An Afghan Interlude
So, um, I added another Stan to my itinerary. This all started when I was eyeing up Termez and trying to decide whether it was a worth a visit. Termez is a mid-sized city situated on a bend in the Amu Darya (aka Oxus) river, which, at that point in its trajectory, defines the border between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The main reason to visit Termez is a number of ancient Buddhist sites in the nearby countryside. The sites are pretty ruined so there was a question of whether I wanted to take a night train from Samarkand just to see them. But then looking on a map, I saw that Mazar-i-Sharif, and its famous Blue Mosque, was just an hour’s drive across the Afghan border from Termez.
This might sound strange under the circumstances, but I’m fairly risk averse. I like adventure but I don’t like danger and I don’t enjoy adventures where I feel I’m in danger. I wouldn’t have gone to Afghanistan if it felt risky.
Assuring myself that it wasn’t risky involved a fair bit of research. First of all, I had to make sure it was even possible on the logistical level of visas and border crossings. But I also read up about other people who had made the trip, and in the past month I’ve also met people who have been or were shortly to go and could compare notes with them.
The re-conquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban, for all their vileness, actually makes Afghanistan safer for tourists like me. Sort of like in Iran, as long as you play by the rules of the governing regime, you likely won’t get into trouble with them (although be careful not to accidentally photograph military installations or the like!). It’s when there isn’t a central governing authority that a visitor is much more vulnerable to gangs or insurgent groups.
I didn’t want to cause family or loved ones undue worry by telling them about the plan but I did give a detailed account to one friend as a precaution: where I planned to be when, with a phone number for my hotel, and instructions on what to do if he hadn’t heard from me by a certain time. But in the end the trip went fine—maybe more remarkable for how unremarkable it felt to be there.
But now with the lede unburied, let’s rewind a bit. I spent a few days in Termez before I crossed into Afghanistan.
First visit to the consulate
The train to Termez left Samarkand at 1:10 in the morning and arrived in Termez at 10:45. I spent some quiet hours at my hotel in Samarkand before heading to the train station around 11. Most Uzbek sleeper trains fit four to a compartment, with two facing bunk beds. I’d booked late enough that only top bunks were available. As quietly and discreetly as I could, I slid up onto the top bunk in a compartment full of sleeping bodies and was pleasantly surprised by how well I slept. I mean, it was hardly a beauty sleep, but I feared it would be a lot worse.
In the morning, I ate the two remaining samsa that Akram and Rushana had packed me off with (my cooking class with them figured at the end of the previous post) and took a taxi to the aptly named Comfortable Home Stay, about which more later.
My first order of business, once I’d dropped my things, was to head off to the Afghan consulate and get the ball rolling on the visa. Mavjuda, who runs the guest house, told me that three people from the guest house had left that morning to go to the consulate. I thought I was doing something bold, but apparently by Termez tourist standards, it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
The consulate is in a nondescript building on a wide and nondescript street. In general, “nondescript” is an accurate descriptor of Termez. It has the Soviet urban planning suite of broad avenues, blocky apartment blocks, and not a lot going on at street level.
Termez is the hottest part of Uzbekistan and temperatures got above 40° (that’s 102°F for the Americans in the audience) on every day of my visit. Things are spread apart enough, with little enough of interest in between, that there was no temptation to walk anywhere. Instead I relied on taxi drivers, most of whom were keen to chat with me in my bad Russian. I asked one how he liked Termez and he shrugged and smiled disarmingly. “It’s my world,” he said.
It was just a little after noon by the time I reached the Afghan consulate and after some knocking on a metal gate, a man appeared who told me they were closed for lunch until two. So I wandered down the wide, empty street to see if I could find some lunch in the meantime.
There are moments when I’m travelling—and this was one—where I find myself wondering what the hell I’m doing. What am I doing in 40° heat in a nowhere town on five or six hours of unsettled sleep trying to secure a visa to visit a country that most people want to leave? What’s all this for the sake of? I have these “what the hell am I doing?” moments most often when I’m tired and/or undertaking something that presents logistical hurdles.
These existential doubts are an occupational hazard of undertaking intrinsically valuable activities. What’s all this for the sake of? Well, it’s for its own sake. With most unpleasant tasks, you can justify their unpleasantness by appeal to some further end that they serve. But when the thing you’re doing is for its own sake, you can’t so easily soften the unpleasantness by saying you’ll be glad you did it later. I’m supposed to be glad I’m doing this right now. And if this isn’t doing it for me, what could?
