Dear Diary – Iraq and the wedding that never was

Driving into Iraq raised understandable questions in my mind. I couldn’t help but think of the news back home, everything I had been told about this warring nation, about the culture, about the way that women are treated and of course the constant state of unrest.

I felt apprehensive about being there even though we had a contact on the ground waiting for us. Afooki is from Baghdad and seemed genuinely excited for us to visit with him. He had put us at ease somewhat by offering to meet us in Kurdistan, the north if Iraq, rather than Baghdad but still, until we arrived, the same as everyone else we had met so far on the trip, he was just a guy on facebook. We were putting our faith in a stranger once again, and this time in a country rarely visited by tourists.

However, as always, we were greeted by friendly faces and open arms. I felt guilty for allowing preconceived notions to be forced upon me by mainstream media and a general public fear of anything, and anyone, who lives or believes differently to what we accept as the ‘norm’ in the Western world.

We learned a lot about ourselves, as always, but we also learned a lot about cultural diversity, we were reminded that we are told that things should be a certain way, we are told what to expect and yet we happily found that things are not always what they seem.

It IS a different world, but its a friendly one!

Monday 3rd March

Looking out of the hotel window in Duhok we can see a small fairground in the distance, its lights pulse to a beat that we can’t hear and the colours fill the sky. The busy street below us continues to flow with traffic into the night and the hotels green, blue and red strip lights beam out onto the path.
We check our emails and find yet more problems with the Iranian visas. The guy that has been helping us has given up. We are back to square one…again.

Tuesday 4th March

Left the hotel at 1pm to drive to Erbil City after arranging to meet Afooki at 8pm. Afooki has offered to help us arrange a wedding and is driving up today from Baghdad where he lives with his family. We have been in touch with him since before Christmas after he responded to a facebook post we made.
The weather is appalling and it soon gets dark, we get lost several times even using our new tablet to which we downloaded an offline map of Iraq. It clearly hasn’t been updated for a while. We got so lost in a small dusty town at one point that we stopped to ask for directions. The man we asked jumped into his cream coloured car and made a motion for us to follow him. He drove us maybe 10 km and finally stopped at the side of the road. He told us to take the next right and that there would be a check point, then we would be in the right direction. We thanked him and offered to pay him for his time. He laughed and waved at us and blew us kisses as he drove away.

Our first checkpoint was without too much drama. We were asked by the heavily armed soldiers where we were going and why we were here. They looked at our papers and waved us on a little bit bewildered that we were here as tourists.

The drive was pretty smooth, several checkpoints all without incident until things took a turn for the worse just 20km outside of Erbil at a checkpoint in the biggest electrical storm you have ever seen. Peggy’s battery failed and we were blocking the checkpoint which had been narrowed dramatically by concrete barriers to slow the traffic. The armed guards laughed and sprang into action in the pouring rain. They pushed us over the speed breaker, out of the narrow lane and onto the dirt that lined the busy highway…and left us there. Lightening split the sky open every few seconds and the thunder boomed as though it was right on top of us.

It didn’t take long before someone came along to help us. Alex pulled up the bed and took the back battery out as the stranger helped take the dead battery out of the front to switch them over. Drenched and fatigued with the constant battle with Peggy we finally made it to Erbil just 10 minutes late and met with Afooki and his friend Haider.

They took us to a restaurant with valet parking which was a real laugh, we parked Peggy up and all laughed as we prayed to Allah that she would start again after the day’s battery problems. We ate kebabs and smoked hookah and chatted happily with our new friends until late. Haider insisted that we stay at his home and took us to introduce us to his family. His wife and 4 young children were a little shy and we were worn out after the days adventures. Haider and his wife slept in the childrens room so that we could take their bed. The kindness of the gesture was overwhelming. We had insisted that we would be fine in the van outside but Haider and his family have a pride that bursts out of them when they can make you welcome in their home. We are truly blessed to be here.

