Sunday, May 06, 2007

Gasoline in Iraq

Our tour sponsor, Bob, told us of purchasing gasoline back in the early '90s for two cents a gallon.

Not anymore.

And most service stations needed quite a bit of attention.

Here's a typical one:





Notice: we're not using the pretty modern pumps. Instead, we fill up from a pump that looks like this:



And the price?

Well. . . . Just before we headed back into Turkey, we filled up at one of the least expensive stations in northern Iraq:



That price is in Iraqi dinars. Except inflation has been so horrible, you're not looking at the actual price in dinars, but at one-one-thousandth (0.001) times the real price.

The price was not 0.825 dinars per liter, but, instead, 825 dinars per liter. We were able to trade our dollars at a rate of about 1300-to-1. (If I recall accurately, we could exchange a US$50 bill for 64,250 dinars).

We saw very few filling stations in Iraq. Far more common were scenes like these:







The different colored gasoline came from different countries.

No fuel is refined in Iraq itself. So some came from Turkey; some from Syria; some from Iran. . . .
blog comments powered by Disqus