October 24th: Kabul

On October 24th 1972 I was in Kabul.

Just to get to Kabul was something of a relief. We drove into the city with, as I recall, only two gears working, fourth low ratio to get started and fourth high ratio to drive along. I didn't want to stop anywhere because moving off was difficult. The gearbox had started to play up coming down off the spectacular Salang Pass with its tunnel and colonnaded sections passing under the snow-covered Hindu Kush at 3400 metres, the highest point on our journey.

There was a Land-Rover garage in Kabul and we found it easily. They opened up the gear-box the next day and discovered that a pin which had been replaced before we left in London had sheared after the pressures of the Northern Route. It was going to cost about £60 to fix and take three days plus the weekend. This completely broke our budget, which had already suffered from the flotation of the pound and rising oil prices. On top of this we had to stay in the Ariana Hotel for several nights, at £1 per night for the room, instead of camping outside at much less. To celebrate this misfortune we ate out with friends at the Intercontinental Hotel, where we had camel steak, red Afghan wine (produced by an Italian family) and good desserts for a total cost of about £1.50 for the two of us. These were huge prices in Afghanistan at that time.

The stay in Kabul could have become miserable, but it was still a picturesque place if you didn't look too closely at the Kabul River running through the middle. We visited the museum which was great with all the Gandhara art, and also the zoo which was interesting if not fun. We went shopping in Chicken Street and the Silver Bazaar. It was also a social time as the Ariana was the place where many overlanders parked up and swapped stories. We enjoyed meals at the Khyber Restaurant and the Marco Polo, both of which I think still exist. In fact most of these landmarks have been in the public eye over the years, the Intercontinental being the journalists' centre during the civil war, the zoo became famous for the lion called Marjan which survived the ravages of the Civil War and the neglect of the Taliban, and the museum was ransacked by the Taliban. The Ariana may be the same building that became the headquarters of the CIA, but I'm not so sure.

Video from Kabul in 1972 by Erich Siegel on YouTube.

A street picture of Kabul in 1972 here.

Kabul River in 1972: picture by Ard Hesselink, CC

Kabul shop in 1972: picture by Ard Hesselink, CC

October 20th: Shibergan

On 20th October 1972 I was in Shibergan in northern Afghanistan.

Arriving in Shibergan felt like an achievement: we had finished the hard bit and crossed the desert. We found a reasonable hotel to camp outside of and the first running water since Herat. The road outside was paved and there was good pilau at the restaurant near the hotel. After the meal we ordered melon as usual. Beside the restaurant there was a huge pile of melons and other customers had been making their way through them. Serving the melons was quite a procedure: the waiter picked out one he thought was good, he carved it into pieces in a trice, holding it with one hand and cutting it in quick strokes with a carving knife which was more like a sword; if he did not think it was perfect, he threw it away for passing goats and carried on until he found the perfect melon for his guests. These were the best melons I have ever eaten.

It had taken us six days to get from Herat, through what felt like open, untouched country, passing little towns and bazaars. The road was not easy anywhere, but it was exciting to drive it. The most difficult bits were before Bala Murghab and the last bit into Shibergan. From Qala-i-Nao to Bala Murghab the road was earth rather than gravel and deeply eroded and rutted. We stopped for lunch in the gorge of a tributary of the Murghab and then continued along the Murghab itself, finally crossing a broken ancient bridge and finding a humble hotel and a poor meal in the town. The next day we passed two fine caravans of camels going across the plain in the same direction as us, the riders and the camels both dressed in rich colours. In this area people would stop us to ask for medical help; usually they had been to a clinic and were carrying packets of medication and the help they wanted was to know what to do with it. We tried to give instructions in the few words of Farsi we had between us. There was very little other traffic on this route, though several times we saw overturned trucks, whose drivers sat anxiously beside them and whose passengers were fleeing or had fled.

After Maimana, we knew we had to get to the little town of Dalautabad and then cross the desert of Dasht-i-Leili with the help of a guide. That night I recorded: 

Found Dalautabad, and got ourselves a guide there who showed us his previous testimonials - not bad, he got a 2CV and VW bus through - but he charged us 500 afghanis. Hans got stuck in mud soon after and we towed him out. Driving fairly easy through the layer of sand - not too many turnings - lots of squirrels and gerbils which burrowed in the sand as we drove over it, lizards and a scorpion - also lots of larks and wheatears. Had lunch on top of hill with good view - whirlwinds or dust devils. Several bits where our guide took us straight through the bush. Road gets much more difficult just before the first gas drillings. Then very thick sand.