Wednesday 5th March

Waking up at Haiders doesn’t happen early in the morning. We were awake and at a loose end so decided to tidy up Peggy after the battery exchange and the aftermath of the storm. As I made a pot of tea a car pulled up alongside us and two plain clothes police officers came to ask us why we were there. We explained that we were staying with Haider and they asked for our passports which they took from us and told us to come by the police station later to collect them. We were still in shock about the whole situation when the officers came back and asked us if they could have pictures with us for facebook. We obliged and tried again to wake Haider to prove that we were welcome there. Haider came out to see them still groggy from sleep and after a loud exchange the officers left again, still with our passports. Haider cooked us 8 eggs and then we all went to the station together.

The station was just a house on the side of the main road into the city with several armed soldiers outside the door. They seemingly angrily bickered with Haider and eventually let us go inside after taking our camera off us. We waited in an office as Haider and the people inside it did a lot of talking and gave us a lot of stern looks. The discussion seemed to get heated then someone would laugh and then they would all laugh and then go back to arguing, it was surreal. It was so strange that I started to laugh. Alex asked me why I was laughing. I was laughing at the fact that we were in such a bizarre situation yet we were both perfectly calm, we weren’t at all phased by the fact that we were in an Iraqi police station having had our passports confiscated and were now going through the inquisition via a person we had met only 12 hours ago. I was laughing because this is our life. Its normal, this kind of thing happens everyday! Every situation we find ourselves in seems; not trivial, but not at all as intimidating as it should be and our reactions are not perhaps the reactions people expect.
We were told to come back the next day for our passports and decided we had better stay at a hotel as we daren’t travel without our documents. Yet another eventful day done.

Thursday 6th March

Decided to take a day out of the city, both Haider and Afooki were busy with work so we set off to Dukan lake. Haider had been back to the station and collected our passports and dropped them at the hotel for us. The drive was beautiful and snaked through green verdant countryside with mountains like toppled wedding cakes. Tier upon tier creating a strange jagged landscape in the distance. We wound along a small river looking for the lake but couldn’t find it. We stopped in a small town nestled in a cluster of sand dunes similar to those we had seen (with thousands of other tourists) in Turkey. Here, we had them all to ourselves. We wild camped outside an abandoned building and laid awake listening to the frogs singing.

Friday 7th March

The abandoned building wasn’t so abandoned when we woke up. Work men were busying themselves around us. They smiled and waved as we drove away not at all phased by us sleeping on their plot of land. We finally found the turning for the lake and stopped in town to buy fire wood and a river fish to cook on the fire.
We found the lake and with it, hundreds of people with fold up chairs or picnic blankets lining its grassy banks. People were barbecuing, drinking and dancing with their families. We found a patch of empty grass and parked up and started to build a fire pit with rocks we collected from nearby, within 30 minutes we had been ‘interviewed’ by several people. Who are we, why are we here, tourists don’t come here, can we take a picture for facebook? It was incredible, everyone so friendly and so intrigued at our visit and our home on wheels.

We drank a bottle of wine, ate our fish and watched the embers of our fire go white while families all around us would sporadically turn up the music in the car and line up to dance with enormous smiles on their faces. I felt like a fly on the wall, privvy to another way of life, to another side of a group of people I had never seen before, like peeping through the keyhole. Yet in reality I was having any idea that had been placed in my mind about ‘what to expect’ of people living in Iraq completely wiped away. Preconceptions I had been forced into were being replaced with experience.

The family parked next to us came and invited us to join them for a drink and a kebab and we took our chairs over. The father of the family had spent several years living in Leeds, a stones throw from our home town. We talked and drank with them until we could drink no more. He was drinking pernod and told us that there are a lot of people who do drink in Iraq and that the Muslim faith is not as prevalent as it was. So many things we thought we knew about the country were just not true, we learned something new every day.

Our new friend asked the police stationed at the lake if we could sleep there and they said it was ok. By 9pm the entire lake was silent like no-one had ever been there.

