This article was written by James Willcox.
Sultan seemed pleased to see me.
“Kebab?”, he asks.
“Yes, please.”
“You drink wine?”
“Yeah, sure.”, I said, almost too eagerly.
“We go uppa!”
So on the second floor of the Hotel, I sat on a faded sofa tucking into a plate of kebabs wondering what I’d get. The last wine I had drunk was a pleasant Lebanese Red 4 months before. It was a warm day so something cold and crisp would have gone down a treat. Maybe a Chablis. Could he pull out a Pouillet Fume? But after I had started on the Kebabs, the rustic fare called for something more robust so by the time Sultan returned I had my heart set on a Rioja. Either way after 57 days, in which the only alcohol to pass my lips had been one warm beer, I was expectant.
He appeared with his mate Alijan and a large Sprite bottle containing cheap Uzbek vodka. “Wine” being a catch all for alcohol in many Islamic countries. Afghanistan, where it is also illegal, being no exception.
Sultan serving Kebabs.
As well as a vast collection of damaged military hardware the Russians also seem to have left their drinking culture. The vodka shots were poured, mixed 50/50 with warm Pepsi and drunk in one. This process was repeated frequently and within half an hour the vodka was finished and were all half cut.
During this time Alijan, a soldier from Helmand province, tells me booze is illegal in Afghanistan but that he can drink 6 litres of vodka or 28 beers (Afghan’s are famed for their exaggeration). He tells me that the British are good fighters but that he had been driving all night so he was tired and had to go to bed. Which he did, crashing into the door frame before staggering off to his room after telling me my Pakistani cigarettes tasted like shit.
This left me and Sultan to chat away the afternoon until we sobered up. He is 32 like me but looks a good 20 years older. He showed me a scar on his left arm that runs from his wrist to his shoulder and talked about his fight against the Taliban in the 90′s when he commanded 20 men (this had grown to 70 soldiers over the years I have known him) and about his dead wife and his son who he doesn’t see as he lives in Canada with his father in law. However, he is upbeat and thinks that the times now are better than they were.
Sultan. Thinking of better times ahead
I am in Bamian, a one street town in a mountainous region in the centre of Afghanistan once famed for having the largest standing Buddha statue’s in the world. The Buddha’s are now rubble, destroyed in a moment of madness in 1999 by the Taliban, but the valley is beautiful with snow capped peaks in the distance and a mountain side covered in caves and niches that used to house people, carvings and statues. They give a glimpse of the towns history as a major trading town on the silk road during the 1st-8th centuries AD. At the beginning of the first millennium the Kushan empire spread in a great arc round the Eastern flank of the Himalayas from present day Northern India via Afghanistan to China. It was through the Kushans that Buddhism and Buddhist thinking rounded the Himalayas and reached China and then the Far East. Bamian was the last town on the Northern side of the Hindu Kush before the passes that took the traders and pilgrims to the sub continent. Here the town grew and monasteries were set up. The cliffs were hollowed out to create places of worship and for traders to build images of the Buddha for luck as they set off into the unknown. The standing Buddhas were some of the last remaining signs of Bamians Buddhist history but even without them the sight of the mountainside riddled with holes and caves on an epic scale in a place so remote is stunning.
Tourism in Bamian, a niche market?
Two days earlier I bounced my way to Bamian in a minibus on the same route that the silk road traders would have taken 2000 years ago. The ride from Kabul was through and up a succession of blossoming valleys, the chap next to me asked why i was spending a whole day in a bus to see some empty holes. I pointed to the magnificent alpine views outside the window and he looked at me as though I had two heads. Sometimes I wish I had a picture of Camberwell High Street with me.
Bamian is in the Hazarajat, now the home of the Hazara. The Hazaras are descendants of the Mongol hoards that came through here 700 years ago. They are also Shi’ite. So, not only do they look funny, they are heretics in a predominately Sunni country. This has led to a succession of usually Pashtun-led ethnic cleansing attempts over the years from the Emirs to the Taliban. Due to the Hazarajat being a maze of valleys deep in the Hindu Kush none were successful and, rather like the Kurds in Iraq, they are flourishing under the new regime allowing children to go school and infrastructure to be built for the first time in their history.
The road to Bamian. Infrastructure is developing….slowly.
But enough of the History lessons. Bamian has some charm. The one street has life and the surrounding valleys are crowned with derelict forts. It was planting season and strolling through the smallholdings meeting farmers ploughing with 2 oxen and a wooden plough, women washing clothes in the river and swarms of Hazara kids armed with catapults is always a pleasant way to spend a few days.
On one visit I met an Afghani translator for the UN called Abdul. He was a nice guy but a little lonely away from his village. He is a generous chap and I stayed in his 1 room flat for a couple of nights whilst he tried to get time off work to take me to his village. Ultimately, he couldn’t get the time off but we spent time chatting about the UK, the UN and why he was trying to develop a Texan accent. Also, I helped improve his English. He now knows the word capsize (Not entirely useful in a landlocked country with no navigable rivers and when I visited Afghanistan’s biggest lake saw only one boat. It could seat 6 people and was called the Donald Duck) and how to use pimp as a noun, a verb and with “up” as a phrasal verb. In one of his more perverse moments, he mentioned that he thought Adolf Hitler was a courageous man. I ventured that maybe he was actually a mass murderer and that most people in Europe do not hold him in high regard. I also asked him what had led him to this conclusion. His English is good so I do not believe I misunderstood him but Hitler’s courage apparently stemmed from the fact that upon discovering that a game of cricket was to last for 5 days he put all the players to death.
The Donald Duck. No sign of Pluto or Minnie.
Anyway, on my first visit to Bamian I stayed at the Hotel then owned by my mate Sultan. The bottom floor of the Hotel is the Chaikhana (tea shop) which, like most Chainkhanas, is a restaurant, cafe, men’s club and doss house all in one. In the centre sits a huge, constantly boiling samovar of hot water and a seemingly endless cast of kids and men work there, either serving tea, cooking kebabs and rice or nipping down the bakery to get more bread using the Afghani store card (a piece of wood in which the bakery carve a notch for every 5 breads taken. When full of notches Sultan would amble down and pay them).
He has asked me to stay in Bamian on many occasions. I would teach him English and help fleece the small stream of tourists that come to town. He would teach me Dari and we would spend the afternoon going “uppa” and drinking “wine”.
I am always tempted.
The author and Sultan (arm in arm) plotting the future of tourism in Afghanistan
James Willcox is MD and tour guide for Untamed Borders, a company specialising in travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Visit them at www.untamedborders.com to see, hear, and experience the Afghanistan you’ve just read about.
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Looks like an amazing place. Still feels a little too volatile for my liking, but can’t wait to visit the region one day!
I’m with you Cam – slightly nervous but can’t wait to go!