In better times, we traveled in one day from Mardin in Turkey, through to Duhok in Iraq (Kurdistan) in one day. Door to door it took roughly nine hours, and this is a report of how our trip went.

Before you go

Save the address for a hotel or two offline, in case anyone asks at the border in relation to your visa. Bring an e-SIM or just wait til Duhok to pick one up. We had an Airolo e-SIM.

We didn’t book a hotel (we didn’t book any the entire time we were there), but we’d found a few on Google maps to keep in mind.

Visas

You can get the Kurdistan e-visa in advance or pick up a visa on arrival at the Ibrahim Khalil crossing. That costs 70 USD per person, cash only. Make sure your money is just about pristine: no torn notes, no old series.

Lately people have been reporting that they arrived at the border with the printout of their Federal Iraq e-visa only, and that the separate visa for Kurdistan is no longer required (or at least, not always enforced). In those cases they’ve had the Federal Iraq e-visa stamped on entry to Kurdistan, and then got stamped again later on entering Federal Iraq, at the Mosul border. Apparently this doesn’t always work, especially not at the Kirkuk border crossing to Federal Iraq.

On this particular trip we weren’t going to Federal Iraq also, so we got the separate Kurdistan e-visa. Processing that at the border took around thirty minutes.

Money

You can change Turkish lira or USD in the duty-free area on the Turkish side at Habur, which is handy but rates are not the best. If you can change in Mardin or Cizre, do that instead. Once you’re in Duhok, you’ll find better rates again (and ATMs).

The route

Our route in one (long) day went like this: Mardin > Cizre > border crossing at Ibrahim Khalil > Duhok.

We also spent some time waiting around between buses. Check and plan your bus timings in advance on obilet.com and get an early start, if you want to make it through in a day.

Keep in mind the bus from Cizre will probably carry on all the way to Erbil, if you want to go straight there. I’d stop in Duhok though, if you aren’t pressed for time.

Mardin to Cizre

Buses run several times a day from Mardin’s Intercity bus terminal to Cizre Otobüs terminal, and takes about two and a half hours through some pretty rugged scenery.

Tickets run 300–400 TRY per person and we bought ours on obilet.com. You can get them at the station in person too.

Cizre to Duhok and crossing the border

In Cizre we picked up a direct international bus going to Duhok, from the same station. There are usually only one or two buses a day, so you should check times and probably book the day before you travel. Again, obilet.com is your friend.

Cizre to Duhok took around five and a half hours including the border crossing, and the tickets cost 700–1,000 TRY per person.

Crossing the border

On the Turkish side the bus stops at Habur Gate and you get off the bus and stamp out of Turkey at passport control there. Then you walk through the duty-free zone (we stopped in a shop there to change Turkish lira to Iraqi dinar), and then you reboard the same bus which drives across to the Iraqi side at Ibrahim Khalil.

You get off the bus again with all your stuff and send your luggage through the xray. Then you pick your queue according to the visa you’ve got (or are planning to get). We were buying the Kurdistan VOA. After sorting out the visa, we moved queues and got the passports stamped. Then, you get back on the same bus once again, and it will carry on to Duhok.

We got off the bus at Duhok International general terminal, which is huge and airport-like, was completely deserted at the time, and is about twelve km outside the city centre. There were not a lot of taxis, we weren’t spoiled for choice but we did get one into town, which took another twenty minutes or so. That should cost something like 10,000–15,000 IQD. Make sure you agree on the fare before you get in. We got ours to take us straight to the hotel we had in mind: Kristal Hotel, which was clean and comfortable and not expensive.

Then we had a celebratory chai in the lobby. And that’s about it! Welcome to Kurdistan.

Read more

We’ve also traveled in Federal Iraq, on another recent trip and you can find our guides to independent travel in Iraq here.

Or check out this story about traveling from Turkey and on to Kurdistan: Killing time in Turkish tombs: on the way to Iraqi Kurdistan.

Check out the Destinations page for travel guides and stories about our off-beat adventures all over the Middle East and beyond.

The post How to cross the border from Turkey to Iraq (Kurdistan) appeared first on WhirledAway.

We got out of the cab in front of a hotel just off Sadoun street. The driver put his number in Oyv’s phone and told us to call if we needed anything, and then he drove off.

Baghdad, one-time capital of the Muslim world, was founded in the 8th century. At this moment the ‘City of Peace’ was enjoying another (possibly self-declared) title: ‘Capital of Arab Tourism 2025’.

‘That’s interesting’ we thought, and with the major tourist attractions in mind, set off to explore. But despite that lofty designation, the tourist attractions were mostly closed. It didn’t matter: we strolled along the Tigris and rambled in the hectic streets. We drank chai and browsed in the stacks at the booksellers that line Al Mutanabbi street.

We went to Iraq in part for its jaw-dropping 7000 years of history. But we also wanted to experience Iraq’s well-known culture of ingrained hospitality. And after a couple of days of getting turned away from closed monuments in Baghdad but warmly welcomed by nearly every person in the street, we set off for Mosul.

Rising from ashes

We’re no strangers to police checkpoints. Good thing too, because there were many on the way to Mosul. The only problem we had at one of them was with a soldier lounging barefoot on a sofa in his office in a dense fog of shisa. He questioned us about our plans, and then he frowned deeply and took a long pull on the waterpipe. Finally, he revealed the reason for his reluctance to give back our passports and send us on our way: he didn’t like our choice of hotel. He tried to dissuade us from going. Not to Mosul, just to that particular one-star hotel.

At reception in the hotel where we went anyway, the power went down as Oyv tried to pull our marriage certificate out of the cloud (the power went down a lot). In the darkened lull, since we couldn’t check in to a double room without proof of our marital status, we asked the receptionist if he gets many foreign tourists. ‘Lots! Europeans. Not tourists. Friends’ Mustafa answered. ‘Have some now in fact’ he added, as a couple walked in the door. ‘I just told them there are lots of tourists from Europe here’ he announced to the couple. ‘And here we are’ said the woman. Despite Mustafa’s claim that the city was practically overflowing with Europeans, we met one other traveler in Mosul and would spot only a handful more the entire time we were in Iraq.

The power came back on and Mustafa leaned in closer across the desk. ‘Can I ask you something? Why do Europeans always feel better when they see other people like them?’ I tried to explain that we were just curious about the state of tourism in Iraq, but Mustafa was convinced we were terrified of his hometown. So he expounded on Mosul’s safety, general awesomeness, and the extreme hospitality of its people. As proof of every Mosuli’s generosity, he insisted we guzzle sugary tea and take his whole pack of blueberry cigarettes.

But Mustafa wasn’t exaggerating, as we saw the second we went outside. Iraqis are welcoming in general but almost nowhere is this trait more apparent than in Mosul, where resilient citizens rebuild every day but still have time to offer snacks and kindness to strangers. Wherever we went, people invited us to tea, wished us welcome, asked if we needed anything, and kindly said it was good to see us.

ISIS captured Mosul in 2014. By the time the army ousted them in 2018, around 70% of the old city was destroyed in the fighting. During the occupation, suicide bombings were regular occurrences, schools and businesses closed, life ground to a halt. In the final months citizens retreated to underground bunkers and existed as best as they could while their neighbourhoods were blown to bits, hundreds of years of history and culture literally razed to the ground around them.

We hired a local guide to show us around what’s left. Osama spent three months in 2017 living in a bunker under his house with two other families while the coalition forces fought ISIS in the streets out front.

Some families live in the old city still. They just stayed there the whole time. Others, with nowhere else to go, have moved back into the bombed out shells splattered with bullet holes, and live amidst the mountains of concrete rubble, twisted metal and tangled wire that once amounted to homes and lives.

There’s constant reconstruction underway. We stood outside of Nouri Mosque with Osama and looked up at the ‘hunchback’ – the minaret leans slightly to one side. ISIS self-declared their ‘caliphate’ right here in 2014. Their black flag flew from the tilted minaret right up until the Battle of Mosul in 2017, when they completely destroyed the mosque themselves rather than lose it. But as of 2025 Nouri Mosque stands newly rebuilt, just as it was before – right down to the leaning minaret.

Cities between the rivers

Baghdad wasn’t always the capital of both Iraq and of Arab tourism. Around 836 AD the Caliph Al Mutasim designated Samarra capital of the Abbasid Empire. Then he devoted himself to building a glorious city to reflect his own greatness. After a brief moment in the sun – fifty-six years, to be exact – his city was suddenly deserted and the capital moved back to Baghdad.

Today Samarra is a holy city for Shia Muslims: the Al-Askari mosque enshrines the tombs of the 10th and 11th imams. But the town’s population is largely Sunni and security – which there is a lot of – is shared between an Iranian militia and the Iraqi army. ISIS left their mark on Samarra as well, attacking in 2014 although they never captured the town. Army presence, blast walls, razor wire and sandbags, all point to Samarra’s complicated history and relatively recent tensions.

If you’re thinking all this sounds like the perfect place to grab some lunch – well, it is. We met a friendly family and ate with them in the utilitarian dining rooms at the back of the mosque. The kitchens feed visitors all day long – for free. Women and men eat in separate rooms so I went with Fatima and her daughters, and Oyv disappeared into the men’s side with Ali and his son. And with Hossein, the taxi driver who’d brought us through all the Samarra checkpoints in the first place and now seemed reluctant to let us go anywhere by ourselves.

A huge spiral minaret stands beside the Great Mosque of Samarra, just down the road from Al-Askari. At times you can climb the minaret – but not at the time we were there. It was closed and we could only look at it from behind a fence.

Still, nobody ever said (to me, anyway) that traveling in Iraq was a ‘been there, done that’ checklist of historical sites. To be fair, nobody ever said anything to me about traveling in Iraq, period.

Except Iraq is full of historical sites. This is Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, the cradle of civilization, and Samarra is not the only ancient city.

We got Hossein to take us to Abu Dalaf mosque. There, a spiral minaret stands on the site of Jafariya, another 9^th century Abbasid city. We climbed that minaret on a steep and twisting ramp, and looked at the desert below stretching away on all sides. There was no one in sight except for Hossein, who’d accompanied us to the bottom of the minaret but shook his head and wandered off when I asked if he was planning to climb it.

