8 Chapter 8. The Road to Kabul

I boarded a local bus the next day, bound for Kabul in the company of other visitors from the West, among them Maude, a young Swedish woman, and Rainer, a brown-haired Dane with a neatly trimmed beard. We would travel together the next few weeks.

I think of Afghanistan as enclosing a rhomboid shape formed by its four main cities: Herat in the west, Kandahar in the south, Kabul in the east, and Mazar-i-Sharif in the north. The Hindu Kush mountains stretch across the interior of the country, rising to heights of roughly 7,000 metres to the northeast of Kabul. Kabul lies more or less due east of Herat, yet the intervening mountains make a direct route between the two very difficult, though not impossible.¹ Similarly, the secondary road from Herat northeast to Mazar-i-Sharif passes through some mountainous terrain before finally reaching the northern plains. For this reason, most Western travellers took the southern route, from Herat southeast to Kandahar, and then north to Kabul.

Among travellers heading east, Afghanistan’s roads were considered the worst. This was especially the case in the early days. In his account of the Oxford-Cambridge expedition, Tim Slessor described the road through Afghanistan as “just an endless strip of corduroy, of rocks and holes and dust.”² The road had not greatly improved when Henry Hamilton and Alastair Harper journeyed by Land Rover in 1962. “We drove at about 45 mph,” Harper reported. “The roads were usually dry, but we got caught in a flood a few times. They weren’t actual roads. Oil barrels, about a hundred yards apart, marked the path.”

After the 1960s, however, while Afghanistan’s secondary and tertiary roads remained poor, often accessible only by truck, the main highway between Herat and Kabul via Kandahar became reasonably good—ironically, perhaps, because of the Cold War. Eager to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, the Soviet Union and the United States competed to prove which country could build the best roads. During the 1960s, the former built the Herat–Kandahar section, while the latter financed the Kandahar–Kabul section. Both Afghans and Western travellers benefited greatly from this rivalry.

Fergus F., who hitchhiked nearly the entire journey from Istanbul to Calcutta (today Kolkata) in 1969, remembered how difficult it was to get a lift in Afghanistan:

There was little road traffic: No private vehicles, just people with camels; once in a while, a jeep with some Russians. Around Herat, carts and horses with little buggies. One guy had a little truck filled with people he was picking up; another guy was very grateful for my company; another quite indignant and offended when I offered him money. But mostly the people were delighted to help and quite fascinated to pick up a young man with long hair and a beard, a bag over his shoulder, wandering the road.

I did not hitchhike any of the way. It was unreliable to do so and, in any case, the buses through Afghanistan were very cheap to ride.

But there was another important reason besides cost. Despite the stress and fatigue involved—I remember well sleeping on my feet at times—the fact is, travel by local bus brought us better in touch with the surrounding culture and people; not merely seeing the countries as though on a movie screen. Don Skelton, who made the trip in 1973–74, recalled “travelling in these beautiful buses crammed with people, goats, and chickens.” Richard Gregory also remembers the goats and chickens but contends that the main difference between Afghan and Indian buses “was that many Afghans seemed to carry guns, ancient Enfield rifles being popular. I never felt threatened though, and they probably deterred the bandits who were known to rob buses out in the desert.”³

These paltry—or poultry—discomforts and ensuing misadventures are the source of endless tales for many of us who made the journey. But I also remember the generally intense quietness of the travel. Occasionally, very young children would glance at me, curious, and a mother would subtly gesture to them to desist. I was to be left alone, although not, it seemed, because they were wary of strangers but rather out of a sense of politeness. Sometimes I might be asked, usually by a young man, where I was from. Other times, someone might speak to me, by word and gesture, about a mistake I had made, such as not paying the correct fare or possibly missing a bus stop—though in such cases people invariably spoke respectfully. But most bus rides took place in silence, even among Afghans themselves.

Despite later road improvements, even the major highway remained dangerous, especially in winter. Margot Miller’s near-death experience in Turkey found its near-tragic sequel—in two parts—only weeks later while she was driving to Kabul from Kandahar. In both instances, the van she was driving hit black ice and did a series of 360-degree spins. The first time the vehicle wiped out a toll road barricade and a small officer shack—it “went up like matchsticks,” she recalls. The second time, they barely avoided an Afghan bus carrying people and livestock. Miller and her colleagues shortly thereafter happily sold the van in Pakistan for $2,000, which they then exchanged on the black market for an additional $1,000 in profit.

Fortunately, no accidents occurred during the bus trip I took from Herat to Kandahar to Kabul. It was sometimes slow, to accommodate road repairs and detours, but no more inconvenient than what I might have expected in Canada. Bruce Finch did, however, recall an incident on the route from Herat to Kabul when the bus in which he was travelling ended up in the midst of a short rock-throwing battle between a few Afghan passengers and a group of tent dwellers. Finch wasn’t sure what was going on, but he himself was in no danger.

