Dispatch 6

Bamiyan, Monday 2 July 2007

Hamayon made a full recovery yesterday and we were up at 3 AM this morning to catch a ride to Bamiyan.

Besides being curious to see the famous sights of Bamiyan, we are also going there with a purpose. Bamiyan is the spiritual centre of Hazarajat and Hazara culture. The Hazara, of any Afghan ethnic group, may have suffered the most under the Taliban as did the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan the Taliban destroyed in 2001. If there is any group of people in Afghanistan who should be thankful for the defeat of the Taliban and appreciate the current occupation, it is the Hazara people. So we will be asking people in Bamiyan if this is the case.

Anyone who has travelled in the Global South is familiar with the chaotic market that occurs at a minibus staging-point where potential passengers haggle with drivers over fares. Our haggling done we settled into a minivan with several other passengers bound for Bamiyan – two Afghan men travelling alone and a family of a man, a woman and a toddler-age child.

Riding in the van with an Afghan family provided a close look at gender segregation. Incredibly, the burka clad woman and her child never left the van during our eight hour trip. Without any dining or restroom facilities enroute for women, she was left to fend for herself. While we men stopped for breakfast and tea, again later for a snack and made numerous rest-stops at the request of an elderly male passenger, she and her child remained in the van. She did not communicate with anyone except her husband and child, who she spoke to with the slightest of whispers.

I have described before in these dispatches the gender segregation I have witnessed in public and private spaces, but it bears repeating. On the streets of Kabul, on any day we have been about, we have seen few women. I hesitate to guess at the ratio of women to men, but we might see only one woman to every seventy-five or even a hundred men in the streets. The pale blue burka is still a common sight in the streets of liberated Kabul and I have never seen a woman without at least wearing a headscarf and this will often be pulled across her face, although this may be as much to filter dust as to protect a woman's modesty. As some of the female students we have talked to have stated; a foreign occupation will not change the way people think. These students added that Afghan women must be proactive in changing society the way they choose for themselves as they earlier had from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Since I mentioned rest-stops, I have to describe our mid-morning snack. We stopped at a yogurt producer known by one of the passengers. Each of the men – the woman was excluded of course – had a bowl of yogurt that was like no other I have had before. The yogurt is covered by a yellow buttery layer of crusty cream on top. This had to be the most delicious yogurt I have ever tasted. No doubt standing in the mountains, seeing the view and breathing the fresh mountain air at close to 3000 metres added to the sensory experience.


The scenery we saw during the ride was indescribably spectacular. We began before dawn and left Kabul driving toward a moon that was a day short of being full. By sunrise we entered Pashtun territory along the Kabul-Kandahar highway were it is said the Western and Afghan military rule by day and the Taliban rule by night. Our driver asked me to hide my cameras until we entered safer Hazara territory, so I was unable to video or photograph any of this part of our journey.

The trip from Kabul to Bamiyan is a short one – only 180 kilometres – but it took eight hours of bone-jarring travel to cross this short distance. At the town of Maidan Shahr, we left the Kabul-Kandahar highway to begin the climb out of the Kabul valley on a road that would make any off-road enthusiast drool.

The minivans that make the trip are four-wheel drive high clearance vehicles that are impressive in their off-road abilities, despite looking at a first glance like any other Japanese-made suburban van. The other vehicles we most frequently encountered were bulky Russian-made trucks with huge balloon tires.


The Unai Pass

The scenery is truly indescribable. A seemingly impassable dirt track zigzags into the Unai Pass between the peaks of snow-capped mountains at 3300 metres and then rapidly descends toward the Bamiyan valley following the path of the Kalu River. At one point the rapidly descending Kalu River drops through a narrow falls to reappear further downstream. The road seems to disappear at times too as we round corners and crest hills on the impossibly narrow and treacherous track, but just as I imagine we are about to fall into the abyss below the road ahead appears.

In a few minutes we rapidly descend from the grandeur of snow-capped mountains comparable to the Canadian Rockies to enter a colourful vista that is like a combination of the most spectacular scenery of the Southwest United States all packed into one place. Our fellow passengers point out the ruins of an ancient city of impressive proportions called Shahr-e Zohak that has existed for at least two millennia on top of the bright red cliffs high above us.


We have several hours to kill before meeting with our friends in Bamiyan, so after our arrival, checking into a hotel and lunch, Hamayon and I wander about at the base of what once were the largest statues of Buddha in the world until they were destroyed by the Taliban in early 2001.