And not far from Mosul there’s Hatra. It was the capital of the first Arab-ruled kingdom, wedged between the Parthian and Roman Empires. Once prospering in a string of famous cities like Palmyra, Baalbek, and Petra, Hatra was deserted by the middle of the 3rd century AD.

In the 1980s Saddam Hussein ordered some restoration and wasn’t shy about taking credit: new bricks stamped with his name are scattered around the site.

More recently Hatra was attacked by ISIS who tried to bulldoze large parts of the site in 2015, as part of their campaign to erase Arab history and culture. Overall they weren’t that good at it. They destroyed some statuary and riddled the walls with bullet holes, but most of the ancient city is still intact. We’d already got used to somebody nodding and saying ‘Daesh’ whenever we looked questioningly at a pile of bricks partially covered in a tumble of barbed wire.

And then there’s the most famous city between the two rivers: Babylon.

‘Babylon the great, Mother of Harlots and the abominations of the earth’, as it’s called in the Book of Revelation. The city had been standing there next to the Euphrates for nearly 2000 years by the time King Nebuchadnezzar II set his sights on it around 600 BC. The King’s idea was to Make Babylon Great Again – the most magnificent city in the world. It seems he succeeded, considering we’ve all heard of his work – the Hanging Gardens anybody? – even though there’s no trace of those left today.

Nebuchadnezzar died in 562. Decline and destruction (and a spate of Zoroastrian fanaticism) left the city in bits and pieces by the time Alexander the Great turned up. He died in Babylon in 323 BC, and the city changed hands again and again as Empires came and went.

Hulagu Khan and his Mongol hordes descended on Mesopotamia in 1258, kind of like ISIS only without the bulldozers. They massacred the entire population of Baghdad and much of the surrounding countryside. After Timur swept in and unleashed another round of epic violence in 1401, there was nothing much left of Babylon, or anything else in the area for centuries.

In the 1980s Saddam Hussein ambitiously set about restoring Nebuchadnezzar’s huge palace to its original glory. And just as the King had had bricks stamped with his name, so did Saddam. Both can been seen today.

While he was at it Saddam had a palace built to look at Babylon from, like a modern-day Nebuchadnezzar. Now empty and abandoned, the palace looms over the silent kingdom of the distant past.

Just another day…

While staying in Najaf we made friends with a local. Ibrahim took us to his house and out for lunch; we met his family. He picked up a huge fish in the souk, had it grilled on the spot, and we ate it on the banks of the Euphrates after a quick spin on a passerby’s boat.

If ever we had a language issue, Ibrahim just called his friend Mina – in Vienna – and she translated. ‘He has the keys to Iraq’ said Mina, when I told her that he’d gotten the caretaker at an ancient mosque to unlock a heavy old door in the corner and let us go downstairs. The shrine underneath the mosque is thought to be built overtop of the grave of Ezekiel, an Old Testament Prophet. But someone named Dhul-Kifl appears in the Koran, and since it’s potentially the same person, the sanctity of this shrine has gone back and forth between Judaism and Islam since at least the early 14^th century.

Altogether, this was absolutely one of our favourite days in Iraq. It captured perfectly the essence of this hospitable country and its welcoming people.

As we strolled in an old brick-arched souk looking for a suitably huge fish and talking about our families, Ibrahim drew his finger across his throat. His father, a teacher, was killed in Saddam’s purges in 1991. We’d planned to go to Saddam’s abandoned palace after lunch. ‘Forget it Ibrahim, let’s drop the palace’ I said. But Ibrahim shrugged – he wanted to take us there.

Getting into the palace is easier said than done: it’s closed to the public.

But with Ibrahim we walked around Ishtar gate at Babylon and into a family park. ‘They see you as Iraqis, with me’ said Ibrahim and he grinned and waved at the guards standing next to the gate. Not to say that he hadn’t done a lot of smooth-talking to get us that far: the guards managing the site weren’t as excited about the prospect of urbex-times-a-million as we were.

From the family park we carried on to the fenced entry to the palace grounds and after some more smooth-talking persuasion from Ibrahim, we were in, scrambling up the hillside and into the monstrous, abandoned relic.

Together we prowled through the vast rooms, and climbed the exposed staircases to the very top of the palace for another look at Babylon.

But while we were busy admiring the view over Saddam Hussein’s empty swimming pool, somebody closed the fence down below.

Actually, they chained it shut.

Back down, we stood locked inside the grounds and wondering what to do. Even Ibrahim looked a bit flustered, probably since we’d managed to get stuck inside the one place in Iraq he didn’t have the key to. I eyed the lock with mild panic which intensified slightly when a police officer appeared on the other side of the fence. He didn’t have the key either.

But in the spirit of true Iraqi hospitality the police officer and a couple of bystanders pried the gates apart and indicated that I should just slither through. As I wiggled through the gap in the fence in front of the families picnicking in the family park, a random man turned up with a key and unlocked the gate.

It’s not every day you find yourself wandering around a dictator’s abandoned palace, gazing out the dusty windows at Babylon. And then locked inside, to top things off. But it is just another day when you’re traveling in Iraq.

But wait, there’s more

Just the mention of ‘Mesopotamia’ brings to mind ancient civilization. Never once have I thought of ‘wetlands’ although it stands to reason they’d be there, between the rivers.

Saddam Hussein had the Mesopotamian marshes drained in the 1990s. Then he built military access roads on top of them – despite the Marsh Arabs who had been living there for centuries. These families who lived in reed houses on the water were forced to leave their homes and make their way somewhere else.

After the Ba’ath regime fell, the dams diverting the Euphrates were destroyed. As the water came back so did the Marsh Arabs. They returned to their reed houses and traditional way of life, fishing, herding water buffalo, producing milk and cheese.

We strung together a minibus and a few more share-taxis to Al Jubayish, where we met Ali at his reed house that’s now a guesthouse. And then we had a look at still another side of Iraq: from a boat drifting in the reedy channels of the marshes at sunset, followed by masgouf fish and chai around a smoky fire on the riverbank.

Eventually we reached Basra, our last stop before the border with Kuwait. As we sat in the hotel lobby eating one more breakfast of dates and fresh cheese, the hotel receptionist came over to us, with a friend in tow. ‘Hei, hvordan går det?’ said the friend. Back home for a visit, he’s been living in Norway for years. Where we’re from and what we’re doing is generally known to everyone in the vicinity a few minutes after we arrive anywhere and the receptionist was obviously delighted to have found this Norwegian-speaker for us. The receptionist just wanted to check, the Iraqi-Norwegian went on, if we needed anything at all. We thanked him, but we were fine. Christmas was approaching, and later that day we were going to the Basra Family Park for the Christmas market.

Yes, in Iraq.

At the Christmas Market we stood next to a huge inflatable snowman, listening to Jingle Bells on repeat, surrounded by happy families. Out the corner of my eye I saw a boy visibly mustering up his courage. When I smiled at him, his dad nudged him forward. He came over, shyly offered his hand, and said ‘It’s good to see you here. Welcome to Iraq.’

Read more

I’ve written a lot about our travels in Iraq, including guides for daytripping to some of the places I’ve mentioned here in this story. If you’re going to Iraq, check out our guide to independent travel in Iraq. And if you’re crossing the border to Kuwait, have a read here.

Check out the Destinations page for travel guides and stories about our off-beat adventures all over the Middle East and beyond.

The post Ancient history and ingrained hospitality: travels in Iraq appeared first on WhirledAway.

Religious pilgrim or not, if you’re traveling in Iraq you will want to go to these cities for sure.

Due to the possibility of sectarian violence there is tight security and police presence on the way to and in both Karbala and Najaf. You’ll get used to it quickly and won’t notice it too much. Just follow the rules about clothing and be respectful at the checks.

A lot of the info in this post – what to wear, and rules for visiting the mosques and the shrines – applies likewise to the mosques Al-Askari in Samarra and Kadhimiya in Baghdad.

Karbala or Najaf?

Ideally I’d try to stay a couple of nights each in both Karbala and Najaf (that’s what we did). If you’re short on time you could base yourself in one of them and daytrip for part of a day to the other. We found better accommodation options in Karbala, but in Najaf the shrine complex is even more impressive (and that is saying a lot).

Plus you have Wadi Al Salam, the world’s biggest cemetery in Najaf, and that alone is worth having a look.

There are also great labyrinth-like souks to wander through in Najaf especially.

Karbala – the Shrines of Imam Hussain and Abbas

In the heart of the old city are the massive Holy Shrines of Imam Hussain (a son of Imam Ali) and of his half-brother Abbas. These two shrines are the focus of Karbala and of everyone in it.

Hussain and Abbas were martyred together in the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, fought over succession to the caliphate. Hussain’s mosque is said to be built on the very site of the battle, itself one of the most important events in Shia beliefs.

Karbala also hosts the world’s largest annual public gathering. Not every day, of course, although it can honestly feel like that in the old city especially at night. The Arbaʿeen pilgrimage marks the end of a forty day period of mourning after the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, during which the battle and Hussain’s death are recreated, to a lot of frenzied grief and apparently even some self-flagellation. Millions of people (mostly Shia) travel to Karbala – many walk hundreds of kilometers to join in. If you’re going to be in Karbala at the same time you definitely want to be aware of that in advance since the city will be bursting at the seams.

Najaf – the Shrine of Imam Ali

The main attraction here: the Holy Shrine of Imam Ali, 4th Caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed. The shrine complex in Najaf is even more impressive than in Karbala, if that’s at all possible, and also thronged by pilgrims day and night.

Ali was stabbed in 661 AD, while praying in the main mosque in Kufa, erstwhile capital of the Abbasid empire and bastion of his own support. His murder led to the Sunni-Shia schism.

Before he died, he ordered that his body should be placed on a camel, and the camel let to wander. Where it stopped, there he should be buried. And so his burial place was kept secret. Until they built this massive shrine and the city of Najaf on the spot, at any rate. Unless…you among those who believe he’s actually buried in Mazar-i-Sharif.

