<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"\n\n The streets of Baghdad were strangled with traffic, everyone rushing home for the Muslim festival of Eid. Our bus hadn't moved in five minutes. If you were brave enough, or stupid enough, to have claimed a window seat, you could see amateur fireworks streaking above the rooftops.\n\n I sat in my usual spot toward the back, next to Chuck. Chuck was a 39-year-old Canadian who'd quit his factory job and was now burning through the last of his savings, bumming around the Middle East. He wore dirty black jeans and dirty white high-tops, and his thinning brown hair fell halfway down his back. He deeply resented the fact that we had been forbidden, for \"security reasons,\" from wandering away from the group and striking up conversations with random strangers and from picking up discarded rocket shells and other potentially explosive souvenirs\u2014in other words, from having fun.\n\n The traffic eased. Chuck opened the window and let the wind rush in. \"Music!\" he cried to the other cars. \"Turn up the music!\" A BMW with prayer beads dangling from the mirror pulled alongside us. The driver was a smiling young man with gel-spiked hair that said, \"I know where the party is.\" He raised a fist in the air and yelled out the name of the violent anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. \"We need to hang out with that guy,\" said Chuck. Another car sidled up, a rust-eaten vehicle of uncertain make, packed with young men. The driver stared at us, taking in our massive cameras and floppy hats and the strange, pale forms of our faces.\n\n \"Where are you from?\" he shouted.\n\n \"Canada!\" said Chuck. He pointed at me. \"U.S.A.!\"\n\n \"Business?\"\n\n \"Travel! Tourist!\"\n\n \"Tourist?\" The driver turned and said something to his friend in the passenger seat, who threw his head back, laughing. \"Tourist!\" cried the driver, beaming. \"Tourist!\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n We heard a lot of laughter in Iraq. We'd be walking around some historical site, some temple or tomb, and a group of guys (they were invariably guys) would come up and ask for our picture. They'd be dressed in the prevailing Middle Eastern\u2013Eastern European\u2013New Jersey youth style\u2014pointy shoes, pre-distressed jeans, tight black T-shirts with Italian designer names gleaming on the front\u2014and they'd be giggling. Not in a nervous way but in a dude-can-you-believe-these-people way. \"Picture, picture,\" they'd say, holding out their cell phones. We'd flash our sunniest American and European smiles for them, and then the roles would reverse and they'd pose for us. That was the deal. We get to go home and tell our friends we hung out with a bunch of Iraqi kids; they get to tell their friends they stumbled upon a band of sweaty, confused-looking Americans.\n\n It was a nine-day tour: two nights in Kurdistan, five in Baghdad, one in the shrine city of Karbala. We slept in hotels not much different from hotels everywhere except for the erratic plumbing and the throngs of Iranian pilgrims in the lobbies. We traveled in a rattling Toyota Coaster that stopped every twenty minutes or so at a checkpoint\u2014sort of like a tollbooth with guns.\n\n We did touristy stuff. In Iraq, touristy stuff means climbing a ziggurat, which is basically the Mesopotamian version of the pyramids. It means shopping in a Baghdad market and paying too much for collectible Saddam-era dinars with the dictator's face printed on them. It means visiting mosques. Lots of them, so many that by the third day we grumbled whenever the bus pulled within fifty feet of one, like sixth graders on a school trip to the capital.\n\n Most of us were knowledgeable about the Middle East, but not all. If there was one interest we had in common, it was traveling to places Westerners tend to avoid. We'd all been to countries of relative stability\u2014China, Kenya, Egypt under Mubarak\u2014but also plenty of places without much stability at all. Ingvild, for example, a 24-year-old Norwegian, had recently spent six months on a trek across Iran and Central Asia. (She claimed to speak Farsi and insisted on wearing a head scarf even in the Christian areas, because this was \"the way of the desert.\") And Peter, a relentlessly cheerful 58-year-old military-history buff, had toured Afghanistan with the same travel company that was leading us through Iraq, and had finally taken to admitting to friends that, yes, he was CIA\u2014a Certified Insane American.