It’s really stressful walking around Kabul at the moment – not because of any security worry, but because the whole place seems to be one vast sea of mud! The snow’s melted and it’s been raining for two or three days – not proper rain, like in Australia, but drizzly rain, like in England. And the roads here are almost all dirt, not tar – which, of course, turns into mud when it’s wet and massive amounts of dust when it’s not. … Read more »
Gavin emailed Green’s Hotel the evening before we left for Peshawar, to try and book a couple of rooms, but we hadn’t had any response. When we arrived there, they didn’t know anything about it and only had one double room, which we decided to take. There were two beds, fortunately.
We paid the driver when we arrived there and Hanif waited while we sorted out the room. Then we grabbed a local taxi to take me and Gavin to the wedding and Hanif to a relative’s place. On the way, though, Gavin got a text message from Wahid saying the wedding was finished and where were we?
We dropped Hanif off at his relative’s place and went back to the hotel to meet up with Wahid. From there, we got another taxi and Wahid took us to Farooq’s house. It had been Farooq’s wedding we’d come for – and missed.
We spent an hour or so there. Sitting outside on the verandah, in the warm Peshawar evening, we were fed fruit, cake, sweets and tea. Then Farooq drove us to Wahid’s house, via John’s place.
John’s an oldish English man who’s been around this region since coming here as a hippy in the 60s or 70s. He speaks several of the regional languages and converted to Islam many years ago. He’s worked in radio for a long time, starting off with the BBC World Service, and is also apparently the imam of the Cambridge university mosque. He’s a pleasant and very interesting person, who i’d met a couple of times before when he was staying in the work guest house, where i used to live.
At Wahid’s place, we met four of his five brothers, but none of his four sisters or his mother – who were all in the house but were in a different part of it, which is normal here. I find the segregation between men and women, in this part of the world, weird and disturbing – and i’m glad i’m not Afghan. I’m also glad that i can hang around with foreign women here, as i’m not particularly fond of the company of men – specially not when it’s only men.
We sat with the men and were fed with food cooked by the women, but brought in by the men. There was a lot of food, but i’d pigged out on the cake and sweets at Farooq’s place and didn’t eat all that much of it.
Not long after eating, me and Gavin went back to the hotel – it had been a long and tiring day.
The next morning we woke up about 7 o’clock and went down for the breakfast that was included in the cost of the room. The restaurant wasn’t open by 7.15 and we sat down outside and waited – as did another of the guests. Fortunately, someone else came along and, not being as patient as us, banged on the door. The restaurant was opened almost immediately, and we went in for breakfast.
There was bread (local style), a bean dish, porridge and toast. I had bread and beans, and some green tea.
Wahid and Hanif turned up at about eight o’clock and we all piled into the Torkham taxi that Wahid had hired before on the way.
The trip back to Torkham was uneventful – despite the lack of an armed guard. At one point, Wahid told me to put on my pakool – a local style of cap – so the guards at one of the checkpoints wouldn’t notice there were foreigners in the car and make us have a guard.
There was a minor bit of drama at Torkham – about me and Gavin not going to customs, or something. It didn’t come to anything though, and we went through passport control in the same way as before.
Walking back across the border, i asked Wahid if i’d get arrested if i took a photo. He said i wouldn’t – although he obviously didn’t really know – and i thought it was worth a try. I thought it probably wouldn’t be allowed, but i’d let them tell me not to, rather than ask first. As it happened, i managed to get one picture before i was told i couldn’t.
On the Afghan side of the border, i decided to have another go. I think either Wahid of Gavin asked a couple of soldiers if it was ok, while i was taking photos. They said it was – probably not entirely surprisingly, as Afghans seem to be much more casual about such things.
Not long after we’d left Torkham, i got a text message from our boss saying our satellite program distribution service was down. Groan… That was the third time we’d had a problem with it in two weeks. And the boss wasn’t very happy as both me and Gavin were out of town and there was nobody there to fix it. Oh well, there was nothing we could do…
We had to go to Mehtarlam on the way back to Kabul, to check out the buildings for the two new radio stations we’re building there, so we turned off the main road about half an hour past Jalalabad and made our way up to the station sites. You can read in an earlier blog post about my last couple of trips to Mehtarlam in relation to these stations.
We met up with the head of the construction company and went over both of the buildings to check on what needed doing and to finalise arrangements for the rest of the work that had to be done.
I was pleased by the way the buildings had turned out – i’d designed them myself and it was good to see the final result was actually really quite good. There were a few things that we’d do differently next time, but the basics were pretty sound, i thought. The dimensions were certainly workable – which was a bit of a relief, as it’s not easy to visualise with any confidence exactly how big a room’s going to be when you’re drawing it on paper. Specially when you’ve never designed a building like that before.
I really needed to do a couple of other things while i was there, but because of the satellite situation – which was a bit of an emergency – we had to get back to Kabul as soon as possible.
Not long before we got back into Kabul, i got a text message telling me the satellite service had just started working again…
I went to Pakistan for the evening yesterday.
Me, Gavin and Hanif – who we hired for a couple of days, along with his car – drove there from Kabul. We left at about 8am and arrived in Peshawar around four in the afternoon – just as the wedding we went there for finished!
We’d been told that the wedding would go on into the evening, so we thought we’d get there in plenty of time. But it didn’t. There were a lot of guests from remote villages and they had to get home, so it ended at four o’clock. Still, we managed to catch up with Farooq, the groom, a bit later in the evening – and spent a bit of time with him, without hordes of people around, which was probably better!
