also called the devil worshippers. However, they themselves say they are not Muslim.

Rashid and his lovely family showed me a wedding video (of someone in the family, not sure whose exactly) and a photo album. Interestingly, girls and women don’t wear head scarfs and join the men for gossiping. However, they don’t seem to join them for eating.
Rashid’s brother drove me up the next hill with his pick-up from where the road was more or less flat.

A few kilometers down the road I stopped at a tiny shop to buy some coke, but I was over-exhausted again and couldn’t move any further from there. I had a long break and talked to the owner of a car repair shop who spoke German. At the end of the day he invited me to his place for the night.
Khalaf is Yezidi, too, has 6 children, and his oldest son is married and has 6 kids of his own, and they all live in the same house.

Had a great evening sitting in the living room with the 15 people and some more friends and relatives. The food was great again.

I’m sleeping on the roof of their house next to the entire family.

Cycled: 30km
Hitched: 8km

Malbworaan - Shekhkaya

Ramadan is over. Eid is on, a three-day holiday following Ramadan. And it’s even worse. Nothing is open at all except for a few food shops, but you have to come across one first before you can buy canned tuna.

So I left Hawler earlyish. I cycled towards Mosul, then turned right well before that city. Mosul, not within Kurdistan, is one of the more dangerous cities in the world, especially for foreigners.

Anyway, I’ll skip to the interesting parts. After 100km and very little food I still felt ok but decided to have a break and either hitch a ride to Dohuk or pitch the tent somewhere. I was in the middle of nowhere, 75km from Dohuk. So I stopped and after a few minutes of relaxation everything went black, then white. I had serious trouble standing upright. My vision came back slowly, I decided to lay down the bike, and to sit myself down next to it – then the lights went out completely and I fell down flat (luckily I wasn’t standing anymore). And right into a bunch of thistles, but I didn’t notice at the time. I don’t think I was gone for long. But… holy crap! That was a first.

After a few more minutes I felt ok again and decided to cycle on to the next village and ask someone there for food. The next village had – a church!

To make a long story short, I’m staying with a huge family in Malbworaan, an entirely Assyrian Chaldean village right next to the church. They speak some English and fed me good.

Cycled: 105km

Hawler - Malbworaan

I managed to not get my visa extended, mostly due to my own lazyness. So instead of going further south I’ll head up towards the northwest and the Turkish border tomorrow.

Hawler/Arbil looks like a cool city (about 1.3 million inhabitants), even though I haven’t seen much of it.
It is actually one of the oldest cities on earth. The center, the Citadel, has been continuously inhabited for more than 8000 years. A couple of years ago the government kicked everyone out of the Citadel, due to the poor living standards there, I believe, except for one family to keep the line of inhabitance uninterrupted. The Citadel is now being renovated – revitalized, as the government calls it.

This is already day 5 of my 10-day visa for Iraqi Kurdistan. According to various sources on the ‘net it should be easily possible to extend the visa at the Directorate of Residency. Now today I found an article in a travel blog that tells a hilarious story of useless bureaucracy at the Directorate – and a failed attempt to get the visa extended.

I’ll give the process a try tomorrow myself. If it fails I’ll have to skip my visits to Slemani (aka Sulaymaniyah) and Amedi (aka Amadiyah), the latter of which was another main reason for visiting Iraqi Kurdistan in the first place.

Ramadan is almost over (tomorrow is the last day) and I cannot say that I’m not happy about it. I must have lost what feels like 10kg of weight over the last days.

So why the heck would anyone voluntarily go to Iraq without being paid lots of money? Well, even though Iraqi Kurdistan is technically in Iraq, it is way different from Arabic Iraq which makes the news so often. Kurdish Iraq has been spared from Gulf War II and enjoys autonomy from Arabic Iraq in many matters since 1991. It has its own government and army (aforementioned Peshmerga). It’s security situation is entirely different from the rest of Iraq. In fact, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) actively promotes tourism to the region and calls Kurdistan “The Other Iraq”.

Peshmerga operate checkpoints along the border to Arabic Iraq (as well as inside Kurdistan) to keep insurgents out.

So, given the hostile conditions in Arabic Iraq and Turkey’s and Iran’s ‘unfriendly’ behavior towards the Kurds, it is no big surprise they are a bit paranoid here.

A short ride today in terms of kilometers, but an interesting one nonetheless.

