Off to Kurdistan
breathe, breathe, breathe. This morning, I managed to go to the wrong airport for my flight. I sort of had a feeling that it was the wrong airport, but people kept telling me it’s the right airport. So when I finally got there, and the counter for my flight was closed, I knew something was wrong. I ran outside and started hastily approaching a taxi driver. The driver told me it would take an hour to get to the other airpot! I was panicking. He was racing at 170km/h with 3 different phones, driving in the emergency lane, and speaking to Allah. It was crazy. Somehow I knew it would all work out, yet my heart was racing. When we got to the airport, it turns out my flight got cancelled. In fact, it had been cancelled for over a week and nobody had told me! I was racing from booth to booth, I needed a new flight ASAP for a reasonable price. With a bit of insistence and pleading eyes, I ended up getting an airport official to help me get a seat on a fully booked flight with turkish airlines for $350. Breathe, breathe, breathe. It’s going to be ok…
Now I had to spend the entire day at the airport till 10pm when my flight was going to leave. I warned the expedition leader, Jan, about what happened and he sent me email back saying he hoped I wouldn’t get too bored at the airport. I smiled at myself. Bored? I would pay for some boredom… In some ways, those 12 extra hours at the airport ended up being a blessing. I sat down in a Cafe, and worked for 12 hours straight, finishing up some last-minute tasks before I was going to be offline for a week.
When waiting at the departure gate, I started to get slightly nervous. After all, I was going to Iraq. Iraq. Iraq. Had I gone crazy? It all started a few months earlier, when I was browsing the web for my next adventure. I had my eyes set on Greenland and as I was collecting some information, I somehow ended up on the website of a tour company called Secret Compass. What a cool name! Secret Compass specializes in trips to unusual places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, the Darien Gap in Panama etc. The Kurdistan trip immediately caught my attention. The moment I read through the trip description, it was too late, I was hooked. Never mind that this was the worst possible time for me to go on vacation… People don’t understand that traveling is not something that I choose to do. It’s something that has already possessed me at age 3 when I started planning out trips to Africa. And the fact that I managed to annoy my parents so much that they let me wander the earth by myself at age 14 is just a sign of how deeply ingrained my passion for traveling is, dormant but ready to take a hold of me whenever it feels like it. This was such a moment. I had to go.
So here I was waiting to board a plane for Iraq. I avoided eye contact with the other passengers, I didn’t feel like facing judgmental looks asking what the heck I was doing here. It couldn’t have been more obvious that I didn’t belong. 95% of the people on the plane were men, middle eastern men. In fact, there were only 5 white people, 4 of them men, all of them at least 10 years older than me. As if this wasn’t enough, everyone on this plane was wearing black, brown, beige and I was wearing red. My bright red dawn jacket. Clearly I hadn’t gotten the memo that Kurdistan was colorless?! oh boy… I felt like red riding hood, a walking target… But there was no turning around now. So I did what I always do in such situations. I faked confidence. I stood straight, and put on a bored face as if this was a routine flight for me and I knew exactly what I was doing. If nothing else, it made me feel better about myself…
As soon as I reached my seat in the airplane, I slept, I was so exhausted. I had been working nonstop for days to make this trip work out. I immediately fell asleep, and barely noticed when we landed at 2am. But then, something miraculous happened. Two seats away, a guy put on a bright green jumper. Thank God, I had some company. Now we were at least two crazies in a monochromatic world. A taxi driver was waiting with my name to pick me up. When I tried to chit-chat with him and asked him if he was from Erbil, he told me he was Kurd not Iraqi. As I learned, this is a very important distinction in Kurdistan.
The little I saw of Erbil that night looked perfectly ordinary, like any other city in the world. In some ways, it was surreal to think that ISIL was only 40km away. The streets were perfectly paved, there were many modern looking stores, and my hotel room could have been any hotel room anywhere in the US. It was hard to believe that there was any conflict at all nearby.
Next Post: Erbil
