Camping in Kabul

ON THE SHORES OF AN immense reservoir, families lounge on platforms jutting into the water.  Music drifts out of loudspeakers. In the distance, a motorboat draws a line of spray across the silver-grey surface of the lake. Colourful paddleboats lie on the shore. Beyond, rises a majestic mountain range dissolving into the reddish haze of the setting sun. It’s easy to forget this isn’t Lake Como, or even Dal Lake. This is Afghanistan.

Government warnings make it sound as if any foreigner who so much as sets foot on Afghan soil is as good as dead: “…terrorist attacks throughout the country,” “armed robbery in Kabul, even during the day…” etc.  Staring out at the idyll, safety warnings are a world away. That is, until six bearded Pashtuns with AK-47s surround me. Bandits? Taliban? Some warlord’s foot soldiers?

“Passport! Passport!” barks their spokesman, a giant with a scar slashed across his right eye.  I give him what he wants and the militant-looking men crowd around to study my credentials.  Almost 200 countries in the world produce passports.  My safety now seems to depend on whether I possess one of the right ones.

The burly Pashtun slaps the passport shut, and calls to a man walking along the shore with a vendor’s tray. He orders Pepsi for everybody, including me, handing my passport back and crowing, “Germany, Good. Very good.”  They take me to the street and insist on calling me a cab (bandits around here, they say).  Eventually, a car comes. The Pashtuns stroke their guns, we shake hands, say goodbye, and I take the taxi back to Kabul, where Afghanistan appears a bit more like what you see on the evening news.

“I’m going to be the only tourist in Kabul,” I was thinking a few days earlier, as my plane touched down between military helicopters and fighter jets. But less than three hours later, I spot a small man holding up a banner, walking through the rubble of bombed-out buildings followed by a gaggle of people wearing white sunhats and sky-blue lip protection. It’s a Japanese tour group—the kind you’d see in Paris or Bangkok. Here they are in Kabul, the capital of a country dangerously close to being declared a failed state, busily snapping photos of bullet holes in cratered walls.

Perhaps they’ve booked a ‘Kabul City Tour,’ that takes day-trippers to the city’s mosques, mausoleums and gardens. There are excursions to the remains of the Stone Buddha of Bamiyan, as well as hiking tours in the northern province of Badakhshan.  Agencies send kayakers down the Panshir River, transport snowboarders to the slopes of the Hindu Kush, and offer hang-gliding over the sapphire-blue Band-e-Amir lakes.  I spot a backpacker leafing through a guidebook—Afghanistan, hot off the presses at Lonely Planet.

More and more, adventurous travelLers are finding their way back to Afghanistan, but time-share condos and package holidays are still a long way off for Kabul and its surroundings. And in this country, even being appointed Minister of Tourism can be hazardous.

The first to hold the post after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Abdul Rahman, was lynched at Kabul Airport shortly after taking office in 2002.  The second, Mirwais Sadeq, was assassinated en route to a business meeting in Herat. The third Minister of Tourism, Nasrullah Stanekzai, is still alive, but was dismissed almost overnight after a government power shift suddenly found him on the wrong side of the political fence.

Perhaps it’s something to do with the fates of his predecessors, but the current tourism minister, Professor Ghulam Nabi Farahi, is not particularly outspoken. In his office, with a poster of ruins at Delphi, Greece displayed on the wall behind him, he never once takes his eyes from the TV on his desk, where an Afghan Elvis croons It’s Now or Never.

“A thousand tourists last year,” says the minister, feeding a chain of light blue prayer beads through his fingers. “This year 1500. Next year, twice as many.”

According to minister Farahi, promoting tourism is an important goal for the government—President Hamid Karzai has reiterated this several times. It’s the media that presents only ‘bad propaganda,’ that keeps Afghanistan removed from the growing Central Asian tourist circuit, he says.

“Anyone can travel where he wants to,” assures Farahi, still glued to the screen—a clown with a mimed shotgun firing into a studio audience—but  “everyone is responsible for himself.”

IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, Kabul’s population has shot up to an estimated four million, and the city just can’t cope. There are mountains of trash. There are water shortages.  There is a danger that cholera and dysentery could become epidemic. The child mortality rate counts among the highest in the world, and compared to Kabul, Lima or Kolkata seem like Alpine health spas. Sooner or later, everyone gets ‘the cough.’

