Photo Link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/2o5VUQDpaEv7j3kU8
So after Diwali, I first flew to Dubai for a couple of days in order to get my Afghan visa. Getting the visa was a shockingly straightforward and easy process. Showed up to the Afghan consulate shortly after they opened, and spent about an hour shuffling around various desks and bureaucrats to answer basic questions and provide info about myself, with a good chunk of waiting. They then took my phone and sent me upstairs for an “interview”, which consisted of giving some other bureaucrat my passport and documents and then waiting in a large room for an hour. They gave me tea, water, and chocolates while I waited, and there was an extensive bookshelf there…I read/looked at this coffee table book of girl skateboarders in Kabul (obviously pre-Taliban takeover) that was curated by Tony Hawk. It was interesting that in this consulate they had the old Afghan flag displayed and pictures of the old Afghani president. Clearly not a pro-Taliban place, yet the Taliban accepts visas issued by these guys. After an hour of waiting in this room, I paid 350USD in cash and got my passport back with the visa in it. Very painless and easy process. Otherwise I just hung out in my Dubai hotel to catch up on reading and also finish up all my grad school applications. I had budgeted a second day in case the consulate had me come back the following day to pick up my passport/visa, so that extra time was actually useful for finishing up my apps.
So I had met this girl in Iraq last year while there who was from England. We stayed in touch and eventually planned on doing Afghanistan together this fall, and settled on late October/early November dates. However, she’s a corporate lawyer, and around April, she mentioned that she had some projects coming up which meant that she wouldn’t be able to go at this time. She was however a part of a Facebook group for more “out there” travel and sent me a post that another girl posted, about planning an Afghanistan trip late October to early November. I joined the group and messaged that girl, and also got lunch with her in NYC this past summer. But basically, me and one other guy (also American, from Kalamazoo, MI) wound up joining her for this trip. The guy actually flew into Dubai on my second day and had a rental car, but because I was finishing up my apps he went on a little road trip himself before picking me up that evening (our flight to Kabul was at 3am). Did a little sightseeing in downtown Dubai, and I have to say, I was shocked that I didn’t hate the city. It reminded me a ton of Shanghai (just the sheer number of massive buildings) and a bit like Singapore too (with the skyscrapers by the marina wharf and all). And I do have to say that it was architecturally pretty well done – didn’t look gaudy or ridiculous, and was overall aesthetically pleasing. But yea, in general I was pleasantly surprised that Dubai didn’t suck. That said, I’m not sure if I could spend more than two days actually hanging out there. There are SO MANY hotels there, and so many tourists, and I am just at a loss for what these tourists do because there’s really nothing to do in Dubai besides eat overpriced food, drink overpriced drinks, and gawk at (admittedly cool) skyscrapers.
The girl, Chloe, had flown into Kabul the day before us from Islamabad in Pakistan. Tregg and I got to the airport and the entire checkin process was a breeze. Boarded our flight – which had like 10-15 other international people on it, but we think most of them were NGO workers (my future!)/UN employees – and then landed in Kabul at 7am. Immigration was also a breeze – they saw our visa, gave a stamp, and waved us through. It was definitely a bit surreal to be at the same airport where *everything* was going on last August when the US pulled out of Afghanistan. But it was very peaceful and easy while we were there. Walked out of the airport and met our guide, who drove us to our hotel where we met up with Chloe, and then got a rundown of our trip. The first day was fun, as we spent like four to five hours going between different Taliban ministries to get permissions for our trip. Once that was set, we really only had time to sightsee at the Sakhi Shrine, which was this very cool Shiite mosque and tomb that was like 800+ years old (the Taliban are of course Sunni extremists, but they take security for this shrine very seriously). Very beautiful blue building with intricate tilework and designs that reminded me a lot of the architecture in Uzbekistan (and of some of the stuff in Iraq like the main mosque in Najaf, and honestly like a lot of what I know is in Iran). The shrine is actually located on the AsaMai hill, which is named after an ancient Hindu temple that used to be here, the Asha Mai temple. This is/was (there is a relatively modern temple at the base of this hill that we did not visit) apparently a famous Hindu temple, and there are various Asha Mai temples around the world that are named after this one, including one on Long Island near my hometown! In general, Kabul was much more liberal than I expected. Very few men had long beards and most were either clean shaven or trimmed like in the west. And the vast, vast, majority of women wore only hijabs and nothing more. But I guess this makes sense given that Kabul is the most progressive and most anti-Taliban city, so they will resist the most in the ways that they can.
After the shrine, we went and got dinner, which was excellent. Yet more Indian connections here…we got a plate of pakora for the table, but what came was not the Indian pakora but rather bhaji, another deep fried Indian food. There was also non for the table – just like in Tajikistan! Basically a sort of freshly baked flat-ish bread, but nothing really at all like Indian naan and pretty much just like what you have in Tajikistan. And also a shared platter of jeera rice with fruits and nuts, which was basically identical to Kashmiri Pulao rice that you get in Indian and (presumably) Pakistani Kashmir. I had a mutton kofta curry for myself…kofta is basically meatballs in the entire region from Turkey through Iran through Central Asia through India. Kind of cool how that huge swathe of land has so many cultural similarities, largely due to the Persian influence. From words (Dari is the most popular language in Afghanistan, which is a Persian dialect like in Iran and Tajikistan. And of course Hindi and Urdu were heavily influenced by Persian) to food items and desserts (samsa/samosa, pakora, naan/non, paneer, pudhina, halwa, anar for pomagranite, jalebi, etc.) to clothing (salwar kameez/pyjama kurta for men, saris for women). And another connection is that a lot of Pashtuns die their hair red with henna, which is obviously super popular in North India and Pakistan.
The next day, we woke up early and went to the airport for a one hour flight up north to Mazar, in order to see the cities of Mazar and Balkh. So Kabul is sort of like on the SW edge of the NE quadrant of the country. Not quite central, still a bit north and east. Mazar is NW of Kabul, close to the Uzbek border but still in the eastern half of the country.
This was honestly one of my best travel days ever, I think. We first went to the hotel and dropped our bags off. Our guide brought an extra salwar kameez with him that he had me wear (we’re the same size and height), and it was a perfect fit. He said we should dress local to fit in, and Tregg already had a pair he bought in Pakistan earlier this year while Chloe was in Yemen before so she already had stuff too. This wasn’t really a safety thing, but more just to make travel easier – less stops by the everpresent Taliban checkpoints while driving, can walk around the city freely without people gawking at the foreigners. Sort of like how in Iraq, the taxi drivers made me put my sunglasses on and smoke a cigarette while driving by checkpoints so they wouldn’t stop our car. Our guide said I could borrow his (it was sort of an off-pink, quite regal looking honestly) until I bought my own here. I could have brought the ones I own that I got in India, as there is no real difference between the pyjama kurta/salwar kameez that North Indians, Pakistanis, and Afghans wear. Honestly I think these look amazing on all guys, and it’s a pretty sweet look. And they are crazy comfortable, and the pockets are SO much more secure than the typical pockets you get on shorts and pants. I was even approached randomly throughout the trip by locals who would talk to me, only to have our guide come to the rescue and answer their questions (always innocent/random questions, nothing about me being a foreigner). And they would always laugh and say that I looked like a local. So I guess my outfit did the trick a little. One annoying thing was that our guide said not to wear sunglasses because that is a giveaway of being a foreigner, so we were all squinting our way through this trip.