Travel is especially prone to these sorts of doubts because it’s a gratuitous undertaking that inevitably has unpleasant patches. But that’s also one reason it’s so interesting. It can force me to confront questions about myself that are normally easier to ignore.
Down the street from the consulate, I found a restaurant and asked for a table. Having ordered, I saw three other tourists a couple tables down. “Are you here for the same reason I am?” I asked. Turns out these were the three people Mavjuda had told me about: Harry and Olivia, an Australian couple living in New Zealand, and Sean from Dublin. They’d met when Sean had joined them on the Pamir Highway, travelling in the opposite direction from the one I plan to go next week. Sean had arranged a weeklong trip to Afghanistan with a guide and Harry and Olivia had decided to come along.
I returned to the consulate at two. Behind the metal gate was a small courtyard fronting a building with a waiting room. Nothing much in the way of security. At the desk, a clean-cut man who seemed to be ethnically Uzbek examined my passport and asked me a few questions. Why did I want to visit Afghanistan? What other countries had I visited? Where did I want to go? He seemed satisfied with my answers but then explained it was too late in the day to process the visa and I should return the next morning.
To fill what remained of the afternoon, I visited the Termez archaeological museum. No photos from this trip because I objected to the supplemental $5 fee for taking photos. And really, there wasn’t all that much to photograph. I was there for the Buddhist stuff but it seems like the British Museum had got to Termez first. There were hints of the Buddha: sculpted ears, feet, a third of a face. After all the Islam of the past few weeks, it was striking to see figurative art at all. But the museum was a bit of a letdown.
Which is disappointing because Greco-Buddhist art is one of the most astonishing legacies of the cultural cross-fertilization that gives the Silk Road its mythic status. Alexander’s armies got as far as present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan—and southern Uzbekistan—and his general Seleucus established an empire in western Asia after Alexander’s death. A century later, Ashoka expanded the Maurya Empire from its base in northern India and converted to Buddhism. As a result, Greek material culture and Buddhist spiritual ideas converged in the area around present-day Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. This Greco-Buddhist culture flourished under the Kushan Empire in the first few centuries of the common era. In museums in New York and London—but, sadly, not in Termez—I’ve seen the sublime results of this syncretism: the vigour and dynamism of Greek sculpture with the serenity of Buddhism.
Second visit to the consulate
The next morning I was up and at ‘em and on my way to the consulate for its opening at nine. I arrived ten minutes after nine and already a number of people were sitting in the waiting room, none of them tourists. A few more questions about my intentions and plans, and then to a copy shop across the street to make copies of my passport. A couple of competing stalls had set up shop here for precisely this purpose. When I returned, I had to hand write a short letter, addressed to the consulate, requesting permission to visit and explaining where I wanted to go, why, and for how long. I also had to put my thumb print on the photocopied passport page with blue ink (he gave me a wet wipe to clean my thumb afterward).
Having got a proper night’s sleep, and starting to see progress on the visa application, I enjoyed the flip side of the previous day’s existential doubts. I started to appreciate that a large part of the thrill of this whole undertaking was the process. After all, this wasn’t going to be a proper visit to Afghanistan—I was planning to spend just a day in Mazar-i-Sharif—but something more like a proof of concept. As much as I was curious to see what Afghanistan was like, I was also curious what the process of getting permission to see Afghanistan was like. And with that curiosity piqued, otherwise dull bureaucratic procedures had a certain shimmer of excitement to them.
This is one of the reasons travel is so much fun. Normally dull activities like making some photocopies or going shopping or taking a bus become fascinating and novel. The real question is whether, and how, one can import that wide-eyed and open-minded outlook into ordinary life.
The visa cost $130—that’s my contribution to the coffers of the world’s most misogynistic government—and the fee had to be paid at a bank that, like everything else in Termez, is far away from everything else. I stepped out of the metal entrance gate of the consulate preparing to hail a taxi with my Yandex app when I was approached by Asliddin, a man who’s good at making himself useful. He’s well acquainted with the whole Afghan visa process and offered to drive me to the bank, along with two other men, for about the same price a taxi would have cost.
The other two men in the car were Uzbek truck drivers. So that’s one other reason to apply for a visa to Afghanistan. Asliddin drove us to the bank, led us to the appropriate desk, and served as a go-between with the bank clerk who processed the payment and provided the receipt. Then it was back to the Afghan consulate to hand over my passport and bank receipt. Come back before the consulate closes at 5, I was told, and I could collect my visa.
