Geli Ali Beg Waterfall is a fall of some 80 metres in a gorge of the Zagros mountains in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, near Rawanduz in Erbil governorate, printed on the country's banknotes for decades, and it is reached by the Hamilton Road, a highway blasted through the canyon in the 1930s, and visited on Fridays by families from Erbil who ride inflatables to the foot of the curtain and eat kebab in the lane of stalls. The fall is where the streams of the Rawanduz, Sidakan and Khalifan rivers come together and drop over the lip of the gorge, coming down a narrow chute above the plunge, spreading across a limestone shelf and tipping over the wide lip in one white sheet into a pool, and nobody agrees on its height, since the figures run from 80 metres to over a hundred depending on what is counted; it was on the five-dinar note of Saddam's Iraq and is on the Kurdish region's tourist posters. Boatmen pull battered inflatables along ropes strung across the pool until the passengers sit directly beneath the falling water, for a few minutes, and there is no version of it that stays dry.
The Hamilton Road is the way in, built between 1928 and 1932 under the New Zealand engineer Archibald Hamilton to link Erbil to the Iranian border, clinging to the wall of the Rawanduz canyon and swinging above a gorge hundreds of metres deep, and the falls lie a few kilometres beyond the town. In spring the Zagros snowmelt swells the rivers and the fall turns brown and deafening, heavy enough to swamp the rocks around the pool, and once the flood passes the curtain thins to white strands and the pool clears to a cool green, with the gorge far cooler than the baking plains below. The approach path is lined with tea and kebab stalls under thatched shades. Geli Ali Beg is the waterfall on the money, and the road to it is the other monument.