IRAQ#2 - The Story About the Traveling Band Caspian Caravan and the Journey Over Land to India Part 5 - Tv-Stars in Iraq!

Welcome again to the story about when I traveled overland to India with a band, funding all our expenses with music. A journey that took 1 year and 8 months, through 32 countries!
In this fourth part we are still in Kurdistan Iraq - I wrote about our arrival and first day in Iraq in this post yesterday:

Part 4 - Kurdistan, Iraq

And if you want to catch more up here are the previous parts:

Part 1 - West Turkey - The Beginning
Part 2 - Central Turkey - Cappadocia & Malatya
Part 3 - East Turkey - Diyarbakir, Kurdistan

Caspian Caravan becomes TV stars in Erbil, Iraq!

In the last episode a mystical guy came out of nowhere, met us, showed us around in the 7000 year old Citadel, called his friends from the TV, who came and picked us up in their pick-up!

Sparrow and Pete - that's how TV stars cruise in Iraq!

We just arrived in Erbil that same day, and didn't know where we were gonna sleep (we usually always slept out or got invited to people's homes), but here we were with one of the main TV stations in Kurdistan Iraq - Zagros TV - and they had a deal!

Matt with Erbil Centre in the background

They wanted to follow and film us for 5 days while they would put us in a hotel and pay for all our expenses!
Why not!

me in the clean hotel bed!

Just the hotel was very exciting for us..! As I mentioned, we never stayed in hotels. We were living the gypsy traveler life, hitchhiking, sleeping out in tents or just under the stars in our sleeping bags (as only me and Sparrow had a tent and the 3 others would just role out their mats) (apart form Jeff who only had his yoga mat which he would not sleep on, but that's another story..!)
But here we suddenly had a fairly luxurious hotel room with clean beds and bathtub - soap and (non alcoholic) mini bar included!

And in the morning Nihad and Fallah from the TV station would pick us up and drive us somewhere and film our strange behaviour..!

me and Sparrow, "being famous"

Actually I didn't take that many pictures from our ventures with Zagros TV, since everything was being filmed, and I was expecting to get a lot of filmed materials in the end

"Being Fallah'd" - aka being followed by our camera man Fallah

Basically they drove us around to places, where we would play music, and give a few interviews about our life.
They took us to the music academy..

... where we played some songs and talked and jammed with the students.

They took us to some fancy parks and shopping malls, but after having done this for 2-3 days, we were like "hey, you wanted to film our life.. but this is not what we do normally..!"
Well, the school maybe yes, it was interesting to talk with the young people in Iraq and see how similar it actually was to a "western" music academy

Me and a beautiful Kurdish music student

But the shopping mall and all these "protected" rich areas, were never our goal, we wanted to see the real Kurdistan Iraq, we were usually on the streets playing, meeting all kinds of people, getting invited to all kinds of homes, very often poor ones. We were not here to be driven around to just the new shiny areas and not seeing the other side.

streets like this were just behind the fancy streets we were 'placed' at

I mean, we were in Iraq! On the News we heard about a country in conflict, in war, we wanted to know what was actually going on, behind the TV facade we had seen in the West, and now also behind the TV facade Zagros TV had put up for us, which were almost two polar opposites!

So we suggested them filming us playing on the street in Downtown Erbil, like we would normally do. They didn't like the idea much, but in the end they agreed.
We thought it would be like it usually was when we had played in Turkey, but this was after all not Turkey! It went fine in the beginning, but very very quickly the crowd around us became bigger and bigger and people were getting closer and closer, until a big pushing crowd was so close to us, that we found ourselves being pressed up against the wall, and the TV team had to rescue us out from there!
The attention was so big, because even though we had been some quite rural places in Turkey, Iraq is just a place where foreigners don't come, and especially not some who starts playing music!
They just had never seen anything like it. And I guess that's also the reason why we were teamed up with a film team following us after just a few hours in the city!

Jeff back in the hotel

So we had a fun time playing famous, in some ways it was super fun, but in others, it quickly became both intimidating and a bit false kind of life.. We were also kindly asked not to mention the war in the interviews.

But instead taking funny pictures on Saddam Husseins stranded tanks!

One day we sat at the office of the TV station and suddenly saw the breaking news that Osama Bin Laden had been found! At the same time as we were playing famous in Iraq..!
It was quite a surreal situation about TV, fiction and reality. Somehow the whole world seemed like a bit of a Truman Show in some bizarre way..

We did manage to get a bit behind the facade though and got some surprises too.
We had imagined a country that would hate Americans for all the chaos and destruction they have brought with the war, but instead we met a people that were actually quite happy with the circumstances..!
The story would probably have been another, had we been in the Arab part of the country, but we were in the Kurdish part, and the Kurds were some of the people that were suffering most under the Saddam Hussein Regime.
Most destructive was the Anfal Genocide in 1986-1989 which killed between 50,000 - 182,000 Kurds and displaced millions from their homes. Special targets were in and around Kirkuk, which are in the valuable oil field areas.
One musician played us a very very touching piece of music with a local instrument that could imitate the sounds of the areal bombings that was send over the Kurdish villages.

Human remains found in at a mass grave site in Iraqi Kurdistan, July 15, 2005 - Photo from Wikipedia

We talked with several people who had fled during those terrible years, and heard stories of getting smuggled out in the back of trucks. Families torn apart and friends and families lost.
The most touching was from the owner of the TV station, who had sat in darkness in the back of a truck for 3 days, without knowing anything.

After the US. Invasion the Kurdish Region of Iraq gained autonomous status and thousands could finally return to their country.

So hell yeah, let's dance on those tanks!

It was very touching to hear everybody's stories, and maybe this carefree attitude we first found strange for a country in war was their way to deal with the past and actually be able to enjoy relative peace!

The last thing we did with the TV team, on our suggestion of doing something we would actually do in real life, was leaving the city and go camping in the nature.
Our idea was 'okay let's make some real interviews and TV', but the Camera team took the camping a bit more "serious", and was more ready to have fun than make TV!

Most Kurds are muslim, and not used to drink, but they decided to bring a few beers, and suddenly our serious TV team transformed to a bunch of teenage boys, being wild and a teeny bit naughty, and they couldn't stop giggling away!
So our trip became less serious, but quite fun and we felt a bit closer to our new Kurdish friends! (again I apparently don't have a single picture from this trip, though I feel like I took some..)

Then we left the team and the K.Melody Hotel..

.. for a new adventure! There will be one more chapter from Iraq, before returning to East Turkey!

Oh yeah and the "Documentary" they did on us? I really don't know! We were told it was going to be send this and this day and we could stream it online. When the day came it didn't appear and we were told it wasn't finished, they would tell us when. We never heard anything and have lost contact since. So I've never seen any of the 5 days of film or know if it was ever send.
But no matter what, we had a really great and special experience with the team that left a huge impression on me.

Thank you for stopping by! Follow for the continued adventure! Upvotes and Resteems are always appreciated! <3

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