After changing, we drove about an hour west to the town of Balkh. Balkh was the capital of the Bactrian empire, which was a Greek empire in the region post Alexander the Great. It was a hub of Zoroastrianism and then Buddhism, and served as an important city through the time of Tamerlane, so obvious connections to Uzbekistan there. The city is but a shadow of its former glory (I honestly love that phrase, very LOTR), and is now this super rural town with a few cool old ruins. It was night and day from Kabul, where every woman here was fully concealed. Honestly a bit depressing and sad everytime I saw a concealed woman this trip, though according to our guide in non-rural regions most women have always covered up, so I guess it isn’t purely a Taliban thing, and the Taliban really did not impact their everyday lives at all. It’s sort of a shitty discourse in the US where it’s like the Taliban are pure evil and Afghanistan was a paradise before they took over. The Taliban clearly suck, there is no denying that. But they have undoubtedly brought security and stability to the country – granted, they were causing a lot of that instability themselves. But even otherwise, in rural areas, the US was backing all of these super shitty warlords purely because they were anti-Taliban, and the US was notoriously droning the rural areas with heavy civilian damage under Bush, Obama, and Trump, so of course the rural population backed the Taliban as they would put an end to those warlords and to US-backed rule. It really is important to understand WHY the Taliban have such strong support bases and not just mindlessly brand them as terrorists and act confused when they are able to take over the entire country basically without any conflict. Only way to beat them is to understand the root causes and then try to tackle those. And the Taliban have cut down on corruption and bribery (Our guide was comparing them now to how the elites were looting the country by pilfering foreign aid and investments before. And he’s firmly anti Taliban so has no reason to lie…one of his brothers was killed by a Taliban suicide blast in Kabul 8 years ago. He will also remain nameless here, for obvious reasons). Though there obviously is still corruption…almost every Afghani we saw, if they had a cellphone, had one of those old Nokia brick phones, while every Taliban soldier we saw was sporting a smartphone…that’s just the most obvious example of the wealth disparity at play. But it does seem like it inarguably has gotten better with the new regime. There’s a definite tradeoff here where urban areas had women’s rights and was far more progressive while the rest of Afghanistan was in dire straits pre-Taliban, whereas now urban areas are regressing and rural areas can resume a regular life under the Taliban (albeit the rural economy is in tatters due to sanctions). There’s no easy answer here when deciding between different flavors of shit. It’s sadly just a complex and difficult situation, and these situations are rarely as black and white as the western media portrays them to be. And speaking of media, one thing I learned in Iraq is that reality on the ground is far different than what is portrayed. But as we learned during COVID, fear sells (watch out for the next big variant!), so that is no big surprise. And Afghanistan is the same…nowhere near the dangerous place that the media would have you believe.
The first thing we saw in Balkh was this really cool ~1500 year old ruins of a mosque, that was built over what was once a Buddhist monastery (and what was before that a Zoroastrian fire temple). The carvings were in crazy good condition. Just very intricate and floral, but also very geometric. Reminded me of that one super old ~1500 year old mosque, the Samani Mausoleum, that my dad and I saw in Bukhara actually. Not as much as Solomoni, but this one also weirdly reminded me of an old church in a way. My high school friend Teddy, the one who is really knowledgeable about antiquities, said that Balkh is probably the capital of looting right now. Of course, we had Taliban security guards with us the entire time when sightseeing most old sites in Afghanistan. He speculated that this was so we wouldn’t loot, so that they could maintain a monopoly on that. Speaking of the Taliban, most of the soldiers are like teenagers who all sport this Lord Farquaad-esque haircut. Kind of crazy to see. But they’re all either indifferent or mildly friendly towards us so no issues there. In Islamic countries, placing your right hand on your heart and bowing slightly is a type of greeting, so I was aggressively doing that and making eye contact with all the Taliban soliders I saw during the trip and most of them smiled back at me and returned the greeting, so I think I was pretty good at fitting in with my local clothes and brown skin with that. Or at the very least, they appreciated the gesture? Not sure.
After this old mosque ruin, we went to a more recent mosque ruin, a 500 year old one in the town center called the Green Mosque. This one was in far better shape, and resembled the mosques of Uzbekistan (and I presume Iran) with an identical architectural style. It was in fact built by Timur’s successors, so squarely in the timeline of what was built in Uzbekistan. Balkh and Mazar are only an hour or so south of the Uzbek border and the town of Termez, which my dad and I did not visit, but has some ancient Buddhist ruins. So it is quite close to Samarkand and Bukhara as well. Our final stops after this were seeing the ruins of a fortress that Alexander the Great built after conquering (which strongly resembled the kalas, or desert fortresses, that my dad and I saw near Khiva in Uzbekistan), and then the 1000+ year old city walls of Balkh, which was very cool to walk on. In general the Balkh and Mazar area geographically reminded me of Uzbekistan which obviously makes sense given the proximity – just flat and vast expanses of dryness. This entire part of Afghanistan has tons of Uzbeks and Tajiks due to how close the borders are. Afghanistan in general is ridiculously diverse…we saw local Afghans who were blonde and blue eyed, those who looked straight up east Asian, those who looked Arabic, those who looked vaguely Indian, those who were Turkic…might be *visually* the single most diverse country I’ve ever been to besides the US and UK (and up there with Russia in terms of appearances). While the Taliban are Pashtun and speak Pashto and are a plurality of the national population, the most common language is actually Dari which is a Persian dialect, which the Tajiks, Hazaras, and other smaller ethnic groups all speak. But it seemed like everyone was fluent in both Pashto and Dari. You’ll even have Wakhis in Afghanistan, from the Wakhan corridor border area with Tajikistan, and of course Kyrgyz as Kyrgyzstan is nearby as well (but does not border Afghanistan). Just a ridiculously diverse country that unfairly gets branded as a monoculture due to the Taliban. Speaking of Pashtun…there is a strong influence on India there. Many big Bollywood actors, including inarguably the biggest actor in India, Shah Rukh Khan, are ethnic Pashtuns.
So after Balkh, we drove to Mazar for lunch. Honestly had an incredible, incredible lunch. Had this dish called a Qabeli Palaw, which was basically a Kashmiri Pulao rice with a cooked lamb in the middle. Just a deliciously greasy rice dish that reminded me of some of the best rice dishes I had while in Iraq (an excellent food destination). After this, we saw the jawdroppingly beautiful Blue Mosque of Mazar, which was also like 600+ years old, and also in the Uzbek style (which, again, makes sense given the time frame). Just intricate tiled patterns everywhere. So Sunnis believe that Ali is buried here, while Shiites believe he is buried in Najaf, in Iraq – Ali is basically the cause of the Sunni/Shiite split. One of the prettiest religious buildings I’ve ever seen and definitely holds up when compared to the majesty of Uzbekistan. After this was the highlight of the day…a game of Buzkashi! I had casually mentioned to my guide about trying to catch one since I missed it while in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (where it is called kok boru) last summer, and our driver here heard of a game near Mazar so we drove out after the Blue Mosque to see this.