Buddhist Termez
This was just before noon so I had five hours to kill. Asliddin, good at making himself useful, was interested in how I planned to spend the next few hours. I realized that, if the visa came through that afternoon, I could head off to Afghanistan the next morning, so I should make the most of the time and try to get out to the Buddhist sites I was interested in. Would Asliddin act as a driver? Of course he would. The price we agreed on was within the range of what I’d been led to expect and he was right there and ready to go.
Well, almost. His four-year-old son was having tooth troubles so what ended up happening was that Asliddin drove me out to Zurmala stupa, then we drove to his village to pick up his son, drove to the dentist in Termez where his younger brother Ziyoddin was waiting, and Ziyoddin took over the driving for the rest of the afternoon while Asliddin took care of his son.
Asliddin is friendly but wily, with a sly grin that suggests he’s always a step ahead of the game. His younger brother has none of his guile and seemed as enchanted as I was by the places we went together. I introduced myself when he got in the car and right away— I’m not sure why this was his opening move—he showed me his split thumb that effectively gave him six fingers on his right hand. I wondered if I should have introduced myself as Inigo Montoya.
At nearly two thousand years old, Zurmala stupa is the oldest structure still standing in Uzbekistan. It’s seen better days. The adobe bricks are crumbling and large portions are covered by more recent protective plaster and the whole is wrapped around by three layers of metal belts. It’s also nearly 14m tall, which would be big even if it weren’t so old. The stupa stands in an otherwise empty field, a strangely unassuming spot for such a venerable monument.
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| Zurmala Stupa |
After the change of driver, Ziyoddin and I headed out to Fayaz Tepe, the ruins of a Buddhist monastery that dates to the first century. As a sign at the entrance explains, the name comes from one R. Fayazov, director of a local history museum who led excavations of the site. The sign further explains that “his children live in Russia and are proud of their father.”
The most striking feature of Fayaz Tepe isn’t that old: an adobe teapot dome that was built over the original stupa to protect it from the elements. It makes the site look like a homestead on Tatooine.
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| The teapot dome over Fayaz Tepe |
A leather-skinned man with a lot of missing teeth took my entrance fee and then showed me around with great enthusiasm. We had to stoop to fit under the teapot dome and examine the original stupa. He pointed out a couple flecks of gold paint that once would have covered the structure as a whole, and pointed out various offerings left by Buddhist pilgrims. On his phone, he showed me videos of laypeople and monks from Korea and Japan chanting and circumambulating the stupa. In one of the videos, I could recognize the Pali chanting, which suggests this group was visiting from southeast Asia.
The monastery itself had been arranged to one side of the stupa so that the central meditation hall would open on to a view of the stupa. Around that central hall were smaller chambers for the monks and a kitchen and refectory. All this required some imagination, as all that remains are five-foot-high adobe walls. Around the central meditation hall were the bases of Greek-style columns.
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| The bases of Greek-style pillars at Fayaz Tepe |
A short distance away, Kara Tepe is bigger but in a state of even greater disrepair. From an earthen mound, I could see the Amu Darya in the near distance and, on the far shore, got my first glimpse of Afghanistan.
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| The Amu Darya and Afghanistan on the far side of the river from Kara Tepe |
The next stop on our afternoon itinerary was the mausoleum of Al Hakkim At-Termizi, a ninth century Sufi saint. But, having seen the Buddhist sites I’d been keenest to see, and having seen much more remarkable Islamic sites in the previous week, I felt my enthusiasm waning. I was also hot, tired, and not feeling great. I thought I just needed to have a quiet evening and an early night but, as we headed back toward Termez, it became clear that something more was wrong. I had to ask Ziyoddin to pull over to the side of the road in a hurry and I puked. I’m not sure what the culprit was, but my best guess were some peaches I’d bought the previous day. I thought I was being all local by buying from a streetside vendor but I guess fruit that’s been sitting out in 40° heat might not be super fresh.
I felt a bit better after emptying my guts and we made our way back to Termez. Asliddin drove me back to the Afghan consulate where I collected my passport with a fancy new Afghanistan visa. Probably just as well that my passport expires in a year because I wouldn’t look forward to trying to enter the United States with this bad boy in my passport.
