Travel Story: The Iraqi Sheik and the Taxi Driver

I have thought about this story a few times since I heard it, and decided to share it here even though it is almost certainly apocryphal.

Due to last minute travel plan changes, we ended up in Amman airport in Jordan this past Christmas eve. (Well, it was past midnight, so it was technically Christmas Day.) We hopped on to the airport bus at 2am and got dropped at Abdali bus station close to 3am.

The pouring rain practically forced us to get on a taxi, and the driver wanted to take us to a hotel where he could get a few Jordanian Dinars (JDs) as commission for his effort. This is the story that the taxi-driver told us, speaking English with a middle-eastern accent, while driving us to our hotel.

Our taxi driver had a friend who was also a taxi driver. Two months earlier, this other taxi driver had picked up an Iraqi sheik with a huge suitcase as a customer. (Ever since the fall of Saddam's regime, several Iraqis have been crossing the border into Jordan, a country that is relatively peaceful in this tumultuous region.) This Sheik directed the taxi driver to take him to any really good hotel, the price didn't matter. Before the sheik got off, he asked for the taxi driver's cellphone number.

The next day the sheik called the taxi driver, and directed him to take him to a different hotel where he could check in. Then, the same thing happened the following day -- the sheik with his big suitcase moved to yet another hotel. This went of for 5 days, the sheik switched hotels every single day.

Finally, it was time for the sheik to leave Amman. He summoned the taxi driver to pick him up from his hotel. "Do you know what's in my suitcase?" the sheik asked the cab-driver just as he was getting off the cab. The driver, of course, didn't. The sheik then told him that he had over 2 million U.S. dollars cash in it and left, hefting the mammoth suitcase.

That's the story our cab driver told us, while taking us to a hotel. Amman is a neighboring city to Iraq, and it's possible that some people in Iraq might have access to money that probably wasn't theirs. It was very late at night, I was jet-lagged and so it was easy to believe that there was some truth to the story. May be the sheik had an urge to show off to the taxi-driver, or may be the taxi driver just made the whole story up.