Out of Iraq – 2018

In September 2017, a month after I left my bike in Sulaymaniyah, disagreements between Erbil and Baghdad resulted in restrictions on international flights into Kurdish points of entry. It was not until August 2018, that I took a flight to Suli via Doha and collected the KTM from its military caretakers. The bike was immaculate… they had even rebuilt the front end, fixed the leaking fork seals, oil change, far better state than it had been for the last 10,000km

I was short of time, so spent a night in Erbil and then decided to visit Mosul which was quieter (post-Isis) than it had been the year before… a bit knocked about… but lovely people. A punctured rear tyre and 47 degs in the shade made the trip north from Mosul into Turkey memorable for the wrong reasons.

With nowhere to buy a new tyre on the Turkish/Syrian/Iraqi border I rode 1,000km north to a KTM dealer outside Tbilisi, Georgia… left the bike there for a few weeks… returned and rode the machine to Burgas, Bulgaria via the southern shores of the Black Sea.

That was 2018