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Northern Iraq Part 5: Erbil
The next morning we had a slight lie-in until 11 due to the small party the night before, then we freshened ourselves up and headed off to the Erbil garage to catch a taxi. This time we decided to brave it and go via Kirkuk as the road didn’t actually go inside Kirkuk it just passed the outskirts of it. The landscape was pretty boring though we saw a few oil refineries and three different armies (Iraqi, Kurdish and American).
The journey was pretty short and soon we arrived back in Erbil. We decided not to go to the Kandil hotel this time and we went to the Bekhal Hotel just around the corner. It was a reasonable hotel and was slightly more expensive than we had expected as Eid al-Adha had started. The beds were comfy but the toilet didn’t really work very well and the last occupant had left us something unpleasant behind.
We then looked around the citadel with a boy from Mosul who started chatting to us then following us around. The citadel wasn’t very exciting itself but it had good views of the city and some interesting architecture. Apparently one family still lives in there just so they can still claim it as the oldest continuously inhabited place in the world.
Out the other side of the citadel we saw lots of people flocking into this house and going up onto the roof, so we decided to do the same and I took a few cheeky pictures, that was until the police came and told us that it was mamnooa (forbidden). Whoops. We all then sat down on a wall overlooking the city and Adam chatted to the boy who had followed us round. The boy then got a phone call from a friend of his telling him that their mum had just died in a car bomb attack in Mosul.
We then headed off in search for Sami Abdul Rahman park, named after a Kurdish leaded who was killed in an Islamist suicide bomb attack on February 1st, 2004. We thought we’d found the park but instead we’d found a minaret park, where lots of families were gathered in their best clothes, and all the little kids were dressed up in suits for Eid. There was also some sort of telecabine across the park which you could pay to go up in. We decided against this and instead went out and found a taxi to take us to the real Sami Abdul Rahman park.
We eventually arrived and it was really nice with paths filled with flowers in bloom. We stopped at the park cafe for coffee and tea then noticed the pedalos in the lake next door to us and decided to have a go, which we did, Adam and Will doing the pedaling and me sitting back and attempting to do the steering and failing due to Will and Adam’s erratic pedaling (or so I claim).
After the park we went in search for another place we’d read about in the Lonely Planet guide: The Deutscher Hof: a bar run by an ex-German soldier deep in the suburbs of Erbil. This proved impossible to find… We spent AGES trying to find this place with people giving us conflicting directions. Eventually we stumbled across a man with his daughter in a residential area and we tried asking him if he knew where this place was. He didn’t but soon his father came out and told us to wait a second while he put his shoes on, then he got in his car and drove us there!
Eventually we got there, after probably an hour or so of trying, and sat down and ordered probably one of the most expensive pints I’ve ever ordered. I think my pint cost around $9, but it was definitely worth it. I had a really nice pint of schwarzbier which really hit the spot. For two months I’d had to put up with horrible fizzy lagers such as Almaza and now I had a nice schwarzbier to remind me what beer should taste like.
Our next expedition after this was to find a restaurant in the Lonely Planet guide which we’d tried to find on our first visit. I am convinced this restaurant doesn’t exist. Admittedly most places were closed due to Eid, but we walked for miles without success and eventually settled on a restaurant in front of the citadel instead and had a kebab.
We then tried to get someone to take us to Gali Ali Beg the next day and Tariq, from Sulemani, tried to get one of his friends to take us, but first of all they were going to charge us $250 which we really couldn’t afford, plus one of them was wondering around with a gun in his jacket which we weren’t exactly comfortable with. Instead we managed to get hold of our driver from Lalish, Ahmar, who agreed to take us to Gali Ali Beg and then to Sulav for $150 at 10am.