What to wear in Karbala and Najaf

Najaf, and Karbala are holy cities with a certain type of atmosphere. For women, an abaya and hijab or a chador is mandatory in the Haram part of these cities – the areas of the old city surrounding the shrines – and certainly in and around the shrines themselves. That means wearing it most of the time in Najaf and Karbala since you will likely spend the bulk of your time in those areas. As soon as you arrive at the haram area you need to have an abaya and hijab or a chador on. You can buy these on the way in from the new town and all over the haram. I bought mine in Baghdad and had it on when we arrived in each city, and that felt more comfortable.

It’s easy to see where the haram area begins. There are walls and security checks, which double as modesty checks for women and you’ll get no further without the right clothes. Men and women enter separately and the women’s checks are inside big tents signed with pictures of women wearing abayas. Although you don’t have to wear it outside these holy areas you might as well because you’ll really stick out otherwise. At very least, I’d wear a loose headscarf.

Inside the holy areas and the shrines themselves, not even a strand of visible hair is allowed. I was flagged a few times for this: workers with huge green feather dusters tapped me and pointed it out. So I bought an undercap – basically a tube top for your head – to solve this problem. Just go to any market stall selling women’s clothes and accessories and ask for a cap. You can also get a hijab stuffer while you’re at it.

Visiting the shrines in Karbala and Najaf

You’ll easily spend a couple of days just visiting the mosques, they are magnificent and fascinating. We went several times any given day to experience the atmosphere at night, in the afternoon, and so on.

When you visit, here are some things to keep in mind:

• there are separate sides in the mosques for men and women so if you’re with someone, expect to split up
• these places are massive. take note of the name or number of the gate you enter at, so as to exit again where your shoes are (and potentially your partner)
• women can wear makeup. I saw plenty of women inside with a faceful of it and I had some on myself.
• cameras are not allowed but phones are fine. In certain spots it’s clearly signed if you can’t take photos.
• there is free storage for your shoes and also for cameras or any other bags you might have. Purses are fine, you can take them with you.
• men and women enter separately, with separate security checks. This applies throughout town and you will go through these checks constantly.

Where we stayed in Karbala

We stayed at the Mayali hotel. Like many others, this hotel is inside the old city area so we had to go through all the security checks to reach it. It cost 57k dinar for two people, per night, no breakfast included. It was perfectly clean and comfortable.

Where we stayed in Najaf

We stayed in the new city but still had to go through security to get to the hotel area. There are quite a few all in the same spot, and all fairly expensive. The first night we stayed at Nobles Palace Hotel for 70 USD and it was really nice. The next day we nevertheless moved across the street to Anis Al-Nufous Hotel for 20k dinar per person – very simple and basic but clean and fine. And noisy due to a huge family in the next room.

Daytrip from Karbala to Babylon

We couldn’t spend all our time ogling the ceilings in the shrines, so we daytripped to Babylon. Reaching Babylon by public transport is simple and you can do it yourself. Note that you can also make this daytrip from Najaf.

See this post for details about making a daytrip to Babylon from Karbala on public transport.

Getting to Karbala to Najaf

We went from Baghdad to Karbala and on to Najaf from there.

Baghdad > Karbala

From Alawi Garage in Baghdad somebody offered us a private taxi for 30k dinar to Karbala, but we took a coaster for 3.5k dinar each. Including traffic and getting off at a checkpoint to hang out with the police…the trip took about two and a half hours. We arrived late in the evening but the city was jam-packed with pedestrians and finding a room was not an issue.

Karbala > Najaf

From Karbala we walked to the garage and took a coaster to Najaf for 2.5k per person. That took just a little over an hour, with a short delay at a checkpoint. In Najaf the coaster dropped us in a garage a short distance from the haram area and there are busses that run the rest of the way into town for 1k.

Najaf > Nasiriyah

Eventually, we went from Najaf to Nasiriyah. In Najaf we got up at six and went out in the street to catch a cab for 5000 dinars to the Southern Garage. From there, it’s easy to catch a minibus to Nasiriyah for 10k each.

You can read about our entire itinerary in Iraq in more detail in this post: Iraq travel guide and itinerary.

Read More

If you’re planning a trip to Iraq, have a look at our Iraq travel guide and itinerary. And, find out more about our own independent travels in Iraq, here.

Check out the Destinations page for travel guides and stories about our off-beat adventures all over the Middle East and beyond.

The post Visiting Iraq’s Holy Shrine cities: Karbala and Najaf appeared first on WhirledAway.

What’s this positive side? So very positive that it made us disregard grim advice like ‘draft a will and leave DNA samples with relatives’, and just grab our backpacks and go? Well, for starters, Iraq has history. Look beyond the lingering bad news and you’ll find 7000 jawdropping years of it. We’re talking about Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, the cradle of civilization. Then there are the Iraqi people themselves, and their culture of ingrained hospitality. The spectacular shrines and religious devotion that draw millions of pilgrims every year. The souks, the tea houses, the busy streets of Baghdad, the ruins of Mosul where resilient citizens rebuild every day but still have time to offer snacks and kindness to strangers.

And of course, from urban exploring in one of Saddam Hussein’s abandoned palaces, to drifting quietly in the reedy channels of the Mesopotamian marshes at sunset, there’s the magnetic draw of adventure. Real travel, raw and a little rough around the edges, the not-quite-perfectly-smooth experience you can only have in so many places anymore, in this age of mass tourism.

Still, anyone planning a trip to Iraq will have at least a few questions surrounding visas, money, and transportation – for starters. Not to mention the big ones: is it safe? Is it possible to travel independently? Really – what’s it like to travel in Iraq? And maybe even: should I tell my parents*?

We had an amazing time traveling on our own in Iraq. That’s why we’re sharing our positive experience here, along with our 14 day itinerary for independent travel in Iraq in the hopes that if you are going too, we can answer some of those questions and help you plan your trip.

*You might decide to lie to your parents about going to Iraq;) I’m not exactly young, and my mother is in her 70s, but parents will always be parents no matter how old their kid gets. That being said, my mom is pretty chill. When we called her from Mosul and admitted where we were, she said ‘Well, I’m used to this stuff from you guys’. And then she wanted to hear all about it.

What’s it like to travel in Iraq
Tour or DIY: is independent travel possible in Iraq?
Visa
What to wear
Cash or card? Exchanging money
Getting around by public transport
Where to stay
Things to bring
Weather
On the road – our itinerary

What’s it like to travel in Iraq?

There are a few things to consider if you’re thinking about traveling in Iraq. As you’ll see in this post, we thoroughly enjoyed pretty much every second we were there, but it’s not for everyone.

Safety

First of all, is Iraq safe? Well, that’s not up to me to say. After reading the travel warnings from most western governments you’ll barely want to leave your house, much less go to Iraq. All I can say from our own experience is that we felt safe there and didn’t encounter any issues. However, Iraq is not a stable country. It’s one of those places which is safe until it’s not. You should be aware that the situation can change quickly, even during the course of a short trip. And, there are regional differences: certain areas (for example, near the Syrian border) should be avoided. The bottom line is you have to put some thought into it and decide for yourself. In our case, we decided to ignore what our government(s) had to say, but that is definitely a personal decision and if you feel it’s negligent, you might want to think twice.

Like it or not, check what your government has to say on the subject (hint: probably nothing good) – because it will have a big impact on your insurance.

Do your research. See what locals have to say, as well as any travelers who are there at the moment. The Iraqi Travelers Cafe Facebook group is good for that, along with a few other similar groups like Iraq Travel Community and Iraq Travel Tips. Join at least one of these groups as they are full of locals who offer guiding services and general advice.

In terms of personal safety, Iraq is considered fairly safe. Like any other city, Baghdad will have its share of pickpockets, areas to avoid at night, and so on. Just use common sense.

Security

How do you feel about police and military presence, lots of security, and checkpoints? What about guns? Blast barriers? If you aren’t already used to all those things, you’ll need to get used to them quickly. As you travel around you’ll pass through a lot of checkpoints, both on the road and sometimes on foot. Mostly you’ll just have to show your passport – make sure you’re always carrying it when you travel from one place to another or daytrip. No police ever stopped us to ask for it when we were just walking around, but we always had them with us.

From the officer who pulled us aside in the street to ask if we have kids and offer us water on a hot day, to the kitted-out soldiers at the Samarra checkpoints, to the policeman who pried open the locked gate at Saddam Hussein’s palace so I could wiggle out (yes, more on that later) – everyone we dealt with was fine. If not overtly friendly (and some were) then they were at least patient and polite.

Insurance

All this talk of safety and security brings me to insurance. Most insurance companies won’t cover you in Iraq since traveling there is advised against. Both IATI and Safety Wing do cover Iraq, and we bought our policy from IATI.

It’s very important to note that although IATI and Safety Wing ‘cover’ Iraq, they don’t in fact cover everything. Your policy won’t apply if something happens to you as a result of armed conflict, terror, or anything else related to the government travel advisories. But unlike most other insurance that is completely voided just by entering Iraq, these ones should cover your run-of-the-mill accidents, injuries, or illnesses.

Tour or DIY: is independent travel possible in Iraq?

Your experience in Iraq will differ depending on who you are and how you travel: ie male or female, solo or part of a group, and so on. Women especially, should be aware of social norms and how to interact with men.

In short, it’s absolutely possible (and certainly allowed) to travel on your own around Iraq – without a guide, driver, or tour group. Guided tours are no longer required.

If it makes you more comfortable you can sign on to a group tour before you leave home, and everything will be arranged for you. If you prefer a more spontaneous approach, try asking in the Facebook groups. Those are full of people offering everything from walking tours and driving services, to daytrips and fully guided tours. These are at least local-run and you can contact prospective guides on WhatsApp and plan as you go.

Consider your past travel experience, particularly in off-beat destinations – so no, not South East Asia. If you’ve traveled independently in the Middle East before (Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan), other Muslim countries (Sudan, Pakistan), or even Central Asia (hello share taxis and marshrutkas), then you’ll have an idea of how things work in general and should be able to get around and do your own thing. We found it easy to travel in Iraq by ourselves.

And consider your comfort zone: if you’re used to meeting tons of travelers when you’re on the road, think again. You will meet very few. Tourist infrastructure is limited too. Are you fine with hotels that are quite simple, power outages, and a very casual approach to, erm, everything (like laundry…)? Forget about planning a rigid schedule and booking tickets in advance, or using Apps to run your life smoothly. You’ll wing it most days and find transport as you go, tolerate random delays, and don’t get me started on the reckless driving.

