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The Kurdistani region of Northern Iraq has much to recommend it as a travel destination, not least the fact that currently very few international travellers seem to have realised this, and in the far too short time we spent there we did not meet a single other tourist.

As the crow flies the distance from Syria to Northern Iraq is relatively short, had we been able to take advantage of the huge expanse of border between the two countries, but somewhat distressingly it is almost impossible to get an Iraqi visa in Syria, so we were forced to undertake the rather longer journey up the length of Syria and into Turkey, then travel along the Turkish Iraqi border to the Ibrahim Khalil border crossing, where tourists are issued with a 10 day Iraqi visa free, as a way of encouraging tourism in Kurdistan. The need for this rather large detour and crossing of two borders and three countries meant that the journey from Damascus to Dohuk, the first large town in Northern Kurdistan, took us 24 hours.

We left Damascus on Saturday evening, having decided to take advantage of the fact that the one train route in Syria, which is both cheaper and infinitely more luxurious that coach travel, begins in Damascus and terminates in Qamushley, the northern Syrian Kurdish town on the border with Turkey. Unfortunately as there is only one train route in Syria it weaves around quite a bit, meaning that the journey took us via both Deir as-Zur and Aleppo, taking 15 hours in total to reach Qamushley. However, as the train left Damascus at 6pm and arrived in Qamushley at 9am the next morning it was the perfect solution, as we meant we got an extra day of essay writing in Damascus and saved on a night’s accommodation, as well as travelling in comfortable two person compartments with proper beds, instead of sitting on a bus for 10 hours.

Surprisingly the train was extremely hot, which was a treat for the first couple of hours, as none of us had been warm for about a month, but unfortunately none of us had any water with us, and after staying up til about midnight playing cards using some of my Arabic vocabulary flashcards with symbols drawn on the corners, I found that my mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow and breathing started to seem like a very bad idea. Still overall it was a great way to travel, and I think all of us had the best night’s sleep we’d seen in months!

Emlyn and Evreritte’s Kurdish friend Halim was in Qamushley visiting family for Eid when we arrived, so he very kindly came and met us at the station and took us to breakfast before accompanying us to the border. The restaurant he took us to was called Miami, and was an imitation American style diner with a bar in the centre and lots of mirrors and fishtanks. They brought us an incredible spread, enough food to last us for days, and then when we finally finished eating they pointed to the next table where they had set up desert, a huge bowl of fresh fruit and plates of chocolate biscuits, as well as seven shot glasses filled with liqueur in traffic light colours which tasted like Calpol. We finished break fact with one of these shots of suger each, although I was a little worried that they might have an effect on our bulging stomaches a little like the infamous ‘waver thin mint’. Luckily nobody exploded although he had unknowingly starting the trip as it was to continue - in an alcoholic vein, as I think that was the first time in my life that I drank a shot at 10.30 in the morning! The bill came to around 400 SYP each, nearly the price of the train ride, mainly because, as the manger kindly explained to Halim, it is their policy to charge foreigners double, but as all of us had eaten so much that we didn’t feel hungry again until 8 o’clock that evening on balance it was probably worth it.

Getting out of Syria proved to be something of a problem, as Everitte, Becka and I had all outstayed our extensions by 5 days, however when we explained, wildly untruthfully, that we had visited the immigration office and been told to come back after Eid the man seemed to believe us and gave us our departure stamps. It turns out there are certain benefits to the insanely chaotic system here, which worked to our disadvantage last time when we went to get our two month extensions and were told it was only possible to get one month, even though, as I pointed out, a friend of ours was granted two months at the same place the day before. When I told the man at the immigration office this he merely shrugged and said ‘Is she very beautiful?’ I said she was and he nodded knowingly, so I asked ‘If I look nicer next time will I get two months?’ to which he smiled and entirely without embarrassment replied ‘Maybe’.