\n\n And then there was Simon, a brooding German neurosurgeon with a tangle of Beethoven hair, who said he collected news clippings in bos organized by country and visited the countries as soon as their corresponding bos filled up. And Kieran, a ruddy-faced Irish priest who'd worked as a missionary in Nigeria, where instead of converting Muslims to Christianity, he became obsessed with Islam. \n\n And Willem and Cristina, the septuagenarian Dutch couple, who sold their house twenty-one years ago and had been traveling virtually nonstop ever since. They'd been to every country in the world, they said. Iraq was last on their list.\n\n The tour company was called Hinterland Travel. You had to get yourself to Baghdad; for $3,700 they took care of everything else. I say \"they,\" but it was really just one guy, Geoff Hann, a vigorous 70-year-old Englishman with a neatly clipped Vandyke beard and darting blue eyes. Despite professing a love for Mesopotamian history, Geoff did very little in the way of explaining the archaeological sites we were seeing and held strong, persistently negative opinions of Iraqi culture. When we talked on the phone before I signed up, he said we'd be staying in four-star hotels, then went out of his way to explain that I shouldn't expect the Bellagio. \"Iraqis don't understand the concept of service,\" he said. This turned out to be a classic Geoff remark. He was always aiming little barbs at the Iraqis, often in their presence, which I tended to find worrisome, since we relied on them, entirely, for our safety.\n\n Hinterland was one of a select group of tour companies bringing Westerners into Iraq, and as far as I could tell, pretty much the only one that dared to venture beyond the relatively peaceful confines of the Kurdish province in the north. Geoff had high hopes for the country. He envisioned it developing a solid tourism economy in a matter of years and suggested that when this happened he'd be poised to make a killing. The Iraqi government was similarly confident. At a tourism expo in London in 2009, amid the potted palms of the Abu Dhabi booth and the half-naked women representing Trinidad and Tobago, an Iraqi official declared, \"We are optimistic about turning the tourism industry into a success.\" He didn't mention that on the way over he'd been detained in Jordan because of problems with his visa.\n\n If it was possible to stumble into the Iraqi tourism business, Geoff had stumbled into the Iraqi tourism business. In 1969 his first wife left him and their two daughters and ran off to an ashram north of Mumbai. To hell with it, he said. He packed the girls into a Volkswagen and drove all the way to India to retrieve her. It turned out the marriage was beyond saving, but he had such a good time on the journey he decided to do it again, this time with paying passengers. Hinterland evolved out of those early expeditions. Along with Iraq, the company's destinations include Burma, Kashmir, and Afghanistan. In that first phone conversation, Geoff noted that all of these places offered \"a frisson of danger.\" This was his British way of saying that people liked to visit them because they enjoyed the thrill of knowing they might get killed.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Of course, there were other reasons to go to Iraq, too\u2014older ones. Seeing where Western civilization came into being, where the first cities were built, where writing was invented. Where (many believe) the serpent tricked Eve, where Terah begat Abram, who became Abraham, who became the father of three religions. Where Gilgamesh set out for the Waters of Death, where the Babylonians tried and failed to build a tower to the sky. But I think I can say that the Iraq most of us really wanted to see was the recent one\u2014the one we'd seen on TV.\n\n We wanted to see Saddam's decadent palaces. We wanted to see the hole where he hid, subsisting on Iraqi Spam. If it could be arranged somehow, we wanted to meet the people who'd provided him with the Spam. We wanted to go shopping in the markets in Baghdad precisely because it would be a terrible idea to go shopping in the markets in Baghdad, precisely because, as Geoff put it to me in his charmingly no-nonsense way, \"Someone can just run up to you and shoot you in the head.