Afghanistan as it was (1973)

After several requests from fellow Puffins, I finally got off my arse to rummage around in the attic and miraculously unearthed a bunch of diaries from over fifty years ago, and most importantly the one which covered my experiences in Afghanistan in 1973.  I was 22, and had just finished a three-year apprenticeship, during which I had managed to amass almost £500 in savings and decided to see a bit of the world.

Afghanistan was always a primitive country, but after criss-crossing Iran to take in the wonders of Isfahan, Persepolis and Mashad, it was a positive relief.  The Shah was still firmly in power in Iran but the country was in the midst of a crackdown on communists and Islamists, and Savak – the not-so-secret police – were busy.  In Mashad I wanted to see the astonishing Goharshad Mosque, built in the fifteenth century and one of Islam’s holiest sites in the country.  When I got close to its brilliant blue dome though I came under hail of missiles – empty drink cans and other assorted rubbish, and I heard the world ‘infidel’ being shouted.  It was a word I remembered from my comic books in stories about the Crusaders and Saladin, and with a start suddenly realised they meant me!  I hightailed it away, and the next day crossed into Herat in the West of Afghanistan, the aggression in Iran had been getting too much.

Compared to the Iranians, the Afghans immediately seemed more relaxed, a happier people, walking along the street took time as every shopkeeper wanted to buy whatever one might have – your clothes, your watch, a radio maybe, money to change, whatever, and each time you sat and drank tea and ate sugary sweets, while the smell of hashish hung heavy in the air.  It was late September, and a few months after the country’s last king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, had been deposed by his cousin, Mohammad Daoud Khan, who had imposed an autocratic republican government.  Some years later he would be overthrown by Nur Mohammad Taraki, who installed the unpopular communist government which led to the Soviet invasion in December 1979 and the beginnings of Afghanistan’s decades of warfare.

But that was all in the future, and in the meantime the Afghan men came across as a proud, if slightly shifty, people, walking straight-backed and with their heads held high, while I also saw my first full niqabs on the women which just looked weird.  Especially when three of them attacked a terrified man in the street with their shoes. After a couple of days in Herat, I met an English doctor and his wife who were driving their camper van overland to Australia, where they planned to work, and they gave me a lift across the country, stopping one night in dusty Kandahar and reaching Kabul late at night a couple of days later after leaving the desert landscape behind and climbing high into the mountains.

Kabul is a sprawling city, about 5,000 feet high and surrounded by more towering mountains.  There were some asphalt roads, back then, some modernish concrete buildings, some wooden ones and others that just seemed to be made of mud.  Wandering around felt safe, the locals were mostly poor but cheerful and friendly and wore a mixture of brightly coloured clothes. We booked into a place called the Jam Hotel where we slept on the roof for about ten pence a night (or two shillings as it was then), and spent the next few days eating like kings, getting royally stoned on the famous ‘Afghan Black’ and listening to music in local cafés, until the doctor and his wife decided to press on with their journey.

A couple of days later I visited the once famous hippie haunt Sigis.  It was by now near deserted, the new government disapproved of the hippies and they were moving on, but the place still served good German food, milkshakes and pancakes.  And it was there that I met Joachim, a German student with straggly black hair and a full beard who told me he was planning to ride a horse from Bamiyan to Bande-e-Amir, and would I like to join him?  I’d already decided I wanted to go to Bamiyan to see the famed giant Buddhas carved into the rockface, so hooking up with Joachim seemed like a good idea at the time, and we agreed to meet at the bus station shortly after midnight a few days later, having ascertained that it was best to get one of the very early buses out.

By the time we met up again, Joachim had been joined by a pretty Swiss German girl called Rita who also wanted to join our adventure.  The first bus actually left at about 4 a.m., and the only seats available were on the roof.  This actually turned out to be a good thing, the worst seats being the window ones at the rear inside – with those at the front continually spitting their foul beetle juices out of the window the phlegm then spattered those at the back (there being no glass in the windows).  On the roof it was cold, but we snuggled into our sleeping bags along with about 20 locals, and listened as one or other of the them sang strange wailing songs.  The Afghans would disembark before police checkpoints, given that travelling on the roof was technically illegal, but we just hid under the mountains of luggage. The Afghans would then re-join the bus a bit further down the road.  We also discovered that Ramadan had been declared, so once the sun came up there was no eating or drinking until dusk.

Bamiyan was about a hundred miles North West of Kabul, and three-and-a-half thousand feet higher, and despite the sleeping bags and warm clothes we were wearing the wind was bitterly cold.  We turned off the main road and mountains loomed all around us, their peaks shrouded in mist.  It was nearly the end of September, and we were told that in another month the area would be snow-bound.  In parts, the gravel and dirt road we were on now was almost like a tunnel, so steep and high were the rock faces on either side, until we finally arrived in Bamiyan in the mid-afternoon. It was a fairly large village but basically just one long main street with various dwellings dotted around. Most of the locals were Hazara, a minority Shia sect and with a reputation for being more peaceable than their turbulent fellow countrymen in the North and South.  We checked into a pleasant enough hotel, again for about two shillings a night.

The next day we set about trying to find some horses, but they were scarce.  We finally struck gold the day after and managed to hire three for about ten pounds a week each, and arranged to set off two days later.  In the intervening day we climbed up the sandstone cliffs where the two famous Buddhas had been carved one-and-a-half-thousand years before.  They were massive, the tallest one about a hundred-and-eighty feet high, and the smaller a hundred-and-twenty feet.  They were astonishing, and the view when we reached the heads of the Buddhas simply breathtaking.  Of course, the Taliban in their wisdom blew them up in 2001.