When I got back to England I bought a copy of Marco Polo, Penguin, translated by Robert Latham; I dated it 3rd September 1973, so it was very soon after I returned. Marco Polo wrote at the end of the thirteenth century of crossing a desert for six days and arriving in Shibergan and finding there the best melons in the world. Shibergan is an ancient place.

The place names for this area have varied transliterations in English. I've followed the names I wrote down at the time, following for the most part Nancy Hatch Dupree's Guidebook, published in 1971, which we had bought at the Tourist Office in Herat.

I've not found any photographs to illustrate this section, but there are excellent photographs of northern Afghanistan by Luke Powell, taken in 1975, here.  Noor Khan also took interesting pictures along this road in 1978, at a much wetter time of year.

View Maimana in a larger map

October 16th: Qala-i-Nao

On October 16th I was in Qala-i-Nao in north-western Afghanistan.

Qala-i-Nao was quite a lively place, when we arrived the night before, with most of the centre strung along the main road. There was a hotel where we were able to camp outside and a restaurant where we sat on a carpeted bench and had good stew and soup for pennies. We met a teacher who spoke decent English and had tea and cake followed by melon with him.

In the morning two boys from the teacher's school took us south-east of the town to the spring they called Khardasi. The road was earth and very dusty, but the valley was fertile, and there were many Uzbek or Turkmen yurts in the little villages along the way. The spring was something of a beauty spot, if that makes sense in such a remote part of the world.  For us it was interesting enough to be even further off the beaten track: the Northern Route was scarcely mainstream, but we would have believed it dangerous to take detours like this off the road on our own.  Hans had a fishing rod I don't think he had used since leaving Alkmaar and so we had fresh fish to go with the bread and melons we had brought. Meanwhile flocks of fat-tailed sheep and goats were brought to drink water at the spring and its little stone and earth dam and reservoir.

This was incomparable richness after the difficulties people were having on the Herat side of the of the Sutzak Pass the day before, where there was a full scale famine in progress. Groups of children came up to the car with swollen bellies with their hands out for food, most of them coming from black tents of nomads camping by the streams from the pass. We knew about the famine as we had met an Afghan general in Herat who was trying to alleviate the problem along with some young American Peace Corps volunteers. Unfortunately the bread shops had been closed in Herat that morning, and we had nothing more than old bread to give which quickly ran out. The top of the pass is very beautiful and richly forested and the land at the foot seemed richer.

Robert Byron recounts in "The Road to Oxiana" how he crossed the pass (he calls it Sauzak) three times, all with different means of transport, all with spectacular difficulty, in 1933 and 1934.  The road was newly built but carried trucks.  In November 1933 he got stuck in Qala-i-Nao with dysentery and the onset of winter; he returned to Herat and came back in the spring.

At The Spring.  Photo by H van Riel, in my possession

Noor Khan took interesting pictures along this road in 1978, in a much wetter season.

View Maimana in a larger map

September 20th: Band-i-Amir

On September 20th 1978, I was at Band-i-Amir, a series of lakes in central Afghanistan.

Bamiyan and Band-i-Amir were places I particularly wanted to visit in 1978 as I had failed to get there in 1972 when my Land-Rover broke its gear-box on the Salang Pass.  Bamiyan is a high, well-populated valley with good farming.  Band-i-Amir is an open wide valley, even higher at 3000 meters, almost unpopulated, almost uncultivated and startlingly beautiful.  It was also a tourist place though only a few were visiting in those days.  There were one or two guest-houses by the road, where I slept on the floor in the Afghan way.  With a couple of others I had a long walk around the six lakes, which each have a noticeably different colour, and we stopped in a hidden spot in the middle of the day for complete isolation.

We found a different way up out of the lakes, past a spring in a defile and past a deserted village, made of slates which had fallen off the stacks; there were ovens and hearths and even chairs in the slate, maybe used by nomads, the ash and the droppings looked recent. Looking out from the top, I thought of the majesty of the mountains in this near desert, the remoteness and (until the tourists came) the isolation, the sheer cliffs coloured red and white and the blues and greens of the water, the few trees turning autumnal, the little fields ploughed occasionally in the steppe.