Saturday 8th March

Drove back to Erbil to meet with Afooki and Haider to go and find some wedding clothes. Everything was falling into place for the wedding thanks to their help and we drove into town to barter for a suit for Alex and to choose materials for a dress for me.
We drew a lot of strange looks in the market but none of them hostile, just curious and maybe a little shocked. The ancient building was being rebuilt upon itself, old pavement ripped up in places and new flagstones being placed in others. I wondered how everyone kept their balance without watching the floor all of the time. The narrow alleys inside the market were packed with people doing their weekend shopping everyone wearing traditional clothing except us, Afooki and Haider. The suit shop was a tiny cubby in a tiny alley and a man sat inside it behind a sewing machine. We chose colours and argued prices and sizes and eventually left with a bag. Next we needed what looked like a scarf which we (Haider and Afooki) bartered very successfully for much to the sellers disgust and headed over to the dress shop.

Brightly covered materials lined the walls in every pattern conceivable, I was like a kid in a sweetshop. Afooki and Haider translated for us as we picked our patterns and materials and then realised that there wasn’t going to be time to have a dress made. We looked at a few ready made dresses and I was measured and Afooki made a few calls and found that he knew someone who had a dress that she was happy to lend to me for the day.
We finished the day off eating kebabs and getting packed for tomorrows adventure…in Dubai!

Sunday 9th March – Dubai – Jilted at the altar.

Today we are flying to Dubai to hold our 64th wedding tomorrow. Alex has been planning it for months and although it was going to be a flying visit to the Emirates we couldn’t wait to get there and see what all of the fuss was about.
We were at the hotel having a leisurely breakfast of boiled eggs, bread and olives thinking our flight was at 11.30… when Alex decided to double check it at the last minute and realised that the flight actually left at 10.10! We were really late and thrown into a major panic. We called Afooki who was taking us to the airport in another hour or so and luckily he could pull the ride forward. We checked out of the hotel, completed all the necessary paperwork for leaving Peggy with them for a few days and jumped into Afooki’s car and screeched off to the airport. I was furious with Alex. We sat through the various checks to get into the airport, sniffer dogs, mirrors and a get out and get patted down search and made it to the desk ONLY because another family was creating a delay for the flight due to their luggage.
Someone took our bags and they rushed us through the empty airport. We were having our tickets and passports checked for the last time at passport control when the guard spotted that we had entered overland with a vehicle. They refused to let us go because Peggy was still in Iraq. We had asked at the border coming in if it would be ok and they had insisted it would be. The wedding was the very next day and no matter how much we begged he wasn’t going to let us get on that flight.

They let the plane go and told us we could fly the following day with our tickets if we got permission from the Interior ministry to leave Peggy in Iraq. I was beside myself, we weren’t getting anywhere, everything we tried to do seemed to crash down in flames around us and we had so many people depending on our arrival in Dubai…there was an entire wedding waiting for us!

Once we had stopped throwing a tantrum

We waited for our bags to be returned and then jumped into an airport taxi and asked him to take us to the interior ministry. He had never heard of it. He asked all of the other drivers and no-one knew where or what it was. We took a cab back to the hotel, googled it and Alex took another cab with the address. It was a waste of time. They told him to drive Peggy to Turkey and leave her there while we went to Dubai. We were so desperate not to let everyone in Dubai down that we looked into it. It would mean setting off instantly, driving 8 hours back to Turkey, risking getting out of Iraq and not being allowed back in without the van and then taking a $250 taxi 10 hours back to Erbil and all before 8am the next day in time for the flight…and that is without mentioning having to repeat the process and get Peggy BACK into Iraq after we returned!

It was futile and just to add insult to injury we received yet another email from Iran telling us that we couldn’t go into their country with Peggy.

We were stuck in Iraq, with no way out except back to Turkey where we could only stay for 6 more days.

We called Dubai and explained our situation, the entire team were so understanding considering that we had left them high and dry literally 20 hours before the wedding was due to take place. We lost the cost of our flights and our hotel booking was non-refundable, we were screwed and so incredibly fed up of everything going wrong.

We have to say a huge thank you to the Dubai wedding team, we are still hoping we can make it to you guys!

Julie and Romeo Wedding and event organiser, Tasneem Alsultan, Helen Schrader and The Palace Downtown – Dubai

So that was it, no Dubai.

