Marc Surchat is an adventurer from Switzerland who is about to sail solo around the world.

When I was in Iran, it was the only time on the trip I thought about giving up, because I didn’t know how to continue. I was in Shiraz asking myself, “Should I go to Iraq? Should I give up?” My plan was to circumnavigate Africa in my Dacia Duster, so I needed to join Egypt at some point. I didn’t know if you could drive through Iraq in 2022. I didn’t know if it was safe. I didn’t know if you could get a visa to go overland. I knew you could fly into Baghdad and get a visa, but going by car, I thought, was impossible. I was researching how to ship the car directly to Dubai by boat, because this was something that other people had done, but it was expensive. So I did more research. I went to a Facebook group that is very useful, Overland Middle East. Someone posted there that they’d entered Iraq by motorcycle. I read this and said, “Okay, one person did it, so it’s possible. I am going to try.”

Border crossings are emotionally taxing when you are alone, because the officials are in a power position. There are more of them, they do this everyday, and they know the rules. They have their ways to cheat you, because they get daily practice. You’re arriving in the unknown, trying not to get fucked, and trying to cross with all the right paperwork. In this area of the world, crossing borders is a day project. It always takes six hours or more. You wake up early and you need to get a good breakfast, because you will not eat during the process. It’s exhausting and it’s disorganized. On the Iraqi side, the first guy said, “You’re missing a document.” I don’t know if it was bullshit or not, but I went back to customs in Iran. They told me, “No, you have all the documents. You don’t need this document.” So then you go back and he doesn’t want to let you go. In the end, with patience, he let me go without this paper. 

Then they stopped me again. That’s when Hassan, my Couchsurfing host in Basra, helped me to clear the Iraqi side. He came to the border and helped. The main problem is that they expect you to pay bribes. I didn’t want to pay bribes ever, to not encourage this system. I knew the temporary import permit should cost 100 US dollars, because I’d read a report from someone who’d passed a few weeks ago. They asked me for $150. I told them, “No. It’s supposed to be $100.” In this situation, officials will lie to you. They will ask you, “What car was it?” You tell them, “It was a Mercedes Sprinter.” They say, “But yours is a Duster. Because it’s four-by-four and the other one was two-wheel-drive, for you it’s $150.” They lie to you without shame. In the end, I paid the $100 bill I'd prepared and Hassan added $50 as a bribe, so we moved on in the process. Talking to the next official, who was a little bit higher ranked, we told him we’d just paid $150. He was like, “What? Who made you pay $150?” We went back with him to these guys and he got back the $50. It was so funny. He extorted from them the bribe they just took. 

When I entered Iraq, it was a breakthrough. I knew after that I was only going to go forward. There was no turning back, because you just got through this border crossing that you never want to do again and you have a one month visa in Iraq. I felt locked into the trip. It was a rubicon. The guy in Basra loved to play backgammon and smoke shisha. That’s classic Iraqi. I don’t have a lot of experience with backgammon — I like to play, but I’m a beginner. I don’t smoke, so being inside a shisha room is hard.

I left Basra slowly towards Baghdad, stopping in Al-Madinah, Nasiriyah, Najaf, and Karbala. In Iran, I slept in the car quite a lot. When I entered Iraq, I tried it in the beginning. The problem is that they are not used to people crossing by car, so what happens when you try to sleep in the car is, in the middle of the night, six people with rifles — police or military — will knock on your window. They will ask you what you're doing here, in Arabic. If they’re not happy, they’ll take your phone and your passport, so then you have nothing to translate. It’s a rough night. They treat you well, but they want to understand what you're doing there and if you’re a threat. Once they understand you’re not, they want you to sleep in a hotel and hotels are very expensive in Iraq. It’s a minimum of 50 dollars a night. It’s a hassle. So I decided that in Iraq, I would always stay with locals, finding them through Couchsurfing or a Facebook group that’s very active called Iraqi Travellers Cafe. Using a combination of those two, I found a place to sleep every night.