Buzkashi is this game that is sort of like polo, except instead of a ball you have a dead, beheaded goat that weights well over 50 kgs. Apparently the game was played with human corpses during Gengis Khan’s time (this sounds like a fun story to believe) and has since been adjusted for modernity over time. The game was pure chaos and at times tough to follow (you have a team variant and a free-for-all variant, and we happened to stumble upon a free-for-all match), but just so so much fun to watch. Such an amazingly incredible experience, definitely one of the more unique things I have done while traveling. And it was cool because some village elders with long grey beards invited me to sit down by them and watch (Chloe and Tregg weren’t as into this game as I was). The fact that we did so much other cool stuff this day was the cherry on top. After watching the match for a little over an hour, we drove back to Mazar to walk around the bazaar. It was bustling and lively, and it was refreshing and nice to see “life as normal” for everyone here. Like I said before, much like in Iraq, I think there is a huge disconnect between how the media portrays countries like these and what life is actually like. Yes, again, the Taliban suck, but it does not mean that life is a total hellhole. Human beings are resilient and make the most of their circumstances, and that beauty of that is why I really really enjoyed Iraq, and likewise for Afghanistan, especially when interacting with locals (which was obviously easier to do while solo in Iraq vs. on a guided tour in Afghanistan, but still). While here, a lady overheard us talking in English and approached us, and invited us to a sweet shop she owned. The decadent deserts here wound up being our dinner, and of course she rejected all of our forced attempts at paying. We had an amazing firni (which is identical to the North Indian desert kheer), and a type of fruit ice cream called sheer yakh ice cream, which was of course wonderful. One other random cool thing about Mazar (and another Indian connection) – auto rickshaws/tuk tuks everywhere! And they were all Bajaj and TVS, which are Indian brands too.
The next day, we woke up early to drive all the way down to Bamyan. It was a long, 13+ hour day, but this included a lunch stop and a couple of hours at these really neat old Buddhist ruins in the province of Samangan. These were all 1500+ years old, and included an impressively massive stupa that was carved into the cliffside, and these really cool Buddhist caves just down the hill from the stupa. The caves were obviously a bit like the Ajanta Buddhist caves in Maharasthra, and even like some of the caves I saw in Sri Lanka. Obviously there were no actual Buddha carvings left or any paintings, but you could see the carved in areas where the idols would have been, and carvings of pillars, arch decorations, etc that were still very, very clear. Incredibly cool to be here and be the only tourists as well.
Much like Iraq, I really got the feeling of exploring uncharted territory in Afghanistan due to the complete lack of tourists. While I missed out on some stuff in Iraq because I was solo (the medieval Samarra ruins, Ctestiphon, Hatra and Nineveh by Mosul), I also had heavy local interactions there which was just such an amazing and meaningful experience for me. On the flipside, with a guide in Afghanistan, I am basically seeing all of the major historic sites except for the Minaret of Jam (which is apparently inaccessible after September due to snowed in roads), but had very little local interaction minus our guide, who to be fair is far and away the best guide I have ever had while travelling. Just an all-round awesome dude. Speaking of the Minaret of Jam…it was built by the same dynasty that built the Qutub Minar, an impressively built minaret, in Delhi, and both are like 800 years old. Both minarets marked the endpoints of the dynasty’s boundaries, and the Minaret of Jam is just in an all-time picturesque location. Maybe next time. Anyways. there is a definite tradeoff between the two methods of travel. However, we basically needed a guide here…had well over 100+ taliban checkpoints that we drove by over the course of the trip, and while we got flagged through for the majority (due to local clothing), we would occasionally be stopped, and our guide would have to provide our tourist permit paperwork from the first day and talk to them to let us through. Doing all of that while solo would have been an absolute nightmare, especially since none of these soldiers speak English. As a quick aside, I of course was always doing my hand-on-heart Islamic greeting at these checkpoints and I think my brazenness slightly scared both Tregg and Chloe, but I honestly wasn’t scared at all. Honestly probably “interacted” with at least a few hundred Taliban and zero issues. If foreign journalists (the “enemy of the people” for all autocratic regimes) can travel around Afghanistan unmolested and without armed guards now, I figure I have nothing to worry about. In general, I will not travel to a country that foreign journalists require armed escorts for…that is basically my barometer for safety. And the fact that our guide has extensively worked with foreign journalists also made me very confident about this trip. In fact, Afghanistan is far safer now to travel around than it was before, in terms of driving between provinces (because of the Taliban-Afghan civil war and US drone strikes). Afghanistan is definitely up there with China and Iraq as the least English-friendly country I have ever been to. And speaking of having that feeling of being “one of the first” visitors to a country…traveling in Afghanistan is really like going back in time and living in an orientalist painting. While Uzbekistan *looked* like an orientalist painting in all the best ways, it really felt like a bygone era here. Part of that was for obviously unfortunate reasons, with the Taliban and the curtailment of women’s rights. But even otherwise, just walking around bazaars and being the only foreigners, and having everyone dressed in local garb (again, because of the implicit Taliban pressure). Just such an interesting and unique experience that I’m not sure I can get anywhere else (at least, anywhere else given my safety standards and my historical-based interest in visiting countries). I really thing that Uzbekistan and Afghanistan are perfect complements of each other, as in Uzbekistan you can see what medieval Islam was all about with beautiful architecture, and in Afghanistan you can experience medieval Islam with the backwardness of the Taliban. While I am partially tongue-in-cheek there, it really is such a unique experience to feel like you are back in time. And speaking of stuck in time, our guide said we were almost definitely being physically tailed by Taliban intelligence throughout our trip. In civilized countries like out west they simply hack your phones and track you, which is obviously 1000x more intrusive, but here there were actual people behind us, unbeknownst to us. Kind of funny how my first thought was “oh shit they are tracking us” but in reality this is infinitely more benign than what happens out west.
After Samangan was a looong 8 more hours to reach Bamyan. Bamyan is pretty much directly west of Kabul, so we drove down south towards Kabul before cutting southwest and hitting Bamyan. The scenery here was quite nice – very rocky and arid mountains with patches of greenery and rivers flowing through. It was like a homeless man’s Tajikistan or Spiti trip. Still obviously cool, but not breathtaking. The landscapes were honestly like a mishmash of parts of Jordan, parts of Egypt, rural Turkey, and even parts of SoCal, especially the area by Palm Springs.
On the drive, there were constant patches of damaged road and bombed out ruins near the road…our driver said these were old military bases that the Taliban had destroyed, and bombs/mines from a few years ago that had damaged the roads. Kind of surreal to see, but also crazy how quickly normalization set in…by the first few we had all gotten used to it. And speaking of normalization, seeing and interacting with literally 1000s of Taliban soliders over the course of my trip, all whom were sporting assault rifles, never really fazed me. Kind of crazy how accustomed I am to this stuff already. I didn’t really take pictures here (like I didn’t of Taliban soldiers or in city bazaars) as taking these pictures would draw unneeded attention and potential Taliban harassment. But again, despite all these draconian measures, they have still brought safety to the country side…no more wanton US drone strikes or anti-Taliban warlords who were far more ruthless but still US-backed for being anti-Taliban. Like I said before, there is no easy answer here, the country has really moved from one unfortunate situation to a worse one, but there is a reason that large swathes of the country support the Taliban.
