Magic Bus (20 page)

No established publisher had foreseen the importance of the alternative, budget-travel movement. It was kids themselves – Crowther, the Wheelers, Gloaguen, Brown, Dalton and, in 1982, Mark Ellingham of Rough Guides – who recognized the potential, because they lived it, they defined it, they sold it.

‘All you've got to do is decide to go and the hardest part is over,' enthused Wheeler. ‘So go.'

I take a room at the Mustapha. The owner's son – Wais, the fast-talking ‘Fonz of Kabul' – doesn't want to be my guide. He doesn't even want to speak to me. He has a stomach ache-cum-peptic ulcer, as well as a tendency to toy with the pistol on his desk. His minder tells me that Wais never met Wheeler, Gloaguen or the Dutchman who wanted to be a doctor. His concerns are now those of day-to-day survival. The Mustapha is an obvious target, full of shady carpetbaggers and fixers and serving alcohol. Stetson-wearing British builders and big-boned farm boys in combat fatigues clutter the foyer. The hotel is also the unofficial residence of the Afghan president's bodyguards, stocky ex-US Marines who wear two shoulder holsters and prop up the marble bar. Their Operation Enduring Freedom tankards hang from hooks on the glitter-mirror wall.

My single room is basic, divided from its neighbours by painted glass panels, but it gives me a chance to organize my thoughts. No Afghanistan handbook has been written in a generation, apart from Bradt's slender
Kabul Mini Guide
, which was conceived as a primer for NGO workers. I skim it, draft a list of highlights and book a driver at the desk. I want to travel into the heart of Kabul. But I resign myself to follow in Crowther, Wheeler and Hilary Bradt's well-worn footsteps, at least until I find my own compass bearing.

Alone, I step back out into the heat. Narrow lanes climb away from the road between a dense mass of baked-brick, flat-roofed houses, mounting the flanks of denuded hills. To the north rise mountains where the snow never melts, to the south spread deserts where snow never falls. I duck into the hand-painted Datsun and spread out my notebooks on the backseat. No passing motorcyclist takes a pot-shot at me. No crazed Islamist throws a grenade into the new Zalmai Weeding Cake Center.

‘Chicken Street,' I say to Ashaf, my driver.

Chicken Street has been a magnet for Afghanistan's visitors since the days of the hippie trail. Back then, ‘the scene' revolved around hash shops, dimly lit haunts and Siggi's eating place, with its outside chessboard and outsized schnitzel. As we cruise past the souvenir shops, I ask Ashaf, ‘Did you ever hear of a German named Siggi who lived here in the sixties?' Ashaf has just returned to Kabul after ten years' exile in Pakistan. ‘He had some connection with the royal family.'

‘Everyone who knew the hippies either left the country or was killed,' he replies, looking at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘
Everyone
with money, an education, a guest house. The Taliban years were an unimaginable hell.'

Outside the window, the pavement undulates without warning or purpose, its edges snapped off like dry biscuit. Every metal street lamp is scarred by bullet holes, bent by shell fire or cropped into stubby posts. ‘The mine museum, please,' I say to him, shuffling through my papers.

I visit the OMAR – Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation – Landmine Museum (with Russian butterfly mines designed to be mistaken by children for plastic toys). We stop by the walled Garden of Babur, created in the sixteenth century by the first Moghul emperor and restored by the Aga Khan Foundation. I see the Ariana graveyard. As I fleet between the guide's ‘must sees', a strange unrest creeps into my blood. I'm both unsettled and frustrated with myself for narrowing possibility.

In their search for answers, the original Intrepids took the time to plunge off the beaten track. Their ambition was to be transformed
by the journey. Most tried to learn a smattering of Hindi, to live in a Nepalese community, to become a Buddhist. Then, guidebooks began to spoon-feed itineraries to time-poor travellers who could afford neither doubt or a year away. More and more, travel became entertainment not
travail
, a change of scene not a life change.

Rather than inspirational, the travel market is now aspirational, meaning readers aspire to do as the writer; to walk alone in the Hindu Kush, to find a forgotten house in Provence, to discover that secret, deserted Thai beach. No writer dares to point out that there are no more undiscovered beaches. That the world has been mapped. That every country on the planet is described in one or other book.