We don’t speak Arabic but that was ok. Learn a few words and phrases, bring Google Translate, and you’ll be fine.

Carry your passport with you everywhere you go. You need it to buy tickets and enter sites, and at checkpoints on the road.

Visas

There are separate visas for Federal Iraq and for the Kurdistan region. The Federal Iraq visa is good for both. The Kurdistan visa which you can get on arrival, is only good in Kurdistan.

For the Federal Iraq visa you have to apply online in advance. Print and bring the e-Visa with you and get the sticker in your passport when you arrive. You can enter Federal Iraq with your e-Visa by air or by land.

Officially, if you are going to go to both Federal Iraq and Kurdistan, you should go to Federal Iraq first. The visa sticker you get there will let you into Kurdistan as well. If you do the trip in reverse, you’ll have to buy the Kurdistan visa first, and then the one for Federal Iraq.

However: despite the whole ‘separate visas’ thing, some people have been reporting in the past year that they successfully entered Kurdistan by land with the Federal Iraq visa, carried on to Federal Iraq, and just got stamped twice. A friend of ours did this.

When applying for the Federal Iraq e-Visa you’ll immediately see two options. Choose ‘Evisa direct’ – not ‘Create profile’. When selecting the visa type:

• A Visit visa costs 115 USD, has a validity period of 60 days, and allows a stay of 30 days. That means from when you receive the approved e-Visa, you have 60 days to enter Iraq. Regardless of when you enter during that validity period, you will then get your 30 days stay.

• An Ordinary visa costs 160 USD and has the same conditions, but I think the allowed stay is longer.

Both include mandatory health insurance.

Supposedly it takes up to 48 hours to get the visa approval but ours took less than a day. It can absolutely take longer than 48 hours, so we applied two weeks ahead just in case.

Print out your e-Visa and bring it. If you’re flying to Baghdad you’ll need to show it to get on the plane.

What to wear

Men can dress how they want but should avoid shorts, tank tops, and so on.

For women, dress modestly and always have a scarf handy. Think loose pants and long tops, long skirts or dresses, long sleeves. If you’re going to go anywhere religious (um, and you will) you will have to wear an abaya and hijab or a chador. You can buy everything easily in Baghdad. You won’t have to cover your face. All women should dress conservatively all the time, solo women especially so.

In Baghdad I wore jeans with a long shirt, and kept a scarf looped around my neck. In Mosul I dressed the same way and often wore a headscarf, but that’s not at all mandatory. The same goes for the Nasiriyah and the Marshes, and Basra.

Samarra, Najaf, and Karbala are holy cities with many shrines and a certain type of atmosphere. An abaya and hijab or a chador is mandatory in the haram part of these cities – the areas surrounding the shrines – and certainly in and around the shrines themselves. Although you don’t have to wear it outside these areas you might as well because you’ll really stick out otherwise.

Cash or card? Exchanging money

Bring most of the money you need in USD or Euro, and a few different cards. Yes, you can pull cash out of machines. But they are not always available or reliable, and the bank rate is not as good as the rate you’ll get changing cash. Official money changers are everywhere. You can also spot places with a visa sign, and take cash out (at bank rates, with a surcharge) against your card on a terminal.

Getting around by public transport

It’s easy to get around on public transport as long as you can cope with some amount of delay.

Transport congregates in and departs from garages. There are different types of transport, typically:

• Share taxis, which come in Dodge or GMC. These are regular cars taking 4 to 7 passengers. They charge by the seat. You can usually take a Dodge privately by negotiating a price.
• Minibuses, coasters. Smaller buses running middle to longer distances.

If the garage is big you’ll have to find the vehicles going your way – this is easy, just announce your destination and people will point you to the next car. Don’t expect a schedule. Share taxis and local minibuses don’t leave until they’re full. Overall I preferred GMCs. Faster but feel safer, more comfortable.

A really great thing about public transport in Iraq: there’s not a lot of touting (in fact there’s almost none). Unlike in some places, you can actually reveal your intended destination to the drivers and others in the car park and they’ll just indicate where you should go – not try to force you into a ride of their choosing. And, they don’t tend to inflate the cost simply because you’re foreign.

Download the Careem and Baly taxi apps and use those to get around in cities.

Where to stay

Hotels are plentiful, cheap, and for the most part basic but absolutely fine. We paid between 30k dinar (24 USD) and 50k dinar (38 USD) for a room. The outlier was Najaf where we paid 90k (70 USD) for a really nice room. Most hotels quoted us in dinar, per person. Note that when somebody says ie 50 dinar to you, they mean 50 000.

None of the hotels we stayed at were listed on Booking.com or similar. Of the hotels we either stayed at or checked, all had vacancies except one. We found them on Google maps or with a quick search, and then we’d just show up and ask to see a room.

You can reach out to some hotels in advance on WhatsApp if you can find a number. Otherwise, you can book the more expensive options that are listed on Booking.com.

Even cheap hotels provide basic amenities and the ubiquitous bathroom shoes, but don’t count on toilet paper, or towels for that matter. Drinking water is easy to come by: we usually found cases of it in room fridges or piled in the hallways. There was always WiFi, but often slow (or off altogether with the power).

Couch surfing is also an option.

Things to bring

Trouble packing? Same. Here are some things we brought.

• the Bradt guide for Iraq. Although much of the safety information is out of date now there is loads of useful context and history.
• a marriage certificate if you’re traveling with your partner and planning to sleep in the same room. They usually don’t ask foreigners, but we were asked for it at least twice.
• download your maps and apps ahead of time. Particularly useful: Google Translate, Maps.me, Careem and Baly (taxis).
• get an eSIM or buy a physical SIM on arrival. We used Airalo and it worked well.
• since we don’t care for starting the day with 30 tiny cups of tea, we always bring an aeropress and coffee
• a water bottle with filtration like Larq or Crazy Cap is a good idea. Plastic is rampant in Iraq.
• a fully loaded powerbank for regular electricity outages
• a sleepsheet for some hotels
• toilet paper, hand sanitizer, wet wipes
• get your abaya in Baghdad before you head to Najaf or Karbala

Weather

We were in Iraq in December. It was mild to chilly during the day, but keep in mind this is a destination where you tend to have a lot of clothes on anyway. In the evenings we needed a fleece or jacket. We got a very little rain. The mornings were incredibly foggy to the point of whiteouts.

Kurdistan is much colder at that time of year.

On the road – our itinerary

We spent about two weeks in Iraq. Starting in Baghdad we looped up north to Mosul and back, carried on south to the border, and then on to Kuwait.

This is our itinerary for 14 days in Iraq. Feel free to copy it and make your life easier: it worked very well for us. This post doesn’t go into a lot of detail about all the things you can see and do along the way, but will hopefully help you figure out where to go and how to get there.

As you’ll see, it’s a good idea to base yourself somewhere and make daytrips. It’s also possible to do some of the daytrips on your way from one base to the next.

Days 1, 2 – Baghdad
Days 3, 4, 5 – Mosul (daytrip Hatra)
Days 6, 7- back to Baghdad, and on to Karbala (daytrip Samarra)
Day 8 – Karbala (daytrip Babylon)
Days 9, 10 – Najaf (daytrip Kifl)
Day 11 – Nasiriyah, Ur, and the Mesopotamian marshes
Days 12, 13 – Basra
Day 14 – the Safwan border and on to Kuwait

Days 1, 2 – Baghdad

We had a day and a half in Baghdad, then came back again later. That was enough for us because a lot of the major tourist sites were/are closed. We used Careem occasionally but walked a lot just to be out in the streets. People are very friendly and welcoming and once we got over the feeling of ‘welp, Baghdad?’ we felt super comfortable. Baghdad is after all, the ‘City of Peace’ although for its every rise in fortune there’s been a spectacular fall, ever since the one-time capital of the Muslim world was first established in the 8th century.

What with the Abbasid palace and school being closed, and the national museum, and the Martyrs monument…we just wandered around the old city, through some bazaars, along the Tigris, and enjoyed the city life like in any other. Zaza cafe in Al Mutannabi street serves good coffee, and of course for something more traditional we stopped by the famous Shabandar cafe.

Women should have a headscarf handy as you’ll need it to walk in the streets around Kadhimiya Mosque. Plenty of market stalls sell chadors and abayas and if you don’t have one already, buy one to go inside the mosque itself. You can read more about the ins and outs of visiting holy sites in Iraq, here: Visiting Iraq’s Holy Shrine cities: Karbala and Najaf.

Arriving in Baghdad

We flew to Baghdad from Istanbul, showing printouts of our e-visas to board the plane. In Arrivals, we went directly to the very noticeable queue for e-visas, where they checked our passports and visa printouts and put the stickers in our passports. Done. From there we moved over to the Immigration counters, showed our brand new stickers, and that was it.

In the Arrivals hall there are a couple of ATMs and currency exchange offices. Official taxis are available inside the airport. They charge 50k dinar and you book at the counter. If you go outside a bunch of other drivers will approach and you can haggle. You can also book a Careem but first, you’ll need to get a ride outside of the airport security zone.

We went outside because we love to start a trip off with petty haggling as soon as possible. We got a ride straight to the hotel for 40k dinar (30 USD). Before we’d pulled out of the car park the driver informed us that his father was Saddam Hussein’s Minister of Defense, and off we went to Baghdad.

Where we stayed in Baghdad

We stayed at Qasr Al Barakat, just off Sadoun street. We contacted them ahead of time on WhatsApp but there was plenty of availability. A double room including a decent breakfast was 25k dinar per person. There are plenty of cheap street eats around.

The WiFi was good. There were constant power outages but the generator usually kicked in quickly. It was noisy at night between the generator, cats on the roof, big families staying, and all that. It was absolutely clean enough and had basic amenities.

Days 3, 4, 5 – Mosul (daytrip Hatra)

Mosul: known to Christians and Muslims alike as the ‘City of Prophets’. Standing opposite the site of ancient Ninevah on the banks of the Tigris, it’s Iraq’s second city. When ISIS captured Mosul in 2014, around 70% of the old city was destroyed in the fighting. Today, Mosul’s incredibly resilient citizens are still rebuilding and reclaiming their home.

