The Hamilton Road: A highway to a Kurdish paradise (2024)

"Every journey should begin with a cup of tea," said my guide Omer Hussein, as we ordered a round in the Machko teahouse in Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq. "But we should drink it the Kurdish way," he added, indicating how to sip the unsweetened liquid through a sugar cube held between the teeth. "The extra energy will be useful for the long drive ahead."

Invigorated with caffeine and sugar, we jumped into Hussein's car and set off along the Hamilton Road. Stretching 185km from Erbil across the imposing Zagros Mountains to the town of Haji Omeran on the Iraqi Kurdistan-Iran border, the road is not only considered one of western Asia's most spectacular routes, but one of its most audacious feats of engineering.

The Machko teahouse is built in the ramparts of Erbil's ancient citadel and is considered the starting point of the Hamilton Road (Credit: Simon Urwin)

Built between 1928 and 1932, it was named after lead engineer AM Hamilton, a New Zealander working for the British when they took control of Iraq following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One. The road was part of a grander plan to form a British-controlled trade route linking the Persian Gulf with the Caspian Sea, and it was built across largely unmapped terrain in the face of extreme weather, widespread pestilence and tribal conflict.

"Many Kurds still consider Hamilton and his workers as heroes for what they achieved," said Hussein, as the adobe ramparts of Erbil's ancient citadel slowly disappeared behind us in the rear-view mirror. "What used to take forever on a mule can now be done in a leisurely two days on smooth tarmac; the Hamilton Road takes you into the most beautiful parts of Kurdistan in the process."

We cleared the city's suburbs, passing by glittering new mega-malls and mosques until we came upon a much more storied construction 27km away near the village of Banaman: Khanzad Castle, the former residence of Khanzad, the so-called "Kurdish Warrior Queen" who ruled over parts of the region in the 16th Century. Hamilton also recalled Khanzad Castle in his memoir Road Through Kurdistan, in which he described the rough track of road near the fortification that he was tasked with upgrading as "an endless zigzag… with an unfinished surface of sharp rocks".

Leaving Erbil, the Hamilton Road passes the Ottoman-style Jalil Khayat Mosque, the largest in the city (Credit: Simon Urwin)

"That was a comparatively easy job for Hamilton," said Hussein. "Far more difficult and dangerous terrain lay ahead: places with no tracks at all, places where few people had ever set foot."

We continued north-east for 40km to Shaqlawa, the site of one of Hamilton's earliest road-building camps. Back then, Shaqlawa was just a tiny village; today it's one of the largest cites on the Hamilton Road, home to 25,000 people and renowned for its honey.

On a busy market day, we found the streets alive with tourists and locals – the Kurdish women wearing brightly coloured kras (floor-length dresses), the men sporting traditional jamadani (headdresses) and baggy trousers tied with pshten (cumme*rbunds.) We entered a health food store belonging to beekeeper Sabah Nasir to sample some of his wildflower honey. He told us his honey's unique floral, menthol, citrus and pine notes are because he moves his colonies along the Hamilton Road to feed on a wide variety of pollens throughout the seasons. The road has brought him other benefits too, notably more customers.

"The Kurdish diaspora come from as far away as Australia and the USA; they buy kilos of my honey at a time," Nasir said. "Westerners pass through here on their way to explore the Zagros Mountains and to climb Mount Halgurd. Hamilton's road has helped open up trade and bring modern tourism; it has opened us up to the world."

Nasir sells his honey at the natural health food store Dukani Mam Hajy in Shaqlawa (Credit: Simon Urwin)

Hamilton met his first major engineering obstacle 32km north of Shaqlawa: a 198m-high ridge rising from the desert plains to the village of Spilk, which he described as "a lonely spot with an unsavoury reputation for robbery and murder". To build a road up through the "great boulders higher than a standing man", he assembled an eclectic army of Kurdish, Arabic and Persian workers for the hard labour, while the project overseer was an Assyrian Christian, the surveyor a Bengali Hindu and the explosives expert an Armenian Jew. With so many religious beliefs to accommodate, Hamilton proposed that as a compromise, nobody should have a holy day of rest, and so they toiled seven days a week, enduring temperatures of 40C, venomous snakes and outbreaks of malaria.

"There were tribal blood feuds going on all around them, too," said Hussein, as we drove up the looping hairpin bends that they went on to construct. "The workers would show Hamilton the skulls and dead bodies that they found amongst the rocks. It was an extraordinary achievement to get them to complete their mission at all."