Over the next days, as Ashaf drives me around Kabul, I begin to question if guidebooks, written to a formula, still open doors for travellers, or just direct them between holiday ghettos along a beaten track. We may go further, faster, but have Lonely Planet and
Guide du routard
in fact limited our horizon by describing one road towards it? Fewer kids now take the risk of staying in an unknown flea-pit or accepting the hospitality of strangers. We still move through an alien society against which our identity can be cast into relief, but often we talk only to other Westerners at safe, familiar spots. Of course, hazards remain – bags get lost, bungee cords snap, the vulnerable are abused – but at the first whiff of danger, most modern ‘global nomads' (myself included) whip out their gold card or Rough Guide travel-insurance policy.

Back in 1964 when the first wave of Intrepids hit town, the Afghans didn't have the facilities. But the surfeit of hospitality and the nights when the moon spilt silver over the city's hills far outshone the absence of creature comforts. Visitors felt at home and extended their stay, not only because they contracted amoebic dysentery. Then, a Year of Tourism was declared in 1967. The promotional posters trumpeted tourism as a ‘Passport to Peace'. When the second wave of backpackers washed across their land between 1970 to 1979, Afghan resourcefulness had filled the gap. You like pancakes for breakfast? No problem, we give you
pancakes. You want music while you eat? Then we smuggle in the latest pop cassettes. You like muesli? We make it for you, whatever it is. It was an honest exchange. A golden era. But it transformed culture into a tourist experience. By the mid seventies, an astonishing 90,000 visitors a year came to the country.

In the same spirit of hospitality, Ashaf now takes me to the Deutscher Hof, which offers Afghanistan's only Oktoberfest, to sing ‘Es gibt kein Bier auf Hawaii' with former Taliban officers. He shows me the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding across the wall of the Lai Thai, a restaurant which also has branches in Kosovo and East Timor. He points out Ching Ching, one of the sleazy Chinese eateries-cum-brothels serving Westerners. We even stop at Zarnegar Park to buy stolen US Army ‘Meals Ready to Eat' from the market traders.

As I'd heard in Turkey, the overland trail spawned an industry which packaged the globe. The commercial benefits of tourism can't be disputed. Worldwide, the travel industry churns over $500 billion and employs 195 million people. But, in such a world, can independent, intrepid travel even exist any more? Perhaps the only way to experience real wonder and freshness today is to travel without a guidebook. But, then, if you do that in Afghanistan, you'll probably end up dead.

To discuss the trials of modernity, I call by the Afghanistan Tourist Organization on my fifth morning in Kabul. I am welcomed as a lost son. I don't think another foreigner has stopped by the office in months. I want to ask the kindly staff about the seduction of foreign ideals. About the poisoning of tradition. About the banality of the material life. But they seem to have run out of those particular brochures.

In fact, the only printed material available is a personally signed pamphlet from the government's new Minister of Tourism. It assures me that many parts of the country are safe for visitors. Unfortunately, the minister is unavailable for interview. He was recently assassinated. As was his predecessor last year.

‘The Kabul Museum,' I say to Ashaf on my last morning in town.

The women crouched around the spring, their veils cast back, their men in the fields. Plum and wild apple trees grew around the shallow pool. The winter's fodder, dew-green and freshly scythed, dried between the mud houses. Fariba, first wife of Said, was teasing her aunt.

‘Tell me again why your teeth are so white?' Fariba asked her.

‘Praise to Allah, because my soul makes them clear,' the old woman replied.

A little part of God was said to dwell in every man and woman.

‘Then I do not understand, Aunt,' she went on, ‘why Uncle's teeth are so yellow?'

The women bubbled as they filled their pitchers. They were in high spirits. The rush of water – unusual at this time of year – meant there was no need to walk the twenty minutes to the well.

Fariba was next at the spout. She held her pitcher under the stream and, as it filled, heard the clink of a pebble against clay. Once. Twice. Three times. She complained out loud, yet when she looked into the vessel she saw not pebbles but silver flashing in the dusty blue sunlight. The other women pushed forward, holding their pitchers under the spout, too, until each of them held more metal than water. Within minutes, the bottom of the pool glittered with coins.

‘Praise God's protection and blessing.' Fariba's aunt was the first among them to speak. ‘But now we will have to walk to the well after all.'

‘No, Aunt, now we will ride there on a mule.'

