Geli Ali Beg is the waterfall Iraqis carry in their pockets: printed on the five-dinar note of 1978-1990, and on the 5,000-dinar note in circulation today. The drop itself is modest — roughly a dozen metres of water over a limestone lip in a narrow gorge of the Zagros foothills, where the Rawanduz, Sidakan and Khalifan rivers come together. The name belongs to the gorge rather than to the water. Geli Ali Beg means Ali Beg's gorge, and it remembers Mîr Elî Beg, the Yazidi prince of Sheikhan. He was executed in this valley in late 1833 on the orders of Mir Muhammad of Rawanduz, who had marched some ten thousand Yazidi captives to his capital and ordered them to convert to Islam. For a long time the falls were hearsay to most Iraqis, walled off by cliffs; then, between 1928 and 1932, a New Zealand engineer cut a road through the Rawanduz canyon, and the gorge finally got the drive that still delivers people to it.
What waits at the bottom depends on the month. In the spring melt the fall runs brown and thunderous and swamps the rocks; by late summer the same lip splits into thin white ropes down a mossy wall and the pool settles into clear green. That is when the boats go out — battered inflatables hauled along ropes strung across the water until they sit right under the curtain, everyone aboard soaked and shouting. A railed walkway keeps drier visitors at eye level with the drop. This is no wilderness: around half a million people come each year, nearly all of them Iraqi, and tea and kebab stalls line the approach while families spread lunch on the rocks. The gorge stays cool while the plains below bake, and the cliff-hugging Hamilton Road above is half the reason people make the drive at all.