According to my journal, I found Band-i-Amir a little depressing, as I could see little function other than as a tourist spot. Yet in my memory it is a highlight: the remote location, the clear air, the wide views, the colours of the water, the changing colours on the hills around, the little mills where the exit of one of the lakes was naturally dammed, the traces of nomads or others who had passed by, the almost tame bluethroat which played around our feet while we rested.  I don't think we saw any other people during the several hours of the walk.

Rory Stewart, in "The Places In Between", describes walking on the deeply frozen lakes in 2002, during his walk from Herat to Kabul. He stayed in a former guest-house whose owner had had no guests for 12 years, maybe the guest-house I stayed in.

Band-i-Amir in 1975.  Picture By Gregory Melle CC

September 16th: Bamiyan

On September 16th 1978 I was in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan.

In the afternoon I took a walk back down the valley, past the bazaar, to the ancient mud brick citadel of Shar-i-Golgola, which was destroyed by Genghis Khan. As usual I went for the view and a sitting place more than for the history. I found the educated locals willing to talk as I walked and the fields were busy with Hazara harvesting. This is from my notebook, written at the top:

Sitting in the ruins of the citadel of eroded mud bricks, far above the valley.  Feeling short of breath at the altitude which I suppose to be well over the 2500 metres of the town. Below lies the valley and its trees and fields, stretching beyond the buzkashi ground and back beyond the Red City, to the left a sort of plateau, little irrigated between two subsidiary valleys leading SE and SW. To the north bare sandstone hills rising eroded behind the two Buddhas and their plateau. To the south similar hills in waves like frozen sand-dunes, but behind darker, more forbidding mountains topped with real peaks and little patches of snow and glaciers.

 

The fields are neat and well tended, a lot of harvesting going on, donkeys or oxen yoked and pulling a grindstone round a circular threshing floor. Other fields are decked out with a serpentine pattern and I cannot see from here what it is or why. Some others have cows and donkeys and goats grazing. Most fields are carefully mud-walled in small fairly irregular shapes - I can't make out much of the irrigation from here, just the odd stream but irrigation is widespread. Little lanes between the fields joining houses in strong compounds, the larger ones like fortresses with little turrets at the corners; inside are barns and animal areas, piles of fodder and sticks, probably dung, things drying. The one I mainly see has what I take to be rooms more on one side with clothes drying on the roof and a two-storied structure in the middle on the far side, one little gate on this side. To the south there is a big building like a palace, with high walls and I can imagine fine rooms on the higher levels; there are two large garden areas, full of different sorts of trees. Most trees around are of the familiar poplar type, big stretches of them in the valley near the river, shading paths, acting as wind breaks. Another smaller house behind the citadel is washed white, has no protecting walls, has a grass roof, or just grass drying on the roof. Little or no sign of vegetables being grown.

 

Ravens occasionally flying around this hill - I saw a large flock near the Buddhas' plateau earlier. Magpies inevitably in the fields, a neophron, little else. Sounds of the animals, particularly donkeys, drift up, or of people shouting at each other or at their animals, trucks occasionally along the principal road. The sun is sinking, as the mountains take on an evening light. The breeze comes into my face WSW, from the sun. 

I stayed at the Caravan Hotel, one of a few that had been developed in a bend of the river opposite the Buddhas. That evening I woke at 11.30 and outside the wooden hut which served as my room, everything was dark. There was a very obvious partial eclipse, like a brown cloud covering most of the moon, leaving the Buddhas quite dark, as if someone had turned off the floodlights when I'd got used to seeing them lit up by the nearly full moon. I remembered that the Grateful Dead had been planning to play at the Pyramids at an eclipse in the autumn.

I met two couples who were travelling overland in VWs, the first I encountered on this journey who were travelling as I had done in 1972. Their stories of stone-throwing in Turkey reminded me of my journey, though we never really encountered any. No-one had tried to cheat them at Afghan petrol stations however. There were lots of stories among the travellers of hassles ahead in India - making people simplify their plans, and nothing I could say from my experiences could convince them otherwise. There were also stories of a woman shot swimming in Band-i-Amir last year and another in Bamiyan. These matched the stories of the person killed in a gypsy caravan during my earlier journey.