That year, over 10,000 ancient coins were recovered from the spring. But the Mir Zakah discovery paled in comparison with the massive hoard uncovered in a nearby waterhole in 1993. Then, three
tons
of silver coins and fifty kilos of ancient gold jewellery
were unearthed by Khoriuri Mangal tribesmen. The second largest treasure trove ever found included gold earrings as thick as tablespoons, silver Buddhist statues, classical Greek tableware, Scythian necklaces and Turkic bangles. The antiquities ranged in age from the fourth century BC to the first century AD. Several local people were murdered during the excavation. And because the nineties were a time of factional fighting – in 1994, 25,000 people were killed in Kabul alone – the entire find was smuggled over the border to Pakistan.

In Peshawar, the gold was sold off to American and Japanese collectors. Then, the dealers, embarrassed by the sheer quantity of coins – around twenty times the size of all the known collections of early Afghan coins in the world put together – melted down the ancient silver to make tourist trinkets.

In Kabul, I have one contact; an American who lived around the Muslim world and for thirty-five years considered Afghanistan to be her home. She is in a way a Grandmother Intrepid, an independent traveller whose wanderlust predates the Beatles and Beats. As Gertrude Stein and Paul Bowles – who, like Penny, she knew in Tangier – the defining purpose in her life has been to experience new peoples and lands. Her example – and her
Dinner of Herbs
, a compassionate portrait of an isolated Anatolian hamlet in the late sixties – had a formative influence on me. Her book's title comes from Proverbs 15:17: ‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.'

A friend in Bath gave me her number. But her phone isn't working – Kabul's three telephone systems tend not to talk to one another – and the city's power has been switched off until December. So I decide to take a chance and turn up at her door.

Ashaf drives through Jad-e Maiwand toward the western quarter. Along Kote Sinki, old trolley-buses are stacked like battered Corgi toys, one on top of the other, shot through and burnt out. The Mirwais Cinema is a façade with bearded men playing volleyball in its open auditorium. An office building, its concrete
floors like a
mille-feuille
pastry, lies where it collapsed a decade ago. The Soviet Cultural Centre is abandoned, lop-sided and pock-marked with shell holes.

‘This area was green,' Ashaf says as we cross the remains of a destroyed university. ‘Here was a fountain. That was a cafeteria. There was the women's dormitory.'

But as extensive as is the destruction in Jad-e Maiwand, I'm not prepared for the absolute devastation, the sinister emptiness, of Dar-ul Aman – City of Peace.

In 1937, Robert Byron wrote that Dar-ul Aman was ‘one of the most beautiful avenues in the world, four miles long, dead straight, as broad as the Great West Road and lined with tall white-stemmed poplars'. In 1976, Nancy Hatch Dupree's breezy Kabul guidebook described the neighbourhood as one of ‘picturesque walled castles, cultivated fields and poplar groves'. Dar-ul Aman survived the Soviet occupation. But, in 1992, after the
mujaheddin
took the capital, four years of vicious in-fighting reduced the area to rubble.

‘We lived on the other side of TV Mountain,' says Ashaf, gesturing beyond a tangled transmission tower. ‘There was so much shooting here that rockets, with their flat trajectory, often overshot the hill and hit our neighbourhood.' Like most Kabulis, he is imbued with a basic sense of ballistics and can tell a Stinger from a Blowpipe. ‘That's when my family moved to Pakistan.'

Not one building lines the avenue. The ‘walled castles', villas, carpet bazaar and match factory are gone. Only a few isolated, mustard-coloured walls and smashed rubble-heaps remain. Beneath them, wild dogs pant in the shade. Behind them, for miles, is nothing. Nothing. Dar-ul Aman brings to mind Dresden or Hiroshima after the Second World War.

Ahead rises the skeleton of the palace, its formal gardens long lost, and beside it the Kabul Museum. Ashaf stops in front of the low official structure, with its collapsed west wing and caved-in upper storey. The museum wasn't destroyed by the Soviets either. Until three years ago, it housed the finest collection of antiquities in Central Asia. Its Indian ivories, foot of Zeus, Roman bronzes,
Alexandrian glass and Hindu Vishnu spanned fifteen millennia of history, with every item having been found on Afghan soil. ‘A Nation Stays Alive when its Culture Stays Alive' is painted on a bed sheet suspended above the main door. ‘Is your weapon unloaded?' asks the smaller sign beside it.