The drive there was fairly uneventful, although it took longer than people say it should. Everyone here tells you “six hours” – and maybe they do do it in six hours. But we didn’t.
The road to the border is the same road that goes most of the way to Mehtarlam, where we’re building a couple of radio stations, so i’d been along that part a couple of times before. We stopped for lunch at Darunta, where i had lunch once before (see an earlier blog post). We ate fish, sitting on the balcony of a small restaurant overlooking the Kabul river dam there. I guess lunch accounted for one of those extra hours…
From Darunta, the road goes through Jalalabad which is a big town. Hanif has relatives there and we stopped briefly while he went to pray – as it was the midday prayer time. His brother-in-law invited us in for some tea, but we turned down the offer as we wanted to keep going.
After Jalalabad, for most of the way to the border, the road is lined with trees – avenue style, which is quite surprising in a way. So many of the easily accessible trees in Afghanistan seem to have been chopped down.
Arriving at Torkham, the border town, the first sight was a long line of trucks snaking their way from the road down the valley – parked and waiting for something. Customs clearance? After that, the road goes through a really weird bazaar – dozens and dozens of small second hand car parts shops. Small sheds, really, with piles of car parts in them. What this bazaar is doing here, i couldn’t begin to guess. A border town seems a very unlikely venue for it – unless, of course, it’s a front for an arms bazaar!
A friend of Hanif’s is the head of the immigration control police at Torkham and the two greeted each other warmly when we walked into the office there. Me and Gavin got our passports stamped in a small room off the main office, by another officer, and then joined Hanif in the main office. This had a long counter – which Hanif’s mate was sitting behind – and chairs along the wall on the public side of the counter. Hanif’s friend offered us tea, which we accepted, and we sat down on the chairs along the wall.
A small table was produced and then some tea, biscuits, and sweets. I’ve crossed a lot of borders, all over the world, and this was by far the most friendly reception i’ve ever had in immigration control, anywhere!
Hanif arranged to leave his car there while we went to Peshawar. It’s so difficult to take a car across the border, it’s virtually impossible. So you have to leave your car and take a taxi on the other side of the border.
From passport control, we walked across the bridge over the Kabul river, which forms the border with Pakistan here – and which we’d been following ever since we left Kabul. On the other side was Pakistan – which, weirdly, was considerably more chaotic than the Afghanistan side.
There were loads of people in the street – most of them crossing the border. And we had to get through them and go into the Pakistan immigration office. Almost all the people crossing the border here don’t pass through immigration control. Afghans don’t need to. Most of them don’t have passports anyway, and Pakistan allows them to pass freely between the two countries. So there were hardly any other people in the passport office.
Compared with the newly built office complex on the Afghanistan side, the Pakistan office was dingy and rundown. There were a couple of men behind a desk which had three computers on it. We put our passports on the desk and sat down to wait. After checking them and putting them up to what appeared to be a reader for the new biometric passport chips, and then writing details in a book, we were called up individually to stand in front of a little camera on a long stalk, which was connected to the computer. After a little more dicking around, we were led to another office, just up the street, where we had to wait for an armed guard to be arranged.
All foreigners crossing this border into Pakistan are compelled to travel through the Khyber pass and the tribal areas on the other side with an armed guard. Hanif went and got us a taxi and me and Gavin and the guard joined him in it.
The infamous Khyber Pass, by the way, is a fairly unremarkable road through some hills. The terrain reminds me quite a lot of some of the drier parts of Australia – particularly far north Queensland, up around Laura.
There are boom gates on the road between the tribal areas, and at the first one our guard got out and a new one got in. The taxi driver paid the guard for us – a hundred rupees, i think. The new guard continued with us all the way to Peshawar, through the next three boundary gates. At one point, on the outskirts of Peshawar, he handed his rifle in to what appeared to be a gun shop, but was presumably a kind of “cloak room” for guns. He stayed in the car all the way to where we were going though.
I’m hoping to go to Peshawar this weekend, for a wedding. The finance manager at work, who sadly left the organisation the other day, is getting married.
Peshawar is just a short drive away, down the mountain range out of Kabul, past Jalalabad and through the Khyber Pass. Well, it’s short by Australian standards, anyway – about 6 hours, but it’s not a simple matter to get there. A lot of people just hire a taxi in Kabul, which will take them to Torkham, on the border. Here, you have to get another car, which will take you to Peshawar, as crossing the border with a car is very difficult.
From the border, the Pakistan government insists on foreigners having an armed guard travel with them – which, of course, you have to pay for. It should be an interesting trip, all in all.
But the weather might complicate matters. It’s very cloudy today and more snow is obviously on the way. With a bit of luck, it won’t come till after we’ve gone – and if it does, hopefully it won’t cause us too much trouble…
The other day, i experienced my first explosion at close quarters, here in Kabul. It was bound to happen, i suppose – and i kinda expected it sooner or later. But it still took me a bit by surprise.
When the guards light the bukhari (wood fire) in my bedroom, they always leave the cigarette lighter on the tray that the fire stands on. It gets hot there, so i keep moving it. But the evening before last the inevitable happened and it exploded!
It was like a loud pop and the thing – or what was left of it – jumped out of the tray and landed six inches away. Bits of plastic flew around the room and i was lucky, really, not to get a sharp plastic shard in my eye!
It was an interesting experience though!