Throughout this long drive, our driver (this was true for all the drivers we had across the country) would blare music in direct violation of the Taliban ban on music, and only turn it off when approaching checkpoints. Kind of cool to see all these small moments of resistance, no matter how benign. Shows that the people are not just submitting and still have resolve, which to me, is beautiful to see. Our guide was for some reason a big Ellie Goulding fan, so between the local music (all in Dari, and honestly sounded VERY Bollywood at times), and the occasional Iranian, Turkish, and Bollywood songs, were pop blasts from the past. And now, I have her banger “Burn” stuck as the song of this trip, so it is what it is.
We soon had to go up a few thousand meters, to a smidge below 4000, to cross a tunnel at a pass before going back down again. The roads here were not good to say the least, though still a good deal better than the Kaza-Manali stretch I had in Spiti (I don’t know if that will ever be rivaled). There were tons and tons of colorful trucks here, just like India (and Pakistan, though I obviously haven’t been). I have to say, any sort of rugged travel I have done in the past three-plus years has been in a Toyota, Afghanistan included. Toyotas are honestly the best, and if I ever do buy a car (which I doubt) I will absolutely go with them. A weird thing was that like 95%+ of all cars we saw in this country were Toyotas. Another everpresent product in Afghanistan are energy drinks…Monsters/Red Bulls/local variants quite literally everywhere. But yea, while seeing all the mountains here, it struck us that there is a definite potential for outdoor/trekking/adventure tourism in Afghanistan that can hopefully take off soon…it is already easy and safe to travel, but once the red tape goes away and it is easier to solo travel, I think the country has huge huge potential.
Lunch this day was a similar Kashmiri Pulao dish, but this time with mutton foot, which was melt-in-your-mouth fatty. Reminded me a little of all of the unorthodox cuts of meat you get that melt in your mouth in Lyon. Very filling and satisfying dish. On the home stretch to Bamyan we were driving under a perfect night sky for a few hours which was a beautiful sight. I really have been blessed with countless spotless night skies the past few months, from (especially) Galapagos to Bolivia to Kashmir to Spiti to Uttarakhand to now here.
On day 4 of 12, we did some sightseeing around the town of Bamyan. There were some old Soviet tanks that we stopped by to see on the way to the Ministry of Tourism office (we need to spend ~10 minutes whenever we enter a new province to register ourselves with the paperwork we have from our first day in Kabul). Some of them were funky and painted up in a sort of urban rejuvenation project which I thought was cool. After registration, we headed to the main draw which was of course the Bamyan Buddhas. Or rather, the former Buddhas – these were a pair of 50m+ tall Buddhas carved into the cliffside that were over 1500 years old, and destroyed by the Taliban back in 2001. Given that the Taliban is actively allowing tourism right now, one can hope that they will do a better job going forwards of cultural preservation – especially with regards to the looting that they are currently involved in selling to outside the country! While the two giant Buddhas (and a couple of “smaller” ones) are now all gone, the complex itself is still impressive – tons and tons of monastic caves just carved into a massive cliffside. I haven’t been, but it reminded me almost of those pueblo settlements in like New Mexico/that area of the US, or even Petra a bit. We even got to explore some of the caves that had some remnants of paintings in them – super cool and obvious Ajanta (from Maharasthra) vibes here. And of course, there just so happened to be a group of 5 or 6 Taliban fighters who were there while we were sightseeing. Not sure if this was a coincidence or them just tracking us – there were also some older Taliban officials from the Ministry of the Interior at our Samangan Buddhist sites who were presumably sightseeing while we were there as well.
After the Buddhist complex, we headed over to this cool place nearby called the City of Screams – it was a town of 3000 that Genghis Khan razed back in the 1200s, and the name is from the screaming of its citizens as they died. Lovely and heartwarming stuff. There were honestly tons and tons of colored pottery shards here (even more than in Afrosiab, or old Samarkand, that was also destroyed by Genghis Khan), but I didn’t want to risk any sort of shenanigans at airport security, especially with these guys in power. So I sadly resisted the urge to tomb raid here. In general, this was a very cool site that weirdly reminded me of the far, far older site of Mycenae in Greece – probably just because of the destroyed ruins on a hilltop vibe. And there were some great views of Bamyan from the top.
Speaking of great views, afterwards we drove over to some point called Dragons View or something like that, which had outstanding views of the area. Super dry rolling mountains and hills, some of the best scenery of the trip by far. Definite shades of Namibia for me with the total desolation view here. I did not pack my camera and only had my phone, so my photos do not do the landscapes justice (Chloe’s various security checks for her camera were painless but a hassle, so I’m glad I didn’t have it). Still pretty good pics though, I think! And after this we walked around the Bamyan bazaar, where I got fitted for a salwar kameez to pick up the following day, as well as buying a black shemagh (Burning Man!!!) because local Afghans actually wear that and I wanted to both fit in and look badass. The locals will either frequently wear the super versatile shemagh, or this longer garment that can be wrapped around for warmth (Bamyan was cold!) and honestly looked straight up like a toga when wrapped. My pet theory is that Alexander the Great and the Greeks that followed brought the toga to this region and this is the modern version of that, and I will not be swayed by evidence to the contrary. Bamyan is a very liberal town by Afghan standards – we saw tons of girls with backpacks as they are allowed to attend university here, and almost no girls had face coverings and just hijabs. And there were tons of cars driving around with the windows down blaring music. Again, good to see that things aren’t quite as hardline as they could be, and hopefully these baby steps can continue. The most important thing I feel is an inclusive government…Pashtuns are only a plurality of Afghanistan so to have a government without Hazara/Tajik/etc. representation will almost certainly not end well in the long run.
The next day, we picked up our fitted clothes (Chloe and Tregg also got these) before heading over to Band-e-Amir National Park, directly to the west of Bamyan. My last full day in my guide’s salwar kameez, though I did wear my new black shemagh. We drove about 90 minutes west to the Band-e Amir National Park, which was situated at like 3200 meters above sea level, so a good bit above Bamyan which was closer to around 2500 meters above sea level. The drive there was awesome and reminded me a bit of Bolivia, with the vast and endless rolling plains hills and big sky above at high elevation, with a powdering of snow here and there. Maybe even a little like Iceland, especially if it had more snow. We then entered the park, which was quite honestly stunning. It looked like a painting at times, with these snow white rolling hills and canyons with perfectly blue lakes dotting the landscapes. Just such a surreal site. Almost reminded me of the best parts of the Bolivian altiplano. As good as it was here, I think the true natural beauty of Afghanistan lies in the Wakhan corrider by Tajikistan and by the Hindu Kush border with Pakistan, both areas that we unfortunately would not be visiting this time. But while this wasn’t quite to the level of my holy trinity of Tajikistan/Ladakh/Spiti for natural beauty (with Bolivia in a not-so-close 4th), it really was something else. Not really comparable to the Kashmir lakes I saw on my trek as that was a totally different setting, but the surreal nature of the landscape here made this maybe the best lakes I have seen – definitely better than the lakes I saw in Tajikistan, and that is high high praise. And again, because I did not have my camera, the pictures do not do the landscapes justice at all. While we were by the lakes, we actually had a small little snowball fight, which our driver and guide actually initiated. This was like perfect snow for a fight, easy to make into a ball that really packed a punch with contact. The final lake we visited actually had duck boats on them for some reason, so we rode around on that for an hour or so. Kind of bizarre to ride a duck boat in a beautiful high-altitude lake in freakin’ Afghanistan of all places.