\" We didn't want a bomb to go off\u2014that would be too crazy and horrible even for us\u2014but if a bomb did go off, we would want to be far enough away so that we didn't die or lose any body parts and yet close enough so that we'd get to see the explosion. We wanted stories. We wanted adventures. In essence, we wanted to visit the American West circa 1870, or a big-game safari circa 1870, or basically anyplace in the world circa 1870, since that was about the last time that travelers looking for adventure didn't have to go to an actual war zone.\n\n We wanted intensity, and for a while we got it: intensity and a pleasant tingle of fear. Landing at Baghdad International Airport, where a friendly West Indian security contractor advised us to not get \"captured\"\u2014that was intense. Driving into Baghdad, past the mud-colored apartment blocks, past the clothing shops and kebab shops and various other kinds of shops: intense. Turning down an empty, rubble-heaped side street and catching our first glimpse of the hotel: intense. Everything was intense, simply by virtue of the fact that it was in Iraq. As we sat in the lobby, waiting for the bus to return from a second airport run so we could go out, we chatted with two of the security guards* assigned by the Ministry of Tourism to follow us everywhere. Faisal wore Turkish rider boots and smoked Gitanes and communicated entirely by means of his eyebrows. Khalid was more of a jokester. Popping a date into his mouth, he smiled slyly and said, \"Women, they like.\" Brendan, a nerdy IT guy from Colorado, elaborated. \"Dates are like Viagra,\" he told us. I ate a handful.\n\n Sitting there in that Baghdad hotel lobby, talking with those Iraqi guys, I couldn't stop thinking, \"I'm sitting here in a Baghdad hotel lobby, talking with these Iraqi guys.\" At some point during this three-hour wait, though, some of the tourists began to grow restless. Kieran, the Islamophilic priest, threatened to desert. He wanted to go out and smoke a hookah. \"No, no,\" said Khalid. \"Outside, very dangerous.\" In the end, Khalid won out, but Kieran made his unhappiness known. Searching through his luggage, he muttered darkly, something about spending two days to get to the bloody place and then once you're bloody there you can't even see the bloody thing.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n In the morning, we drove five hours north to Kurdish country. Kurdistan has its own security force, and compared with the rest of Iraq, it's pretty safe. We spent three days there, touring an ancient fortress and an ancient church and a quiet green park with an ancient minaret in the middle of it and, incongruously, this weird plastic-ball-in-a-pool kiddie game that you might see at Six Flags. There are vast oil reserves in Kurdistan, which, combined with the relative lack of terror, has made it a popular destination for international investors. Shooting up from the dried-grass wasteland were lots of shiny glass office buildings that looked like they'd been airlifted from Toledo.\n\n One night Peter and I hung out in the lounge of a Sheraton down the road from the much less upscale hotel where we were staying. Apart from us, the only customers were a few Arab corporate types. A Bulgarian husband-and-wife duo played Abba covers. Take a chance-chance, take a chance, take a chance.\n\nThe rest of the group had turned in for the night, and it was nice to get away from the herd; only a few days into the trip, tour-group anxiety was setting in. (Tour-group anxiety is a specific subset of social anxiety. Symptoms include embarrassment at being seen in a large group, an aversion to dining with others, and an intense fear of the questions \"Where are you from?\" and \"Where have you been?\" coupled with a contradictory compulsion to incessantly pretend you're having fun.) Peter and I drank Heinekens and talked about failed relationships. We drank more Heinekens and fell in love with the Bulgarian singer. Peter tipped her excessively and told her we were headed to Baghdad in a few days, to which she responded with the appropriate feminine gasp of awe. I hovered near them awkwardly, stealing uncomfortable glances at the keyboard-player husband, who, I'd decided at some point in the past hour, was a tragically underappreciated genius, a Bulgarian Benny Andersson, and who was now glaring at Peter with a distinctly Eastern European mixture of boredom and menace. Geri\u2014I think that was her name\u2014told us that they'd been in Iraq for a month and had never left the hotel.