Mosul was an absolute highlight, I wouldn’t miss it.

It can be hard to get money in Mosul – ATMs are not plentiful or reliable. Better have USD or Euro with you and change it as you go. There’s no Careem in Mosul. Back to the good old days, bargaining rides in the street.

The very best thing to do in Mosul is just to be there. The people are amazing. Go for a walk, eat some food, drink some chai – you’ll see what I mean. Don’t even bother trying not to – everywhere we went people welcomed us, fed us, poured chai down our throats. It’s one of the friendliest places I’ve ever been.

The first day we hired a guide to show us around: someone who lives there, and was there during the worst of the conflict. That was eye-opening to say the least. You can easily find a guide in the Facebook groups I’ve mentioned. Our Mosul walking tour was a full day and covered the Old City, many mosques, churches, souks, a couple of museums, the city gardens, and lunch in Mahale 21 cafe.

NOTE: We’ve been to Kurdistan on a previous trip. But if you’re going there on the same trip, it would make sense to flip this around: follow the itinerary south from Baghdad first, then up to Mosul and on to Kurdistan after that.

Getting to Mosul from Baghdad

Transport runs to Mosul from Alawi Garage in Baghdad. It’s big but very easy to find your ride – everyone shouts out destinations and will point you the right way. Destinations are signed in Arabic so if you can read it, follow the signs.

We got the last two seats in a GMC and waited a couple of minutes to set off. That cost 20k dinar per person and dropped us off at a roundabout on the outskirts of Mosul where a ton of taxis were waiting to go the rest of the way into the city. The GMC driver said he’d take us right to the hotel for the inflated price of 10k dinar. Iraqi people are wildly hospitable but taxi drivers are the same everywhere.

There were six checkpoints on the way from Baghdad. We drove straight through three, stopped briefly at two where officers checked our passports, and at one we had to get out of the car and trudge off for a short chat in the boss’s office in a portable.

It’s about five and a half hours from Alawi Garage to the centre of Mosul, including a lunch stop where the driver was the only person in the car not punctually back and ready to go after thirty minutes.

Where we stayed in Mosul

We stayed at Hotel Kharamana in a double room for 15K dinar per person. The rooms and lobby are clean and comfortable. They don’t provide towels. The WiFi only works in the lobby or downstairs and not in the rooms. There’s a power outage (at least) once a day in the early evening when they change over from city power to the generators. The hotel staff are really friendly and we liked it a lot.

During our wanders around Mosul we found a brand new (literally, opened two days previously) boutique hotel called Manara Hotel over near the Great Mosque of Al-Nuri. It’s lovely and costs about 50 USD a night including breakfast.

Daytrip to Hatra from Mosul

The ruins of the ancient city Hatra make a good daytrip from Mosul. Once the fortified capital of the first Arab-ruled kingdom wedged between the Parthian and Roman Empires, Hatra was destroyed by a Sassanid king and deserted by the middle of the 3rd century AD. You’re probably more familiar with other Arab-controlled cities in the same kingdom: Palmyra, Baalbek, and Petra.

The well-preserved ruins were discovered in the 1800s, although not a lot of excavation was carried out until the 1900s. In the 1980s Saddam Hussein ordered some restoration work and as a result you can see bricks stamped with his name. More recently, Hatra was attacked again by ISIS who tried to bulldoze large parts of the site in 2015. They succeeded in destroying some statuary and riddling the walls with bullet holes, but otherwise most of the ruined ancient city is still intact.

Hatra is not reachable by public transport. You need a ride.

We arranged a taxi at our hotel’s reception. It cost 80k dinar/50 USD and included the driver picking us up at the hotel, driving us to the ticket office, on to Hatra, waiting there, and bringing us back. We spent about an hour at the site itself. Driving there and back took about one and a half hours each way, including the checkpoints that became quite frequent the closer we got (to Hatra, and so to the Syrian border).

Tickets are not sold at the site. Make sure your driver knows to take you first to the police station/office of antiquities, just outside town in Ninevah governate. It goes without saying, as you need it for checkpoints, but bring your passport. The ticket office only took credit card which was the exact opposite of what we expected.

Tickets – to all major historical sites – are 25k dinar each.

Days 6 and 7 – back to Baghdad, and on to Karbala (daytrip Samarra)

After Mosul we went back to Baghdad and stayed there one night. The next day we went to Samarra and then carried on to Karbala.

Getting to Baghdad from Mosul

We went to Baghdad Bus Station in Mosul which is very close to Hotel Kharamana. There were plenty of share taxis standing there ready to fight over us and we opted for a GMC. After waiting for some time the driver moved the car to the garage on the outskirts of town (at a roundabout in the direction of Baghdad) and we waited some more.

Eventually the driver rounded up a few more passengers and we left. It cost 20k dinar per person to Alawi Garage in Baghdad, and took five and a half hours including lunch.

We spent the night in Baghdad at the Qasr Al Barakat.

Daytrip to Samarra from Baghdad

Around 836 AD Samarra was designated the capital of Abbasid Empire by the Caliph Al Mutasim, who then devoted himself to building a glorious city as a reflection of his own greatness. After a brief moment in the sun – fifty years, to be exact – the city was suddenly deserted and the capital re-established in Baghdad.

To Shia Muslims, Samarra is a holy city – the Al-Askari mosque there contains the tombs of the 10th and 11th imams. However the town’s population is largely Sunni and security – which there is a lot of – is shared between an Iranian militia and the Iraqi army.

Down the road from Al-Aksari is the Great Mosque of Samarra, also known as Malwiyya mosque for the spiral minaret that stands beside it. You can at times climb the spiral minaret – but not at the time we were there. There are ruins of Abbasid palaces belonging to the Caliph and his son outside town but they leave a lot to the imagination. But at Abu Dalaf mosque there’s a smaller spiral minaret which tada! you can climb.

There are no hotels in Samarra (that allow foreigners anyway) but you can sleep overnight in the mosque. However the atmosphere in Samarra is infamously kind of strained and you’re probably better off just daytripping from Baghdad. Give yourself a full day with an early start.

There are a couple of ways to do this daytrip. Read about it here: Daytripping to Samarra from Baghdad.

And, you can read more about the ins and outs of visiting holy sites in Iraq, here: Visiting Iraq’s Holy Shrine cities: Karbala and Najaf.

Getting to Karbala from Baghdad

Our daytrip to Samarra included a ride back to Alawi Garage in Baghdad. There somebody offered us a private taxi for 40k dinar to Karbala, but we took a coaster for 3.5k dinar each. Including traffic and getting off at a checkpoint to hang out with the police…the trip took about two and a half hours. We arrived late in the evening but the city was jam-packed with pedestrians and finding a room was not an issue.

Day 8 – Karbala (daytrip Babylon)

Karbala: one of Iraq’s – if not Shia Islam’s – holiest cities. Home to two imposing shrines, there is serious pilgrim traffic here and a completely different atmosphere to Baghdad or Mosul. In the heart of the old city are the shrines of Hussain (a son of Iman Ali) and his half-brother Abbas, and they are the focus of Karbala and everyone in it. Hussain and Abbas were martyred at Karbala in 680 AD, in a battle over succession to the caliphate.

We stayed a couple of nights each in both Karbala and Najaf. If you’re short on time you could base yourself in one of them and daytrip to the other.

Due to the possibility of sectarian violence, there is a lot of police presence in Karbala and a lot of security. You’ll get used to it quickly and won’t notice. Just follow the rules about clothing and be respectful at the checks.

Read more about how to visit Karbala and its holy shrines, in this post: Visiting Iraq’s Holy Shrine cities: Karbala and Najaf.

What to wear in Karbala

As soon as you arrive at the edge of the old city near the haram area – the holy area surrounding the shrines – women need to have an abaya and hijab or a chador on. You can buy these on the way in from the new town and all over the bazaars in the old city area. I bought mine in Baghdad and had it on when we arrived. That felt more comfortable and easier since we arrived at night and I didn’t feel like clothes shopping. Outside the old city you can go without – but wear a headscarf at the very least. It’s easy to tell where the perimeter is: concrete barriers, police, gates, fences, and security surround the old city.

Where we stayed in Karbala

We stayed at the Mayali hotel. Like many others, this hotel is inside the old city so we had to go through all the security checks to reach it. It cost 57k dinar for two people. It was perfectly clean and comfortable.

Daytrip Karbala to Babylon

We couldn’t spend all our time ogling the ceilings in the shrines, so we daytripped to Babylon. Reaching Babylon by public transport is simple and you can do it yourself. If you want to visit Saddam Hussein’s palace at Babylon while you’re at it you need extra time and a local friend or a guide, because that site is closed to the public. Make sure you save your tickets to Babylon since access (if you can get it) to the palace is from inside the Babylon site’s checkpoints.

NOTE: you can also make this daytrip from Najaf.

For more about how to daytrip to Babylon yourself and (possibly) explore Saddam Hussein’s palace, see this post: Daytripping to Babylon from Karbala.

Days 9, 10 – Najaf (daytrip Kifl)

Like Karbala, Najaf is one of Iraq’s holy shrine cities. Here the shrine complex is even more impressive if that’s possible. Also like Karbala, you’ll find throngs of pilgrims day and night.

In the heart of the old city is the main attraction: the Holy Shrine of Imam Ali, 4th Caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed.

Due to the possibility of sectarian violence, there is a lot of police presence in Najaf and a lot of security. You’ll get used to it quickly and won’t notice. Just follow the rules about clothing and be respectful at the checks.

Aside from the shrine, we spent some time getting lost in the souks, and in the old city itself. There’s a mosque on every corner.

We also got a look at Wadi Al-Salam, or ‘Valley of Peace’. The biggest cemetery in the world, it’s practically a suburb of Najaf, with millions of graves so far. You can wander into certain limited parts of the cemetery but a lot is off-limits and keep in mind: it’s a cemetery that’s still very much in use. The best way to get a good look is to go to the parking garage nearby and walk up to the top.