Hamayon explains that the destruction of the Buddha statues was the culmination of a cultural ethnic cleansing that has been occurring for centuries. The Pashtun rulers of Afghanistan have in the past frequently ordered destruction of the many art works of Bamiyan that feature the faces of people with Hazara features. The facial features and skin-colouring of Hazara people are similar to the people further east in China and other regions of East Asia, whereas the Pashtun people share the features and colouring of the peoples of the Indian sub-continent and many Tajiks have European features. The Mughal Aurangzeb destroyed the faces of the Buddha statues in the 17th century and the destruction of the frescoes adorning the hundreds of caves that honeycomb the cliffs has been an ongoing project that was only completed in recent years.

At the base of the cliffs lie the ruins of the famous bazaar of Bamiyan destroyed during battles between Ahmad Shah Massod's Tajik army and the Hazara Islamic Unity Party in the 1990s.

Bamiyan, Tuesday 3 July 2007

We suffered a serious setback today; our video camera has broken down. I doubt we will be able to get it fixed in Kabul and chances of getting a replacement are slim. We already have enough footage, but this is particularly frustrating, because we have spent weeks negotiating a very exclusive interview to take place in a few days time.

The camera malfunctioned during one of our best interviews and certainly the most scenic. This afternoon we climbed to the top of the Shahr-e Gholghola, which was a mountaintop castle destroyed by Jenghis Khan during his famous raids in the 13th century. While exploring the ruins we met the only other person on the mountain – an Afghan high school teacher. He had some very interesting things to say and the panoramic view of the Bamiyan Valley in the background was breathtaking. I hope the tape that was damaged when the camera malfunctioned can be salvaged.

Hamayon and I dragged ourselves out of bed early in the morning to make the short hike to the cliffs of Bamiyan. We hired a guide who led us through the maze of caves that honeycomb the cliffs. Here we saw close-up the cultural destruction Hamayon had described to me the day before. The frescoes that once adorned these caves were methodically scrapped off with much of this damage inflicted during the past fifty years. This was not merely wanton vandalism, but a political project to break ancestral claims of the Hazara people in the region.

In one of the caves we met a Japanese archaeologist cataloguing the few remnants of art left on the cave walls.


The two giant Buddha statues, which were 55 metres and 38 metres tall and several smaller Buddha statues that stood here until 2001, must have been awe-inspiring judging only by the niches that remain in the cliff walls. A German archaeologist supervising the collection and cataloguing of the fragments of the Buddha statues tells us about his work on the site.

We leave the cliffs to go to the University of Bamiyan hoping to chat with some students during their lunch break. We manage to catch a few students before they leave and hear some interesting stories. One young man, who has been studying agriculture and geology, told us he is frustrated with what he says is becoming an economic occupation of his country. He told us that one of the richest deposits of iron ore is situated close to Bamiyan. Now that this area is relatively stabilised militarily, foreign companies are competing to extract these riches. But this student points out that most Afghans are likely to receive very little in compensation or employment from the mines. The Afghan government will likely receive a paltry mining royalty that will not compensate for the environmental and social damage caused by mining. This was certainly the case with mining developments by Canadian companies in Central America in recent years, so I suspect this student's predictions are likely to prove true here as well, unless action is taken to prevent this situation from occurring.

One of the students from the university offered to guide us through the mine fields that surround the base of the mountain of the Shahr-e Gholghola, so we followed his lead and found ourselves at the top of Bamiyan meeting the Afghan high-school teacher who gave us what may be our last recorded interview.

Bamiyan, Wednesday 4 July 2007

Today we headed off for the town of Yawkawlang with a stop to explore the lakes of Band-e Amir. A childhood friend of Hamayon, who now works for an international NGO, offered to be our guide for the next two days and to show us a refugee resettlement program his organisation sponsors in Yawkawlang.


Our trip to Band-e Amir took five hours along rough roads that cross mountains and vast expanses of dry pasture land. Many of the farmers in the Bamiyan region winter in the valleys and herd their livestock to these high altitude pastures in summer.