Lunch this day was a really good fried fish (fresh from the lake!) as well as cool little egg and tomato/pepper/onion dish. We ate on one of those raised table platforms while seated on a carpet – just like Tajikistan! And just like Tajikistan (in here and all meals), we were given copious amounts of non and tons and tons of tea. I must say that I am a chai supremacist – the masala/milk chai in India is just so so so much better than regular tea that it isn’t even funny.
After Band-e Amir, we made it back to Bamyan in time for dinner. The next day, we stopped by the Red City – ruins of a citadel destroyed by guess who, Ghengis Khan! – just outside Bamyan, before going back to Kabul for some sightseeing. The Red City was awesome, and honestly probably my favorite historic sight in all of Afghanistan. It was a solid 300m or so steep hike up a cliffside, and ruins dotted the entire path on the way up. It was honestly pretty neat to see how these 800+ year old citadel ruins have almost blended in with the red cliffside, and at points it was almost hard to tell what was manmade and what was natural. Honestly it reminded me a ton of some of the nameless fortress ruins I saw on my Pamir roadtrip in Tajikistan, though obviously the natural views in Tajikistan were unmatched (but it was plenty scenic here too!). At the very top there was a great 360 view of the whole area, as well as an old soviet anti-tank gun that was used by the Muhajadeen during their war against the Soviets in the 80s. Crazy cool how an 800 year old fortress was still useful in a war fought in the 1980s. Like the City of Screams, the Red City also had tons of pottery shards laying about, but I didn’t take any because of my paranoia about Taliban airport security.
The drive back to Kabul was scenic – sort of similar to the drive to Band-e Amir (but this was going east instead of west), with high altitude rolling hills and plains that were carpeted with recent snow. Very beautiful drive, I would say like a lower middle class man’s Bolivia. Kabul is at an elevation of roughly 1800m, so this 3.5 hour drive was a slow and steady descent. Much like portions of the drive from Mazar to Bamyan, there were heavy stretches of road damage, bombed out villages, and the like on this drive. I didn’t take photos here because there were villagers actually living in these ruins and it would have been incredibly disrespectful to take voyeuristic photos (hell, it’s probably bad enough being a tourist and driving through these areas. But at least all of our money is staying local, to a local tour guide and local drivers and local restaurants and hotels and tailors and shops). Our guide said that this stretch was actually arguably the most dangerous road in all of Afghanistan prior to the Taliban takeover, with constant fighting between the Taliban and US backed government forces. Sort of like the road I took from Baghdad to Samarra (and back), it was surreal to see what was recently one of the world’s most dangerous roads as now an easy and safe drive. In general the roads in Afghanistan were excellent, largely due to the US. Another good thing the US did – cell reception across the country was outrageously fantastic. I swear my TMobile reception was faster in Afghanistan than in the US. Seriously impressive stuff.
We got back to the same Kabul hotel as our first night, and then I changed out of my guide’s loaned salwar kameez and into my own (which was in midnight green, because #GoBirds). We really only had time to see one thing in Kabul this day, so we went to Babur’s Gardens. Babur of course was the founder of the Mughal dynasty which ruled over India until the British, and who was banished from Ferghana in Uzbekistan (my dad and I saw his hometown!) before conquering Delhi and northern India. He died in Agra, but as per his will his body was moved to Kabul and buried here, with a garden built for his tomb. The garden was pretty nice but was honestly a far lesser version of the Mughal gardens I had just seen in Srinager. The tomb itself was gorgeous, and just as nice as some of the more intricate marble works that you see in the Red Fort in Delhi or in the Agra Fort, with the same exact design style. But obviously Delhi and Agra (and even Fatehpur Sikri near Agra) were far better simply due to the sheer volume of terraces/tombs/etc., where this only had one tomb and one terraced mosque. But still, I really really enjoyed it. Honestly, the white marble Mughal works in India and here (and presumably Pakistan) really remind me of like Gondorian architecture from the LOTR movies. The gardens were overall a really pleasant tourist attraction, just walking around the lush greenery and then taking a look at the ornate tomb and also the small yet equally ornate mosque that was built there by Shah Jahan (the same guy who built the Taj Mahal!).
One thing that I really liked about Kabul is the rolling hills – almost like Amman, Jordan in a way. Kabul is honestly quite a unique city – vague hints of India (especially Srinagar in Kashmir) or even Cairo and Baghdad, but still its’ own thing. It’s a pretty cool city though – tons of pedestrians riding bicycles around, tons of kids flying kites (like Kite Runner! Now that I’ve finished apps I finally have time to read again. Probably will pick up Kite Runner as my next book to read), and even saw a whole bunch of female medical students walking around near their campus (the Taliban have set the bar so low that seeing female students is a noteworthy positive). Just very atmospheric, and I really think that it would have been an awesome city to experience before the Taliban took over and it was more modern.
The next morning, we had to catch a morning flight to Herat, which is way out to the west, right by the Iran and Turkmenistan borders. Just like the last time, the airport security was a fun experience – pretty similar to Baghdad and Srinagar as by far the most security I have seen, where there is a pre-airport security check before even entering the building, and then the regular security check. Baghdad takes the cake though, where the taxi has to drop you off a few km away and then you need to take a shuttle to the airport. One amusing thing in Afghanistan is when boarding a flight, you always take a bus to the plane no matter what. In this case, our flight was, quite literally, a 20 second walk directly outside, yet we took a 1 minute bus ride that basically drove us in a circle to the plane that was in front of us. Just such incredibly pointless inefficiency that is so absurd that you can’t help but laugh. After a one hour flight, we landed in Herat, and it honestly felt like a stereotype of those movies set in the Middle East (yes I know Afghanistan is Central Asia), with a dusty yellow haze welcoming us to western Afghanistan.
There were a couple of similarities between Herat and Mazar. For one, Indian branded auto rickshaws were everywhere. But more importantly, we saw tons and tons of schoolgirls, and our guide said that in both Herat and Mazar (two of the four biggest cities in Afghanistan), girls are permitted to attend school all the way through, which is awesome. He actually said that Herat is arguably the only province (the city is the capital of the province of the same name) which is arguably better off post Taliban because the Taliban here are relatively liberal, which I thought was kind of interesting. Herat was also noticeably different than other parts of Afghanistan in that there were pretty much no Tajiks here (Tajiks are the second biggest ethnic group after Pashtuns, and there are actually more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan!). Tajiks can look just a tad bit east Asian, and here the entire population more or less looked similar to Iranians or to Pakistanis/North Indians. Our flight did have one guy who we once again thought was a white tourist dressed up but our guide said that he was actually a Taliban intelligence officer. This reminded me of that old Chris Rock joke, where the most dangerous person in a group of black guys and one white guy is the one white guy…likewise, the gringo Taliban that you sometimes meet are sometimes the most dangerous ones. And because Herat is so close to the Iranian border, we saw a few Iranian similarities…many of the women were wearing decorative hijabs, while in the rest of the country it was all solid colors.