Read more about how to visit Najaf and its holy shrine, in this post: Visiting Iraq’s Holy Shrine cities: Karbala and Najaf.

Getting to Najaf from Karbala

We took a coaster from the Garage Unified in Karbala to Najaf for 2.5k dinar each. That took just a little over an hour with a short delay at a checkpoint.

In Najaf the coaster dropped us at the Najaf bus station a short distance from the old city. Buses run the rest of the way into town for 1k dinar.

What to wear in Najaf

As soon as you arrive at the edge of the old city near the haram area – the holy area surrounding the shrines – women need to have an abaya and hijab or a chador on. You can buy these on the way in from the new town and all over the bazaars in the old city area. I bought mine in Baghdad and had it on when we arrived. Outside the old city you can go without – but wear a headscarf at the very least. It’s easy to tell where the perimeter is: concrete barriers, police, gates, fences, and security surround the old city.

Where we stayed in Najaf

There are quite a few hotels in the same area just outside the haram area, and all fairly expensive. The first night we stayed at Nobles Palace Hotel for 70 USD and it was really nice. It included a good breakfast and was super clean. The next day we nevertheless moved directly across the street to Anis Al-Nufous Hotel for 20k dinar per person – very basic but clean. And noisy (so very many kids in the next room).

Daytrip from Najaf – Saddam Hussein’s palace, Kifl, and around

A local friend took us to some places out of Najaf, just to show us around the area. We went to the shrine of Dhul-Kifl/Ezekiel’s tomb, the spiky ruins at Borsippa thought to be the site of the Tower of Babel, and the Mosque of Prophet Abraham.

And absolutely not least, we got into Saddam Hussein’s palace at Babylon with our friend. As I’ve already mentioned, that site is closed to the public. You won’t get in on your own. If you’re hoping to go to the palace, build it into the same day as you visit Babylon, save your tickets, and remember – you’ll have to have a local friend or hire someone to take you.

We also went to our friend’s small home town, Kifl, dropped by his house, and met his family. He picked up a huge fish in Kifl’s old souk, had it grilled up, and we ate it on the banks of the Euphrates after a quick spin on a passing local’s boat. This was absolutely one of our favourite days in Iraq and captured perfectly the essence of this hospitable country and its welcoming people.

You could likely get to some of these places on public transport using Kifl as a hub. At any rate this post is the report of what we did in Iraq, so there you go.

Day 11 – Nasiriyah, Ur, and the Mesopotamian marshes

Saddam Hussein had the Mesopotamian marshes drained in the 1990s and built military access roads on top of them – despite the Marsh Arabs who had been living there for centuries at the time. After the fall of Saddam the dams diverting the Euphrates were destroyed, slowly restoring the marshes. As the water came back so did the Marsh Arabs, returning to their traditional reed houses and way of life.

We spent a very peaceful and comfortable night at a guesthouse in the marshes. The stay included almost three hours drifting in the reeds on a long boat at sunset, with masgouf fish for dinner. And an even better breakfast, as far as I was concerned: hot fresh bread, date syrup, home made buffalo cheese and warm milk.

While we were at it, we arranged a side trip to the Ziggurat of Ur since it’s on the way. You do not need a lot of time at that site so fitting it into the trip to or from the marshes makes sense.

Where we stayed in the Marshes

All this we arranged very easily by contacting a guesthouse owner who advertises his trips in the Iraqi Travelers’ Cafe Facebook group (many do). We set it all up a day or so ahead of time over WhatsApp.

Getting to the Marshes from Najaf (via Nasiriyah and the Ziggurat of Ur)

The main point of access to the marshes is the tiny town of Al Jubayish (also called Chibayish). To get there from Najaf we went to Nasiriyah and then picked up onward transport to Al Jubayish, with a detour first to the Ziggurat of Ur.

We went to the Southern Garage in Najaf at 6 am. From there we caught a minibus to Nasiriyah for 10k dinar each. That took about four hours. At the main garage in Nasariyah there was tons of transport and tons of interest in transporting us. We arranged a private taxi there to take us to the Ziggurat of Ur, wait for us, and bring us back to the same garage (making a quick falafel stop on the way). That costs 20-25k dinar, with some haggling.

Tickets to the Ziggurat of Ur are, you guessed it, 25k dinar each. With checkpoints it took about 45 minutes driving each way. The Ziggurat is fenced off and there is not much to see let alone actually get up close to. The history there is amazing! But we ended up wishing we’d just read about it and looked at pictures, and saved ourselves the bother. We spent thirty minutes wandering around the site.

Back at the garage in Nasiriyah, it was 5k dinar each in a share taxi to Al Jubayish, which took about an hour. There we met our host and went to the guesthouse in the marshes.

Days 12, 13 – Basra

After a breakfast of local milk and cheese at the guesthouse we headed straight to Basra. Old Basra is nice for walking around, as is the corniche. The Basra Antiquities museum is supposed to be really good and we wanted to go to but it’s – surprise – 25k each. At that point we were down to our last dinars to use up exactly before leaving the country, and didn’t want to change more.

Since we were there in December, we went to the Family Park for a pretty festive Christmas Market.

Getting to Basra from the Marshes

We took a taxi for 10k dinar to the garage in Al Madina from the guesthouse in Al Jubayish. That took about thirty minutes. From Al Madina we got a minibus to Basra for 3.5k dinar each. That took two hours.

Adam’s tree and the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates at Al Qurnah are on the way from Al Jubayish to Basra. If we’d thought of that in advance, we’d have taken a private taxi all the way from Al Jubayish to the hotel in Basra, stopping to see those sights along the way. That would have cost about 30k dinar.

Where we stayed in Basra

We checked a couple of hotels as there are many on Google maps all in the same area. We stayed at Jandian Hotel for 20k per person including a decent breakfast.

Day 14 – the Safwan border and on to Kuwait

We got up and ate one last breakfast in Iraq at our hotel in Basra. As usual on a border crossing day we got an early start, although nothing crazy – we left the hotel around 9.30 in the morning.

Have a look at this post about getting to the Safwan border, and on to Kuwait.

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Read more about independent travel in Iraq. And if you’re crossing the border to Kuwait, have a read here.

Check out the Destinations page for travel guides and stories about our off-beat adventures all over the Middle East and beyond.

The post Iraq travel guide and itinerary appeared first on WhirledAway.

It’s easy to get to Babylon by yourself on public transport. You could certainly sleep in nearby Hillah for the night, but either Karbala or Najaf is more interesting. I’d use one of those as a base and just daytrip to Babylon. We stayed in both Karbala and Najaf for a couple of nights each.

This post is about how to get to Babylon from Karbala, and explore Saddam Hussein’s palace while you’re at it (…if you’re lucky).

Ancient Babylon, a constant work in progress

Perhaps the ongoing cycle of destruction and restoration started around 600 BC, when King Nebuchadnezzar II drove the Egyptians out of Syria and then set his sights on Babylon. It had already been standing there next to the Euphrates for nearly 2000 years first in the form of a small village, then a brief and heady stint as an important capital, then dwindling into obscurity and sacked at least once.

The King’s idea was to make Babylon the most magnificent city in the world. It seems he succeeded, given that today we’ve all heard of his work – the Hanging Gardens, for example – even though there’s no trace of them left today.

Nebuchadnezzar died in 562 and Babylon’s good fortune ran out, falling to the Persian King Cyrus in 539, and eclipsed by Persepolis. Decline and destruction (and a spate of Zoroastrian fanaticism) left the city in bits and pieces by the time Alexander the Great turned up. He knew a good fixer-upper when he saw one, and started a new campaign of restoration. But then he died in Babylon in 323 BC. And the city changed hands again, and again, as Empires came and went for a few more centuries.

The Mongols descended on Mesopotamia in 1258 and the preservation – let alone restoration – of anything at all was not something they were known for. Hulagu Khan massacred the entire population of Baghdad and much of the surrounding countryside. There was barely time to recover from that before Timur swept in and unleashed another round of epic violence, in 1401.

In more recent times, excavation started on the ancient city in the 1800s and the cycle slowly started again. Saddam Hussein embarked on an extensive project in the 1980s, especially intent on restoring Nebuchadnezzar’s huge palace to its original glory. In fact he ordered so much work that Babylon became the most-restored site in Iraq. And just as Nebuchadnezzar had bricks stamped with his name, so too did Saddam. Both can been seen today.

You can still see original reliefs of bulls and chimeras, here and there. The famous Ishtar gate is a copy: the real one was dismantled and taken in (thousands of) pieces to Germany by the team of archaeologists who did the excavations after WW1. They put it back together in a museum in Berlin – and it survived WW2.

Babylon today, in our lowly opinion: not so interesting to look at. It’s so heavily restored as to feel practically new, while old parts are mostly rubble. You really need to use your imagination (and ideally bring a guidebook). Still, it IS Babylon and you should go.

Saddam Hussein’s palace at Babylon

Not just content with restoring Babylon, while he was at it Saddam Hussein had a palace built to look at it from, like a modern-day Nebuchadnezzar. It’s not known if he ever spent much time here – he had many palaces throughout Iraq – but there’s no stopping a megalomaniac from dreaming.

During the war in 2003 American forces captured the palace and used it as a base for a while. Once they left the locals descended, ripping out whatever they could use for their own restorations after the war.

Exploring inside the palace

Empty and abandoned, the palace looms over the silent kingdom of the distant past, and I’ll bet that you want to get in there for a look around. We definitely wanted to, so we came with a local friend.

If you’re going to try, you should time it for the same day you visit Babylon. You need two things:

• the ticket to the Babylon site, since access to the palace is from inside the historical site’s checkpoints
• a guide or a local friend to sort it out for you. The palace is fenced off and guarded by the military. Apparently you can talk to the guards for hours if you want, but the palace is off-limits and they will not let you in by yourself.

However you arrange this: finding a guide, or if you’ve got a local friend showing you around – it’s still not a guarantee they’ll let you in. But if they do, you walk around past the left side of the Ishtar gate and into a family park which costs 1k dinar for locals (…and people with them). From there it’s a short stroll to the fenced entry to the palace grounds.

With our friend we went right up the hillside and into the monstrous, abandoned relic.

We prowled through the echoing rooms and climbed the exposed staircases to the very top of the palace for a whole different look at Babylon.

