Day Trips from Iraq

The rebuilt blue-glazed walls of Nebuchadnezzar's palace climb beside the Euphrates, while just down the road Borsippa's ruined ziggurat stands raw and wind-scoured.

The 50-metre Malwiya tower corkscrews above the Tigris like an outsized snail shell, ringed by the endless, sand-blasted bricks of the ninth-century Great Mosque.

The planet's largest single-span brick arch still vaults 37 metres high, followed by a pause at Salman Pak's ancient taq-i kisra palace on the Tigris bank.

A 6,000-year-old citadel caps Erbil's old city bazaar, while two streets away the textile museum keeps hand-woven Kurdish rugs alive with the clack of wooden looms.

The cascade hurls 30 metres over limestone cliffs before winding through the Rawanduz Gorge, framed by oak forests and stone huts of passing shepherds.

Walk the actual ziggurat that once loomed above Abraham's birthplace, then push on to Eridu's sand-drifted temple mound, reckoned the world's first city.

Slip through narrow channels between floating reed islands, past buffalo herds and houses built entirely from bundled qasab reeds.