9 Chapter 9. Kabul

Afghanistan’s fabled capital, Kabul, lies in a long, narrow valley that slices through two ranges of the Hindu Kush mountains. By the mid-1960s, it was a sprawling and rapidly westernizing city of roughly 400,000 people, with foreign embassy staff—especially Americans and Soviets—visibly present.¹ Many Western travellers of the time thought that Afghanistan was, like Iran, a peaceable and modernizing kingdom, while at the same time retaining its aura of traditionalism. Remembering his stop in Kabul in 1974, Bill Fillmore noted the inhabitants’ quiet serenity and “guys with long beards, turbans, and long-sleeved silk coats sitting on a rock wall by the river’s edge.”

But Mike Ramsden, a teacher-cum-poet who travelled through Afghanistan in 1971, captured the city’s less romantic reality in his poem “Kabul” (1973):

Sitting in a chai-house here in Chicken Street

donkeys nod along the street

laden with plums, apples, cherries, melons

weighed by a man, scales in his hand,

with stones for weight;

someone selling honey in coca-cola tins;

a young man like a prince,

walking by with a hawk on his wrist;

men from the high plains

selling horses, antique rifles;

and the Western kids

smiling benignly

at the tattered children

trying to sell a single rose of carnation

baksheesh, baksheesh they cry

the wandering children.

Ramsden was writing at the beginning of the drought that, in part, broke the Afghan political order. Describing Chicken Street three years later, Basil Jay writes, “Poverty is everywhere, from the absence of cars on the roads, to the downcast looks of most of the inhabitants,” later adding, “There were men selling ‘funny dust,’ men selling money, men selling camels, men selling sheep, men selling their sisters and even wives.”²

When I arrived in 1976, Afghanistan was in the early stages of a period of political instability that had begun with the overthrow of King Zahir Shah three years earlier and the advent of autocratic rule under President Daoud Khan, though few of us at the time recognized the enormity of these events with respect to the country’s future. As travellers, we saw the agonizing poverty and were moved by it, but most of us knew too little to understand the larger story that was being written.

Merely walking in the street could be emotionally and psychologically draining. Fending off street vendors and beggars, often children, or haggling over small items of purchase took an emotional toll:

One of the more dreadful feelings in the aftermath of dealing in the marketplace is that of meanness, or parsimony bordering on crude belligerency. You find yourself quibbling over mere pennies that don’t mean a fig to you, yet—in the strange new world in which you find yourself—take on a heightened importance. It cloaks itself in the name of principle and justifies itself as an antagonism to pestering. You find yourself brushing off beggars left and right, like summer flies on your sleeve, or arguing, as I once did, over two Afs for a cheap bracelet, and then watching the agony of my victory as the beaten old man gave in. I had offered either a pack of Marlboro cigarettes or eight Afs, but he wanted both, or ten Afs. His kid wanted him to take only money. When I won, I felt like giving him the cigarettes anyway, but I thought he might throw them in my face.

While bargaining could sometimes be fun and challenging, almost a game, it was also wearing, especially when one stopped to realize the shameful pettiness of one’s role in the transaction being conducted.

As young Western travellers, our impressions of Afghanistan were shaped by the country’s major cities: Herat, Kandahar, Kabul, and in some cases Mazar-i-Sharif as well. We did not understand that the Afghan government’s authority did not carry much beyond Kabul, that elsewhere the country was governed by a tradition of local autonomy and tribal loyalty, and that the polity was divided by history, religion, and culture, truths that I and others—not to mention Western governments—would only tragically learn years later, and perhaps do not understand even now.

But my impressions and those of my fellow travellers were even more restricted. As in Istanbul and Tehran, our experience of Kabul and its peoples was largely shaped by acquaintance with a specific area—in this case, Chicken Street.

