7-Day Iraq » Baghdad, Babylon, Ur, the Marshes & Samarra

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, capital of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar II, and the city that gave us the Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel story and the first written code of law. You walk the Processional Way through the reconstructed Ishtar Gate — the original is in Berlin — past the basalt Lion of Babylon, and up to Saddam Hussein's palace, which he built on an artificial hill overlooking the ruins so that he could be photographed above Nebuchadnezzar. Continue to Karbala, one of the holiest cities in Shia Islam, arriving as the shrines light up at dusk.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

Karbala in the morning: the golden-domed shrine of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, killed here in 680 AD in the battle that split Islam into Sunni and Shia. Then Najaf, where the shrine of Imam Ali sits beside Wadi al-Salam — the Valley of Peace, the largest cemetery on Earth, five million graves stretching to the horizon. In the afternoon you reach the Great Ziggurat of Ur, built around 2100 BC, the best-preserved ziggurat in Mesopotamia, and the traditional birthplace of Abraham. You can still see the bullet scars from 1991 and the airbase the Americans built beside it.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

The Mesopotamian Marshes are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the largest wetland in the Middle East, and — by long tradition — the site of the Garden of Eden. The Ma'dan, the Marsh Arabs, have lived here for five thousand years in mudhifs: vaulted cathedral-like guest houses woven entirely from reeds, without a single nail. Saddam drained the marshes in the 1990s to punish the people living in them; after 2003 the dykes were broken and the water came back. You go out among the reeds in a mashuf, the long canoe of the marshes, with water buffalo swimming alongside. It is the strangest and most beautiful thing in Iraq.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

A final run north to Samarra to climb the Malwiya — the 52-metre spiral minaret built in 851 AD, still the strangest silhouette in Iraq — before returning to Baghdad and transferring to the airport for your flight home.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

A relaxed morning and a private transfer to the airport in good time for your flight, with our representative to see you through departure formalities.