Unfortunately the delay on the Syria side meant that by the time we got to the Turkish side the border was closed for lunch, so we hung around in the middle for 15 minutes or so until they finished eating and told us where to go to get our visas. We were directed to a little square hut with two windows, one on each side, and a little old man sitting in it on a swivel chair. I went up to the window which had a sign next to it saying ‘Visa’ and started trying to explain that we were going to Iraq and wanted to get transit visas if it was possible. Unfortunately he spoke no English or Arabic, only Turkish, and couldn’t understand what we wanted at all, even when I decided to keep it simple and just said ‘Visa - Turkey’. A passing man who spoke some English stopped and asked what we needed, then said something to the man in Turkish before turning to us and saying ‘You must go to the police station - this man is no relation to anyone’.

We were fairly sure that the police station was not where we needed to be, but had no other option, so asked a police man who walked us back to the same hut, but this time to the window on the other side. The old man on his swivel chair swivelled round the face us at the new window, and suddenly he miraculously appeared to know exactly what he was doing, took our $20 dollars each, and gave us all visa stamps... We were left wondering if some rare condition meant that his brain only worked when we was facing a certain direction!

Once finally through the border and into Turkey we were faced with the prospect of travelling to the Iraqi border crossing using a mixture of buses and taxis, with no Turkish money, no guide book, and nobody with any grasp of Turkish among us. Luckily a lovely Syrian Kurd who had also just arrived on the Turkish side of the border offered to translate for us from Arabic to Turkish, and we decided that as we had little time and there were so many of us anyway the cheapest and simplest option was probably to hire a taxi to take us all the way into Iraq, and pay in dollars to save changing money which would likely cost us more after commission and bad rates in a small border town.

With the help of our Syrian friend we were able to negotiate for a big taxi, in which we all fitted with surprising comfort, Sam in the front, four in the back seat and Becka sitting on the floor in the enormous boot which fitted her and all our bags with ease. We finally agreed on $140 for the driver to take us across the border into Iraq and help us with all the necessary paperwork, which seemed a reasonable price between six, given that the whole process take about 4 hours, so that by the time we arrived in Iraq it was too late for the driver to go back, and he had to swing by his house and pick up a suitcase on the way past so he could spend the night in Iraq before returning the next morning.

We had a lovely drive through the beautiful mountainous Kurdistani region of Turkey in the end, and our driver, although he only spoke Turkish, turned out to be great fun, stopping at every check point to open the boot and reveal Becka, so he could shout ‘Al-Qaeda’ and laugh uproariously, much to all the police and border guards’ amusement.

The crossing into Iraq was surprisingly quick and easy, and our driver finally dropped us off at about 7pm, so we decided that instead of spending the night in the small border town of Zahko, we’d press straight on the Dohuk, the first big town in Northern Kurdistan, which is situated near both the beautiful hilltop town of Amediyya, and the Yazidi monestary, and pilgrimage site, Lalish.

Due to the very low tourism levels in Kurdistan, unlike Damascus there are not really any restaurants, or indeed hotels, catering to travellers, so we ate almost every meal in large cafeteria style restaurants catering to groups of local men. One thing about Kurdistan which I will not miss is the food - except for the bread, which was very much like naan bread, and was a wonderful treat after the cardboard bread served everywhere in Syria, the food itself consisted of many strange and exciting concoctions based on various types of animal fat. The first night we got to grips with the way eating out in Kurdistan works - you are quoted a fixed price per head, which, if you are a tourist you immediately half, for a meal consisting of rice and rotisserie chicken, which was actually fairly pleasant, as well as water, tea, and a variety of side dishes, in most cases a lamb fat stew with a nominal amount of tomato and other unrecognisable vegetables, as well as ‘humous’ made of dyed chicken fat, various pickled vegetables, and even, on the first, very special night in Dohuk, a plate a bright green paste, which we finally decided must also be made of some kind of animal fat, and which looked exactly like toothpaste, but tasted like Vimto, of all things. It was very sweet, and extremely nasty, and was served alongside the main meal. Unfortunately although everybody else refused to eat it, I developed a kind of strange addiction to it, and as I had no one to help me I ate quite a bit before an ominous feeling of nausea warned me to stop!

