A Short Walk

Afghanistan After Dark

I'm back in Kabul now. Sitting in Mazar, I was exploring options to go to Herat. I could hire a jeep and spend three days driving there, twelve hours each day, sleeping on the roof of a caravan-serai each night for free. Or, I could catch a ride back to Kabul and fly to Herat from there. Or, I could fly directly from Mazar to Herat.

The third option seemed the fastest and cheapest, so I went to the local Ariana Airlines office and tried to see when the next flight was. Nobody in the entire airline office spoke any English whatsoever. It took me about fifteen minutes of miming and looking up key words in my phrasebook to figure out the following that the next flight was, in fact, today at 11am. It was 11:30am already as we talked in the office, but I was told the flight probably hadn't left yet. It would take 10 minutes to get to the airport. Maybe someone would cancel or fail to show up and I could take their place. The cost is 1500 Afs (~ US$30). If I missed that flight, the next one was next Monday -- a week away. (Or Thursday, a few days away, on Kam Air, but nobody in the Ariana office would admit that.)

I thanked them and sprinted out of there, grabbing my bag from the hotel where I'd tracked down Barukh and Chris. I said goodbye as Barukh was writing notes in his journals and Chris lay in bed, nearly naked, sweating, half-dead as he'd been for the last 12 hours from some stomach bug or flu. I caught a taxi to the airport. It took 30 minutes to get there instead of 10. At that point it was almost an hour and a half after the plane should have left, but when I arrived it hadn't even boarded yet. I talked with someone at the airport and he told he there was no way I could get on and to come back next week. The plane was booked for 150 people but the airline cancelled 20 of the seats due to the heat (?!). That meant there were 150 people waiting there, 20 of which were already on the "waiting list" ahead of where I'd be.

I caught a taxi back to the city and reevaluated my options.

Eventually I decided that although my ego would be slightly bruised by backtracking, and while I had a certain trepidation about the trip after what happened last time, my plans would really be best served by catching a ride back to Kabul and trying to fly to Herat from there. I wandered off to find the "bus area" of Mazar and spent thirty fruitless minutes looking. Eventually I ran into a two-man American military patrol and asked them. They had no idea but radioed another patrol and had them ask their interpreter. Instead of answering over the radio, the other patrol said they would come over in a few minutes.

I chatted with one of the soldiers, a guy from Orlando, Florida, and he was surprised that I was a tourist. He asked if things seemed really dangerous to me and when I said, no, that there was danger but very little, he said he agreed. "I'm not sure if it's just because we have machine guns or what, but everyone is really nice and we don't really see any violence." Indeed. We talked about the need to win "hearts and minds" here and he agreed that all of the soldiers in the country needed retraining in friendly "diplomacy" more than they needed more weapons.

The other patrol arrived a few minutes later and their interpreter pointed me in the right direction. I was on the right road, but about
a kilometer off from where I needed to be. The commander of the patrol asked what I was doing here and when I said I was a tourist, he roared with laughter and said, "Yeah, right!" giving me a friendly slap on the shoulder. He was a National Guard call-up from Virginia. His "normal" job is managing part of a hospital, but here in Afghanistan he wears body armor, wields an M16, and leads patrols into Mazar-e-Sharif to do shopping. As I started to leave, he fired a parting shot (haha): "And when you travel," he asked, "is it with a visa or a military ID? Hahaha!" I laughed it off, sure that even I stayed there for the next hour, I wouldn't convince him that I really was just a tourist.

I walked down to the "bus area" and carefully and slowly selected my driver and vehicle. I wanted a driver that seemed patient and calm, a
vehicle that seemed stable and roadworthy and, if I could find it, a car with someone who spoke at least a little English for translating.

Within a few minutes, I found what I wanted. A red Toyota 4Runner-type thing. One of the other passengers was a translator for a general at
the military base up here near Mazar. Perfect. I paid 400 Afs and off we went. The drive takes somewhere between 7 and 10 hours and we left at around 2:30p. The driver was very sane and safe, slowly working his way up toward the Salang Pass and onward toward Kabul. Perfect, right? Wrong.

