The marshes of southern Iraq are one of the strangest places on earth to find in a desert. Where the Tigris and Euphrates come together in their last stretch before the Persian Gulf, the land is so flat that the water spreads out instead of flowing, forming a maze of reed beds, shallow lagoons and channels, some of them wide enough for a boat and others narrow enough to touch both banks. The East Hammar is one of the great blocks of marsh that survives here, a wide mosaic of reed and open water lying east of the Euphrates and close to the Iranian border. UNESCO inscribed the Ahwar of Southern Iraq in 2016, as both a natural wonder and the home of a unique culture.
That culture belongs to the Ma'dan, the Marsh Arabs, who for thousands of years have lived on floating islands of reed and in houses woven entirely from the same plant. Their great guest halls, the mudhif, are arched like cathedral naves in bundled reeds, and their water buffalo wade among the lilies. In the 1990s, the government of Saddam Hussein drained much of the marshes, to punish the people for the 1991 uprising and to remove a hiding place for rebels, and the area shrank to a fraction of its size. After 2003 the dikes were broken and the water came back, and many people returned, although reduced rainfall, upstream dams and salt are a continuing threat.
The birdlife is exceptional. The marshes are a wintering ground and a stopover on the route between Siberia and Africa, and they hold two species found almost nowhere else: the Basra reed warbler and the Iraq babbler. Pelicans, ibis and pygmy cormorants fill the sky in winter.
Access to the marshes involves local guides, boats, permission and a realistic look at the security situation, and the summer heat, which can pass fifty degrees in July and August, is dangerous. The cooler months, from November to March, are the only sensible time.
The nearest town on the map is Al Hartha, north of Basra, a large place with fuel and markets, and Basra, a port city on the Shatt al-Arab, has everything. The ancient city of Ur, with its great ziggurat near Nasiriyah, is the other half of the ride list, and in a landscape this old it is natural that the two stand together.