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n The Ministry of Tourism didn't allow Geoff to take us to the most dangerous parts of the country\u2014Mosul, Fallujah, Ashur. And Geoff himself was concerned enough to keep us from lingering on the street or in the markets (\"Someone can just run up to you...\" etc.). We were shielded from any semblance of daily life, which meant that conversation with Iraqis was mostly limited to whatever we could coax out of the Iraqi army officers who were assigned to us as additional protection at the ancient sites. In Nimrud, a 3,000-year-old Assyrian imperial city, our designated protector was a talkative, sun-pinked soldier who said he'd spent two years in the mountains fighting in the Kurdish uprising against Saddam. It was hard to follow his English, but as he spoke it became clear that he had devised an elaborate plan to immigrate to Australia wherein he'd present himself to the authorities as a terrorism expert. When I asked what he meant by \"expert,\" he pulled out his cell phone and showed us a video.\n\n This sort of thing happened a lot in Iraq. The phones would come out and you'd be grinning at a picture of someone's kids or his favorite ayatollah. One guy showed me a naked picture of his girlfriend. The soldier's video was different. It opened with a shot of a car; then the car blew up. There were screams, gunshots. A tiny figure was charging down the street, firing his rifle at something. \"This is I,\" the soldier said. A few more tourists ambled over and joined the viewing party. It was almost impossible to make out what was going on, but we were enthralled. Brendan, the IT guy, asked if we could find it on YouTube.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Most of our time in Iraq was spent on the bus. I read George Packer's not completely depressing book about the American occupation. I ate not completely terrible made-in-Iran cream-filled cookies by the package. I slept. Ingvild chattered tirelessly about the Great Game, the melancholy beauty of Persian poetry, whether she should pursue a career in diplomacy, her disappointment in the fact that we were not going to get to see the Green Zone. In the back of the bus, Chuck quietly plotted her assassination. Kieran asked Khalid whether he'd ever shot anybody. \"Yes,\" Khalid said. \"In water.\"\n\n \"I think he means he shot someone with a water gun,\" Chuck said.\n\n One afternoon our driver made a wrong turn and drove us to a checkpoint outside Mosul, arguably the most dangerous city in Iraq. Realizing what was happening, Geoff jumped out of his seat, furious. \"What's the matter with him?\" he shouted at our interpreter, Mohammed. \"Idiot! Idiot! Now we'll stay here for an hour probably!\"\n\n \"We will stay here five minutes,\" Mohammed said calmly.\n\n \"I'm 70,\" Geoff retorted, \"I want to live to see 80. How do you think I lived this long? By being very, very careful.\"\n\n I looked to Khalid for reassurance. \"No problem,\" he said. A few minutes later a soldier waved us to the other side of the road. We joined the traffic flowing out of Mosul and drove away.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n On a bright morning toward the end of the trip, we drove an hour south of Baghdad to a site that I'd have been very excited to see, had I been more into antiquity, or God, or heavy metal. We were headed to Babylon, the world's first great city and, according to one interpretation of the Bible, the symbol of the evil empire that will usher forth the apocalypse. (The book of Revelation foretells that the end of days will come after the Whore of Babylon, a.k.a. the \"Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the Earth,\" meets her ruin at the hands of a seven-headed beast.)\n\n On a hill overlooking the site stood a huge palace constructed as part of Saddam's attempt to restore the city to the glory of its ancient, Jew-enslaving past. We explored the gutted, empty halls. American troops had succeeded in covering nearly every inch of wall with short declarative sentences: FUCK SADDAM and AMERICA RULES and, cryptically, YOU ARE HERE. Chuck took out a pen and scrawled a message of his own: CANADA LOVES IRAQ.\n\n Our extra security detail for the day was led by a policeman who said he'd worked for the Americans as an interpreter. He asked us to refer to him by his American nickname, Timmy. Timmy had a deep tan and perfect white teeth that looked like they'd been carved from a bar of soap. As we toured the ruins, he entertained us with war stories, interrupting himself every few minutes to share some interesting Babylon-related factoid.