At a village an hour outside Kabul, we stopped at a chaikhana and took a rest break, drinking "chai sabz" (green tea) and chatting. A rotund Afghan immediately took a liking to me and in a booming voice tried to teach me how to say new things. "I am travelling from Mazar to Kabul!" Another asked me if I was Muslim and then asked me if I drank alcohol. When I responded no to each, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a stick of "chars" (hashish). With the consistency of brownies, he broke a small piece off the end and rolled it into a round ball the
size of a dime, placing it in my palm. I rolled it between my fingers and told him, no, I don't smoke hashish either. He then offered me a cigarette and when I declined that also, he laughed and walked away.

This was pretty low key and tame but I began to get an ominous feeling from the situation overall. Body language, quiet discussions, people eyeing my backpack, the hair on the back of my neck beginning to stand up. It may have been nothing, but I felt certain that "something was up" and that I'd better be careful.

After about half an hour here, things started to reveal themselves. The driver finally admitted that he didn't want to go to Kabul tonight. Instead, he wanted to sleep in the chaikhana, most hash with his buddies, and continue on to Kabul in the morning. I was torn at this point between wanting to be casual and affable and flexible and my general feeling of unease. I decided I that I definitely wanted to continue on to Kabul and I said as much. The other two passengers who weren't friends with him, one of whom had an eye-operation scheduled
in Kabul in the morning, also wanted to get going. The driver claimed he was sleepy and mimed, to me, falling asleep while driving and crashing the car. It was obviously a bullshit ploy and I told the translator as much but he felt there was little we could do. After half an hour of discussion and arguing, with me pushing for Kabul, I
finally got the driver to refund a small portion of my money (50 Afs, though I asked for 100 Afs back). The translator turned out to be useless and capitulated early on, leaving me on my own.

Against their alternating pleas and warnings, but in line with my gut instinct, I walked over to the road and tried to flag down passing cars going in the direction of Kabul. It's dangerous to drive in Afghanistan at night and even more to hitchhike, but by that point, whether grounded in fact or just a quickly growing fantasy, I felt very unsafe and wanted to leave.

After twenty or thirty minutes of trying, with only two or three cars passing in that time, I managed to flag down a car which almost ran
into me as he skidded off the road, throwing up a cloud of gravel and dust. I jumped out of the way and quickly told him, "Sir, please. I want to go to Kabul tonight." Seeing my success at getting someone to stop, my previous taxi driver sprinted across the road and immediately got in a fight with the driver who'd stopped. They were shouting and pointing at each other and then at me. I had no idea if the driver was telling him what really happened, or if he was telling him NOT to give me a ride, etc. It seemed like the latter, from the ebb and flow of the shouting, but the driver took pity on me and I climbed in, sitting on top of a bed of melons.

The driver spoke Urdu, Pashtu, Dari (Afghan Persian), Farsi (Iranian Persian), Tajik, and Russian. Despite having the good luck of being picked up by a polyglot, we had no languages in common and had to stumble through conversation with a few keywords and lots of miming. I found out he had a wife and four children. One girl and three boys. I told him I was Australian. He asked if I was Muslim and I told him that no, I was "isawi" (Christian). (That's not true either but Christians are still a "People of the Book" and are thus considered "brothers" of a sort. It's likely the safest category to avoid getting the dangerous label of "kafir" -- unbeliever.) He asked me if I was circumcised, making a knife-hand gesture at my groin and a "SWISH!" sound. I told him I wasn't and he asked me if Australians were circumcised. I told him that some were and some weren't. He shook his head and seemed disappointed or upset by these revelations.

As we passed Bagram, the US's largest base in Afghanistan, he told me that America was good but that America in Iraq and America in Afghanistan were bad. He disliked Ismail Khan, Dostum, and Massoud. He called Massoud a killer and said he murdered 1,000 people. He disliked Hamid Karzai and said he was NOT the president of the Afghan people and that Afghan people were bad Muslims because they drank alcohol. Pakistanis were good Muslims and Pervez Musharaf, the current president of Pakistan, was good -- as was his military backing. I pointed out that Musharaf had said all foreigners must leave the madrassas (religious schools) in Pakistan and it was at this point that I learned what his job was. He was a teacher at a madrassa in Pakistan himself. (For anyone unfamiliar, it was the madrassas of
Pakistan where the Taliban were "born" and where most of the terrorists/bombers who've "travelled to Pakistan" went prior to 86'ing themselves on subways and airplanes.) I wasn't sure what to make of this, and wasn't immediately more concerned. It wasn't really a surprising revelation after the previous judgements he'd passed on every political figure in the region.

