Leaving Kurdistan

Call me crazy, and many people did, but I decided to get another bus back to Istanbul when it came time to depart Duhok. It had been a long, grueling 24 hour bus ride in, but hey, if I could do it once I could do it again. And one saved far too much money busing over flying to pass it up. I wasn't traveling alone this time either - Sonya was traveling with me.

Although well protected by the Peshmerga and at this stage outside the boundary of ISIS's new Islamic Utopia, Kurdistan was beginning to feel a wee bit apocalyptic in the final days I was there. Petrol was becoming scarce, which was difficult for an oil driven society. Transport prices had doubled overnight, and queues for petrol pumps were half a day long. Many were packing up and leaving, and there was a tense feeling in the air. Sonya had finished her teaching job just that afternoon, and we quickly did a final pack up and headed to the bus stop.

Kurdistan seems to have a 'save face' culture. That means that people do not want to disappoint you to your face, and are prepared to make matters considerably worse to avoid this. So when we went to the Chizre Nuh bus office and asked if we could catch the Best Van Tours bus there the office worker happily said 'yes'. When we continued to wait  an hour after it was due we started to get worried. When other buses we could have caught sailed past and the office worker continued to ensure us our bus was just "15 minutes" away, we started to get suspicious. Hmmm, will this office worker always say "in 15 minutes" even when no such bus is coming? At what awkward stage will this whole fiasco be revealed. We decided to take action. Thankfully a bus driver who spoke German (many Kurdish people spent time in Europe during Saddam's totalitarian regime) strolled in. Sonya spoke German, and so we seized the opportunity to figure out what the hell was going on. A few frustrated sentences were translated, and a few accidental references to boobs instead of buses were made (the German is very similar), but suffice to say we soon manged to find ourselves on a bus - a real, actual bus - traveling direct to Istanbul.

Waiting 6 hours at a bus station is a poor prelude to a 24 hour bus ride. However, during the time I managed to make some new friends who were also waiting for a bus. Stepping out for some air I was invited to eat seeds with a group of fine Turkish gentlemen, some of whom spoke Turkish, some Kurdish, some a bit of English, some a bit of Arabic. It was confusing working out who spoke what, and what language I should butcher in the attempt to communicate, but we got by. Before long they were my new best friends and we were having a great old time. The club was male only, so poor Sonya wasn't invited.

It was only about an hour drive to the Kurdistan border, at which point Sonya, myself, and my new best friends would have to get off and go through border customs. It had taken two hours to get through the border coming into Kurdistan, but it would take a lot more time getting out. Border customs in Kurdistan essentially consists of a large car park where buses line up awaiting their turn. It takes about an hour per bus, and there were about 10 buses ahead of us, so I foresaw ahead of time that we were going to be waiting for a while. We passed the time by walking around the car park, finding cups of tea and sleeping on cardboard boxes (the 10 hours spanned the evening starting about 10pm). Finally our turn came. It was then I learned the answer to that well known pub quiz question, "Which country should you not try to leave on an expired visa." That's right, the answer is, Iraqi Kurdistan. My visa was a day expired, or two days after the long car park wait, and although I had been assured by some officials in Duhok that this was fine, the border control decided differently. Referring to a system that did not exist but was progressively created by whatever strange idea popped into their head at the time, border control sent me upstairs to talk to the most unofficial and unaware person they could find. The unofficial official asked me where I had obtained my visa. I replied the city I was living in - Duhok. Putting two and two together he decided I therefore needed to return to Duhok to sort it out. At this point it was 5am. The thought of attempting to find a way back to Duhok, find a place to stay, somehow arrange a meeting with some official visa person, have them confirm that the visa was indeed expired, finding another bus back to the border and sitting through another 10 hour wait at the border, did not appeal to me. Although I could not speak the language well enough to explain this, my body language gave certain hints. Thankfully an alternate arrangement was reached that involved a $100 bill I had.

I had held up my entire bus while this fiasco was taking place, who were stuck waiting for me back in the car park. It was an incredible relief to be walking back to the bus, and I was met with a chorus of questions from my new bus amigos. "Jon, what happened?" I sat down and explained it all in a medley of simple English and broken Arabic, and we boarded the bus. We progressed slowly through the border over the next 3 or 4 hours, which mainly involved more milling around on the Turkish side before we were finally through. Only a 22 hour bus ride across Turkey to go. It all seemed like peanuts after the border crossing. We arrived in Istanbul tired but happy and crashed onto our hostel beds, 40 hours after we had first arrived at the bus stop. Istanbul; the crossroad between the Middle East and Europe.