The horses were real nags, the kind that Jesus or Bob Crow might bet on, but it was what it was, and we set off early one morning once a couple of Afghans had finished loading them with our belongings and sacks of feed for our steeds.  Except they didn’t do a very good job, so the first morning packages kept falling off and we had to stop every fifteen minutes to pick stuff up and re-pack, and then my saddle fell off as well, dumping me on the ground.  A passing local helped to re-secure it, and in the process managed to make off with my treasured Swiss Army knife.  Well, I said they were shifty as well as proud.  After that we made slow progress, mostly at walking pace, occasionally trotting and very occasionally breaking into a gallop.  Bande-e-Amir was about fifty miles away as the buzzard flies, but I doubted we covered much more than fifteen miles that first day, following a gravel track that wound up through the mountain, until we decided to make camp.

As dusk approached the wind rose and it grew increasingly cold.  I fetched water from a nearby stream and after securing the horses we made a small fire to make some tea, and dined on cake, bread and figs, and then it was into the sleeping bags on the open ground, fully dressed and staring at a new moon and a brilliant star studded sky with plenty of shooting stars, until it was too cold to leave our faces out and we burrowed deeper into the bags.  A horse whinnied, and of course it was mine, tangled up in his chain, so there was no choice but to get up again, untangle the chain and replace the beast’s blankets, then dive freezing and shivering back into my sleeping bag to try and get some sleep on the uncomfortable stony ground.

We awoke in the morning to discover our bags were covered in frost and we lay still until the sun had clambered over the mountains to warm us up.  The stream had frozen over, so getting water to make tea meant breaking the ice, while our jars of jam and marmalade were also frozen and, without the Swiss Army knife, we had nothing with which to open our cans of corned beef, which were probably also frozen anyway.  Even the cake and bread we had were frozen solid and impossible to eat, so we slowly packed up and got ready to move on, resolving that that was our last stop out in the open, we’d have to find rest houses or local families to stay with for the rest of the journey.

We set off at about 10 a.m. and rode solidly until 3 p.m. apart from an hour’s break to eat once the food we had thawed out enough, and out of sight of prying eyes due to Ramadan.  Miraculously we stumbled upon a kind of inn by the side of the track, probably there were numerous locals who made this journey, and we gratefully stepped into a large room with a mud floor covered with rugs where a couple of Afghanis had already staked out their places.  As soon as the sun had gone down, we were served soup, with flat bread and some stringy meat, it wasn’t much but at the time it seemed like a feast.

We set off early the next day determined to reach Bande-e-Amir by nightfall, but again the going was slow.  As much as anything, the thing they don’t tell you about this horse riding malarky, is how much your arse and legs ache from sitting in the saddle all day, and day three was the worst – it would get better in the days ahead, but now every jolt was agonising. And then disaster struck when Joachim realised he’d lost his wallet and passport and whirled around and galloped off back the way we’d come, while Rita and I plodded slowly on, and then waited at the next roadside inn we cam across.  Remarkably Joachim re-joined us a couple of hours later with all his belongings intact, he’d left them on the floor of the first inn, and the owners had looked after them for him.

We finally clip clopped into Bande-e-Amir in the afternoon of the fourth day, sunburnt and windburned after going over the final high pass, and what a mind-blowing place it was.  Nine-and-a-half thousand feet above sea level, a cluster of six turquoise lakes sat behind natural travertine dams. After days of riding through a brown landscape of near desert, it was hard to comprehend at first, it was so totally unexpected. The waters were crystal clear and icy cold, and the cliffs surrounding them were a mixture of colours, red, grey, blue and black.  There were streams and mini waterfalls, and white sand, and clusters of goats, and a few houses scattered around, one of which offered a kind of hotel service.  Again, there was one large room for sleeping, again a mud floor covered in rugs but with the added delight of heated water pipes running underneath, the first underfloor heating I’d ever come across.  Astonishingly there was also an outside ‘toilet’, basically a small mud outhouse, but still it afforded some privacy.  Bathing though still had to be carried out in a nearby freezing stream.

We stayed in this unexpected paradise for three days, exploring the surrounding countryside on horseback, wandering around the shores of the different lakes, and in the evenings being served mutton with rice and flatbread and a few vegetables, sharing our last precious tins of corned beef with the locals, and listening to one or the other of them playing a makeshift rubab – a kind of Afghan lute, although in this case it consisted of a single string, a piece of wood, and an old petrol can.  Well, it was almost better than nothing.

The ride back took just three days, staying in the same places as on the way out, we were by now at ease in the saddle, all the aches and pains had gone, the skin on our faces and hands was rough and leathery and we had that sort of permanent dusty look of the locals.  Occasionally we’d pass a lonely Afghan walking to some destination, but other than that we were almost entirely by ourselves in the mountains, apart from the occasional hawk high above.  Riding back down Bamiyan’s main street felt surreal, kids chasing after us with baskets tied to their heads which they filled with the shit our horses were leaving behind, using their bare hands.  It felt sad to return the nags to their owner and then have to walk back to the hotel, like getting off a ship after weeks at sea, our legs felt unsteady.  But it was time to ‘Carry on up the Khyber’ and head for Pakistan, the Afghan adventure was all but over, I bade farewell to Joachim and Rita, and never saw them again.

In the weeks that I spent in Afghanistan I never felt unsafe, the people were always hospitable and friendly, primitive but proud.  Now after nearly five decades of war and upheaval following the Soviet invasion in 1979, then the rise of the Taliban, the US-led invasion and now the Taliban again, I doubt it is the same place.  Probably the entire country is suffering from PTSD, which is why they don’t make for good imports here.
 

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