In the city centre, the archaic is being supplanted by the modern. A shepherd leads his flock through streams of cars, minibuses and mopeds. A Toyota Land Cruiser with TV screens in the seatbacks overtakes a donkey cart. There are Internet cafés with high-speed connections and Italian espresso machines, SIM cards are being sold everywhere, and mobile phones are ubiquitous. But there are always reminders of that undercurrent of danger—one sign advertises ‘Bike Rental. Car Rental. Security Service with up to 3,000 Armed Men.’

My hotel room, just big enough for the rock-hard bed, is the size of a prison cell, and just about as comfortable. There’s no fan.  Pinkish-red plaster peels from the walls.  The toilet is at the end of the hall, and as I soon discover, there are power cuts at night.  On the way back from a midnight visit to the washroom, through the darkness of the long corridor, I bump into someone. My hands graze a beard, and when the lights suddenly come back on, I’m embracing an aging Pashtun man in a nightgown.  He nods down at the Kalashnikov he’s holding and says, “AK-47, Good. Very good.”  Then we say goodnight and retire to our respective rooms.

In the clear morning sky, a flock of doves glide peacefully over the city in the absence of the usual cacophony of traffic. It’s Friday, Jumma, the day Muslims visit the mosque, but the silence is as eerie as it is enjoyable. Then, as if in response to a hidden signal, the forty, perhaps fifty birds make an abrupt right turn toward the south.  A split second later a dull boom jingles the plastic tassels on the ceiling lamp in my room.  When I arrive in the breakfast area, other guests are crowded in front of the television. CNN shows rubble all over the ground, clouds of smoke rising.  A suicide bomber has hurled himself ‘into the middle of a convoy—in Kabul, Afghanistan.’ This does not auger well for tourism, but one musn’t come this far and be deterred. Even when, later the same day, I meet Osama bin Laden in the Bird Bazaar behind the Pul-e-Kishti Mosque.

There are hundreds of birds chirping in every pitch from their cages, the ground littered with grain and seed.  Thrushes, canaries, and parakeets sing away while partridges and pigeons ruffle their feathers. They all contribute to the singular and overwhelming smell of bird droppings.  A dealer offers me an imported budgie. A thousand Afghanis for it (roughly 20 dollars).  He sees I’m not interested, but invites me into a cave-like back room for tea anyway.  “Allow me to introduce myself, I’m Osama bin Laden,” he says. He points to a second man holding a finch between his fingers. “And this here, this is Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban.”  They double over with laughter. ‘War on Terror’ humour pervades in Kabul.

We have our tea, and as I’m leaving, the bird dealers tell me that in Dari and Pashtu, the two most important languages in Afghanistan, a new Spanish word has come into use of late. Anything that one perceives as horrible or unbearable is described as ‘Guantanamo.’

On Chicken Street, hanging outside one souvenir shop in an endless string of souvenir shops—amid everything from Uzbek embroidery to Persian rugs—some carpets are woven with contemporary designs. One has George W. Bush wailing, another portrays the Twin Towers in flames and inscribed beneath it is: WAR ON TERIRISM 9/11 / AMRICA AND AFGHANSTAN / HAPPY VICTIRY!!! I assume Osama and Omar in the Bird Bazaar would find the humour in such things.

The only thing that you can’t buy on Chicken Street is chickens. You’ll find those a little further along on Flower Street.  And it’s there I meet Gul Agha Karimi, who invites me into his house to tell me about the 90,000 hippies who once upon a time, every year, travelled through Afghanistan en route to India and Nepal, following a trail straight through Kabul. They enjoyed the undisturbed beauty of the country, the hospitality of the people, and the best dope in the world. They would meet on Chicken Street, in the Sigis Restaurant, and party in the Green Hotel into the wee hours. Reading your average news story about Kabul, the golden age of the city as way station on the hippie trail to the subcontinent seems almost unimaginable.

“All the hippies knew me,” Karimi reminisces, full of pride.  We’re sitting in his living room surrounded by a big screen TV, VCR, DVD, satellite receiver, and several stereos—but no electricity.  “The hippies went barefoot,” he recalls, rubbing the rough soles of his feet on the edge of the living room table as we drink syrupy-sweet orangeade.  “We thought, how poor these people are. By Allah, look at them.  They can’t even buy themselves some shoes.”