The day before there had been a buzkashi game up the valley. I described it in my notebook during the event:

People are beginning to assemble around the arena. Apple-sellers, the "royal" tent where we were invited to sit, the tent for women and children, the goat now lying thoroughly dead in a little heaped up circle, flags away on the far corners, truck bringing some spectators - we hitched a ride on an Afghantours chartered wazi (jeep), beginning to see a few more horses with big strong shoulders. In front of me the bare cliffs of the Hindu-Kush, flecked green and red among the ochre, green trees along the river valley or in gardens, already turning golden.

They have to carry the goat past the flag - this achievement is reported to Caesar's proconsul in the tent - then take the goat to the centre spot; the successful rider takes a bow and some baksheesh from the punters. Mostly it's a great melee with riders reaching down and grabbing or pulling, whipping the other guy's horse, until someone makes a run for the flag and there's a cheer, but the crowd are mainly passive. A couple of umpires shout the flag-passes and the goals up to the proconsul's tent.

Everything centres round the proconsul. We waited for him to arrive while we watched a passing caravan of camels through camera lenses. He stood up and said "hello" in English, and there was a lot of laughter when he cracked a joke. In the middle of his tent are serious looking civilians, egregious generals and a little hunch-back with glasses.

Another time I walked around the Buddhas, sat at the top, looking at the paintings which reminded me of Ajanta in India, and made me think of the journey of Xuanzang and the temple of the Thousand Buddhas, which I'd been reading about before I left England. I could look down at the bazaar and my hotel. The Buddhas felt more like guardians of the valley, curiosities rather than works of religious or artistic value, lacking their red and other colours and with their faces hacked away, their power coming from their being there more than anything else.  Some of the paintings in the cave still had some force.  You could walk for miles behind on the hard sandstone surface, getting closer and closer to the coloured mountains behind. The Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang visited Bamiyan in 630 and described tens of monasteries and several thousand monks, though Peter Levi, who visited with Bruce Chatwin in 1970, points out in "The Light Garden of the Angel King" that this was probably a decline from a century earlier.

On the way back from Band-i-Amir I overnighted in a more Afghan-style hotel, sleeping on carpets on the floor. The foreigners requested and got music and dancing with a mainly Afghan audience who clearly enjoyed it. The journey over the Shibar pass back to Charikar, on the main road to Kabul, was on top of a truck, often the best way to travel in more remote areas. I noted that "we stopped for a pilau in a very unspoilt place, the best Afghan bazaar I'd seen on this trip."

Patrimonio Mundi:  Panoramas of Bamiyan, looking a bit different these days.

Valley from the Buddha Niche 1975

One of the Buddhas 1975

Pictures by Gregory Melle Creative Commons

Links:  Wikipedia - Bamiyan, Wikipedia - The Buddhas,  A visitor in 1977,

September 7th: Herat

On September 7th 1978 I was in Herat in Western Afghanistan.

I couldn't help but be struck by the changes in Herat since my visits in 1972 and 1973.  Some parts of the new town were almost unrecognisable with new buildings.  The traffic had changed and you now had to be careful when you stepped into the road.  There were taxis and minibuses and three-wheeled scooters - it was beginning to feel like an Indian city.  There were still the painted trucks, maybe a bit more modern, and donkeys bringing food into the city, but the horse-cabs were dying out.  There were still foreigners arriving, many beginning to freak out gently, wearing Afghan clothes, smiles beginning to break out on their serious faces.  They smoked their hashish in their hotels and tumbled out to eat or go to the tourist shops.

I rarely saw foreigners in the Old City now, around the partially covered bazaars called Char Su, but I was attracted by the antique charm of the area.  I wrote this in a tea-house near there:

Stopped into chaikhana on the broad street with the looms, between the mosque and the metal bazaar, don't seem to have chai-houses in the bazaar streets themselves - I'd have liked to have recorded what I saw there. People mainly friendly, a few over-anxious to sell but they're easily dealt with. Tried on some hats in the hat corner of the covered bazaar. Barber shops with pictures of combs and scissors. Better looking fruit, all the shops making tin boxes, trays, ovens. A lute shop in the octagonal building in the middle of the road, mediaeval English towns had such things. Behind the white facade of newer streets lie earth walls, sometimes with fancy patterns as in Mashad, and earthen streets with central open gutter.