How to get to Babylon from Karbala

Your transit point is Hillah, the city Babylon is just a bit north of.

From our hotel in Karbala, we walked to Hillah (Babylon) Terminal in the new city. There it’s easy to get a minibus going to Hillah for about 2k dinar per person.

After waiting for it to fill with passengers, it takes about an hour to Hillah. You get dropped off near a busy intersection under the bridge, and there should be at least a few taxi drivers around. Ask one of them to take you to Babylon. It might not be a bad idea to have a photo of the gate ready on your phone – as our driver first took us up the hill to the huge Babylon sign overlooking the city and we didn’t really want to go there.

The taxi cost about 5k dinar to the actual site itself and takes less than fifteen minutes. Tickets to Babylon cost 25k dinar each.

Getting back to Karbala from Babylon

First, we grabbed a taxi from the carpark out front next to the Ishtar gate back to Hillah. Tell the driver you are getting a bus to Karbala (or Najaf, as the case may be) – that’s what we did and the driver dropped us right off at the same busy intersection we arrived at. He even pointed out the next minibus we could go for.

If there isn’t a bus already waiting there, just watch and flag the next one heading back to Karbala.

Have a look at this post about Karbala and Najaf, for more information about the ins and outs of visiting these two holy cities.

Read more

If you’re planning a trip to Iraq, have a look at our Iraq travel guide and itinerary. And, find out more about our own independent travels in Iraq, here.

Check out the Destinations page for travel guides and stories about our off-beat adventures all over the Middle East and beyond.

The post Daytripping to Babylon from Karbala appeared first on WhirledAway.

Today, Samarra is a holy city for Shia Muslims: the Al-Askari mosque contains the tombs of the 10th and 11th imams. However the town’s population is largely Sunni and security – which there is a lot of – is shared between an Iranian militia and the Iraqi army, and so religious tensions can run high. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Shia Iraqis retreated to their holy city and outbreaks of sectarian violence followed. ISIS left their mark on Samarra as well, attacking in 2014 although they never captured the town.

In recent years it’s been hard for visitors to get to Samarra. You needed special permission and a guide, or at least a local friend to help you out, but this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

There are no hotels in Samarra (that accept foreigners anyway) but you can sleep overnight in the Al-Askari mosque. However the atmosphere in Samarra is infamously kind of strained and you’re probably better off just daytripping from Baghdad.

This post is about daytripping to Samarra: how we arranged to go there from Baghdad, and then carried on to Karbala afterwards.

What to see in Samarra

Besides visiting the impressive shrines at Al-Aksari mosque itself, there are at least a couple of other points of interest in and around Samarra.

Right in town and down the road from the Al-Askari mosque is the Great Mosque of Samarra, also known as Malwiyya mosque for the spiral minaret that stands beside it. You can at times climb the minaret for amazing views – but not at the time we were there. It was closed and we could look at it only from behind a fence.

However, at Abu Dalaf mosque there’s a smaller spiral minaret which tada! you can climb – on a steep twisting ramp that dwindles down to a foot wide. The minaret stands amid the ruins of another 9th century Abbasid city called Jafariya, out in the desert just beyond the military defenses, security, and checkpoints of Samarra.

There are also some Abbasid palaces belonging to the Caliph and his son outside town but they leave a lot to the imagination, in addition to being closed at the time we were there.

How to get to Samarra from Baghdad

From Baghdad it takes about two hours to drive to Samarra. With another two hours for the return trip to Baghdad and at least two hours for Samarra itself, give yourself a full day with an early start. On public transport you’d need to give yourself more time for waiting around. And, keep in mind that if you take public transport to Samarra, security might not let you wander around freely once you get there.

There are a couple of ways to arrange a daytrip:

• You can take a share taxi from Alawi garage in Baghdad going to Tikrit or Mosul and have it drop you at the first checkpoint outside Samarra. From there, the police will probably make you arrange another taxi to cart you around Samarra itself. Also, the distance to Abu Dalaf is about 20km and I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t let you walk it (or try to hitch) anyway.

• You can hire a guide with a private car to take you there and back himself. We contacted some guides in the Facebook groups and got quoted 150-160 USD.

• You can go to Alawi garage and hope to hire a private taxi there that will do the same, and be ready to negotiate pretty hard on that.

• You can pre-arrange yourself a private taxi to take you there and back again. This what we did and we had the hotel just set it up for us, for 100 USD. This was fine for us. You just need the car, and the driver to talk for you at the checkpoints. Plus, he will probably ‘supervise’ you a bit, similar to a guide, just cheaper.

We arranged our trip to include picking us up at the hotel, driving to (and waiting at) Samarra and a couple of other sites in the area, and dropping us off at Alawi Garage in Baghdad afterwards so we could get onward transport to Karbala. Since we weren’t going back to the hotel in Baghdad, we threw all our stuff in the trunk and took it with us, which also made this a good option for us. All in all, we were with Hossein the driver for eight hours.

No matter how you go you have checkpoints galore, first out of Baghdad and then into Samarra. Some of them took a while but overall they weren’t a big deal. Once you arrive, you’ll notice there is plenty of police and army presence, blast walls, razor wire, sandbags and all that, pointing to the town’s complicated history and relatively recent tensions.

There is a final passport and driver ID check before you can enter town. No one took our passports to keep while we were there (as I’ve read was the case before).

About visiting Al-Askari mosque

Women should bring an abaya and hijab or chador as you’ll need it for Al-Askari mosque. There are stalls selling abayas and chadors just outside the checkpoints for the mosque, and places you could change clothes but it’s better to just come properly dressed. There is a security/clothing checkpoint on the way into the haram area where on the women’s side they will also make sure you’re dressed properly, hair covered, and so on.

After the checkpoint we boarded a free bus loaded with some pretty serious chanting pilgrims, which runs you up to the shrine. I assume you can just walk, it’s no distance at all, we were just beckoned enthusiastically onto the bus and so we got on.

Where you get off there are some public bathrooms and another checkpoint to pass through and then you get to shoe and bag storage in the forecourt. Men and women can mingle there, before you reach the separate entrances to the actual mosque.

Cameras are not allowed in – phones are ok. If there’s a problem with photos anywhere it’s posted. It’s allowed taking photos in front of the mosque. Remember ladies, do not show a strand of hair or a member of the green feather duster army will tap you and admonish you to cover it up.

The mosque serves food and tea all day long. Just like anywhere else in Iraq there are plenty of friendly people, and we ended up having lunch (the two of us separated of course) with an Iraqi family.

See this post about Karbala and Najaf, for more information about the ins and outs of visiting these sacred religious sites.

Getting from Samarra to Karbala

From Samarra we drove back to Baghdad (about two hours) and Hossein dropped us as planned at Alawi Garage. There somebody offered us a private taxi for 30k dinar to Karbala, but we took a coaster that was ready to depart, instead.

Including traffic and getting off at a checkpoint to hang out with the police, the trip to Karbala took another two and a half hours. We arrived late in the evening but the city was jam-packed with pedestrians and finding a room was not an issue.

Read more about Karbala, and how to travel independently throughout Iraq, here.

Read more

If you’re planning a trip to Iraq, have a look at our Iraq travel guide and itinerary. And, find out more about our own independent travels in Iraq, here.

Check out the Destinations page for travel guides and stories about our off-beat adventures all over the Middle East and beyond.

The post Daytripping to Samarra from Baghdad appeared first on WhirledAway.

Iraq is one of those places where things can change at any time, so if you’re following this (or any) post in reverse (to Iraq), you should check on the security situation before you consider going. And, if you’re going to Iraq then you can read my guide about traveling in this amazing country.

With that in mind, if you ever wondered how to cross the Safwan border from Iraq to Kuwait by road, then read on.

Before you go

Visas

We got the Kuwait e-Visas online ahead of time. You don’t have to do this but I’d recommend it since it makes the border crossing process much faster. It’s also cheaper: the e-Visa is about 15 USD, and buying a VOA is almost double. We got the e-Visa in about a day.

Money

You can use your bank and credit cards at ATMs and everywhere else, in Kuwait. Just tap. However, it doesn’t hurt to bring a few Kuwaiti dinars with you when you’re crossing the border. There’s a mandatory bus you have to pay for to ride around no man’s land and all that. We changed the last of our Iraqi dinar to Kuwaiti in a little shop on the border.

The route – Basra to the Safwan border

There are a couple of ways to reach the Safwan border crossing from Basra:

• take a taxi (Careem) to Basra garage. There, pick up a share taxi or a mini bus to Aczubayer, that’s a quick trip. From there, take another taxi to the Safwan border. I’m not sure what this costs but I’d guess not much. It’ll take one and a half to two hours depending on how smoothly your rides line up.

Or, especially if you are two or more, just do what we did:

• take a taxi (Careem) all the way straight to the border for around 20k dinar. That took about an hour and zero fuss.

Crossing the border

We got out at the border and said goodbye to the Careem driver who was super nice and wished us welcome back to Iraq another time. We were seriously sorry to go at this point.

Exiting Iraq

We walked right up to the first office building where the Iraqis took a quick look at our passports and ran our bags through the x-ray. From there, another short walk to Iraqi Immigration where they took our passports and stamped us out.

As you exit Immigration and continue your stroll, you see a couple of shops. We stopped there to change the last of our Iraqi dinar to Kuwaiti dinar in the little supermarket.

Then you walk to the big covered parking lot and wait for the bus.

Entering Kuwait

When the bus finally appeared, we rode it (not by choice) to Kuwaiti Immigration, which cost 1 KD, took about five minutes, and was generally annoying because we had to wait for it forever. As far as I know, walking across is just not allowed.

Inside Kuwaiti Immigration we took our e-Visa printouts and passports to the desks on the right side of the room and did all the visa checking and biometric stuff there. This was pretty quick. As I said before, the e-Visa isn’t mandatory but it’s definitely a time-saver. If you haven’t got it, I’m not sure what the process is but someone in that office will direct you.

After the photos and fingerprinting, we took our passports to the main counters and got stamped. Keep your visa printout handy because everyone will demand to see it until you clear this border zone.

We got back onto the bus and drove for literally two seconds, during which there was another passport and visa check.