Karimi says he once accommodated as many as 300 hippies at a time on his campgrounds. “I made a thousand dollars a day,” he boasts.  Like the streams of Western dropouts on their way to get turned on in India, camping in Kabul all but disappeared. The original campground is gone now,

too, replaced by Karimi’s small grocery store and eleven, boxy, single-storey houses for his extended family. Tourism had once been one of the country’s most important sources of revenue, says Karimi, but by 1979, the hippy trail had hit

a roadblock.

AFGHANISTAN WAS OF GEOPOLITICAL interest to the superpowers as far back as World War Two, but when the Soviet Union backed the rule of a Marxist Government, the Mujahideen, fighting for an Islamic republic, would challenge them. The rebels accomplished what some credit directly to thefall of the USSR—who by the time of its collapse, had greatly overextended themselves fighting the Soviet-Afghan War. The Mujahideen drove the Soviets out, and maintained a precedent set by their victory over an invading Great Britain: Afghans cannot be beaten on Afghan soil.

The Russians began their war by shelling Kabul, and some of their bombs fell scarcely 50 metres from Karimi’s campgrounds. There followed a three-decade war of Russian occupation and civil war that reduced the country to rubble.  And now, finally—Karimi takes off his cap and puts it over his knee—things may have come full circle… well, kind of.  In post-Taliban Kabul, camping is back, but this time it’s behind reinforced concrete, sandbags, and barbed wire.  Nonetheless, many visitors are quick to point out the warmth of the people in Kabul rather than the security risks.

“The media always shows the same images,” says Alan, an Irish traveller in his mid-50s.  “Suicide bombings, kidnappings, these video messages from al-Qaida…and then you’re standing in front of the vegetable stand in the bazaar and the guy is smiling at you.  And all of the images you’ve got through the media just suddenly fall away…”

White Toyota Land Cruisers with a big ‘UN’ painted in black on the side are always the most visible sign of the presence of international aid organisations in the world’s conflict areas, and Kabul is no exception. The United Nations and its retinue of do-gooders have landed, having been followed by journalists, speculators and NGOs. Also like other conflict zones, attracting short-term businesses and affluent expats, a new slice of society has been created, one that often alienates the locals.

Employees of the countless registered aid organisations, consultants with daily fees of a thousand dollars, bodyguards and other security ninjas with perfect six-packs frequent Kabul’s new hotels and bars, far removed from life in the city’s bazaars.

L’Atmosphére, on Street 4, Qala-e-Fatullah is, according to the brand new Lonely Planet, one of the most beloved international meeting places in the city, where Afghans aren’t allowed inside. Next to a swimming pool in a secluded garden, bathers relax with tropical cocktails, sun creams, and the newest Vogue. Journalists sit in the shade of pomegranate trees with their laptops, typing stories and sipping on gin and tonics. But as usual, the fact that this is a war zone is never far away. An army helicopter flies in from the west and circles the pool area. Pilots, I’m told, prefer to cruise the ‘Latmo’ on Fridays—when the most babes are out sunning themselves by the pool.

Since the fall of the Taliban, Afghans’ expectations of the international community have been high, but many fail to find visible results. Dubbed “cows that drink their own milk,” many foreigners in Kabul arouse the ire of the people; what with the freely available alcohol, brothels disguised as Chinese restaurants and parties Afghans aren’t invited to.

After a stint at the Latmo, I see one of these parties for myself.  The bar is stocked with Bordeaux and South African Shiraz, and cans of beer chill in a barrel of ice water beside bottles of Johnny Walker Red Label—the same bottles that the merchants in the bazaar will later fill with cooking oil. The ones they drop a picture of a semi-naked woman sell better.

It’s late and the music is very loud. Around forty, maybe fifty people dance on the well-lit terrace, as Afghans in the surrounding houses try to sleep. Their neighborhood is pitch-black, with only the spire of a minaret alight, floating in the night sky like a luminous, watchful eye. It’s threatening somehow.  “Not safe here,” says Rahraw, a half-Afghan with an Italian passport. He’s right, too. He points to the wall around the garden that’s barely three meters high. Rahraw continues to take in the scene and calculates the dance floor would be an easy target for any irate neighbour by the mosque wanting to fire a weapon at the hedonists in their ivory tower. “For a rocket? No problem,” he says.