I had just passed through the town of Salahuddin and enjoyed a couple of kilometers of hair-pin bends downhill, when I stopped at the road side before the next long climb to rest for a short while.
A car with two men, one in plain clothes the other in Peshmerga camouflage uniform, stopped next to me. They wanted to know where I was coming from and where I was going. No English was spoken, which made any further communication very difficult. The plain-clothes guys eventually introduced himself as ‘FBI’ and wanted to see my passport.

They then insisted on taking me (and the bike) back to a non-descript house in Salahuddin, non-descript except for the AK47-armed Peshmerga keeping watch outside. My initial annoyance changed to amusement and curiosity. I was brought to the ‘manager’s’ office and questioned by a German-speaking man in traditional Kurdish dress with a gun sticking out of his belt. They wanted to know where I had traveled before, especially in Iran, and where I planned to go. They asked me directly if I was spying for Germany and also asked if I was trafficking drugs from Iran. Hm.

So they were obviously Asayish, the Kurdish intelligence organization – counter-espionage and counter-drug trafficking are amongst their jobs.

I had to unlock my phone and it was passed around. I objected to them looking into my phone. Silence. Then, apologies. “It’s just our job.” I got my phone back and had to show them myself what they wanted to see, which was just the last photos taken and the last texts sent. They weren’t very thorough, and I managed to avoid showing them the daily GPS snapshots. I had no interest in explaining the existance of (somewhat) detailed maps and GPS tracks for the blog on the phone.

Eventually they were convinced I was no threat to Kurdish security and let me go. More apologies for wasting my time. They said they would have fed me some lunch had it not been for Ramadan – they didn’t have anything themselves. Hrmpf.

I’m in Hawler (pronounced Hauléhr) now, also known as Arbil, Erbil, or Ibil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital. Will probably stay here for a day or two and decide where to go next.

Cycled: 56km

Shaqlawa - Hawler

As usual I started cycling later than planned – I left Mahdi and his extremely friendly and hospitable family at half past 11am.

The landscape just outside Rowanduz was dramatic. The Gali Ali Beg gorge features vertical rock cliffs and was a major obstacle for Hamilton’s road-building endeavours. In his book he describes the gorge and the exploration missions to find a viable way through it – so I had a picture of the place in my head. However, in reality it was much more stunning.

The ride was way more exhausting than I had expected. A headwind, the hilly terrain, and the heat – more than 48°C (in the sun) again – didn’t help and I didn’t make it to Arbil, I stopped in Shaqlawa, a touristy town known for it’s pleasant climate, located about 40km from Arbil.

On the road it sometimes happens that people drive past me then stop to talk to me. They then offer a lift – probably knowing very well that it would be very difficult to fit my bike and my luggage into their cars if I accepted their offer. The amazing thing is, they all come across as if they wouldn’t be bothered by any such difficulties and would find a way to make it work. Maybe I should challenge one of these guys one day. :)

Cycled: 64km

Rowanduz - Shaqlawa

On the Hamilton Road

Old stretch of the Hamilton Road?

Gali Ali Beg Gorge

Last night we hung out around Soran’s bazaar, meeting Mahdi’s friends and people-watching. Soran is a city very close to Rowanduz.

Today we went swimming in the Rowanduz river again with Mahdi’s friend Nisar aka Shadow, and Mahdi drove me around the area showing me some of it’s amazing countryside. However grand I found it, he kept pointing out that it’s much nicer in spring when everything is lush green and the rivers’ water levels are higher.

The road I’m traveling on from the Iranian border to Erbil (Kurdish: Hawler), the KRG’s capital, is called the ‘Hamilton Road’. It was built by and named after New Zealand engineer A.M. Hamilton in the 1920s when present-day Iraq was under British administration.
Hamilton later wrote a book called ‘Road Through Kurdistan’ about his time in the area and his experiences with the Kurds. Rowanduz is also prominently featured. When I read the book about half a year ago and then thought about this trip, I added the visit to Iraqi Kurdistan and traveling on the Hamilton Road as a ‘must do’ item to the itinerary.

There is little left of the traditional Kurdish life-style that Hamilton witnessed, of course. Iranian and Iraqi towns and villages look and feel very similar. The one difference is that there are nearly no old buildings to be found in Iraqi Kurdistan. The reason is Saddam Hussein, who frequently ordered the killing of Kurds and demolition of thousands of Kurdish villages during his reign.

Iraqi Kurdistan has its own army nowadays, which is called Peshmerga – Kurdish for “Those Who Face Death”. That is actually a pretty suiting name for an army.

I’ll continue my ride on the Hamilton Road tomorrow.

Night watchman(?) in traditional Kurdish attire and armed with a Kalashnikov, Soran