In Najaf, I stayed with a family a little out of the city. They took me to a place where the men from the village gather and drink chai and talk. It was a house with just one room. On the walls, there were a lot of photographs of imams and religious pictures. There were old men and young men, all the people from the village. Among the old men, some had scars on their faces. Two were military during the war. We talked about everything and nothing. Then they asked me about my itinerary. At that time, I was thinking of driving from Baghdad to the Trebil border to Jordan directly. There used to be a lot of killings on this road. These men, of course, knew about that. They told me it's very dangerous, don't go there, you will get killed. As always, I don’t really trust the first information I get, because I’ve been to a lot of places where they tell me it’s dangerous and then it’s not. 

One of the former military men thought it would be a good idea to take out his phone and show me pictures of people that got attacked by ISIS, taken out of their cars and killed and mutilated. I saw bodies on the hood of a car, naked, with the chest completely open and organs out. All the men told him in Arabic, “La, la, la,” which means “no.” They were like, “Don’t show him that. It’s not necessary.” I was disturbed for a few hours after that. I was telling my host, “That was too much.” And he was like, “Yeah, I’m really sorry. I don’t know why this old man showed you that.” I didn’t sleep well that night. We figured out that what he showed me was from 2014. Since then, ten years have passed. 2014 was really bad in Iraq, mostly the area near Syria. It's not the same. Some people crossed this road in 2022. I’ve seen reports in the Facebook group, so I think it’s fine now.

I have a theory that the more a country and people suffer, the nicer they get. Sudanese, Syrians, and Iraqis were the nicest people I met traveling. Yemenis also. They have this history of war and atrocities, but they’re super chill, hospitable, generous, and nice. In Baghdad, I was hosted by a guy named Wissam, who was a bodyguard in the Green Zone. He took me to one of his friends who was also a bodyguard, a huge guy, really muscular. He wanted to give me a gift, so he gave me a tie. I was traveling completely out of the suit world. I didn’t really think through my reaction at the time or what it meant, so I just told him, “Thank you, but I don't think I will use it.” He got offended, obviously. My friend turned to me and said, “Just take it. It’s just a gift.” I understood my mistake right away. Of course, I’m with Arabs. Another man had already gifted me a shaving machine. It's just a gift. They give you something, you accept it, and that's it. So then I took it and he was happy.

It's always interesting when you sleep at peoples’ houses in Iraq. You never see the wife. Usually, you enter the house and one of the first rooms on the side is the guest room. You sleep, eat, and do everything there. The food is prepared by the wife, but the man will bring it. If you want to wash your clothes, you give it to the man, who gives it to the wife, who will wash it, and he will bring it back. Sometimes I wanted to say thank you to the wife for cooking, but I couldn’t talk to her. You can see the children, even if they are women, even if they are teenagers. That’s okay, I don’t know why. Sometimes I took family pictures. I have one of the bodyguard and his kids. He had boys and girls, but there is no wife in there. It’s normal for them, because you cannot meet the wife in the house. 

We used to eat on the floor. They’d lay down a big sheet of plastic and we’d sit on the floor cross-legged and eat together. Because I was staying with people all the time, it was really exhausting for me. I’m more of an introvert than an extrovert. After three or four days, I was totally exhausted from talking. Like Iranians, they want to take care of you, like a parent with a child, so they will stay around. I realized in Iraq, if I wanted to rest, I would have to specifically ask to be alone. If you don’t ask for it, they will stay. They have endless energy to host you.

In Baghdad, I had problems with my Duster’s injector. The bodyguard helped me find a garage that knew something about Renault, because Dacia is Renault. We went to them, looked at my injector, and said we needed to replace it. But they didn't have new ones. So they went somewhere and, I thought, reconditioned the injector. It cost $35. I wanted to pay, but Wissam refused and paid for me. I drove from Iraq all the way to Namibia before I had a problem with my injector again. I went to a specialized place. They checked my car and the girl called me. She asked, “Did someone touch your car?” I was like, “Yes, of course. A lot of people touched my car, I crossed Africa.” She told me, “Okay, because the injector that you have is not for Renault. It’s for a Ford. It’s not supposed to work.” I was like, “Okay, but I drove from Iraq to Namibia with this.” She didn’t believe me. She was like, “It’s not possible.” They used a Ford injector that day in Baghdad. It worked all the way to Namibia.

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