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0530 Garry’s clock wakes us for the 0700 bus to the border 150km away for £3. Everyone on the bus is western types and we get to the clean smooth efficient Iranian side of the border at 11am. Then 29 people pack onto a 19 seater Mercedes minibus with our rucksacks etc on the top of the minibus and on top of the baggage is a boy acting as an anchor to keep them in place as the minibus jolts over the uneven road. The boy on top slides in and out of the driver’s window occasionally like a monkey. We drive 3km in no man’s land between Iran and Afghanistan to the Afghan border post and arrive at 12 midday when surprise surprise, everything closes for lunch and siesta until 1400 and the minibus dumps us and our gear in the middle of nowhere with no shade in the heat of the hottest part of the day. It was surely a coincidence that someone had the drinks concession to serve warm Coke to desperate thirsty hot westerners.
We are then stuck in various queues waiting for half an hour until we are told to see customs who after another half hour say see the police first who say see immigration first. Catch 22 until 1730hrs!! I wonder if they wanted a sweetener?
The border post is really unbelievable, like something out of a Mexican village in a second rate cowboy western. Dope and black market money exchange around us but we stay clear. We are in a desert. The sun is painfully hot and I put a towel on my head. A wind blows dust everywhere. I expect tumbleweed to come rolling along with the wind and John Wayne following it. The shanty town of shops are selling coke at impossible prices but we must buy. The toilets are so bad that Joy forgoes her urgent pee. A beach buggy rolls in from Switzerland. Someone says they have just seen a push bike roll up! There are three British wagons here, like the Treasure Treks we would later meet and hitch a lift over the Khyber Pass. A girl has not got her inoculation certificates but a 500Afs £7 gets her in.
We are lucky; we later hear that at the Iranian border yesterday, everyone had their armpits, necks and groins groped for “medical reasons”. We get through untouched. We have to load into another minibus for 150kms of crowded suffering. We stop at a “hotel” which was a grotty chairless room with broken windows and no toilets. Border – Herat 70Afs £1. We have chai, tea, and nobody thinks to ask how much and they rip us off with 10Afs here though it’s 5Afs in town but we need to get used to being placed as captive bus travellers. We have trouble getting some passengers aboard because they are smoking dope from hookahs with the old men in the back room. Already people are offering us hashish.
At last we arrive in Herat and book in to the Niagara Hotel 25Afs 30p each for a double room with cold showers, single beds and a restaurant downstairs. Food was not good, potatoes with gravy adn tomatoes and a thought of meaty gristle and rice all heavily garlic flavoured but with tea and cake it was only 80p each.
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At last there was a chance to escape the desert heat and have a cooling swim in the pool at the Herat Hotel for 25p each. Unfortunately the water had so much pee in it that the ammonia affects Joy’s silver chain and when she sunbathes the silver oxydised with a black tarnish. Making silver jewellery is one of her skills so she knows about this sort of thing. The water is cold but the marble surrounding the pool is too hot to walk on so there are interesting dancing steps to get in and out of it. Joy tries a turban on,click. Everyone looks away, no obvious lecherous men.
We sunbathe then meet another master of languages and maybe a master of cons… He speaks Afghan, French, English and Italian apparently fluently or as fluent as Joy’s Italian and my French level of skill can assess. He offers us a lift to Kabul but the trouble is that he spends 20 minutes trying to convince Joy that he is not interested in sex but that it’s an Afghan custom to share your wife and if we didn’t like it then why are you here?! He also says that in the villages they carry guns and shoot people for infringing their obscure customs. This experience clearly explains the assumption, no, the belief, that every western woman who does not wear the clothes that hide their body and do not behave in a subservient way must be either loose morals and sexually permissive or must be a prostitute. It is inconceivable to the Moslem people that women can be equal to men.
I recently heard an explanation of why Mary is called a virgin and that is because there is no word for virgin in the old middle eastern languages; the word for virgin and young unmarried woman is the same because it is inconceivable that a young unmarried woman can be anything other than a virgin so an extra word is not needed nor understood. In Afghanistan the women believe and are part of a culture where not showing any part of the body is a requirement so they wear the full Burka. Joy tried one on in a clothes shop and the woman that took it off had a normal dress on underneath. I tried it on, much to everyone’s amusement, and the woven eye cover made the world look very limited. I wonder if there are traffic accidents because the women cannot see properly?
Joy looks for her embroidered dress of kaftan but I spy an Asterix book in a dress shop so she conveniently takes 30 minutes looking for things while I read. I then looked up and saw a camera case on sale that fitted perfectly and cost 120Afs £1.50 but would have cost £15 in England. The camera was starting to get bashed and dust in it and I was going to ask our cobbler to make one here. The cobbler repaired my sandals and made a pair to measure for Joy for 140Afs, £1.50. Joy fancies a kaftan but the guy won’t come below 200 Afs though he started at 350 and we say 170. His perfect English seems to be used for his travels, he’s been to Moscow, Paris, London, Rome …. “Why” I ask, “Smuggling morphine” he says! Everywhere people are offering dope – hashish, opium etc. Europeans are talking about kilos of the stuff as if this is the big chance of a get rich quick smuggling operation. We keep away from it all; it’s difficult to keep motivated in the heat when sober so when stoned it would be too much – and we have a long way to go to get to those big mountains.