Nino Gualtieri faced a more palpable threat when he and his family encountered a Kochi camp between Kandahar and Kabul. Gualtieri remained in the van while his wife, Peggy, and their children ventured out to meet a group of women. The latter put out a welcome blanket and Peggy soon returned to the van to get some glass jars for the women in exchange for their hospitality, at which point Nino joined them. It was then, while they were having tea, that the Kochi men arrived back from cutting firewood in the surrounding hills, and the gathering took an ominous turn. As Gualtieri later described it:

Suddenly, one of the guys put his gun in my face, perhaps because I had seen the women’s faces. I thought I was going to get my head blown off, but the women interceded. They pointed to the blanket and extended their hospitality. I made a proper gesture of apology and obeisance and walked back to our van. Peggy and the children followed a little bit later. I jokingly offered to give the head man my wife and van if I could have his tent and his women. It was, in the end, a very good memory.

In this case, anger directed at an apparently disrespectful male gave way to a peaceful resolution, aided, one suspects, by the interventions of the Kochi women themselves. Bill Fillmore also had an encounter with a group of Kochi, although without similar incident. Like the Gualtieris, Fillmore and his wife were driving through southern Afghanistan when they saw a row of black Kochi tents on the hill in the middle of nowhere. They stopped their car, got out, and walked toward the tents, where a man greeted them politely. “There were three girls all dressed in luminous skirts, embroidered blouses, and vests; silver hanging everywhere,” he remembers. “They didn’t speak English, and we didn’t speak their language, but we had a good conversation anyway. We joked around and they offered us tea.”

To be sure, one could face real threats, and many Afghans carried weapons. But genuine dangers were more imagined than real. I cannot remember an instance where I felt a real sense of threat. One did have to be cognizant, though, of Afghan customs and expectations, especially those around religion and women. Anyone who disrespected these, even accidentally, was inviting trouble.

The Afghan people are often said to be fiercely proud, and that was my impression as well. Theirs is also a firmly patriarchal society in which gender roles are clearly defined and men might easily take offence to a perceived insult to their wives and daughters, as Fergus F. discovered on two occasions during his travels in 1969. The first incident took place when he was invited into the home of a villager, his wife, and their thirteen-year-old daughter:

We were sitting on the carpet; there was no furniture, just carpets everywhere. The man’s daughter was in the corner making tea. At one point, she dropped her face covering, exposing her nose and eyes. I happened to look over and she smiled. The father saw this and exploded. He threw her outside and screamed at her. I spent the night at the house anyway, and we all slept in the same room, but it was tense.

Here, the man’s wrath was directed at his daughter, who had behaved immodestly, although Foley, their guest, was implicated inasmuch as he had provoked her behaviour, albeit accidentally.

The second incident occurred when Foley and a male companion got a lift in a small pickup truck. The truck was carrying an older Muslim man and two women who were completely covered. Ignoring Foley’s advice, his companion repeatedly looked at the women, until finally the Muslim man began shouting and pulled out a rifle, which he pointed at the offender’s chest. So reprimanded, Foley’s companion made a show of obeisance, and the incident drew to a bloodless close.

The various accounts of Western travellers to Afghanistan often highlight second-hand tales of assault, even murder, at the hands of wandering “tribesmen” or local police. Tomory recounts, for example, a story told to him of three hippie travellers going to sleep in an Afghan village and the next morning one of them wakes up to find his two companions beheaded.⁴ The tale has all the earmarks of an urban legend, though on my arrival in Herat I was similarly told quite matter-of-factly about a Western visitor who had recently been axed to death in a rural village.

Stories about bandits were also plentiful. Richard Gregory writes that “banditry was common in outlying districts, and Herat was under a night-time curfew when I was there.”⁵ Similarly, Jean recalled spending the night in a travel bus somewhere in the desert between Herat and Kandahar in 1975. “The driver was quite concerned about bandits,” she noted, “so the men took turns staying up, keeping an eye out for anybody coming in the distance.” It was not that incidents of violence, or threats of violence, were purely fictive, but such stories were often based on rumour, and they were told in disproportion to the actual occurrence of violence. As is generally the case, real physical harm awaited the unwary, the unlucky, or the culturally obtuse, but there is scant evidence that, at the time, Western travellers were in greater danger in Afghanistan than elsewhere.

In retrospect, I realize that Pashtuns, whose cultural code includes the obligation to avenge insults to honour, were well suited to the role of dangerous Other. I also now see how a desire for adventure fed into our attention to perceived dangers. Even the mere hint of threat added an excitement to the otherwise often mundane events of travel.

Our bus arrived in Kandahar. We were driven to a hotel determined by the bus driver, which is where we stayed overnight. I was exhausted by the time we arrived and still shaken by the events of days earlier involving the Kabuli education minister, but I was also thinking about the evening before and Wyhet’s kindness and generosity.

I remember nothing of the hotel, and regrettably little of the city. Beyond physical or emotional fatigue, I think I was also too concentrated on heading to that shiny object in the distance, India, and not the jewels that lay at my feet—Kandahar being one of them. Impatience is a dubious attribute of youth.

It’s a shame, as I have since learned, for Kandahar was, and is, a remarkable city, an ancient one with an intricate, if also turbulent, history. Over the centuries, its geographic location on the trade route between East and West and, most particularly, between Herat and Kabul has made it wealthy but also a magnet for invading armies.

