An icy wind blasted in our faces as we trudged up a rocky slope on the southern outskirts of Kabul, the war-shattered capital of Afghanistan. Around us rose a moonscape of treeless, dun-colored hills, broken by clusters of mud-walled squatter huts. I squinted into the sunlight, looking east toward the earthen citadel of Bala Hissar, a stronghold from the time of the Silk Road to the post-Soviet wars. High above us, another wall of mud brick and stone — a fragment of the ancient rampart of Kabul, constructed before the arrival of Islam in a futile attempt to defend the city against invaders from Arabia and Central Asia — snaked along the ridgeline.
"It's always been easy to conquer Afghanistan," said my companion, Jonathan Bean, the American co-founder of the Great Game Travel Company Afghanistan, which shepherded about 70 Western tourists, including several dozen Americans, through this rugged land last year. "The problem is keeping control of it."
After an hour's slog up trackless scree to the top of the ridge, Jonathan and I, along with our security guard, a lean, gray-bearded Pashtun named Shafik Ullah, reached the rampart. We followed it for a 1.6km, sometimes walking alongside it, sometimes balancing ourselves on its crumbling surface. Perforated with apertures for archers, 9m high in places, the barrier climbed toward the summit of Kabul's highest hill, 2,195m above sea level.
The Hindu Kush, a massif of snow and ice, loomed 48km to the north; Kabul lay far below us, obscured behind a layer of dust and smoke that smudged the panorama like a dirty fingerprint. Jonathan opened a thermos of coffee, and we warmed ourselves amid piles of stones and spent cartridges, the remains of a military post used by Ahmad Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance fighters during the battle for Kabul in the early 1990s. "You can feel the history all around us," Shafik said.
In the 1970s, tens of thousands of visitors poured into Kabul each year, when the Afghan capital rivaled Katmandu as the favored Central Asian haunt for young backpackers who bunked down in cheap hotels and congregated on fabled Chicken Street to smoke hashish and while away the hours in coffee and carpet shops.
Then came the Russians, then the Taliban, and then the bombings following 9/11, pretty much destroying Kabul's reputation as a favored stop on the Hippie Trail. Now, however, even though much of Afghanistan remains dangerous, tourists are beginning to trickle back in, some lured by the thrill of the unknown, others by the pleasures offered by such new tourist spots as the Kabul Serena, an elegant US$36.5-million hotel that claims a "five-star ambience" in the heart of the city. As many as 5,000 Western tourists visited Kabul last year, Jonathan Bean told me, most of them affluent Europeans and Americans who have traveled to "30 or 40" countries, including developing ones. "Most of our clients are experienced travelers," Jonathan said. "They've trekked in Nepal, gone on safari in East Africa. Some have returned after coming here in the 1960s and 1970s. They see Afghanistan as the next great adventure-travel destination."
Most tourists who pass through view Kabul as an overnight stopover on the way to more remote corners of the country: the rugged Pamir Mountains in the northeast; the exotic bazaar town of Mazar-i-Sharif; and Bamiyan, the former site of the giant stone Buddhas that were destroyed by the Taliban. But those who linger for a few days, as I did, will discover a vibrant capital, steeped in tumultuous history and rich with Silk Road atmospherics.
RSS