I asked about the Taliban, noting that they brought an end to the mujaheddin fighting and he loved the Taliban, saying they were very good Muslims. At this point, he asked again if I was circumcised and then shook his head and looked disappointed when I repeated that I was not. He told me Muslims circumcise boys and girls both. (I think this is only partly true. Muslims in parts of Africa "circumcise" girls (ie cliterodectomy and sewing the labia majora together), as part of the local cultural blend, but I don't believe most Muslims do so, and specifically not the Muslims of Afghanistan.)

Conversation continued, sliding across various subjects, with him continually interjecting comments about circumcision. He kept grabbing my hand and sliding his thumbnail across the back of my thumb saying, "Doctor. SWISH!! Easy. Good!" While not especially concerned, I did start to wonder why we hadn't reached Kabul yet and started thinking ahead, casually sliding my hand across the sill of the door, noting where the handle was in the dark. A few minutes later, I silently
removed my seatbelt while he wasn't looking and cast a casual glance of my shoulder to see exactly where the top handle of my backpack was.

Finally we reached the outskirts of Kabul, much to my relief, and he issued a clear dictum, revealing more badly accented English than he'd revealed in the past hour: "I take you guesthouse. Kabul. If tomorrow you doctor.
SWISH!! Yes?" Again, his nail slid violently across my thumb and he made a chopping motion at my crotch. Inwardly I was laughing at his audacity -- a taxi ride in exchange for my foreskin. Somehow it didn't seem like a fair trade. I was silent for a moment and then smiled a sloppy, stupid smile, saying in Farsi, "I don't understand." I shrugged and played dumb for the next few minutes as he tried to
clarify. "You SWISH!!" His voice boomed in the small car while I grinned and looked blankly around, biding my time, hoping the hotel was close.

Finally, we reached the Mustafa. He stopped the car out front and honked the horn and then told me he would come by tomorrow at 12 noon, to visit me. I tried to play dumb some more but finally just told him I was flying to Herat tomorrow, grabbed my bag, and jumped out. I thanked him, in Farsi and Dari, and offered him money. He declined the money and disappeared into the night. I was happy to have arrived in one piece, with my backpack, and with my foreskin intact.

---------

I spent most of the morning chatting with a Dutch photographer at the Mustafa named Mary and most of the afternoon running around town trying to get a plane ticket to Herat. After finding the main Ariana office, where they would sell domestic tickets to a foreigner, I was told all flights were booked through Saturday. I went and found the main Kam Air office and bought a flight for tomorrow morning for 3000 Afs. That's about sixty bucks and is double what Ariana charges. The Kam Air office, interestingly enough, was staffed by three young (Afghan-looking but, I learned later, Syrian) women, all of whom were wearing tight-fitting Western clothes, far too much make-up, including purple glitter eyeshadow, and all of whom had
very fancy, layered haircuts with bright, multi-colored (purple, red) highlights.

With my ticket set, I wandered around the neighborhood more and found a large cinema in the middle of a park. I paid 20 Afs (about 40 cents) and was ushered into the movie theatre. It was a Bollywood action epic dubbed into Dari. I didn't understand a single word but was quite surprised at how risque it was. One of the girls wore a top that didn't cover her stomach and when she and the other girl, in a miniskirt, danced, they would shake their butts like Shakira. All thirty of us in the theatre were glued to the screen, wide-eyed. After the movie let out, I exited from the side entrance and saw about 25 bikes all tied up in a row. The young men in the theatre had come from all over Kabul to watch the movie.

This afternoon, I want to stop by the OMAR landmine museum. I've been meaning to do that for ages and have never gotten around to it. I'm
off to Herat tomorrow morning and will make a long, overland trip through the mountains to get back here. In Herat, I want to see the Friday Mosque. It's even more spectacular, I hear, than the one in Mazar-e Sharif. From there, it's about a one day drive to the Minaret of Jam, and then about two more days in a 4x4, slipping from village to village, to reach Bamiyan and go up to Band-e Amir.

I'll likely post again from Herat but once I leave there I'll be incommunicado for somewhere between four days and eight or ten days.

posted by daviduri @ 5:57 AM