In this chaikhana there is more light and air than often. People eating stews with cut up pieces of bread, you cut up your own bread and the man puts stew on top. 2 men eating now and another just starts. Only I drink tea in a little bowl, sugar in first. Blue and white washed walls, raised sides with simple kilims. Flower pictures and some Farsi writing on the walls. He keeps wood to break up to use with the samovar, also I think there is dung to use as fuel, maybe kindling. Two big samovars by the window as usual, and stovepipes above. Water for washing from a container with two taps, goes into a basin with fretted rim and by a funnel into a receptacle, all hand-made in the bazaar. A mynah in a battered metal cage beside me, and a finch beyond in a separate cage. Owner is friendly, pointed grey beard and little cap on his short hair, wears a nicely cut fawn to beige Afghan suit.

Herat had seemed most exotic in 1972, full of men from the north in colourful costumes, few vehicles in the streets.  We ate meals in raised restaurants where you climbed up to the reclining area on rugs; old men sang and played music on ancient instruments for us; the common local dress for any male over the age of ten was the chapan, a highly coloured quilted jacket with overlong sleeves which hung loose on top of the arms.  We had camped outside the Park Hotel, and one night there was a wedding of well to do people, where there was music and the women danced freely without veils.

I had seen the sights in 1972, helped by the guidebook to Afghanistan by Nancy Hatch Dupree which had been recently been published and was being sold at the Tourist Office.  We were shown round by a schoolboy for an arranged fee of a couple of shillings.  We went round the glorious Friday Mosque, enjoying the coolness of the columned recesses and greens of the gardens.  We saw the workshop and simple kiln where the tiles were being recreated by artists and fired.   One of the artists told us how he was saving patiently for bride-price: he expected he would have enough when he was an old man and then he would take a young girl as his wife.  We saw the tomb of Jami, the Sufi poet, and the huge minarets and mausoleum of Gowher Shad. The boy told us how most of the minarets  had been destroyed by the British, as if it had happened yesterday.  He took us to see a windmill beyond the suburbs, which involved climbing into one of the dome-roofed compounds so characteristic of the area.  In the afternoon we drove outside the city through fields and over a little bridge to the shrine of Gazargah.  I wrote this when I got back to England:

The shrine itself was surrounded by a thick grove of trees casting their shade across the sand. The coloured tiles were peeling off the structure of the main buildings, and this added to the natural atmosphere of the place. I was unprepared for the number of people in the main courtyard, as the outer areas were quiet and inhabited by a donkey and the birds. But inside were collected a large number of beggars squatting or lying among the tombstones which are planted in no order around the courtyard. Many of these pilgrims were blind, or had deformed limbs, or amputations or sores.  A white robed old man greeted us and pointed out the features of the holy place, a tomb of black marble which looked like metal and was carved most intricately ‑ it was kept in a room to one side behind a locked door for which he produced a key from the folds of his robes; and an a ancient tree studded with nails, which had been hammered in by the faithful as a prayer.

Gazargah is a centre of Sufi ritual.  Jason Elliot recounts in An Unexpected Light from 1999 how he  stayed overnight and witnessed Sufis and Talibs enraptured there.  The guardian who looked after him was possibly the same man I met in 1972.

It is hard to imagine that the city I saw and is described by others such as Veronica Doubleday in Three Women Of Herat was about to change. Barely six months later in March 1979 the army mutinied there under Ismail Khan against the new government and their Soviet masters and thousands were killed.  When Nick Danziger visited in 1984, as described in Danziger's Travels, the city and countryside was being bombed and strafed in continuing conflict and reprisal.

Erich Siegel's video of Herat in 1972 on YouTube and here, from Afghanistan Before The Wars.  Luke Powell has great photographs from 1974 here.  Noor Khan has pictures from the 1970s here.

Patrimonia Mundi:  Panoramas of Herat, including Gazargah.  

Herat 1975:  Picture by Gregory Melle, CC

Gazargah:  Picture by Sven Dirks, CC