Part 7 . Across Afghanistan. A meeting of roads, or not quite.

 The bus journey from Herat to Kabul would take about a day, leaving before dawn and arriving after sunset. It was Ramadan. The road from Herat was a slightly pinkish tarmac, it had been built by the Russians. We stopped at various intervals, usually just in the desert, for toilet breaks and prayer breaks. Occasionally the bus stop would be at a house and tea was available, but food was scarce because the locals only ate between sundown and sun-up , fasting during the day.

About 4 hours out of Kabul the road just ran out. All there was, was sand . Deep wheel tracks and shallow wheel track criss-crossed to a point about half a kilometre to the left. We all got out and walked across the sand in the wake of the bus until it reached another road, this time dark grey tarmac. Apparently this road was built by the Americans, there had been some agreement to jointly build the main road, but the cold war meant that they wouldn’t actually talk to each other about where the road would join so they never actually met.
I still had no idea about the politics of the region, happily and naively bumbling along on my personal spiritual journey to India, just picking up snippets of information when it might actually impact on my journey. I knew very little about the Islamic faith, but had read bits of the Koran as part of my general interest in comparative religion, philosophy and poetry. The little of Afghanistan I’d seen was very basic, almost arcane and felt like something from before the middle ages, utterly different to anything I'd experienced, tribal lands just paying lip service to a more modern world, devout and self contained.
Arriving in Kabul therefore was a shock, this was a proper City, business districts, tourist areas, Hilton and Intercontinental style hotels, banks, schools, universities. A bustling place with cars, taxis, street lights tower blocks etc. I’d read enough travellers guides to know to head out of the new areas and head for the older parts of the city, where cheap accommodation and travelers hostels had sprung up around the markets affectionately known as Freak Street and Chicken Street . I found a very basic hotel, just a dozen plain concrete rooms around a courtyard with a kitchen at one end. The family that ran this had three sons and three daughters , the boys spoke fluent English with American accents and the daughters were young enough to wear western style clothes in the confines of the hotel, just putting on the burkha if they were going into town or just a headscarf if they were visiting neighbours or the local market.
Not all the women in Kabul were covered, many had adopted western dress to go with their more international lifestyle and it was quite surreal to see that some women were wearing bright coloured modern high heels and mini skirts under their burkhas.
The girls in the hotel would cook breakfast in the mornings if requested and even do an evening dish of some kind. Being vegetarian was a bit limiting as almost everything was meat based and a bunch of us talked the family into letting us use the kitchen during the day to prepare rice and veg and warm food bought in the market. I met two English girls here and we generally cooked and ate together, but on the 3rd or 4th evening I took one of them to Sigis.
Sigis, like the pudding shop in Istanbul, was the place where everybody met, it was traveller central, a place to meet up with people, find lifts or companions and pick up post, change money on the black market or score a little smoke. It was more expensive than eating from street stalls but was a truly beautiful spot, a long veranda around a central courtyard , a well kept garden of huge sunflowers and herbs. It was the first time I had seen a man sized chess board with pieces as tall as me, much copied since, but extraordinary the first time you see it. It was full of “the beautiful people”, tanned and relaxed, wearing Indian and Nepalese jewellery, cheesecloth wrap around skirts, sarongs, Indian cotton waistcoats and trousers. It was like a hippies dream moment. Entirely international, Germans, Swedes, French, Danes, Aussies and Americans.
I offloaded three quarters of the Afghan Black to a French girl at twice what I’d paid for it and arranged to travel north the following day with the English girl from the hotel.


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