A sick day in Termez
I was not feeling great when I got home that evening but Mavjuda, who ran the guest house, took good care of me. She cooked me some boiled rice and advised me to stick to bland food and water. I figured I’d sleep on it and see how I felt the next morning.
The next morning I did feel quite a lot better, and was able to keep down a decent-sized breakfast, but I thought I should give it a day rather than drive off to Afghanistan with a dicey digestive system. The guest house was comfortable and cool, with a spacious common area, so I could relax a bit and type away at my blog as well as taking care of a few other things.
It turns out it was a good day to be stuck in Termez. All four guests—me plus Harry, Olivia, and Sean, who were chilling in Termez until their trip started on Monday—got an invitation to an engagement party. I’m forgetting the connection now but the father of the bride-to-be was in some way connected to Mavjuda’s husband Akbar.
Weddings in Uzbekistan are a big deal and must be ruinously expensive—so much so that Akbar told us that the government is trying to rein in the tradition, so far to little effect. This was the second of four parties, each of increased size and inclusivity, where the fourth is the wedding itself. The central purpose of this one was to formalize ties between the two families. Neither the groom nor bride were there in person but this event had about a hundred guests—including four shabby foreigners. A modest number compared to the six hundred that we expected at the actual wedding.
We filed into a banquet hall with rows of long tables. At one end of the room was a lavish display of gifts for the bride from the husband’s family and on the other was a lavish display of gifts for the groom from the bride’s family. Men and women were seated at tables on opposite sides of the room, although an exception was made for Olivia. The father of the bride-to-be warmly greeted us and shook hands with me, Harry, and Sean, while discreetly declining to extend a hand to Olivia.
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| Gifts for the bride |
There was feasting and there was deafeningly loud music. Akbar knew I’d been sick and didn’t have much appetite but he also didn’t care. I was a guest and I had to eat. That included a juicy leg of lamb. There was no way to refuse it without giving offense, so I decided to allow neither dicey stomach nor vegetarian principle to stand in the way of being a gracious guest. I’m glad my health was rapidly improving because it also wouldn’t have been gracious of me to puke lamb chunks all over my hosts.
At a certain point, some of the women got up to dance and Mavjuda roped Olivia into joining. The men didn’t dance—apparently they do that at the wedding—but there was a lot of swaggering around between tables and back-slapping and firm handshakes. I imagine this would be a difficult culture to be gay in, or even a bit effete. We’re basically at the intersection of Russian and Islamic culture, neither of which is known for tremendous flexibility about gender roles.
The main event involved some prayers and a literal breaking of bread between the men. The broken bread was then shared out to all the tables and we all had a nibble to seal the ceremony. Then it was back to the guest house for more R&R.
Entering Afghanistan
Asliddin—a man, you’ll recall, who’s good at making himself useful—had offered to drive me to the border at a cheaper rate than the standard taxi fare. On the drive, he chided me for being vegetarian, explaining that that was the reason I got sick. In Uzbekistan, you have to eat meat.
We drove past the Airitom Free Zone, a free trade area right near the border on the Uzbek side where Afghans can buy foreign goods duty-free and Uzbeks can buy cheap Afghan stuff. It includes fancy restaurants and a Hilton hotel where Afghan citizens can stay visa-free for fifteen days. High fencing and barbed wire around this “free” zone suggests that Afghan citizens are not free to wander beyond its limits.
Asliddin dropped me at the end of the road and I walked through Uzbek customs, where I was stamped out of the country. All that stood between me and Afghanistan now was the Amu Darya and the Afghanistan–Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge that spans it. You’re not allowed to walk across the Uzbek half of the bridge and so I was ferried to the mid-point of the bridge in a shared taxi with no back to the front seat. From the mid-point of the bridge, I had to walk the rest of the way across where I was greeted by a “Welcome to Afghanistan” sign, sponsored by Afghan Wireless.
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| The Afghanistan-Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge |
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| Welcome to Afghanistan! |
In case I wasn’t sure I was in a very different country from the one I’d just left, the Afghan border entry assured me that this was so. I wandered through a pair of drab one-story buildings where my bags were put through a rudimentary x-ray scanner and emerged on the other side never having actually had my passport stamped. A boy on the far side led me back to a side room where the bearded passport control man was waiting, feeling no particular urgency to intercept people entering the country. He examined my passport and visa and asked if I was Muslim. No, I said. He frowned, entered some information in a ledger, stamped my passport, and waved me through. From the Uzbek side to the Afghan side, the whole border crossing took less than an hour.