\n\n \"Once, I am hit by IED,\" he said. \"Three guys were killed. We lost Ray, he's a soldier, and Stillman, he was a medic, and Williams, he was a sergeant. It was very bad.\" He pointed to a statue of a lion: \"The Lion of Babylon. He is very strong.\" We took a picture. \"Another time, an IED killed Dix. It sprayed blood out.\"\n\n Ray, Stillman, Williams, Dix. I was fixating on these names, thinking about how their families would feel if they knew we'd come here\u2014paid to come here\u2014for kicks, when I heard Timmy say something.\n\n \"But I like them days.\"\n\n I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. \"You liked those days?\"\n\n \"I like fighting. I like the danger. I like to work with it.\"\n\n It took a moment for me to formulate a response. \"You think it's fun?\" I asked. \"Oh yeah,\" he said, \"very fun.\"\n\n He was grinning.\n\n \"You're crazy, man,\" I said.\n\n He laughed. \"Somebody told me, 'You're crazy, man.' But I'm telling you, believe me, every day we shoot by mortars, IEDs, rockets, every day blood. I pray God, 'Please don't let me see the blood every day,' but every day blood. But I like it.\" Gripping an imaginary trigger with one hand and holding the other hand in the air as though supporting the barrel of an assault rifle, he turned slowly from left to right, making shooting noises. Imaginary bad guys in beards and turbans were dropping all around us. Timmy might as well have been a kid playing G.I. Joe, except for one realistic detail. \"The shells,\" he said, slapping frantically at his lap. \"Hot!\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n That afternoon we got back on the bus and followed Timmy and his unit in their truck to the fabled birthplace of Abraham. A small turquoise-domed mosque marked the spot. As we approached, I saw Timmy standing in the doorway gesturing at a tall man in clerical robes. \"Muslim?\" the man asked, turning to us. It was clear from his expression that he wasn't about to invite us in for tea and sharing. He and Timmy shouted at each other for a few moments in Arabic, and then Timmy did something alarming. He put a hand on the man's shoulder and pushed him, forcefully enough to make him do a humiliating little crab dance away from the door. \"Please, come in,\" Timmy said to us. This was an order, not a suggestion.\n\nI considered our options. We could stay outside, undermining Timmy's authority. Or we could enter, aggravating whatever offense we'd already caused the cleric. Colin, a retired doctor from England who traveled with a watercolor set, went in first. A few more followed, and then I joined them, sneaking a quick look at the cleric as I walked past. He was staring straight ahead, his face a tight knot of resentment. Even as it occurred to me that he was very possibly praying for our destruction, if not actively planning it, I guiltily muttered, \"Thank you.\" When I got back outside, he was gone, and most of the group had wandered off. \"What just happened?\" I asked Timmy.\n\n \"I tell him this holy place is not just for Muslim,\" he said. \"Abraham is prophet for Christian and Jewish, too.\" His voice was shaking. \"That's what I tell this jack-off,\" he said, \"and maybe now he kill me.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n When you are relaxing in the safety and comfort of your home, thinking about going to Iraq and wondering how you'd react if something frightening were to happen there, it is easy to imagine that you would remain cool and calm. When that something actually occurs, however, especially if it occurs in the middle of a vast unsettled expanse of shrub and rock\u2014literally a biblical wilderness\u2014you may find yourself hurrying over to your travel companions and greeting them in an overly cheerful yet panicky voice that simultaneously says \"Great mosque!\" and \"Let's leave immediately.\"\n\n I found most of the group clustered on the edge of a plateau across a broad valley from a rocky, barren mound\u2014the remains of a ziggurat. \"We've got a problem,\" said Chuck. A bunch of soldiers had just arrived and were now ordering everyone to stay put and not approach the ziggurat. Squinting toward the valley, I could make out a small figure winding his way there. Someone had finally gotten fed up with soldiers and clerics and security guards telling us where we could and couldn't go. It was Geoff.