The seven lakes of Band-e Amir are truly amazing natural wonders. These lakes formed when calcium and other dissolved minerals in spring water solidified to form dams. Over time the dams have grown to great heights, so the lakes are like seven giant bathtubs that sit high above the surrounding land. Water spills from the uppermost lake into the next cascading through a series of six more lakes. Two of the lower lakes have all but disappeared because of breaks in their dams. My guidebook says the dams are made of sulphur, but the bright yellow and green colours mistaken for sulphur deposits are actually algae growth on the white powdery walls of calcium rich clay.

A small tourist industry exists along a short bit of shoreline of the middle lake, Band-e Haibat. A few vendors and restaurants cater to a small local tourist trade and the few international workers who venture this far. I had to go for a swim in the crystal clear spring water, but I couldn't stay in the icy cold water for more than seconds. We rented one of those silly swan-shaped paddle boats that are familiar sights at tourist attractions everywhere, so we could paddle to the end of the middle lake and then hike to the uppermost lake. The views of the lakes that turn from turquoise to azure as they deepen set against the multi-coloured cliffs are breathtaking. Unfortunately my digital camera ran out of batteries before our hike was finished.

After a fish dinner back on the shore of Band-e Haibat, we set off again for Yawkawlang. The trip took longer than expected and we arrived late to find that the best accommodation we could find was to sleep on the roof of a chaikhana. At this high altitude, the nights are cold. I slept well, waking only once when the rising moon lit the sky so brightly that I thought it was dawn, but my friends complained about a restless night due to the cold.

Yawkawlang Thursday 5 July 2007

After a much too early rising with the 4:30AM sunrise and a quick tour of Yawkawlang, we began the trip back to Kabul via Bamiyan to drop off our friend off. We decided to take a longer route back to Kabul, because we were warned fighting has broken out at the Hazara-Pashtun frontier. But this battle is not between Taliban and Western forces; this fight is between Hazara farmers and Pashtun nomads who want to cross into Hazara territory. The Pashtun rulers have historically sided with the nomads and have often used them as a reserve army against the Hazara people. This dispute has resurfaced again this summer.

While crossing one of the vast stretches of rolling pasture our driver suddenly turned off the road and headed across the fields towards a herder's encampment far off on the horizon. The driver honked the car horn as we approached and we could see furious activity in the camp. By the time we arrived, the large family of herders had prepared a breakfast for us. Thick blankets of unprocessed wool were laid out on the ground for us to sit on and kettles of tea, bowls of yogurt, chunks of hardened cheesy-cream and whole wheat nan were laid out for us to eat. I asked how much I should pay for our breakfast, but I was told that it would be an insult to offer money to our hosts. Our driver knew the family from Bamiyan and we were their guests in the true style of Hazara hospitality.

As I wrote in an earlier dispatch, the many peoples of Afghanistan are well known both for their hospitality to strangers and their resistance to invaders. Being treated to breakfast in the middle of a vast seemingly empty land where the only human-made features beyond the roadway are burned out Soviet tanks that litter the landscape proved this point to me.


We found a consensus among the few Hazara people we were able to talk to that although they are happy to see the Taliban gone, economic conditions have seriously deteriorated in recent years. The New Zealand provincial reconstruction team (PRT) situated in the town of Bamiyan, which is probably one of the most secure places in the country, has done little more than send soldiers out on regular military patrols. One small school for girls was built, but it is adjacent to the PRT camp several kilometres outside of town, which forces the girls to walk a long distance from town to attend the school.

Kabul Friday 6 July 2007


We arrived in Kabul early this morning a full twenty-four hours and four flat tires after departing Yawkawlang yesterday. My body aches all over from the constant pounding of the rough roads. In the final hours of the trip we descended from the Hindu Kush following the valley of the Ghorband River. This is the same river we visited much further down stream several weeks ago.

We saw many places where huge swaths of mud and gravel were left behind from the recent floods that swept through the area. The already treacherously narrow road was made all the worse due to numerous wash outs. Fortunately, the typical scene from Hollywood movies that always show a vehicle going madly out of control and plunging over a cliff when a tire blows wasn't the reality for us. Two of our flats occurred on the edges of precipitous cliffs and our driver kept us on the narrow road.

After a much needed rest and a shower we headed downtown to seek the camera repair expertise of Peter Jouvenal a former cameraman and journalist who now runs a hotel in Kabul. Peter was unable to repair our video camera, but did refer us to a camera rental company that asks $250 per day to rent a camera similar to ours. I'm afraid this may be the end of our filming until Alex and Angela arrive in the fall. •