As soon as I emerged into the border town of Hairatan, I was swarmed by boys wanting to change my money. Knowing that these boys weren’t here to offer me a favourable exchange rate, I just changed $16 worth of Uzbek som, keeping my USD $100 bill for when I got to Mazar proper.
It turned out the 1000 Afghanis I got in exchange was exactly what the taxi driver wanted to drive me to Mazar. Ashman was handsome, with soft eyes and a warm smile, and the first of many examples of how warm and welcoming Afghans were to foreign visitors. He apologized for his near-total inability to speak English and I apologized for my even-more-total inability to speak Dari (I’d memorized a couple basic phrases but that was it).
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| With Ashman in his taxi |
We didn’t talk much in the car but I learned a lot on the drive. Ashman’s car was a beat-up old Toyota (I don’t think I saw any vehicles in Afghanistan that weren’t beat-up and old) with a variety of stickers on the windscreen attesting to its life before Afghanistan. Among other things, it had passed a New Hampshire vehicle inspection in 2018 (also notice the headrests in the photo above). In general, vehicles in Afghanistan had haphazard licensing and curious backstories. In the streets of Mazar, I saw one car with plates from Jalisco state in Mexico.
The first forty minutes of the drive were on a very straight road through a very flat and featureless desert before a roundabout turned us eastward toward Mazar. Ashman’s car had a dashboard screen on which he played pop music (which I think is banned by the Taliban) with videos featuring women singers in make-up, showing hair and legs (which I’m sure is banned by the Taliban). Periodically, we passed through checkpoints with bored guards with Kalashnikovs who waved us through, unimpressed by the fact that a foreigner was in the car. Ashman turned off the dashboard screen before passing through these checkpoints.
Occasionally Ashman would speak into his cracked smartphone to ask me something via a translation app. When he learned I lived in Turkey, he said that Turkey is bad: they have no respect for Afghans. There are several hundred thousand Afghan refugees and migrants in Turkey, many of whom lack any formal status, and the Turkish government is keen not to be too welcoming to them. By contrast, everyone I spoke to seemed to think well of Canada.
With some embarrassment, Ashman asked for more money. 1000 Afghanis was enough to get me to the city limits but not all the way to the hotel. I felt a bit put upon by this—he hadn’t stipulated anything about the city limits when he first offered me a ride to Mazar for 1000 Afghanis and where did he expect I was planning to go?—but could also truthfully tell him that 1000 Afghanis was all the cash I had on me. After a few attempts to get more from me, he shrugged, smiled, and said, “welcome to Afghanistan.” I later learned that 1000 Afghanis was a very cheap rate from Hairatan to the center of Mazar-i-Sharif so I feel bad for suspecting Ashman was trying to fleece me.
First impressions of Mazar-i-Sharif
Mazar-i-Sharif means “noble shrine” or “tomb of the saint” (sometimes shortened to Mazar or just “shrine”/”tomb”), so called because of its central Mausoleum of Ali, or Blue Mosque. It’s said to be the burial site of Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam and the first Shia imam. Ali’s actual burial place is uncertain, and the Shrine of Ali in Najaf in Iraq has a more widely accepted claim. But the Blue Mosque is nevertheless a Very Big Deal if you’re Muslim.
Mazar is the fifth largest city in Afghanistan, with a population a little over half a million. It’s also in the most liberal part of Afghanistan, although “liberal” is a relative term here. Mazar was the first major city to fall to the US-backed Northern Alliance in 2001 and the last to fall to the Taliban twenty years later. But Mazaris have once again had to learn to toe the Taliban line, and while Ashman can watch sexy singers gyrate in his car, the dress code on the streets is strict.
Maybe 80% or 90% of the people I saw on the streets were men and women’s dress ranged from hijab with a body-covering abaya to the full burka, which covers even the face. Almost all the men wore the traditional perahan tunban, which consists of a knee-length tunic with loose-fitting trousers. I saw one or two men in t-shirts and jeans but they were very rare. One guy I met told me that, before the Taliban takeover, more people dressed like me but that now it was safer to wear traditional clothes. I reflected on how this contrasted with Uzbekistan and (as I soon learned) Tajikistan, where long beards and traditional dress are officially discouraged as they’re signs of potential Islamic extremism. One country’s halal is another country’s haram.