\n\n Chuck and I ran after him, shouting that the soldiers were taking a shortcut in an attempt to cut him off. \"Let them bloody shoot me,\" said Geoff, \"I don't mind.\" Sure enough, when we got to the top, a soldier was waiting there, waving frantically. \"No picture, no picture!\" he shouted.\n\n We retreated in silence back to the bus. Most of the group were already inside. The soldiers were speaking heatedly with Khalid and Faisal. I felt certain we were about to be arrested. Colin sat on the ground fifteen feet away from them, placidly watercoloring.\n\n I was trying to determine whether I'd be allowed to keep my tape recorder in jail when, just like that, the soldiers got back in their truck and rumbled off. Khalid and Faisal herded us back onto the bus. Nothing had happened. Still, as we drove away, a feeling of excitement surged through the group. We'd seen something. Not a bomb, not even a fight, but something. A glimpse of the Iraq we'd imagined.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n On the last day of the tour, Kieran gave me his card. It depicted Jesus as a sort of Hindu deity, flames pouring out of his stigmata. Willem and Cristina's showed them lugging their backpacks toward the horizon. Peter, who hadn't stopped talking about the Bulgarian girl since the Sheraton, promised to stay in touch. And then they were gone. The tour had ended. My Iraq adventure, however, had not. Somehow I'd accidentally managed to book my ticket so that I left a day after everyone else. I now had twenty-four hours in Baghdad by myself. Freedom at last! I could wander the streets, shopping at markets we'd been forbidden from entering, striking up conversations with strangers about politics and war! I could go find one of those art galleries I'd read about in the Times! I could befriend some young intellectual types who would invite me back to their homes and offer me tea!\n\n I stayed at the hotel.\n\n The hotel manager, Sadr, an almost obsequiously nice guy who said he worked part-time as a Tae Kwon Do instructor and had the taut, muscular build of someone who could drop-kick you across a dusty alley, gave me a string of prayer beads, which I wore for two months after the trip and showed to anyone who asked how I spent my summer. He gave me a tour of the hotel: Here was the courtyard with its generators, which he needed because the power still went out all the time in Baghdad; here was the kitchen, where a guy in a chef's hat took a break from slapping chicken breasts onto a log of shawarma to wish me \"bon app\u00E9tit\"; here was a clerk who showed me his cell-phone pictures of sexy Iraqi pop stars; and here was the gentleman who'd serve as my guide for the rest of my stay. He was 9 years old.\n\n Hassan was Sadr's son. He was a sweet-faced kid with a hairstyle that looked like it had been fussed over by a professional. For the next few hours, he followed me around everywhere, gabbing at me in an endless stream of Arabic. We ate dinner together, played soccer in the courtyard. He taught me how to count to ten in Arabic. And before turning in for the night, we watched TV.\n\nThe TV was an enormous flat-screen propped up on a stand in the corner of the lobby. Hassan proudly marched me over to it and flipped through the channels, talking nonstop, indifferent to the fact that I couldn't understand a word. Finally he found what he wanted to show me\u2014the American channel.\n\n A Justin Timberlake video was playing. It was for that 2007 song \"What Goes Around Comes Around.\" I know this probably reveals me to be some kind of crank or recluse, but this was the first time I'd seen it. Hassan sat staring at the screen with that narcotized, vacant expression that kids get watching TV even when what they're watching is absolutely insane, which this was. It was a ten-minute pop opera with dialogue interludes, Scarlett Johansson making out with Justin Timberlake, Scarlett Johansson making out with some other guy, and then, for no apparent reason, Scarlett Johansson dying in a horrible car crash. Scarlett Johansson's corpse sprawled out on the road, the camera panning up to the blue American sky. I felt like I'd stumbled upon some bizarre artifact of a strange and violent civilization. I felt like a tourist."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/iraq-vacation-saki-knafo-tourist?currentPage=1>