Instead of continuing to cry over spilled milk we embraced it (everything for a reason) and decided that it meant we had 5 days to explore Kurdistan before the wedding in Erbil. We tried to hold our chins up and hit the road north to get lost in the wilderness for a few days. We got stopped and checked at every single check point along the way to Shaqlawa (a small village at the base of Safeen Mountain), got lost and spent the night in a lay-by.

Rain, thunder, lightening and depression about our situation kept us awake all night. In the early hours we talked about what we were going to do. We were so down in the dumps but knew that only we could pull ourselves out of it. We had a word with ourselves, threw in the usual mantra that everything happens for a reason and decided to make the most of our time exploring a country we never even dreamed that we would visit.

The realisation that we were sulking about our inability to move forward in a country that has been under constant scrutiny and in a state of war for the last 100 years made us feel stupid and grateful and we gave ourselves a mental slap and got on with it.

Tuesday 11th March

We enjoyed cruising all day and having nowhere in particular to go. The scenery was just astounding and we made a lot of important decisions about what our direction would be once our Iraqi visa’s expired in just 8 days. Iran was looking like it was never going to happen and we didn’t have long enough to extend our visa’s in Turkey with just 6 days left. We consulted the map and planned to drive back to Turkey and hurry through to Georgia. We could stay there for as long as we wanted as we didn’t need visa’s, it also meant that IF we got permission to go to Iran we could enter through Georgia’s neighbour, Armenia. We started to feel better about the entire situation until we drove over a huge tumbleweed and thought we had ripped Peggy’s engine out.

I was about to start stamping my feet and refusing to go another step further until our run of bad luck broke when Alex pulled the tumbleweed out and started to laugh. We found a half built house and decided to stay there the night. Someone stopped to ask us why we were there but seemed happy with us sleeping there the night. The view was spectacular, rolling green hills with jutting rocky outcrops.

Anyone need a hospital?

Wednesday 12th march

Woken up by the army asking why we had stayed there, ever friendly they moved us on and we drove further into the mountains. We took a dirt track trying to escape the constant, but understandable scrutiny of the army and police. We thought we might get stuck but we were ok. We parked up and watched the shepherds with their goats…and their AK-47’s…follow tiny paths along the mountainside. Thousands of the tiny paths weave in and out of each other where the goats have explored every inch of the green grass making it look like a knitted jumper under a microscope.

Thursday 13th March

Enjoyed a lazy morning freezing in bed with a coffee. We were pretty high up, around 3,000 meters in the Zagros mountain range and had an incredible view from where we had parked for the night. It is such an amazing feeling being on top of the world in a rarely explored country and we just enjoyed the moment until we had to make a move and set off back towards Erbil, after all we had a wedding to get to.

As it started to get dark we realised we had gotten too close to the city to stop without being bothered but it was too late. We found a park as the sun started to turn the sky pink and got Peggy stuck in ridiculously sticky mud as the rain started to pour. We had to laugh as Alex got completely stuck in it, it was like glue but our laughter was short lived. We got moved on 5 times that night and finally found a quiet spot under a bridge around 1am.

Friday 14th march

Woken up by a knock on the door from the Police moving us on yet again. Got back to Erbil, did a food shop and met Afooki and Haider at 8pm for a night out. We made them dinner in Peggy  in the Hotel carpark and Haider decided it was only right that we had a ‘Batchelor party’ so we went out to a club to watch a lady singing and to drink wine and whiskey. The club was a big hall and as we walked into the dark smokey room we were seated and served fatoush and our drinks at the table by men in sharp suits. It was so loud and smoky it reminded us of a scene out of Indiana Jones. We drank far too much wine and I even tried smoking Hookah for the first time. We had a great night with the boys and I was so happy that we had gone along with them.

I felt like I had learned so much about their culture just from that one experience. The woman singing was beautiful and her voice amazing and the men just idolised her. They watched in silence with respect and awe at her power over them. It was meserising and had been the perfect pre-wedding party.