Go Speed Racer Go! Our Drive to Dohuk

“Nice to meet you,” our driver said, “but I won’t be taking you to Dohuk. This is Serkio, and you will go with him.”  Infused with the excitement of leaving work on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in boots, jeans and a t-shirt, and with the anticipation of touring Dohuk’s sights, I paid the plan change little heed.  The immediate thought of road tripping through most of Iraqi Kurdistan effectively dulled my sensitivity to traveler’s instincts.  I did not know what to expect.

Nor was I familiar in any way with the route.  Five minutes into the trip, I turned to the back and asked Christine if she had a map in her Charles Tripp book on Iraq.  It looked something like this:   

Now, those who know me are aware of my obsession with maps as well as my urgent need to know where the hell I am going.  So things got interesting when, on the way to Erbil, we decided to take what seemed like a random left off the main road.  Literally, Christine said aloud, “well this is interesting…”

And that was when we started driving fast.  The thing about riding in a car that only measures km/hr is you never know exactly how fast you are going.  That compounds the taxi cab paradox best described in Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up as a lackadaisical attitude toward the driver’s recklessness, “Well I would never try that in my car,” the passenger chuckles, unaware of his impending doom.  Despite this state of ignorance, I feared going to sleep. When the sun eventually fell below the horizon, the trip became a blur of windy roads and small villages whose names registered little more to me than landmarks which went dutifully recorded in my notebook.  I would relay them here, but because they were written in the dark while careening over pothole-filled roads, that page looks more like an abstract painting.

Sometime after Shaqlawa the highway cut through a small town.  While passing a car perusing the wares of this town’s highway souq, our driver hit the leaves of a harvested plant hanging out of the back of a truck with the front of the driver’s side wheel.  Almost instantly, the car smelled like a freshly cut lawn.  The aroma, transcending time and place, brought me back to the suburban sidewalks of Connecticut on a Sunday afternoon.  It was as if I was no longer in a car hurtling through Kurdistan at exhausting speeds.  Then the driver opened the window, and the smell was gone as soon as it came.

We arrived unexpectedly in front of the Sulav Hotel at 7:30pm.  Serkio the Speed Racer finished the trip that normally takes five and a half hours in a harrowing four.  Thoroughly strung out by such an extended trip at high speeds, our nerves took very quickly to the bottle of red wine that beckoned from the bottom of Christine’s bag.  After leaving our effects in the rooms, we found a taxi driver to take us to the Dilshad Palace Hotel restaurant, one of the few places that offered what used to exist among Christine’s belongings.  The attentive waiter informed us that the hotel could not offer wine in a carafe, which, unbeknownst to him, was fine with us.  With it, we ate a dinner of mediocre Lebanese food in a near-empty ballroom, simultaneously thanking the powers for granting us safe passage to Dohuk and attempting to forget the incident altogether.

Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer
He’s a demon on wheels
He’s a demon and he’s gonna be chasing after someone
He’s gaining on you so you better look alive
He’s busy revving up the powerful Mach Five
And when the odds are against him and there’s daaangerous work to do
You bet your life Speed Racer’s gonna see it through

 

 Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer go

He’s off and flying as he guns the car around the track
He’s jamming down the pedal like he’s never coming back
Adventure’s waiting just aheeeeeeeeaaaaad

Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer Go!