No two people’s descriptions of anything are exactly alike, but taken together they can sometimes create a reasonably coherent montage. Journalist Christina Lamb described Chicken Street as “a favourite destination back in the days of the hippie trail, with all its little shops selling carpets, shawls, and lapis and garnet stones set into silver rings that would soon blacken.”³ One of the travellers to whom David Tomory spoke likewise mentioned the panoply of goods for sale: “Chicken Street was a great wash of embroidery, rusty cutlasses and unidentifiable knickknacks to poke around in.” Another recalled a visit to a dimly lit haunt: “A gigantic hound, a mastiff, guarded the doorway to a room like a dark, domed cave. Inside were three people and a gigantic hookah. The ceiling was encrusted with soot.” Yet another all too vividly remembered “Flytop Pudding,” a confection whose raisins, upon closer inspection, rose, hummed, and hovered in the air. For more stable fare, travellers headed for Sigi’s, a restaurant and hotel run by a German man named Siegfreid (“Sigi”) that featured a giant-sized chessboard and pieces in its garden. “The main room inside was filled with Afghan carpets and cushions,” said one traveller. “You had a little seat, a little table, an outsize German schnitzel, so big, hanging off the plate, and potato salad.”⁴ As was typical of tourist haunts, the restaurants catered to Western musical tastes, with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles on regular offer.

Rainer, Maude, and I stayed at the Eagle Hotel on Chicken Street. My recollections of our hotel square with those of Basil Jay, who recalled a Kabul hotel where his family stayed in 1974 as having hot water, a wood burning stove for heat, and unlimited electricity that powered “a single, shadeless light bulb hung from the ceiling.”⁵

In her diary, Brenda Grant remarked somewhat enthusiastically on staying at the Super Payam Hotel in 1974, at a cost of 30 Afs per person per night. The hotel came with “hot showers and a restaurant,” the latter having the additional benefit of being an “evening hangout.” Bruce Shore described a room at the same Kabul hotel, where he and Grant stayed in 1976, as “a very comfortable, pleasant place. But, of course, the electricity was intermittent, hot water was difficult, and bed bugs were rife—the other side of the coin.”

A mile from Chicken Street lay the European and American sector, home of the foreign embassies. Except to obtain visas or deal with medical issues, only a few of us wandered outside Chicken Street to take in the broader city. Arthur recalled a poignant moment at the site of Bala Hissar, or “High Fort,” the ancient fortress on the southern edge of Kabul, when he was there in 1977. He had pulled out a book while sitting on a tiny ledge overlooking the city’s old part, its slums, when a young Afghan boy came and sat down a few feet away. Saying nothing, the young man took a wooden slate and some chalk from his bag and began doing his homework. And there they sat for several minutes, quietly, without speaking, until it was time for each to leave.

One Friday afternoon, I took in a buzkashi match at the city stadium.⁶ Buzkashi is an ancient team sport played throughout Central Asia involving horse-mounted players competing for the carcass of a goat. It is considered Afghanistan’s national sport, much like hockey is to Canada. In days of yore, games might take place over several days and hundreds of miles. Today, buzkashi continues to be played in several countries. The size or type of field used remains largely unregulated in Afghanistan’s northern provinces, where as many as 500 riders may participate, but a more regulated version is played in Kabul.

Though still dangerous, games in Kabul take place in a stadium on a field roughly the size of a football pitch, at the lengthwise end of which are goal posts. Teams compete to throw the goat carcass, only recently killed and—in the contest I watched—still dripping blood, into the goal area. The Kabul games consist of two teams of ten people, five playing in each of two 45-minute periods, with a 15-minute break at the half. A field master (i.e., referee) is present to punish fouls. The game I watched had all the intensity of any Western sporting event. The crowd cheered as the riders, who barely stopped short of whipping an opponent and his horse, tried to take away the quarry. Sometimes they swooped low—feet firmly strapped in their saddles, reins between their teeth—to pick up the fallen carcass, then pass it to a teammate. It was one of the most amazing feats of horsemanship I have ever witnessed.

