All the cheap beds in Afghanistan were simple wooden frames with woven tops, something like cane or wicker. Functional but needing some soft covering to stop you being marked by the woven pattern on any part of you that was exposed directly to it. It was hot both day and night in the city, my sleeping bag was too bulky so worked just as a mattress cover. We’d shared one to avoid paying for two rooms and were both heavily marked by the weave, I remember. It was easy to rise early during Ramadan, the call to prayer from the local mosque was accompanied by clattering from the resident family as they prepared food before the fasting began at sunrise.
We walked across the city, having picked up the English girls travelling companion nearby and got to the bus station, if you could call it that. Basically, a huge empty area filled with trucks and busses parked in a seemingly random manner. A local lad showed us to the truck which would take us to Bamyan, another open pick up style truck, mainly full of local people and their children and luggage, just the one goat and few very scruffy men in some kind of non-military uniform.
My intention had been to travel as directly as possible to India, avoiding any tourist attractions or busy (and therefore expensive) locations. My primary aim was to explore ashrams and holy places, practice meditation and listen to wise men…… I had however become fascinated with traveller’s tales of Bamyan and Band I Amir, links to this ultra conservative Islamic country's Buddhist history. I had also become quite fond of the sultry, brunette, brown eyed English girl……..
It took about 3 hours to get across the desert to Bamyan, with another stop where we all had to get out and walk beside the truck to negotiate some soft sand and when we arrived it was nothing short of astonishing. The Bamyan valley was ultra-sheltered by high sheer rock faces and at the western end, close to our Tea shop accommodation, were two enormous Buddha figures carved out of the rock face, one about 175 feet high. I can honestly say that I had never seen anything quite so imposing.
The family that ran the tea house (basically a truck stop, that had got used to a few western tourists and hippies) were practical folk, with a little English and French, who were happy to feed us a vegetarian lunch and let us store our bags under lock and key. Some were working on trucks, doing repairs and cleaning fuel lines, some taking parcels to transfer on to other transport. They sold postcards that looked like they’d been produced 30 or 40 year before, dog eared and faded.
As we walked over the gravel towards the statues, a really scruffy old guy shuffled over to us, he had no shoes or sandals, had worn and faded trousers with the remains of a short sleeved western style shirt and a filthy piece of headgear similar to the local tribesman. He waved a pad of paper at us demanded that we pay him money, we told him where to go and waved him off, convinced it was some kind of begging trick.
We spent the whole afternoon exploring the huge network of caves and connecting tunnels that surrounded the statues. Many still had intricate mosaic tiled walls depicting Buddhist stories and practices, the larger caves with ledges where ancient monks had slept. At intervals the tunnels would emerge into the light at different sections of the statues, the feet, the hands, the shoulders and ultimately onto the flattened top of the head of the Buddha itself.
I was completely transfixed and transported. I can’t quite explain the connection I felt with this place, it just felt like a home that I had once known, somewhere that I was completely at ease. (those who like to translate this kind of feeling into something tangible could have told me that I had been there in a previous life, I would have believed them… ).
When we eventually emerged from the last of the statues the scruffy guy with the note book was waiting for us with a very smartly dressed policeman. He spoke fluent English and told us that the old guy was the official ticket seller for the “museum” and simply wanted to collect the gate price and issue us a ticket. We all coughed up the equivalent of a few pence and the three of us chatted to him at length. He was the area police superintendent ( just happened to be passing), educated in the west and living near what was going to be our next stop, up in the mountains at Band I Amir. He invited the three of us for dinner at his house the following evening, said he would collect us from the tourist tea house.
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