We crested the ridge at Spilk, where the road narrowed from four lanes to two. Hamilton described the path ahead as a "50-mile maze of gorges and canyons", but he relished the scale of this particular challenge, setting up camp near the waterfalls of Gali Ali Bag where he would remain for two years. Following ibex and goat tracks, he began mapping out the shortest possible route through the canyonlands and ordered specialist equipment from England, including jackhammers, air-compressors, steam rollers and steel bridge parts that were shipped by boat, train and truck thousands of miles to Shaqlawa, before a caravan of camels carried them up to his mountain base.

Kurdistan's Rawanduz Canyon is part of the "50-mile maze of gorges and canyons" Hamilton faced (Credit: Simon Urwin)

Hamilton and his 1,000 workers then laboured day and night, toiling under the light of hurricane lamps after dark, when the roar of snow leopards could be heard on the mountaintops. Over many months, they drilled and blasted their way through the ravines in searing heat and bitter cold as they endured attacks of dysentery and "plagues of locusts flying in clouds so dense they darkened the sun". Eventually, they cleared a way through the rock labyrinth with a smooth ribbon of bitumen and five new river bridges.

We stopped near the Gali Ali Bag waterfalls to admire a now-disused stretch of that original road: a half-tunnel carved into a sheer precipice. "My grandparents drove along here until it was diverted in the 1970s, terrified that the mountain would come down on them," said Hussein. "For a quarter-mile it was so narrow only one car could pass at a time. They'd honk their horns as a warning and pray for no oncoming traffic in case they all got stuck."

We stopped for the night at the foot of Mount Halgurd in Hussein's hometown of Choman, where we dined on the much-loved Iraqi national dish of masgouf: roasted, spatchco*cked carp. We shared the earthy, muddy-flavoured fish with his friend Sadik Dealzi, a sociologist, who told us he saw two principal side effects of Hamilton's road for the Kurds. The first was that schools were built in a region with high illiteracy rates, which led to the education of male and female doctors, lawyers and engineers – something unheard of at the time. Secondly, it linked the scattered mountain communities, giving them a sense of common identity and a desire to preserve their traditions and beliefs.

Iraq's national dish of masgouf is often cooked over a fire to crisp the carp skin (Credit: Simon Urwin)

Later that evening, Hussein's wife, Nasreen, shared a story of one such local belief. Years ago, her grandfather-in-law had gone missing on Mount Halgurd after an avalanche and was presumed dead. "So, the family went looking for a pure-black co*ckerel," she said. "It was taken to the slopes where it walked about on the snow for a long time until it suddenly stopped and crowed – only once. In that same spot, they dug and found the corpse. We don't need a helicopter or mountain rescue – we have the black co*ckerel."

The next morning, after a traditional breakfast of flatbread, sheep's yoghurt and honey, we set out, stopping briefly to pick up an elderly hitchhiker, Ahmed Ali, who was heading home to Haji Omeran laden with purchases from Choman's bazaar. As the road climbed, the landscapes softened into broad, gently sloping valleys. For Hamilton, construction of this final serpentine stretch was a breeze: "What was left to do we could take in our stride," he wrote. Our own progress was rather more faltering, brought to regular standstills by sluggish diesel trucks heading for the border and flocks of fat-tailed sheep crossing the road on their way to fresh highland pastures.

"Even though the road has brought the farmers new markets for their mutton and tail fat (popular amongst mountain Kurds as cooking oil), in many ways, their lives are just as hard as they were centuries ago," said Hussein. "Brown bears and wolves kill the sheep, and eagles steal the young lambs."

Mount Halgurd towers in the distance above the Hamilton Road near Haji Omeran (Credit: Simon Urwin)

Two hours later, we finally pulled into Haji Omeran, a scruffy, scrappy kind of town with a frontier feel. Ali explained that many of the town's 500 or so families were part-time residents, choosing to escape the harsh winters for the relative comforts of Erbil. "Only a few of us brave the -20C temperatures and 10ft snow drifts. It makes you realise what Hamilton and his workers went through all those years," he said, before collecting his belongings from the car boot. "But only by suffering the winter can you truly appreciate the beauty of spring, summer and autumn. Those are the times to come here. Then you will see how Hamilton built a road to a Kurdish paradise."

By the time his job was complete, Hamilton had fallen in love with Kurdistan – so much so that he was too emotional to bid his team farewell. Instead, he wrote of his final glimpse of the "wilderness of snow-bound peaks, barren as the mountains of the moon", adding "the picture of it all will live forever in my memory".

The Open Roadis a celebration of the world's most remarkable highways and byways, and a reminder that some of the greatest travel adventures happen via wheels.

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