Tragically, after coming to power in 1996, the Taliban used the same Kabul stadium for show trials and executions, while banning the game as immoral. Buzkashi was revived, however, following the Taliban’s overthrow in 2001. Since its return to power in August 2021, the regime has continued to allow the game to be played and has even embraced the sport.

Apart from short excursions such as mine and Arthur’s to Bala Hissar, those of us on the trail generally confined ourselves to Chicken Street. Our contacts with the local peoples were thus largely transactional, mere glimpses only of a proud culture forced by outside forces to play in a Great Game far beyond any contest of man and horse.

People today often assume that travellers along the Hippie Trail were on a spiritual quest of some sort. But this was far from universally true. I saw a few kaftan-clad souls who were clearly headed straight for India in search of enlightenment, or at least the appearance of it. But for most of us—including myself—the prospect of spiritual awakening was not a significant drawing card. In fact, until I got to Afghanistan, religion was rarely a topic of conversation among the overland travellers I encountered.

Like other travellers, I was passing through devoutly Muslim countries, where religion pervaded daily life. There were mosques everywhere, and the five sonorous calls to prayer could be heard throughout the day. But I was not a Muslim, nor were most Western travellers. I was respectful of the faith, but I felt like an outsider. Islam wasn’t merely a religion but an entire culture, one to which I did not belong and on which I could not intrude.

My first sustained encounter with religion occurred in Kabul, but not with any traditional or orthodox faith. Rather, the Children of God had set up shop in several cities on the route to India.⁷ The cult began as a breakaway from Christianity in the late 1960s. Its founder, David Berg, was a former ordained minister of the Christian Missionary Alliance. Exploiting America’s cultural upheavals at the time, including rapidly mounting protests against the Vietnam War, Berg sought out disaffected youth. By the mid-1970s, the movement had morphed into Berg’s own vanity project, whereupon he changed his name to Moses David and declared himself a prophet. His messages were heavy on enlightenment through sex: his religious injunctions included orders that his female followers should become “flirty fishers” of men, seducing them into becoming members of his church and giving him money.⁸ Perhaps a few male travellers, being fatigued and lonely, were easy prey for their siren call, but I suspect not many.

I had heard vaguely of the Children of God before heading to India. In Kabul, I met several female cult members. I was handed a pamphlet David had written, titled, “Jimmy Carter: America’s Last Chance?” It sold for 5 cents. The pamphlet called for America’s repentance and listed other “CHILDREN OF GOD colonies near YOU!” in Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore, and New Delhi. Meeting with the women led to an intriguing encounter of another kind, of which I wrote:

One day, I go with a couple of the young women to the main Afghan prison. They are visiting a Western prisoner, named John, being held on drug charges. He is thin, bearded, and dirty, but seems otherwise healthy and alert.

John says the prisoners must pay for absolutely everything, including a bed or blankets, and must buy their own food or otherwise starve. The prisoners and guards regularly smoke hash, yet John has been in jail for ½ kilo and a recently arrived German had only 20 grams of hash. John told of another man, an English citizen, who was now in a “helluva schmozzle” because he had been acquitted of a charge in court, but the prosecutor was now reviewing whether to appeal the case, and so he was in limbo. Ironically, had he been convicted, he likely would have bought his way out of prison already. But even if you pay off the fine and the prison “residency” costs (50 Afs per day), a sentence might be extended on some whim. Moreover, the longer one is in the prison, the number of people to be bribed increases.

As John and I talk between the bars separating us, he nods to a balding Afghani. “He killed five people,” says John.⁹

Arthur had similar recollections of the Children of God as “the only people apparently in Kabul who would take care of the prisoners.” Angela Ford, who travelled in roughly the same period, remembered eating “a Christmas turkey dinner in Kandahar provided by the group members.”

While prominent, the Children of God were not the only cult in town. The road to India was laden with spiritual opportunists. Patrick Welland recalled staying in a cheap hotel in Kabul where he and his future spouse “fended off an offer from a lunatic American couple to join their religious cult.”

