Journey a culture shock
-Marty Gervais
Friday, August 17, 2007
SULEMANIYA, Iraq - Get some sleep, they said, because the 300-kilometre car ride from Erbil to Sulemaniya would be long and difficult.
Someone should have told the tiny lizard-like creature which kept me up until 2 a.m., scurrying out in the open in my room, defying me at every opportunity.
I finally coaxed Aziz, the night hotelkeeper, to come up.
He was on his hands and knees searching for it, and finally tracked it down, and was laughing himself silly while slapping it with a flip-flop.
He carried it out of the room on a business card.
I felt a little embarrassed.
The room was sweltering. For all its billing as a progressive oasis in a war-torn country, the power grid in Erbil, a city of some one million, kept failing and I'd wake up sweating.
I was up most of the night restarting the air conditioner each time the power returned.
The next day we embarked with my fellow travellers, Border City Boxing Club's Josh Canty and Andre Gorges, for a scheduled meeting with the Iraqi National Boxing Team in Sulemaniya.
Our driver, former Iraqi weightlifter Sahrong Abdullah, collected us at Hotel Liwan in his red KIA with a cracked windshield. We loaded the suitcases and headed out through the maze of streets clogged with cars and bicycles.
Diesel fuel and dust filled the air. My face was burning from the 46 C sun beating down upon us.
We finally made it to the outskirts, and I was just nodding off when Sahrong came to a screeching halt, as another automobile decided to take his westbound route in the eastbound lanes. The other driver swerved out of the way, but no one seemed perturbed.
NON-EXISTENT SPEED LIMITS
I discovered after a few minutes, lanes along the roads are mere suggestions. Cars travel helter skelter, wherever they want, and the police and military stationed along the way pay no heed. In fact, double-parking is the norm. And speed limits are non-existent.
We didn't leave until after 1 p.m., mostly because Sahrong, who teaches at Salahaddin University, stopped by there to pick up his pay. And I mean pay, not a cheque.
He walked out of the building with a stack of dinars flopping in his hands. He deposited them into the glove compartment.
Cheques and banks are still foreign to many here. Cash is real.
For this journey, Sahrong had decided he would not rent a car after all. We had expected air conditioning, but told him it didn't matter.
A big mistake. We drove with the windows down, because his air conditioner was broken.
The car hurtled down the road with the hot wind burning our faces, and Kurdish music assaulting our ears.
At one point when I looked to my right, I saw a man in the shade of a makeshift corrugated shelter defecating by the side of the road. About a hundred yards away was a man selling fresh fruit and another man trying to repair his motorbike.
Sahrong is used to this ride. He said, "It can take two hours or three hours. It all depends who is driving, and what the roads are like."
It also depends upon the Kurdish military stationed at a number of junctures along the route. I had to fork over my Canadian passport a couple of times, and Sahrong sweet-talked the official. In another place, the officer didn't bother to rise from his chair. He asked me, "Are you Italian?"
"No, I'm Canadian."
"Then go!" he said in perfect English.
We pulled over at a rest stop and bought some ice cream. Sahrong lifted the hood of his car and washed down the engine.
He also filled the radiator. "It's one of those things I have to fix. It doesn't hold water very well."
He also watered down the brakes because the trip to Sulemaniya passes through a number of mountain ranges.
"The brakes get very hot, and we don't want trouble," Sahrong said.
Along the way, Sahrong, a gentle and kindhearted man who will stop at nothing to please you, spoke matter-of-factly about his life in Iraq. At one point, he yanked up his shirt on the right side as he was driving, and told me to check out his scar.
"From one of Saddam's bombs," he said.
Scud missiles that former dictator Saddam Hussein fired at Kurdish strongholds in 1991 landed in Erbil, and put him in the hospital.
At these rest stops, people pull their cars up to the shade, and lie down to sleep.
Using the bathrooms in these places, or even in some hotels and restaurants, is enough to cause you to pray to be constipated.
There are holes in the cement, and the flies and stench dominate these tiny rooms.
At one of these rest stops near Koya, we had lunch and fought off the flies. We washed up in the outdoor sinks. I saw one man washing his feet.
Sahrong dipped his arms in a large reservoir of water and washed his face.
And off we went again. We finally arrived in Sulemaniya.
Five hours later. The hotel was situated along a clogged little street with shop vendors and kids trying to sell bubble gum.
In minutes we discovered the air conditioners didn't work and the toilets were holes bored in the floor.
A pitcher of water stood next to it to wash down the waste.
Toilet paper was non-existent, and towels a dream. The boxing team manager promised to go out and buy what was necessary.
Now, this wasn't a dump.
This was a good place. Safe and proper. And clean.
With insurgents targeting Iraqi sports figures as a way to undermine the government, and Kurdish military keeping close watch over the boxing team, my night ended with the military police escorting me to an Internet cafe where I could write this story and send these photos.
They waited outside until I was done.
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