I’d been told it would be wise to buy a perahan tunban if I was spending any real time in Afghanistan. Because my visit was so short it didn’t seem worth the trouble, but Harry and Sean were planning to get one (Olivia had had to buy an abaya at the Airitom Free Zone before she could even enter the country) and the only two other foreign men I saw in Mazar were also in traditional dress. It might seem silly to suppose I could “blend in” no matter what I was wearing, but a perahan tunban might have helped me stand out like a slightly less sore thumb. And while I’m tall and fair by Afghan standards, I’m not exceptionally so. Like in Turkey, Afghan phenotypes vary quite a lot, and I saw faces that wouldn’t seem out of place in Mongolia as well as faces that wouldn’t seem out of place in Europe.
I arrived at my hotel a little after noon (bookable online through booking.com!), where I was welcomed by a man I’d guess was in his mid-to-late twenties and who spoke passable English. He explained the regulation (of which I was already aware) that I’d have to register my arrival with the Ministry of Information and Culture, but that they were closed until two o’clock. I took my bags to my room and settled in a little and heard the call to prayer for the first time since I’d left Istanbul.
I decided to wander the streets a bit and get some lunch before my appointment at the Ministry of Information and Culture. I felt like some cross between an alien who’d landed from another planet and a visiting celebrity. Lots of stares but also lots of warm greetings, questions about where I was from—“Canada good!”—and warm welcomes to Afghanistan and to Mazar-i-Sharif. Walking the streets reminded me of my time in India twenty-five years earlier: noise, chaos, and strong smells everywhere, as well as an overwhelming feeling of foreignness. It occurred to me that I was probably better informed than anyone in this entire city about the 2025-26 roster of the Vancouver Canucks.
I identified an upscale-looking restaurant not far from the Blue Mosque and figured this might be a safe bet for keeping my food down. The guy at the foyer wasn’t quite sure what to do with me but ushered me downstairs to sit at one end of a long table that hadn’t yet been cleared after a large gathering. A lot of the seating was communal, with long tables lining the sides of the restaurant. The restaurant as a whole was gender-segregated—I was seated downstairs with the other men while women and families were ushered into a separate space upstairs.
I couldn’t read the menu and the waiter spoke no English so I had to make informed guesses based on photos. I’d written down the word for “vegetarian” in Dari but, feeling like I’d already created enough confusion just by showing up, I decided simply to point to the least obviously meat-like items on the menu. Those were a yellow soup that I think had chicken bits in it and a plate of rice that turned out to have a chop of lamb in the middle. Oh well. I’d already failed to be a vegetarian the previous day so why not make it two in a row?
After lunch, I went to the Ministry of Information and Culture. I was seated in a cramped office where three French tourists were getting their paperwork done. There were two officials at separate desks. One was a middle-aged man with a thin face and a long, dark beard and the other was an older, chubby man with a round face and greying beard. The thin-faced man was warm and friendly and thought well of both my nationality and my profession—Canada good! Professor good! He has a brother in Toronto and his wife is a teacher at a girls’ school. The older man spoke almost no English but had good Russian—my first clue was when, asking about my port of entry, he said, “Termez, da?”—and it turned out he’d studied in Tajikistan and had worked for a decade in the bazaar in Almaty in Kazakhstan.
I had to cross the street to get photocopies of my passport and visa and, on my return, apply a blue ink thumb print to a ledger. Here, and elsewhere, all record keeping was done with pen and paper in big ledgers. Electronic record keeping doesn’t seem to have arrived in Afghanistan yet.
The Blue Mosque
With my arrival in Afghanistan now officially sanctioned, I went to see the shrine from which Mazar-i-Sharif derives its name. It’s situated in a square park around which the centre of the city is organized. Getting into the mosque was a minor undertaking but that just made the whole thing more of an adventure. There are entrances to the park on all four sides but, as I learned after approaching the wrong one, only one through which tourists are permitted to enter. At that entrance (the south one), I was escorted by a guard through the pristine courtyard surrounding the shrine. To that point, I’d not been wearing sunglasses so as to show a more open face but I had to put them on as the glare off the white stone blinded me. The guard led me to a small office slotted into the north side of the shrine. Five men were reclining on the office floor and one filled out a paper ticket (again, everything done with ink on paper) and charged me the entrance fee of about $5. He explained that I was free to walk around the grounds of the shrine and look at it from the outside but I wasn’t to enter the central shrine itself.