Chicken Street offered a relatively safe, familiar environment for Western travellers. One could eat traditional Afghan food but could also have meals suggestive of Western cuisine: hamburgers, French fries, and omelettes—though there were also surprises, such as when Bruce Finch one day discovered the minestrone soup he was enjoying was made from sheep’s heads.

Chicken Street was a key transit point for travellers coming from the east (Pakistan) or the west (Iran). It was the hub especially for the commercial bus companies that, by 1976, had grown in number, yet were no more reliable than before. Of these, the Magic Buses were the most famous. As Gregory notes, the company was primarily “a booking agency and didn’t run a fleet of branded buses.”¹⁰ MacLean describes the company’s original office as operating “from a cockroach-infested office on Amsterdam’s Dam Square,” out of which a string of subcontracted buses, “diverse and decrepit,” took passengers across Asia.¹¹

It was out of Amsterdam that I took my one and only Magic Bus, to Athens. The bus was of British origin, a right-hand drive vehicle. As a result, its co-pilot would act as a spotter and shout instructions to the driver from the back of the bus when a lane change was needed. After Athens, I travelled primarily by local bus and train. I did not regret my choice.

The buses travelling under the Magic Bus name were not uniform. As such, the soundness of the buses was often in question—and that of the drivers and their assistants even more so. In consequence, the bus tours faced frequent customer complaints. All too often, passengers changed companies and buses in mid-journey. Having survived their journey to Kabul, many chose to travel the rest of the way to India by alternative means.

To the uninitiated, my account of travelling to India might seem carefree and exciting, perhaps even exotic. One imagines the mundane activities of day-to-day life subsumed beneath a stream of adventures. And, to a degree, this is correct. Absent were some particularly repetitious demands and routinized activities, like showing up every day for work or school, and responsibilities in general. The relative lack of material goods to be maintained and protected was also a relief, while the possibility of the new and unexpected hovered over each day’s horizon.

But as the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz has noted, “No one lives in the world in general. Everybody, even the exiled, the drifting, the diasporic, or the perpetually moving, lives in some confined and limited stretch of it—‘the world around here.’ ”¹² Human beings require routine. Gradually, much of everyday life on the road takes on an everyday quality. The days become filled with quite ordinary activities, albeit in changed material and cultural contexts, involving predictable problems and challenges.

Granted, some travellers did engage in activities that stepped outside the ordinary, such as exchanging money or peddling contraband goods on the black market or selling hair (to make wigs) or blood. Angela Ford reported that money could be made smuggling pistachio nuts and honey from Afghanistan into India, while Jean remembered selling a bottle of Scotch she had purchased at Heathrow’s duty-free on New Delhi’s black market for US$200, enough to pay for her flight back to London. A few travellers found paid jobs at hotels or worked as movie extras, as did John Hunter’s wife, Pamela, at Madras Movie Land, one of the city’s many flourishing film studios. Inevitably, though, moments of adventure and excitement are replaced by long stretches of boredom and loneliness. Repetition returns.

Outside of days spent in vans or on buses and trains going somewhere, or nowhere, my daily activities often took on a functional similarity to life in Canada. Typically, my day began with a visit to the nearest toilet—ubiquitously, a squatter—and washing up, followed by breakfast (often eggs, toast, and coffee or tea) in the hotel or at a nearby café. Breakfast might morph into lunch at a local café, such places as Sigi’s being a kind of meeting place cum hideaway. Catering to their Western clientele, the proprietors generally provided a musical diet of rock and roll. (Bruce Finch remembered the Green Door Hotel constantly playing Johnny Rivers songs.)