After checking into our hotel, we went and got lunch. I got kichidi, which was absolutely nothing like the Indian dish of the same name (other dishes, like samosas, are at least vaguely like their Indian namesakes). Probably the best food I had in Herat was saffron rice…saffron is a huge crop in Iran and western Afghanistan, and this was legit great. All in all the food in Afghanistan was shockingly good. After lunch we drove over to the tourist office of Herat province to register ourselves…this is usually a 10 minute process where we would sit in the car and our guide would deal with everything, but this time the province tourism head wanted to meet us. He was this stereotypical looking Taliban dude (old, fat, turban, white beard, glasses, yada yada yada), and he basically was thanking us for visiting Afghanistan and asked for our thoughts so far. But the main purpose of this visit was for a photographer to take propaganda candid pics of us in this office, probably for them to proudly display “3 American tourists visiting Afghanistan” in some outlet or another. And our guide said the photos are also used by intelligence to disseminate in the cities we are going to (so Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul) so that they can keep an eye on us. In this case, it is actually for our safety – like in Iraq, if anything happens to Yankee tourists it is a blight for them so in some ways they treat us better than they do the locals, which is honestly shitty.
The first tourist sight we went to this day was the Gazur Gah shrine. This was a Timurid era shrine that was built by Shah Rukh (not Khan), the son of Timur himself. It was in a sort of ruined form, with patchwork blue tiles, and like Herat as a whole, was like a lesser version of Uzbekistan. But this actually worked out as a positive, because it gave it more of a ruined vibe, while in Uzbekistan everything is breathtakingly gorgeous but also looks brand new thanks to excellent preservation. It’s also maintained by the Aga Khan foundation, who do a fantastic fantastic job at maintaining Islamic monuments and the like, across Afghanistan and in other places as well. This even though none of these sites in Afghanistan are Ismaili Shia sites. But yea, this shrine is actually a Sufi one (Sufis are a sort of saint-like figures in Islam, and do not fall neatly in the Sunni/Shia split. In fact, in India/Pakistan there are many examples of Sufis who are worshipped by both Hindus and Muslims. It can almost be like a syncretic faith). But overall it was a cool little shrine. After that we visited the Musalla Complex, where all that remains are four massive minarets. Shah Rukh actually moved the Timurid capital from Samarkand in Uzbekistan down to Herat, and this was one of the grand structures commissioned for the new capital. These minarets were all in a ruined state but still quite magnificent and stately, with the patchwork blue everywhere. There were literally tons and tons of bright blue fragments all over the ground here, all 600+ years old and perfectly sky blue or dark blue. I strongly resisted the urge to pocket one of these…again, I was paranoid about Taliban airport security. Especially given the case from a year ago (around when I was in Iraq actually) when a foreign tourist was caught in the airport with a small trinket he picked up at an archeological site, and was imprisoned for months in Iraq. And Iraq has a legitimate government now, unlike the more unpredictable Taliban in Afghanistan. We then went right next door to the Gawhar Shad Mausoleum, which reminded me a bit of the Bibi Khanym complex in Samarkand with the dome shape of the building. Again, beautiful building that was in a slightly ruined state, and the inside was a really cool colorfully patterned walls and ceiling that at the same time looked both Christian and Ottoman. Very unique.
The following day was a full day in Herat. The city itself was quite pleasant, with broad avenues lined with tons of trees. Fairly green city given the harsh desert environment that it was sitting in. So the first place we went to was the grand Jama Masjid (which just means Friday mosque, hence there being a Jama Masjid in many cities including Delhi). Reminded me a ton of the main mosque/madrasa in Bukhara with the giant open square for prayer and Timurid style architecture (though the Jama Masjid is actually post-Timurid but clearly inspired by them). The giant open square flanked by magnificant “gateway” type structures and minarets was also a bit like the Mughal site of Fatehpur Sikri near Agra…the Mughals were also post-Timurid so this makes sense. Not as extravagant as the blue mosque in Mazar but just as beautiful because to me, with bright blue tiles laid in the brickwork. In terms of Islamic architectural beauty…Uzbekistan is still a clear first (with Mughal India not far behind, and then Ottoman Turkey a bit behind that). Really, in terms of regal beauty, the only non-Islamic place that I think is close to those three is Rajasthan in India. But as I mentioned before, the beauty of Herat is that it is like Uzbekistan but in not as pristine of a state, so you can sort of see the impact of time. The Jama Masjid however was in fairly good shape, but that was because of the 600 year old, continuously operating tile factory that is right next door. It’s literally the same families that have been working there over generations, and they continuously churn out newly designed tiles to replace old ones for this mosque to keep the conditions good. Pretty awesome to see a slice of living history here, and our guide was able to get us a tour of this and have them show us around. Really interesting experience. Like in all of Afghanistan, we could not enter the mosque because we weren’t Muslim, so we never got to see how cool it looks inside (Uzbekistan was insaaaaane. And Turkey was nifty, especially in Edirne). After the “factory” (really a small workshop) tour, we stopped by an antique shop nearby where I took a flyer on a coin for $5. I sent a picture to my antiquities-expert high school friend Teddy (the one who told me about the looting in Balkh/Afghanistan in general), and he said that it’s a real half-dhiram coin from the Sassanian Empire. These guys were the last Persian empire before Islam, and their capital was actually in Ctesiphon outside Baghdad! This was one of the sites I couldn’t see because it was “closed”, but had I had a guide in Iraq (I really wish I did) I could have gotten in to see it.
Afterwards we went to the Herat Citadel, which has been standing in some shape or form since the time of Alexander the Great. Unlike the totally ruined fortress in Balkh, this was in tiptop condition due to restoration work and also because it was in use longer before being abandoned. Reminded me a lot of the Cairo citadel (and a bit of the Bukhara one I suppose), and it was surprisingly cooler than I thought to wander around this little castle. We stopped by an old 1000-ish year old hamam (bathhouse) that has since been converted to a nifty little art gallery afterwards.
After this was a very interesting sidetrip…we drove outside the city a bit and did not tell the Taliban about this, but basically went to a camp for displaced families from the Civil War. Interestingly enough the displaced were predominantly Pashtun (aka the ethnic group that is the primary makeup of the Taliban), but they were being neglected by them (combo of lack of resources and lack of care). Thankfully there were a bunch of UNICEF tents setup that have provided clean drinking water and medical supplies, but food was sadly not enough for the entire temporary settlement of 3000 people. We collectively gave the remainder of our cash (minus some saved to tip this driver, as our guide was going to be tipped in USD), which probably wasn’t much, but still…gave it to a guy who was the head of a “department”, and he was responsible for about 60 families. Since we interacted with him the most and our guide said he was trustworthy we did it, and he’s also not Taliban but just a local dude so we figured that the money would be safer. But yea, given that my top choice for grad school is humanitarian aid at Columbia, it was definitely sobering to see this. Though mentally I already know that this line of work means you are dealing with failure like 90%+ of the time. One thing I wish that we were able to do was to interact with the UNICEF staff there as well, but sadly we did not.
