13-Day Grand Iraq » Babylon to Basra, Mosul and Kurdistan

Our representative meets you inside the terminal at Baghdad International and walks you through the visa-on-arrival desk — the part most travellers worry about, and the part we handle. From there it is a short drive into the city along the road that was once the most dangerous stretch of tarmac on Earth and is now simply a road. Iraq tends to reorder your expectations within the first hour. The rest of the evening is yours to sleep off the flight.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

A full day in a capital that was, for five hundred years, the richest and most learned city on the planet. You start at the Iraqi National Museum — Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian treasure across twenty galleries, including the Warka Vase and the Lady of Uruk, both looted in 2003 and both recovered. Then Mutanabbi Street, the booksellers' street named for a 10th-century poet, where the old saying still holds: Cairo writes, Beirut prints, Baghdad reads. You finish at the split blue dome of the Al-Shaheed Martyrs' Monument and at Firdos Square, where a statue came down in front of the world's cameras in 2003.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

South to Babylon — the Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way, the Lion of Babylon, Saddam's palace on its artificial hill — then out into the desert to the Abbasid fortress of Al-Ukhaidir, standing alone in the sand since around 775 AD. Continue to Karbala, arriving as the golden shrines light up for the evening.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

Karbala's golden shrines in the morning, then Al-Kifl — a small town on the Euphrates where the Tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel sits beneath a Jewish-built dome, wrapped in Hebrew inscriptions, inside what is now a mosque. It is one of the last visible traces of the Jewish community that lived in Mesopotamia for 2,500 years. Continue to Najaf and the shrine of Imam Ali.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

South to Ur, the Sumerian city that was old when Babylon was new. The Great Ziggurat, built around 2100 BC for the moon god Nanna, is the best-preserved in Mesopotamia — a three-tiered mountain of mud brick with a monumental staircase you climb yourself. Beside it stand the royal tombs where Leonard Woolley found the Standard of Ur and the golden headdress of Queen Puabi, and the modest brick house identified by tradition as Abraham's. Overnight in Nasiriyah.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

A morning among the reeds of the Mesopotamian Marshes in a mashuf canoe, with the Ma'dan and their water buffalo — a UNESCO site, the largest wetland in the Middle East, and by tradition the Garden of Eden. Then to Al-Qurnah, where the Tigris and the Euphrates finally meet, and where a gnarled trunk behind a low wall is shown to visitors as Adam's Tree. Continue to Basra for the night.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

Basra was the Venice of the East — a port of canals and shanashel, the ornate carved wooden balconies that lean over the water on the old Ashar creek. Many are collapsing; a few are being saved. The Basra Museum occupies one of Saddam's riverside palaces and holds the Sumerian collection of the south. You walk the Shatt al-Arab corniche where the two great rivers run to the Gulf, then return north to Baghdad.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

North to Samarra to climb the Malwiya, the anticlockwise spiral minaret of 851 AD. Then out into the desert to Hatra — a Parthian caravan city that twice broke Roman armies under its walls, its temples mixing Greek, Roman, Arab and Mesopotamian gods in a way that exists nowhere else. ISIS filmed themselves destroying it; most of it stood. Continue to Mosul for the night.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

The Old City of Mosul in the morning — the leaning minaret of Al-Nuri, being rebuilt stone by stone, and the alleys behind it. Up the mountain to Mar Mattai, a Syriac Orthodox monastery founded in 363 AD, still occupied, with a view over the whole Nineveh plain. Then Lalish: the holiest place on Earth for the Yazidis, a valley of conical fluted spires where you must walk barefoot and must not step on a threshold. The Yazidis were subjected to genocide by ISIS in 2014. They are still here, and they will welcome you in.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

Into Iraqi Kurdistan. Amedi sits on top of a flat-topped mountain, a town on a plinth, walled and reached by a single road, inhabited for three thousand years and — by one tradition — the home of the Three Wise Men. The drive north takes you through the Zagros foothills, a green, cold, utterly different Iraq. Overnight in Soran.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

The Rawanduz gorge is the deepest canyon in Iraq, and the road through it is one of the great mountain drives of the Middle East. You ride the Korek cable car up to 2,000 metres for the view across to Iran and Turkey, stop at the Bekhal waterfall on the way down, and come into Erbil in the evening.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

Akre is a town built up the side of a bowl of mountains, famous for the Newroz fire festival when thousands carry torches up the slopes at once. Back in Erbil, you climb the Citadel — a tell of packed mud-brick layers rising 30 metres above the modern city, continuously inhabited for at least 6,000 years, which makes it the oldest place people have never stopped living in.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

A final morning in Erbil and a private transfer to the airport for your flight home.