We might read novels. Hesse’s Siddhartha was especially prominent, but books by Emily Brontë, Carlos Castaneda, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Michener, Harold Robbins, and Jacqueline Suzanne were also common. Or we might play cards or other games (chess, checkers, and backgammon). Like Istanbul’s Pudding Shop, Kabul’s cafés were a conduit for exchanging information. These activities were often accompanied by the passing of a joint, which all but assured further time would be spent in the café.

Once I left the café, a series of other mundane activities would fill the day: cashing traveller’s cheques, getting travel visas, or buying train or bus tickets; shopping for food or toiletries; getting a haircut—often performed in-house by fellow travellers; or making small sewing repairs. Some days I walked to the Poste Restante to send or receive mail, or simply for something to do. Mail service was slow and unpredictable, but inexpensive. Brenda Grant sent two small postcards from Afghanistan to Canada and England for 33 Afs; the cost of aerograms was 10 Afs.

The receipt of mail was complicated by the fact that we did not always know where we would be and might not stay in one place for long. In consequence, I received very few letters during my travels, but in truth I was also a poor correspondent. Letters from home were both bearers of comfort and bringers of homesickness.

Travel is always to some extent a challenge, all the more so when it takes us into cultures radically unlike our own. Fergus F. noted that travelling overland through Europe and Greece, and then to Turkey, could help travellers gradually acclimatize to the changing cultural landscape.¹³ But no amount of preparation through reading or talking to others could entirely prepare anyone for the strange and often unsettling sights, sounds, and smells—the sense of awkwardness and psychological stress or the fatigue and ill health that often accompanied these constant changes. Don Skelton remembered his panic early on when, as the only Westerner on a passenger train crossing Turkey, he suddenly thought to himself, “What have I gotten myself into?” Then, suddenly, he was in Kabul.

1. Don Skelton still has an Afghan recipe book put together by the wives of diplomats at the US embassy in Kabul and printed on a hand-cranked machine, for which he paid ten cents.

2. Basil Jay, 65 Days to Delhi: An Incredible Journey, 529. Jay also writes of wandering for several hours through a “dusty, dirty, and ramshackle town” in Afghanistan where everything appeared “to be incredibly cheap, brassware and antique weaponry, particularly” (502–3).

3. Christina Lamb, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World, 19. In the late 1980s, Lamb travelled with a group of mujahideen as they crossed the border from Pakistan into the Hindu Kush to fight the Soviets, She returned to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.

4. David Tomory, A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, 64. Tomory uses the spelling “Siggi’s,” which is not uncommon. But the restaurant was actually named “Sigis,” with no apostrophe—the possessive form of “Sigi” in German. Gregory also recalls Sigi’s “large chess board laid out in the courtyard, the pieces being two or three feet high, and chess sets were provided at tables for less energetic customers.” “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Afghanistan” section.

5. Jay, 65 Days to Delhi, 513–14.

6. “Buzkashi: The National Game of Afghanis,” Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Canberra, Australia, accessed September 23, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20140930234340/http://www.afghanembassy.net/cultural/buzkashi.

7. See Tomory, A Season in Heaven, 148.

8. See Faith Jones, Sex Cult Nun: Breaking Away from the Children of God, a Wild, Radical Religious Cult, 55–58. Bernie Howgate tells movingly of falling in love with a woman who joined the Children of God and, in turn, brought him into the family. Eventually, he pulled himself out, but at the cost of losing her. Tales of a Travelling Man, 140–51.

9. Among his account of several harrowing experiences on his journey, Basil Jay recounts spending “a very long night in an Afghanistan police cell, accused of killing a man, and told that execution was what I could expect come the day.” 65 Days to Delhi, xviii–xix.

10. David Gregory, A Pukka History of the Hippie Trail: Overland to Asia in Search of Hashish, 6.

11. Rory MacLean, Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India, 82.

12. Clifford Geertz, afterword to Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, Senses of Place, 214.

13. Fergus F. observed that those who “just flew in from San Francisco to New Delhi” had more trouble adjusting. They “would just freak out and start banging on the embassy door looking for medicines and things.”