After this we just walked around the city bazaar for a bit before dinner and calling it a day. Much like in Mazar, it felt like we were warped back in time with everyone dressed in traditional clothing (again, Taliban pressure and probably not by choice). It honestly reminded me a ton of really most of India or Baghdad, with the chaos, the spices and smells, the clothing shops, and on and on. I really feel at home in these chaotic settings, I don’t know. Just feel alive, like all your senses are on high alert. It’s almost like a drug. Apparently this bazaar area was a part of the ancient Silk Road, and we could clearly see signs as it was littered by abandoned and ruined caravanserais. Again, while in Uzbekistan everything was fully restored here you could really see only the remnants, and some imagination was required. Luckily, Uzbekistan provides the material for your mind to fill in the gaps. But I guess there’s something romantic about the ruined state here, though I obviously found Uzbekistan to be more aesthetically pleasing.
Herat and Balkh specifically were very, very cool to me, because of Wikipedia rabbit holes. When I used to work in Chicago I would always find myself looking up cool historic shit, and I distinctly recall reading about these two cities (and the Timurids, and Bactria, and all related things like that). And to actually be physically in those places that were always “distant” and “historic” and not necessarily “modern” is just amazing to me. Like a weird fulfillment of a childhood dream, to realize that these places aren’t just stories but are currently living, breathing locations. In general, I find that I am more into history for travel for specific regions – really India, Central Asia, Middle East, Russia, and Germany are my top ones. Central Asia (obviously including Afghanistan, even though the media lump it as Middle East it is clearly geographically Central Asian) in particular is interesting to me because so many heavy hitters have used it as their stomping grounds, from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan to Tamerlane to various Persian empires to the Mughals, to more recently the Soviet Union and the US of A. If I am not super into the history, then it’s just interesting but more like in a fun fact way – so for example, how I found the historic stuff in places like Peru or Spain. I think another aspect of my interest here is the difficulty level…Afghanistan is certainly a “tougher” country to travel in and that level of effort makes the historic sites all the more rewarding. In general, I am really proud of myself for being able to do this and stuff like Iraq last year…one of my personal goals when I first quit my job was to get “good” enough to go to tougher places, and I think I have definitely made it in that sense.
The next morning we left a little earlier to begin our long, long drive to the southeastern corner of the country, close-ish to the Pakistan border, to the city of Kandahar. Kandahar is a bastardization of Alexandria (Sikand/Sikander is a South Asian version of Alexander), and is notoriously the home of the Taliban movement. The bulk of Afghan Pashtuns live in this part of the country, relatively near Pakistan (there is also a sizeable Pashtun population in NW Pakistan). Apparently some people think Kandahar might instead come from Gandhara (a Greco-Indian empire in the modern day Pak/Afghan border that was famous for their Buddhist art).
I actually woke up at 4:40am that morning to watch the Eagles improve to 8-0 (WiFi was good enough to stream!). While watching, I found out from a high school friend that my 9th and 10th grade World History teacher, Dr. Dorman, had passed away…he had only retired after the 2016-2017 school year. Yet another case in point of not waiting til the very end of life to quit and do things. But he is legit one of the main reasons I am long term travelling. My initial interest in travel has always stemmed from three things: visiting India every summer of childhood for two months, constant European vacations with my family, and my general interest in history. My interest in nature/landscapes/outdoor activities is a much more recent phenomenon that has gone with those three. But my interest in history first started from playing a WW2 shooter on my PC in middle/high school – Red Orchestra: Ostfront, about the eastern front of WW2 (which got me into German and Russian history). But it was really Dr. Dorman’s classes that made me love world history as a whole, and I can’t really stress enough how heavily that made me want to travel to all of these exotic historic locales. If I hadn’t had him, I genuinely don’t know if I would be the history nerd that I am right now, and maybe I’d be sitting miserably in a cubicle designing a Power Point as to why a company should lay off employees for the good of their shareholders. In terms of the butterfly effect his classes were huge. I always had this weird hope in the back of my head that I would run into him when traveling to somewhere more “out there”, like Iraq last year or Afghanistan now, since those were the types of places that were right up his alley in terms of his historic interest (his PhD was related to Chinese history, and Afghanistan’s Silk Road history is a clear link to that). But (obviously) besides my uncle passing away in March, Dr. Dorman’s death is up there as the one that impacted me the most over the past few years (Kobe is the only celebrity who I was genuinely sad about). RIP to the best high school teacher there was.
The drive to Kandahar was loooong and relatively uneventful. It was almost all a totally flat desert expanse with dry rocky mountains in the distance. All at low elevation too, so like a mix of Jordan and Iraq landscape wise I feel. Actually almost Playa like, which led to our guide asking why I was grinning while I was absent mindedly reminiscing about Burning Man. Probably an inappropriate grin to be honest, as we were driving by bombed out village after bombed out village, all with those same mudbrick houses, and with constant road damage serving as periodic speed bumps. Honestly though, the resilience of the Afghan people to just power through life after all of this is incredible. Much like Iraq, literally every single human here has an unbelievable amount of trauma that they are coping with, and it’s mind boggling to me how they are able to soldier on through life with that. Human beings really are resilient – in a way, look at how we all have continued to live after the madness that was COVID.
For dinner in Kandahar, I actually had biriyani…because Kandahar is a Pashtun city (everyone here is Pashtun, so the population all look a bit more stereotypically “Afghan” ie shades of brown like in North India or Pakistan), their food is similar to Pakistani/North Indian in some ways and they eat biriyani. Pretty good but not great dinner.
The next day was a full day in Kandahar. We first went to a mausoleum that was for the father of the first king of Afghanistan, which was forgettable but cool. Then was the highlight of the city for me, which was a place called “Forty Steps”. Babur, the first Mughal emperor. carved these forty steps up a steep rocky outcrop just outside Kandahar, and at the top is this really cool Mughal shrine that is carved into the cliff, with Persian script everywhere that detailed Babur’s conquests. One thing here that I was unfortunately not able to see, because armed Taliban officers were blocking the path and said no foreigners allowed on the path, was Ashoka’s rock edicts, which was only a couple of minutes walk away from here. My mom and I saw one of his edicts in Odisha in eastern India a few years back, but it’s basically a set of proclamations that Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor (an Indian empire post Alexander the Great), carved into cliffsides across his empire. These edicts are about 2500 years old. And stretching from central India up to southeastern Afghanistan is no mean feat. But the edict that was in this cliffside in Kandahar was written in both Greek (post Alexander the Great there were Greco-Indian kingdoms here) and Aramaic (the main language of the Persian empire that preceded Alexander the Great).