Off the bus again, it was time to drag our luggage off with us and run it all through the x-ray we’d parked next to. Women have to go separately to other side of the lot and into an office, taking their bags with them. In there, female officers check purses and makeup bags and you get a little note to hand to the guard back at the bus again.

Reunited at the bus next to the x-rays, we got back onboard for some more visa checking and a two minute drive through the gate.

Into the city

Outside the gate, we got off the bus in another carpark and the taxi drivers pounced. From what we heard, you can expect to pay 40 to 50 USD for the trip. We painfully negotiated 45 USD and still the driver tried for more when we reached the hotel. You can pay the taxi in KD if you have it or in USD. The trip is 90 kms and took an hour and half or so. We had ours drive us straight to the Best Western in Salmiya.

Yalla! Door to door in four and a half hours. Welcome to Kuwait.

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For more about traveling in Iraq and things to see and do while you’re at it, check out this guide about traveling in this amazing country: Iraq travel guide and itinerary.

And, if you’re planning some travels in the Middle East on the way, take a look at these posts from other countries in the area.

The post How to cross the Safwan border from Iraq to Kuwait appeared first on WhirledAway.

Istanbul’s famous for its feline rulers, who graciously share the space with the humans who feed them and obediently build little houses for them.

Almost every cafe, bar, and restaurant has at least one or two cats acting like they own the place, to the point where the best seats are taken (under the heat lamp, for example, it’s getting cold now).

I for one, wouldn’t dare object.

As for breakfast – countless cafes and restaurants serve up a traditional kahvalti (a sort of morning mezze to pick and choose from).

Lingering over the meal each day – preferably with a cat in my lap – is my favorite thing to do here.

I felt like I could just stay in Istanbul, breakfasting and hanging out with cats, but then Oyv and I would probably have to get divorced. And besides, it was time to get this show on the road. We were bound for Iraqi Kurdistan: an autonomous region in northern Iraq. It’s a part of the unofficial Kurdish homeland which also spreads into bordering areas of Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

Still, we weren’t in any rush to get there. We had time to kill and a bit of Turkey to cross. After all, Turkey is not just about cats and breakfast. There’s also baklava.

And hair transplants. Anyone transiting through Istanbul’s airports will see flocks of men with fragile bright red scalps recently sewn with relocated hair and covered by bandannas advertising the clinic they went to. And now, based on our recent experience, I’m going to add mausoleums to the list. On our meandering way to Iraqi Kurdistan, we didn’t realize it at the time but we were embarking on a tour of famous tombs.

Obviously, there’s Ephesus

Ephesus was an important center for early Christians from around AD 50, though it’s much older than that. The Apostle Paul spent time here while he was writing 1 Corinthians. Not everyone appreciated Paul’s letters – he wrote his epistle to the Ephesians from prison in Rome later on.

Ephesus is still very atmospherically intact.

The number one attraction has to be the Library of Celsus, built around 125 AD to hold nearly 12,000 scrolls. A retired governor in the Roman Empire, Celsus paid for the library’s collection himself on the understanding that he’d be buried beneath it.

The city is also home to one of the biggest amphitheatres in the ancient world. Up to 24,000 citizens who weren’t otherwise occupied with all the scrolls at the library could watch gladiators fight to the death instead.

Tombs are popular with pilgrims, too

One of Turkey’s most conservative cities today, Konya is built around a famous mausoleum complex.

The entombed corpse in this case was a Persian poet, philosopher, and teacher named Rumi who lived in Konya from 1207-1273. Known as Mevlana, ‘the master’, he taught a mystical interpretation of Islam called Sufism, based on purification, rituals, spirituality, and asceticism. Adherents to the Sufi order are known in the West as ‘whirling dervishes’.

Sufism is sometimes a topic of controversy: in fact we’d been warned off visiting Konya altogether by a waiter (at breakfast, of course) who informed us that ‘Bad people live there’. But the waiter’s opinion hasn’t stopped seemingly all the old people in Turkey from visiting Konya at once, not to mention the elderly pilgrims from abroad who overwhelm the mausoleum complex.

The mausoleum also contains the coffins of other dervishes and a collection of ancient and beautiful Korans.

Obscure kingdoms

Maybe you’ve heard of the Kingdom of Commagene, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter – they didn’t leave much behind when they were swallowed up by Rome. But what they did leave behind is mainly at the top of Mount Nemrut, one of the highest peaks around. King Antiochus didn’t stop at digging out his tomb on the summit in 62 AD. No, he surrounded his final resting place with huge 8-9 metre high statues of himself, lions, eagles, and a few Greek and Persian gods he no doubt considered himself in league with.

The statues’ heads are long since detached and scattered around like huge broken toys.

It’s thought that the tomb itself, a conical hill, was deliberately covered in loose stones to make it harder for grave robbers to dig in. It’s true that no one has ever opened the tomb to check if Antiochus is actually inside, but they are pretty certain he is.

And it’s not just tombs that stand the test of time. There’s a Roman bridge nearby, built in 190 AD. This feat of ancient Roman engineering was still in use for regular traffic until the early 2000s.

The main event

Finally, we boarded a bus that would take us out of Turkey altogether and into Iraqi Kurdistan. We drove past kilometers of fencing, watchtowers, and checkpoints, and processed immigration. Although Iraqi Kurdistan is technically in Iraq, it is autonomously governed and requires a separate visa and all the other bureaucracy that comes with a border crossing (around here, anyway).

It was dark when we arrived in Duhok, a city whose existence we were only previously aware of because there is a hairdresser’s on our street at home named after it. Duhok Hairdresser is constantly filled with men who aren’t getting their hair cut, but simply seem to be drinking tea and passing the time of day. They obviously copied this concept directly from Duhok because the entire city was filled with men drinking tea in the bazaars, at street stalls, and in shisha lounges.

Having just about exhausted ourselves lately on mausoleums and the whims of those who build them, we took a break and immersed ourselves in another major feature of the region: the bazaars.

We wandered into teahouses and drank glass after glass of sugary chai and arabic coffee.

We ate enormous meals meant for one that covered the entire table top.

After dinner, we got into the habit of popping by a sweet shop to browse to rows of candy and pastries. And by ‘browse’ I actually mean, get fed our dessert in samples, and possibly hot chocolate.

Revitalized and ready to sightsee in the land of the living for a change, we organized a daytrip to Lalish and some surrounding villages. Abdul the taxi driver was on a mission: oncoming traffic did not faze him and he drove fast and furiously down the middle of the road, occasionally muttering into Google Translate and then pointing his phone at one of us. He was considerably more cheerful once we agreed to him smoking in the car. Smoking indoors everywhere and all the time, is still very much a thing here.

Abdul was silent for much of the drive from Duhok, until we reached the first checkpoint and handed our passports out the window to the soldier manning it. The soldier looked briefly at our documents and waved us through. We’d barely passed the checkpoint when Abdul spat at the window and rolled it up. Via Google Translate he informed us that the soldier who’d asked for the passports couldn’t read them anyway, and was therefore a donkey – a pretty major insult around here. Abdul seemed personally offended, and we drove on in an awkward silence.

Checkpoints are a regular feature on the roads in Iraqi Kurdistan, and we passed through many during our travels. We very rarely had to get out of the car and talk to the soldiers. In most cases they just wanted to know where we were from, and confirm that neither of us is actually a journalist. But there’s an extra rule at the checkpoint right outside Lalish – we had to take off our shoes, and leave them there. Abdul was ok with this. Footwear’s not allowed in Lalish – not even on cold and rainy days in November.

Lalish is a Yazidi temple built around – you guessed it – the founder’s tomb. There are less than a million Yazidis worldwide, and each one is expected to make a pilgrimmage to Lalish at least once in their lifetime. Just sixty kilometers north of Mosul, only about twenty-five people actually live in Lalish but during ISIL’s relentless persecution of this peaceful religious minority in the 2010s, many others fled here for refuge.

It’s around this time that we started delving into more recent history.

On another daytrip from Duhok, we circled a roundabout featuring a bronze bust of a mustachioed man in the centre and I asked our current taxi driver who he was.

The driver’s response was brief. The only words I picked up were ‘Generale’ and ‘Saddam Hussein’, accompanied by the driver gripping his own throat and squeezing it. We took this to mean the bust honoured a key player in the infamous dictator’s capture and execution – at any rate, it wasn’t a bust of Saddam Hussein himself. As we climbed out of the car in front of yet another kebab restaurant, I asked the driver where to find a ride back later. He pointed over his shoulder towards the roundabout and grabbed and squeezed his throat again.

Saddam Hussein’s government relentlessly persecuted the Kurdish people (amongst others) particularly at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s.

From 1979 to 1991, the Iraqi intelligence agency was headquartered in Sulaymaniyah, the city we moved on to next. From the street this notorious prison looks like any other building (if you look past the bulletholes sprayed across the outer walls), but up until the early 1990s it held Kurdish nationalists, students, and other dissidents. It’s now a very disturbing museum, documenting the human rights abuses under Saddam’s rule. There’s a row of rusted Iraqi tanks in the courtyard, and exhibits of artifacts collected from prisoners.

To enter the museum, you walk through a hall of broken mirrors where 182,000 shards of glass commemorate each Kurd killed during the time of persecution and genocide.

In 1988 Iraqi planes dropped chemical weapons on the nearby town of Halabja. At least 5,000 civilians died instantly and an estimated further 7,000 were injured or suffered long-term illness. There’s a monument on the edge of town commemorating the victims and testifying to the Kurdish people’s resilience in the face of such atrocity.

But that’s not all

We knew about these terrible things up front. But there were so many positive surprises too, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Steep rocky mountain roads lead to little villages with big views.

There’s religious diversity – we visited Christian monasteries and churches too.

It didn’t feel overly conservative either – we saw lots of young men and women mingling together and few women covering up. The cities we visited are peppered with trendy cafes alongside the more traditional shisha bars. There’s even an English pub in Erbil. We know because we spent a rainy afternoon daydrinking there.

And you can bet we scoped out some great breakfasts, too.

Coming right up: it was around this time that we both developed Covid. Not a major concern in most places anymore, but Turkmenistan is not like most places…

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For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

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