AMERICAN TOURIST in POST-WAR IRAQ

While surfing I came upon a website put together by a young American to document his trip as a tourist in Iraq. His trip from Europe to Iraq, his stay in Baghdad, and his return to Europe are described by his words and pictures. The blog is Bergen to Baghdad and fascinating to read. Here's an excerpt:

the driver takes me to the border. we get out of the taxi, go to a window, have some guy look at my passport, get waved on to some other place. my driver brings me to the front of every line, and this is allowed for some reason. repeat three times. then we come to an air conditioned trailer, where a plainclothes border police guy invites me to sit down.

where are you from? california. what do you do? computers. why are you going to iraq? tourist. how do you pay for your travels? in america, computers good money. this goes on for a while, with people coming and going from the office. one guy comes in sits down, has his passport looked at and okayed, and leaves. 'he is going from turkey to iran through iraq. bad idea.' 'do you speak turkish?' 'no.' 'arabic?' 'no.'

he calls for his supervisor, who is unavailable for the moment. he stands in front of me, hands me my passport. then he says the five words that rarely precede anything good: "i think you are cia."

"go to the police, come back." he says, says the same to my driver in kurdish. so the driver takes me back (the wrong way through traffic) to the first office. they look at my stuff more thoroughly, give me an exit stamp on my visa. then we go someplace else, wait for a guy to process some paperwork. he's sloppily dressed but he, i guess, is the one everyone needs to go through, people surround him everywhere he goes. my driver slips our paperwork to the top of the pile when no one is looking. 20 minutes later we're in the cab again, going to the customs checkpoint. turkish soldiers examine my bags, not looking too carefully for anything. one of them sees my nikon slr camera and thinks i am a journalist; another guy asks me questions about why i'm going to iraq. i think the soldiers are more curious, they're not the ones you have to really worry about. 'if you gave me one million dollars, i would not go to iraq,' the blue-eyed one said.

back with the border police. this time im in the room with 4 of them. three were young guys, around 30, another one about 40. they were persistent questioners, but none of them put the fear of god into me. i admit, i was quite nervous through the whole thing. not that i was afraid anything bad would happen to me--i was afraid because, frankly, if i had been bounced from the border, im not sure i would have had the balls to try to get through again, making this whole leg of the trip pointless.

i think during this second interrogation, they were saying nasty stuff about me in turkish or arabic to see if they'd get a reaction out of me. "may i see your identity card?" i hand him my driver's license. "no, your identity card." "in america, no identity card. driver's license, passport. nothing else." "you know there is war in iraq?" yes. "are you afraid?" yes. "you may die there." i smirked, instantly thought of al pacino in 'heat'. "you may die in silopi!" one of the guys looks at my passport really long, the picture is from when i had shoulder-length hair. he says something in turkish to the other guys, and i hear the words 'mel gibson'. everyone laughs. that's when i knew i was off the hook.

"ok. you may go." "is it possible to enter turkey from iraq?" i asked the guy. "i will not be locked out?" yes, they said, it is possible. wonderful.

miraculously, i made it through all this without having to pay any fees of any kind to anyone.

we cross the river, stop at a checkpoint with a sign, 'WELCOME TO THE KURDISTAN REPUBLIC OF IRAQ.'

The blog is an unedited, unpolished, matter-of-fact, first-person chronology which relates his experiences with the people and places in his travels. It doesn't dwell on the negative nor the positive.

What it does do is provide a refreshing snapshot of life in the Middle East that hasn't been skewed by the politicized liberal media.