We then got lunch where I had this incredible lamb curry dish (probably my 2nd best meal after Mazar) that was honestly just like a Mughlai dish from North India. Spicy, flavorful, and well cooked lamb. We then checked out the tomb of the first king of Afghanistan and a shrine which allegedly holds the cloak of Mohammed, which was in Bukhara in Uzbekistan before Kandahar. We then walked around the local bazaar for a bit. Even moreso than any other part of Afghanistan, this was a real blast in the past…literally every woman was fully concealed (our guide said that this was the same before the Taliban for Kandahar specifically), and every man was wearing uber traditional clothes with either a hat or turban (not just a salwar kameez and shemagh like what I had), and with longer beards and that Jack Sparrow-esque eye black that the more pious Muslims of this area wear. Honestly, the Taliban support in this part of the country makes sense given the constant US drone strikes in the villages nearby (basically “creating terrorists”), and the existing cultural conservatism that is here…for them, the Taliban don’t really change anything, while for big cities outside of the Pashtun belt that were more liberal, the Taliban have considerably worsened things. My personal two cents is that to tackle this, you need to invest in things like economic mobility and education, not enforce a top-down cultural shift. Hopefully over time, as people’s fortunes improve, they slowly drift leftwards. I don’t think this is anything you can feasibly fix overnight, or in 20 years of shit investing. The highlight of this bazaar was what is easily the coolest antique shop I have ever been to. But it was definitely cool for all the wrong reasons…they were clearly selling giant slabs of stone that were hacked off from Buddhist sites in the country, and he insinuated that he had a bigger shop with more, where I would assume the real valuable stuff (hacked Buddhas, etc.) are stored. This is definitely the type of place that western museums would have shady middlemen buy shit and transport to a Pakistani port to send over. Another clear example of Afghanistan being stuck in time…this is the sort of bazaar shop that eccentric British people would buy stolen loot for their personal collections like 150 years ago, yet here we are in 2022 in Kandahar with a shop like this out in the open.
Our penultimate day was pretty lowkey. We were able to sleep in and relax before catching an afternoon flight from Kandahar to Kabul…the Kandahair airport was just as stringent as the Kabul airport with all the pre-airport security checks. After checking into the same Kabul hotel as the previous two nights we spent in this city, we walked around a bit in an area called Chicken Street which had some cool antique shops (not as cool as the one in Kandahar, but still did a great job of showing off cool Indiana Jones-esque stuff) and some good street food (there was this incredible spicy chickpea soup dish). Also had some really good dogh, which is almost like Turkish ayran or Indian buttermilk.
At one point, Chloe, Tregg, and I were having a half-serious half-joke conversation at one point this trip about why the Right in the US doesn’t support the Taliban – ultimately, all super “traditional” religious value types want to bring about a society with a male breadwinner, females being purely domestic, no gay marriage, and conservative views on religion and culture. Sounded like the Taliban to us…it’s kind of crazy how historically, every religion when warped to its’ worst winds up being incredibly sexist.
On our final day, we wandered around some bazaar areas and then went to a cool viewpoint with a 360 view of Kabul. The bazaar stuff was honestly amazing. There is this area called bird market which is probably not the best for animal rights, but it was just so unique to see the typical Islamic/Indian style bazaar with tons and tons of caged birds for sale as pets. Afghanistan is a big pet bird country, kind of cool as I have never seen this volume of pet birds before. During this walk, we stopped by for lunch at this true Afghan hole-in-the-wall restaurant that was serving chainaki, which is this incredibly delicious (top 3 meal for me along with the Mazar pulao rice and spicy lamb curry from Kandahar) mutton, sheep fat, and chickpea stew that is made by heating up in 50+ year old tea pots for ~4+ hours every morning. They have like 100s of tea pots that cook at once, and sell out within an hour every day, and then they are done for the day. There was even a BBC article about these guys a few months ago! See: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220904-the-kabul-restaurant-preserving-the-teapot-stew-tradition. And an LA times article from literally a few weeks ago…pretty sure our guide mentioned that he took a journalist to this restaurant so it was one of these two. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-10-18/afghanistan-delicacy-chainaki-teapot-lamb-stew-master-chef.
One random aside here, but a weird parallel with Iraq was that there I was travelling with a journalist, Miranda, who I had met in Egypt. Here, Chloe was also working fulltime as a social media influencer (actually kind of wild, she is legit and makes seemingly good money from it). But I feel like in both cases, these were both two of my all time favorite trips, while both Miranda and Chloe were unable to fully enjoy it as much as they could have due to stress from work. For me it was further validation of my decision to just travel and do nothing else…I feel bad that they didn’t have the same experience I did due to external commitments. But then again, there were also numerous cases this trip where both Tregg and Chloe were stressed and I was just chillaxing. And both of them are incredibly well traveled (well over 100 countries each), so maybe I am the weird one for never getting stressed out? I always find whenever I spend extensive time with someone that one of my first observations of them is that they get stressed too easily, so maybe it’s just that everyone else is normal and I’m not…I really don’t know here. Since you would think that two people as well traveled as them can deal with stress well, so maybe they actually do and I just have a ridiculously warped view.
Speaking of well traveled, I find that whenever I go through my whole schpiel with people I meet, one of the first questions they ask me is how many countries I have been to. I genuinely have no idea but assume it is over 50. Chloe and Tregg are also country counters, and while there is nothing wrong with that, I just hate the whole quantification of society. From people (like my parents!) religiously tracking their step count every day, to yuppies who base their happiness level and self-worth on reaching a specific salary number, to travelers who are checking boxes to hit every single country, for me it is just such an unhealthy way to live life. I feel like over quantifying things sucks the humanity out of it, so I prefer to just do what I want and not delve too deep into the numbers – this obviously requires a ton of privilege as not everyone has the luxury to do what they want. But I don’t know, just a little rant, but it’s just so disheartening for me to see everything in society go towards this trend.
One thing that Afghanistan really did was fuel my interest in visiting Pakistan. I feel like that is the perfect blend of both Afghanistan (especially the Pashtun regions in the northwest) and India. I would honestly place Pakistan 2nd in my top 5 places I want to visit after my whole retirement gig…China is an easy #1 (I could easily spend 6+ months here I feel), Pakistan 2nd, and Chile/Antarctica/Iran round it out.
Anyways. Overall, Afghanistan was an absolutely incredible trip. The history was obviously amazing, and it was fascinating to see a post-conflict country that is dealing with a government that is, for lack of a better word, as unique as the Taliban. Our guide was saying that the younger Taliban members are mostly more liberal (don’t care about music bans, support women’s education, etc.), but I genuinely don’t know how much if that was pure truth vs. how much of that was him projecting his hopes so that there can be a better future for him, his family, and his country. I do feel that a realistic best case is something like what happened to Saudi, where they quickly reformed in order to bring in tourism, especially since Afghanistan has SO much tourism potential. Personally I’m cautiously optimistic for the country…the Taliban are awful but they have brought stability which hopefully will spur some type of development.
In terms of ethics, I didn’t have a problem visiting Afghanistan…minus a roughly ~25 USD tourism fee paid to the Taliban on day one, all of our money went towards locals, as I mentioned before. Besides, every government does terrible things – Mynamar and China with genocide against their Muslim minorities right now, India with their general behavior towards their Muslim minority, the US with how it treats African Americans, Europe as a whole with how it treats asylum seekers, and on and on and on. I think it’s dumb to draw arbitrary lines in the sand about how much immorality is too much with regards to visiting a foreign country. As long as you can ensure that as much money as you spend goes towards locals and people who need it, it’s fine for me. And I am definitely glad that I visited Afghanistan…100% one of the most rewarding trips I have ever taken. So I will be back in India for about a month, will do some trips with my mom (who is visiting my gradma for a bit) and solo while there, before flying to NZ in early December! With a day or two in Kuala Lumpur beforehand because my NZ flight is from there.