Incognito Travel and Chinese Hookers
I'm in Kabul now, no worse for wear despite spending three hours stuck behind a German ISAF convoy who would point their machine guns at
us if we got too close. During the course of the trip I probably inhaled about two pounds of dust.
First and foremost, Kabul is much cooler than Peshawar was. Today, Kabul had a low of 86F and a high of 93F. By contrast, Peshawar had a low of 100F and a high of 111F. Even the low is in the triple digits! Hotel rooms with "air conditioning" (ha) are more than twice those without. I woke up many times last night to roll a little to one side of the other, shifting my body onto parts of the sheet that weren't yet soaked with sweat.
This morning I packed my Western clothes away for the next month and slipped into a shalwar kameez for the first time. At the Khyber Agency Home Office in Peshawar, every official that I had to talk to commented on my appearance. "You are Pakistani? Afghani?" "No." "You are Muslim?" "No." The second no sent him reeling and it was more than a full minute later when he finally spoke again. "But you speak Pashtu, Urdu?" He wasn't the only one. The next official I had to talk to, for a signature, joked that I looked "100% Pathan." Some other foreigners entered the office a few minutes later and greeted everyone with a "salaam alaiykum" and then went boggly eyed and giggly minutes later, when I spoke in English.
And on and on. I traveled from the border at Torkham in a taxi shared with three Koreans. At the first military checkpoint, the guard asked
everyone for passports but didn't bother with me or the driver. At another checkpoint just south of Kabul, a guard was shocked when I said I was American and later, while his peons searched the bag of one of the Koreans, he tugged on his moustache and pointed at my beard and said, "Very nice, very nice. You are like Pathan." and then launched into rapid-fire Dari and laughter with the driver who also thought I looked Afghan.
Outwardly, I laugh with them and nod in agreement when they say I look "much better" this way than in my clean-shaven, doe-eyed-at-age-16
passport photo. Secretly, I'm loving it. It's not quite on the same level, but it has shades of a Sir Richard Francis Burton or Lawrence of Arabia moment. How easily can I make slight changes to my appearance, assimilate body language and cultural cues, fitting what people expect to see?
The trip took all day and by the time I arrived in Kabul, it was already dark. I'll have to explore the city tomorrow. In the mean time, I've checked into the Mustafa Hotel, quickly making friends with a young Afghan man who works here named Samim. His father is a driver for the hotel and he is going to check on how to visit the Panjshir for me. There're day trips, of course, and maybe there's nothing more to see, but it'd be nice to travel in a circuit, even if part of the trip, ie from the northern tip of the Panjshir, where the road ends, to Faizabad, are on horseback. Too romantic perhaps, and with too many shades of Jason Elliott. We'll see. I talked with another taxi driver on my way to the hotel tonight, a gentleman named Safi Hosseini, and he told me that Kabul has kite fighting on Fridays now but I missed the season. I then asked about buzkashi and he said that Kabul has that too, but not so much and that I missed the season. Ho hum.
Tomorrow, I'll give Babak a call, find a cheaper hotel if I'm going to stay here for a few days, and maybe visit Babur's Gardens (recently reopened after being redone by the Agha Khan agency) and check in with the US Consulate, ANSO, and view the OMAR landmine museum to bump my mine awareness.
Some other miscellanea: Just south of Kabul, we passed a Canadian ISAF convoy with one of their eight-wheeled armored megabeast trucks tipped
over off the side of the road. They typically outfit those things with a driver or two inside, a top-side front turret .50 cal gunner, and a rear guard/gunner. That's two people up on top and this thing was sitting directly on its top. Hopefully no one was killed. If so, I'm sure it'll make the news soon.
Kabul is also overrun with Chinese prostitutes, I hear. At an opportune moment in the discussion to drive the point home, a guy here at the hotel returned with a Chinese girl in tow, leading her into his room and then slipping out to the bar for two beers and two Pepsis.
There're mosquitoes here. Peshawar had none, I think, or maybe they were just on strike until the temperature cooled. I'm getting bites already and I'll pull out my DEET later.
The toilet paper available here is from China and has the exact texture of the rolled paper we use for streamers in the States. It's neon pink and slightly rubbery. It might still be a step up from doing the "hand thing." My hotel room in Peshawar had a squat toilet, which was my first, and a bucket with a ladle for cleaning yourself (left hand only!) -- also a first for me. After my first go, I can say that I think your ass ends up much cleaner, but that all the "accessories" (bucket, ladle, splashing water around, etc) probably make the whole thing less hygienic overall.
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