Excursion!

I knew I'd have a hard time keeping up with this everyday...

I've had several fun adventures since I last wrote, so I'll catch you up.

Friday:

We took 6 land cruisers out into the mountains and headed North! We weren't able to go to our original destination (near the Turkey border) because we were warned by security not to... So instead we stopped at several other places, the first being a waterfall at Gali Ali Baig, which is usually really impressive... but with the drought it didn't have much water coming through. However, the canyon it is in is the deepest in all of the Middle East. Iraq has some amazing landscapes! I'll post pictures on Picassa later this week. From here we headed North and UP into the mountains, we stopped at a cave and on the way we passed some Nomads living in the black goat hair tents and lots of sheep and goats! Oh I didn't mention that one of the 6 land cruisers was filled with Peshmerga (Kurdish Army) soldiers who are there as our security! It was good to know that we had some protection, just in case and they were well prepared with AK 47's and handguns and they all had fancy ear pieces and bullet proof vests, I was entertained at least. I got a picture with two of them! :) So the cave we went to, it appears they are maybe beginning to develop it for tourism b/c they're working on putting stairs in, but not yet... it's a steep climb up the mountain to get to it.

Thankfully the soldiers were prepared and had a few flashlights so we could walk around a bit... and this cave was pretty awesome! Now I come from the land of caves, East TN has tons of caves, but there were some really unique formations here! However we couldn't see them all that well. At first there was some confusion as to whether or not we could take pictures, first it was NO, then it was ok, but no flash, then it was ok, but no video. ??? Odd! My flash wasn't really strong enough to get great photos inside of the cave. It was pretty muddy inside and I slipped down a rock once and got my bum covered in mud... We got back into our caravan and headed for the next stop, which was another cave. However, this one was more of a giant overhang with a few rooms off to the side. If you've ever read Clan of the Cave Bear, its exactly like something they would live in. I could totally picture Ayla in here! Though this is quite an important cave, anthropologically speaking. Inside of the cave they found two Neanderthal skeletons buried with flowers... this cave is the very first example of ritual in all of history! Though the cool stuff has all been removed and is in some museum somewhere, though I've been told that they never finished excavating. It was a very peaceful place, once you were inside the sounds just seemed to disappear. I actually left my camera in the car on this one, oops! We ate lunch here, so we spent quite a bit of time enjoying each other's company (a good mix of Americans, a French girl, a Canadian, some Kurds that were drivers, the soldiers, two Dutchmen, and a military col. from the US military).

We wound around a couple hundred more turns and up and down a few more mountains until we reached the peak of a mountain way up in the North, to which we could overlook a border town with Turkey and the mountain behind it, which was Turkey. We took a group photo here and thankfully someone brought a GPS along, so he was able to track everywhere we went, which I'll try to include here, though it missed a whole section where you'll see the green lines (our path) don't meet up.

One thing I can be thankful to MSI (the company I used to work for where our offices are on boats) for must be curing me of my motion sickness! We were on curvy mountain roads for hours and hours and I only got slightly nauseous at the end of the day on a really bumpy and curvy road, but it was manageable. Back in the day I would have been sick the whole time!

We got back to where we were eating dinner around 7 pm and had a nice meal and got back to Erbil arond 10 pm... we left at 8 am, it was a long day of adventure!

Iraq is a beautiful place! Right now its the driest part of the year and they're in a drought so its mostly brown with a few trees, but the views are still awesome. I can't wait to see this place in Sping when everythign is green. There is so much to see!!!