We hear hippy stories of scabies, fleas and lice at hotels and people start complaining of severe stomach trouble. Someone in another hotel has hepatitis. Thank God we got inoculated. At a restaurant someone plays the tambouri which is like a sitar and an Afghani makes one small drum sound like everything from a tambourine to a kettle drum. Joy is moved by the music and the rhythm and the waiter gets up to dance so she joins in and is immediately the star.
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Money exchange in 1978: 130 Rials = £1; 71Afs = £1; 39Afs = $1 travellers cheque.
Joy fixes up sunbathing on the veranda and I write this journal in Hotel Herat which is one of the few times that I haven’t written it on a bumpy bus or train. The sandals need altering and my shirt is too tight. We search for more shops for Joy’s ultimate dress and she finally chooses two. We eat at Kohl Noor vegetarian restaurant again and the waiters and the musician and drummer are all unhappy and grumpy until Joy dances again. She’s fantastic, she used to go to dancing lessons and understands the Martha Graham technique (whatever that is). Unfortunately she is so energetic for dancing so long that she gets a blister on her toe. We caught a fleeting glimpse of the old quarter and a mosque.
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The sandals are fine, the handmade shirt too short, the dress decided on at 450Afs £6.50. We spend the afternoon in Koh I Noor but Joy feels unwell with her third sore throat this trip. A guy showed us how to make Afghan carpets on a small loom so we bought the loom for Joy’s craft classes when she starts teaching art and craft. She has just completed her 3 year teacher training course at Alnwick Castle which is where I met her while I was living in Alnwick and I was teaching in Broomhill Red Row and running youth clubs in Shilbottle and Amble and Red Row. Hoy now has embroidery materials so she shouldn’t get too bored while travelling which she has suffered so far. She bought a hook and knife thing for weaving.
We saw a mosque in the old park but weren’t allowed to enter it either because we haven’t washed our feet or because it’s prayer time and the kids outside just say “burrow” which means “burrow off” maybe they can’t pronounce their G.
Joy is too ill to dance so we eat at the hotel and the manager, who is a young westernised Afghani, is very strangely rude in his humour. I become equally rude and we part as non-friends.
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Our last day so we wake slowly and wander and see a loom in operation opposite the hotel. The rhythm is like a trotting horse but with 6 clip clops. It has 4 shafts and the operator sits in a hole in the floor with his warp stretching upwards slightly. He has a shuttle for silk, one for cotton because he does a mixed cloth. To propel the torpedo shaped shuttle across he pulls a cord which operates a lever which whams the shuttle to the other side. The cloth is very fine and is used for turban, it takes 6 metres to make a turban.
Next stop was the mosque and we approach by the front but the sun silhouettes it so I don’t photo it but the outside has some lovely coloured stones that make patterns commonly seen in Islam and there are writings from the Koran around its walls. I remember the first time I saw the Koran writing on a wall was in a fish and chip shop run by a Pakistani in Fort William. We take our sandals off and Joy has a jacket and head scarf on but just as we thought we were going to see a real live rural mosque a guy runs up with a book of tickets and argues for money – 10Afs admission and 50Afs for a photo. We are already almost inside and the prayer bit just looks like the inside of an aircraft hanger with curved beams, not a dome so we escape quickly with Joy taking the opportunity to lecture the lad about the house of God should be free to worship etc but when she started on about Christ loosing his temper in the temple with the money lenders I thought I’d better drag her away She’ll change the heathens yet, good lass.
We reckon the religion is really perverted – start the cursades again chaps. We reckon that when religion interferes with a man and woman’s natural inclinations then repressions and hangups start, Catholic and Moslem, poor sods.
So now onto the old quarters where we see people ripping old tyres apart to make buckets and jugs with the strips of rubber. Obviously the sandal soles have Mitchellin treads. Joy finds a goldsmith to polish her chain that the pee blackened. We expect a revolving wheel with rouge like she has at UK but an old tin can is produced with a spout like a tea pot and in the spout is a wick and presumably there is paraffin in the can so he lights the wick and with a curved pipe he blows onto the flame thus concentrating it onto the silver chain. He coats the chain with flux, heats it, cools it and gently brushes it with a brass brush and the chain is as perfect as new. We eat lunch at a local person’s place, not a restaurant and his house has a small room with the back part being a raised platform with a carpet on it which makes a settee and sleeping platform. We take our sandals off and sit up there on the platform in the gloom. We say yes to the only thing on offer and get rice with a miniature helping of okra ladies fingers, bread and tea for 15Afs, 20p. Joy is bitten by something that crawled from a bale of wool beside her. We wonder about salmonella.