Modern Afghanistan is said to have been founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani, who united several warring chiefs into a new confederation—an act for which he was crowned Afghanistan’s first king at a site near Kandahar. The city subsequently became for a time the country’s capital, but this was reversed following his death in 1772. Ahmad Shah was buried in a mausoleum in Kandahar, but his son and successor, Timur Shah, moved the capital to Kabul. The young country soon faced challenges from outside forces, especially Russia and Britain. British efforts to rule the country faced particularly stiff resistance from Kandahar’s largely Pashtun majority throughout the nineteenth century. Opposition to imperialist rule runs deep in Afghanistan.

When I was there in 1976, only three years had passed since King Zahir Shah had been overthrown. The political and economic crisis was deepening, but, like many travellers, I remained unaware of these tensions. Those of us on the road often watched the country through the windows of a bus or a hotel room, and sometimes the hotel stuck in our memory perhaps more than what we saw through the window. For example, David Tomory’s notes on Kandahar focus on the Peace Hotel, which he said was “like dying and going to heaven,” while Richard Gregory describes the city’s New Tourist Hotel as “a nice two storey property with a courtyard and garden.”⁶ Margot Miller similarly remembered her group staying in an expensive guesthouse in Kandahar where, one day, “a young boy came out from behind a gorgeous old floral chintz curtain to serve us breakfast. I thought, ‘I wonder how this got here?’ It looked like beautiful old British chintz fabric.”

I too wonder, how did it get there? Was it a survival of the British occupation of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century? Throughout the country, in one small shop after another, I found miniature statues, snuff boxes, rings, and other such personal items—each presumably with a story begging to be told but now laying silent on the display shelf. On my bookshelf is a small metal figure of Shiva. By which route did it end up in Afghanistan? On the same shelf is a metal powder flask, likely of Kochi origin. To whom did it once belong?

Every object has a story of its own. But rarely do we learn these stories: we must settle for more generic impressions. In attempting to describe those impressions, however, travellers to the East can at times lapse into Orientalist imagery. Describing Kandahar, Erik Pontoppidan, for example, recalls “the smell of exotic spices and the sound of bicycle bells everywhere” and “camels and bedouins walking along the road,” a depiction seemingly lifted from Arabian Nights.⁷ One individual I interviewed similarly described Kandahar as “an oasis of fruit and walled gardens, a lot more sophisticated than Herat”—with “sophisticated” implicitly reflecting Western standards and values.

Such images—at once romantic and formulaic—reflect the influence of enduring cultural stereotypes, which too easily overshadow the lived reality behind the stereotypes. Captivated by the exotic and unfamiliar, travellers hold themselves at a distance, gazing at what surrounds them but not venturing to look below the surface.

As I noted earlier, most Westerners, myself included, were largely unaware of our privileged circumstances as we set off on the journey, though we sometimes became more aware in the course of travelling. The realization often came subtly, sometimes only on reflection. Consider, for example, something as simple as a decent shower, with plenty of hot water—the sort of luxury that Western travellers easily take for granted. Journeying overland along the Hippie Trail and staying, by necessity or choice, in cheap accommodations, travellers soon learned to revise their expectations.

The taken-for-granted-ness of a good shower was cast in a new light when travelling in Afghanistan or elsewhere in the region. Terry Ledressay particularly remembered the shower in one Kandahar hotel: “It had three sides, all made of tin, except for the door. You’d turn on the water and it would make a really loud noise.”

Lana Parn recalled taking an outdoor shower where noise proved a minor concern:

The water was coming off the roof in the garden. I got a pail of water to wash our clothes; you don’t have washing machines while you’re travelling. When we were back at the campsite, I happened to look down into the pail, and saw it was full of all kinds of worms and creepy crawly little things moving around in the water. And here I had been taking a shower and splashing the water on my face and hair, and everything. It was quite unpleasant to think about.

While some travellers admittedly complained that things were “not like home,” the majority of us took things in stride, often with amusement. The petty irritations of life became just that—petty annoyances. They faded into the day-to-day course of living in a different culture and, in so doing, drew most of us closer to the people of the region. Even if we could not entirely understand each other, a kind of empathy did emerge from day-to-day encounters. There were not the obvious walls set up by class or the flaunting of wealth as sometimes seen in Mexican tourist resorts. But the walls could not be scaled in the short time most of us had in places like Kandahar. And, as always, many of us continued unconsciously to fall back on cultural tropes—prejudices—long engrained.

Under deepening grey skies one morning in late October, I and my fellow travellers boarded a local bus. A few hours later, we were in Kabul. But, as I realize now, Kandahar was a lost opportunity.

1. An exception is Rory Stewart, who made the journey on foot across central Afghanistan in 2002, which he recounts in The Places in Between.

2. Tim Slessor, First Overland: London-Singapore by Land Rover, 243.

3. Richard Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Travelling Alone” section.

4. David Tomory, A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, 65.

5. Richard Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Afghanistan” section.

6. Tomory, A Season in Heaven, 60; Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Afghanistan” section.

7. Erik Pontoppidan, “The Hippie Trail: The Road to Paradise,” n.p.