When we got back to our hotel, a rather nice clean budget hotel called the Parleman, it was only about 9pm, and as like many small towns there is very little to do in Dohuk after dark, we faced a long evening of sitting around followed by an early night. We decided it would be nice to go and get a drink somewhere if such a thing was possible, so approached the very nice hotel owner, an Egyption who spoke both Arabic and English, and for fear of sounding like a British yob Sam opened the conversation by enquiring if there was ‘anything cultural’ to do in Dohuk. To our surprise, hilarity and slight embarrassment he immediately replied ‘Do you want whisky or beer?’. He gave us a little hand drawn map with directions to an off-licence, and when arrived we found to our admiration that he had managed to direct us to a street on which there we both an off-licence and a large building labelled ‘Dohuk Cultural Centre’!

For a very reasonable $6 we purchased a bottle of Araq, and a litre of Jordanian Whisky, officially called Black Jack, but affectionately known as BJ. We therefore spent our first night in Kurdistan getting happily pissed as newts in Becka and I’s hotel room, and having a discussion, only at times heated, about the benefits or otherwise of polygamous marriages, broken only by a trip out on the town in search of further sustenance, during which I found myslef absentmindedly spinning around on a rather nice lampost while we waited for Everitte and Becka who had disappeared on route, when suddenly it collapsed into the road, hitting me in the head on the way down. I'm sad to recount that rather than acting like mature adults we acted like drunken British students, and reacted to my act of inadvertant vandalism by laughing hysterically, and running away. Sadly our rather considerable hangovers meant that we didn’t all make it out into the world again until about 10am the next morning, and after a standard brunch of animal fat in all its many and extensive guises we made our way to the taxi station to negotiate a ride to Amediyya, a beautiful hilltop town in the mountains about an hour from Dohuk. We were once again faced by the Kurdistan taxi mafia, who have unfortunately worked out, much like the shopkeepers of Straight Street, that if they all offer you the same hugely inflated price, and utterly refuse to budge, you will eventually have no choice but to pay it. In the end we managed to negotiate to be taken in one taxi instead of two, but still had to pay rather a lot of money for the privilege of sitting on each others laps for over an hour while our bodies were gradually reformed into new and interesting shapes.

Luckily Amediyya was well worth the trip. A beautiful little town built entirely on top of a flat mountain, it covers every inch of available space, with a tiny roundabout, a café and a couple of newsagents forming a town centre, and beautiful views of the surrounding mountains all around the edge. We wandered around the town, taking pictures of the picturesque little houses and being stared at by the local children, who were everywhere, playing and laughing and shouting in the streets. There was also a lot of old men in traditional Iraqi clothes walking around the town, for reasons unknown, although unfortuanely it was a lot harder then I had been expecting to communicate with most people in Kurdistan. I assumed that as a part, albeit a reluctant part, of an Arab state, most people would speak at least some Arabic, but in many cases people spoke only Kurdish, and we could not make ourselves understood at all, using Arabic, English or even, when we became desperate enough to try anything, French, and had to vainly continue in Arabic until such time as a passer by, usually older men, who spoke some Arabic, took pity on us and came over to translate for us. We had negotiated for our driver to wait for us for four hours, using this method, so that we could stay to watch the sunset, and after about an hour we had explored the whole town, so Sam and Becka sat down in front of a spectacular view to play some folk music on their guitar and violin. Emlyn, Everitte, Tamsin and I wandered back to the little café in search of tea to warm us up, and sat at plastic tables drinking lovely sweet tea for an hour or so, before heading out to watch the sunset. By the time we made it back to where we’d left Sam and Becka they had disappeared, but after a few aimless minutes we spotted their instrument cases in the garden of a nearby house. Tamsin went to knock on the door and disappeared inside, and after a few minutes Sam came out and beckoned the rest of us inside. It turned out to be a local club, where they served alcohol and had live music for the local youth, and a couple of local guys, one of whom spoke very good English, sat and chatted to us and brought us beer and salad and bread and delicious homemade kibbeh. They wanted Sam and Becka to stay and play at the club, and invited us all the spend the night there, but unfortunately for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that we’d already paid the taxi driver and the hotel, and we wanted to leave for Lalish early in the morning, we declined, and set off back to Dohuk without being allowed to pay for anything, and with many entreaties to return.

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