We look at some open air stalls selling cloth. Often they have carpets on the earth so we take our sandals off and leave them on the pavement while we peruse the goods. In one shop we saw some 5 Afghanis sitting in a circle choosing the wedding cloth for a bride. We are getting quite accomplished at walking past people who reach out hands to shake them, offer tea, say hello how are you, come in and see my … Some of it is genuine Afghani friendship. Often when we are considering buying a dress or bus ticket the proprietor sends for tea and we sup it and suck sugared almonds, their alternative to sugar in tea. There’s never any obligation to buy because of this hospitality.
Satar, the man in the restaurant where Joy danced, has introduced us by a letter to his buddy in the bus company that will take us on the next step of our journey and the letter asks his friend to give us good seats. We have the choice and he advises me to sit behind the driver because of my long legs and for the view and the extra ventilation from the driver’s window.
After 4 teas we go and change and visit Satar at the Koh I Nor for a final dance and goodbyes’ Everyone is so friendly and the sitar player gives Joy some really lecherous looks when he sings certain lines. Satar is infatuated by her as she dances for him. I’m enjoying it because I know I’m the only one.
By 2300hrs we disappear and in the morning while Joy showered I went to the bank for two hours to get a travellers cheque cashed. They just sat us down in the bank until 12:30 when they closed for lunch. There’s no rush in Afghanistan. I think that is where I first heard the phrase “there’s no such word as hasty as maniana”. I hope the shower didn’t flood in the blocked loo hole for Joy.
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Up at 4am, bus departs 5:30am for 1067 kilometres, 666 miles, in 14 hours with only one half hour stop for lunch and two ten minute stops for prayers at local shrines.
There is desert everywhere with only six or so oasis and a few camels. The local bus is a large minibus with so many people on it that they hadn’t got room to even sit on the roof so they stand on the roof. Fortunately ours is a full sized 40 seater coach. Later we meet an English guy who says he likes the desert and since the water table is 250 feet below it then it could be irrigated and nourished with alfafa grass which could be grown if water could be pumped from the water table. It sounds almost like hydroponics, the minerals are there in the soil. The guy telling us this story had amoebic dysentery and Joy caught the runs in Kabul but lots of pills cured it, messy.
We passed through Kandahar and ate muck and rice with the locals 10Afs marred by Joy needing a pee but no toilets. The driver let her off in the middle of nowhere but during her performance he moved the bus for a better view, only fund though; the Afs are just fun loving clean minded people. Lots of camels now and we stop as a herd crosses the road. There are two ruined camel forts or caravanserie places. We are the only westerners on the bus and the Afghans stopped for two ten minute prayer and pee breaks and when the bus sets off someone shouts some oggy oggy sounding thing and the rest of the bus shout their version of right on brother. We are all getting very tired as we get towards the end part of the 14 hour journey and we pass more than one coach on its side that has crashed for no obvious reason except for the driver falling asleep.which was a real danger and he realised this so he kept parping his high pitched screaming horn so the noise would keep him awake. In the end even this was not working and as the bus started to weave across the road I kept giving him a shake on his shoulder to keep him awake.
Kabul after 14 hours and 1076 km is a welcome relief and we find the Green Hotel 80Afs for a double room outside and use the outside bog. Inside rooms are 200Afs. We can use the veranda, classy. We eat our first good meal for days in a classy Italian restaurant. Joy has veal stuffed with monserala cheese with chips and veg on the plate but then we have a large plate of spinach, egg plant salad and cauliflower cheese. I had a tender steak in Swiss sauce and two cold drinks for £3 for both of us!
Unfortunately the next morning Joy sicks it all up and has diaorhea; the last time I treat her to a good meal!
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Joy convalesces, I tour the streets and in the evening we eat at the steak house that travellers had told us was a common meeting place to meet and do deals. I need to use the local money changer there. Suddenly Joy shouts “Kelvin” and we see a friend of hers from Alnwick Teacher Training College who I also knew from living at Alnwick. He is driving a converted ex army 3 ton lorry for Adventure Trek with paying passengers. He tells us of the trick of buying 8.5 or 9 Indian Rupees for $1 in Kabul but in India we would only get 8 or less to the $1. It’s something to do with Indian or Pakistanis going on The Haj pilgrimage to Mecca and having too many of one currency and … who cares just do it! However we are / I am a bit shy about getting mixed up with what seems to be unofficial if not illegal so
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I try to find a bank to change money so we can arrange our next leg of the trip but the banks are closed for some reason so now I search for the money changers that Kevin had told us about but we miss them all. We have a commiseration meal at the Italian place again and resell our bus tickets because Kelvin has offered to take us over the Khyber pass in his lorry with his punters. So I can say that I hitched a lift over the Khyber Pass!!
A note about the meals in Kabul. At this time in history Afghanistan was a hotbed of intrigue and the great powers were playing just like they did in the old days of the Raj except that it is mainly USSR and USA and their supporting bit players. As a consequence there are more foreign embassies with their intelligence gathering staff than most other countries and each embassy wants their own cuisine so there was so much choice it was like being presented with a United Nations restaurant choice. We stuck with Italian so that our stomachs could settle to a diet and routine that may settle them, but bugs beat that hope.