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| A little office in the side of the Blue Mosque |
The Blue Mosque is indeed blue. The central shrine/mosque is in the middle of a spacious white courtyard which is in turn ringed by an outer wall that contains further buildings and minarets. The current structure dates from the fifteenth century. An earlier mosque on the same site was built in the eleventh century but, in a familiar refrain from Central Asia, it was destroyed by Mongol invaders. In keeping with its Timurid vintage, the mosque is decorated with richly ornamented tiles in shades of blue, white, and yellow. Having already seen the marvels of Samarkand didn’t diminish the beauty of the structure.
It was a serene space, quiet and dignified. White doves perched above the entrance to the shrine. People seemed unbothered by the presence of a foreign-dressed foreigner wandering about. I was approached at one point by three young men, one of whom spoke okay English and clearly wanted to practice. Muzamil explained that tourists used not to come to Afghanistan so the Taliban was good for making the country safe again but they also needed to do more to create jobs. He was one of three people I met who wanted my contact info and has exchanged some messages with me over WhatsApp in the days since.
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| With Muzamil at the Blue Mosque |
Exploring the park around the shrine, I discovered where the doves at the shrine came from. A fenced-in enclosure at the northeast side of the park was jam-packed with doves and, for a small fee, you can buy a plate of seeds to feed them with. Offering my dish to some doves, I thought of the recently deceased Tom Lehrer and his song about poisoning pigeons in the park. Wish you were here, Tom.
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| "It just takes a smidgen to poison a pigeon..." |
The markets of Mazar-i-Sharif
I spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering the markets that ring Mazar’s central park. This is where you find the beating heart of the city. Small shops and stalls covered with tarps or corrugated metal roofing bustling with activity, some with Chinese flags as makeshift tarps. Shopkeepers shouting out their wares, shoppers with big bags, tuk-tuks and motorcycles weaving between pedestrians, boys pushing wheelbarrows full of goods. Rows of fruit and veg, butchers with lamb carcasses hanging up, stacks of caged chickens, household goods, clothing (including boys running stalls piled high with bras), young men sawing blocks of ice for use in refrigeration. People bustling about, people sitting around idly. Noise and dense crowds and the stench of motor fuel but people courteous and friendly and no one especially pushy or hurried. I must have spent at least an hour wandering about and could have spent twice as long.
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| Afghan war rugs |
It hardly needs saying, but Afghanistan is very poor. Tourists aren’t a familiar enough sight for us to become marks for beggars and pickpockets but there was a lot of begging in the streets. Especially sad to see filthy children wandering about and women trying to sell cheap odds and ends. It’s not like there are many opportunities for women’s economic empowerment and a woman without economic support must be in dire straits indeed. I bought a pen from one child and some gum from a woman in a burka and put small bills into the hands of some beggars. All a very small drop in a very big bucket.
It was getting toward dinnertime, and I’d been walking around trying to work up an appetite, but I was starting to feel overwhelmed by the stench of the tuk tuks and motorbikes that definitely wouldn’t pass an air quality inspection in New Hampshire. A young man invited me into his smoothie stand and the resulting concoction was filling (and delicious) so I decided to call that dinner and head back to my hotel.
Leaving Afghanistan
I decided to spend only the one night in Afghanistan. It’s a large country with poor infrastructure and it seemed like I’d need at least a week, or more likely two, to get more than a superficial look. I needed to be online four days later for a student’s MA thesis defense and I didn’t want to rely on Afghan WiFi for that, so this visit ended up being a quick in-and-back-out.
I was so overstimulated by the day in Mazar that I slept quite poorly. Before breakfast, I stepped out for one more lap around the markets to the north of the park before returning to my hotel. The guy at my hotel had organized a taxi for me back to Hairatan. This one cost twice what I’d paid Ashman, and no doubt a hefty amount of that went straight into the pocket of the guy at my hotel, but (a) my room rate was nearly a quarter of his monthly salary (he told me he earns about the equivalent of $140 per month) and (b) I wouldn’t have any use for any Afghanis I kept with me once I crossed the border. He was certainly keen for me to take this taxi, insisting on how complicated it would be for me to arrange a shared taxi—and for which he’d be less likely to get a cut.
Driving out of Mazar and back toward the border, I felt a thrill similar to the first time I left the maximum-security prison I taught at one summer near Chicago. On one hand, I’d had an intense, vivid, and emotionally charged visit. On the other hand, there was a tremendous feeling of relief to be returning to a place of greater freedom. Afghanistan is a prison of a kind: the people there are constrained in their possibilities and it’s very hard to leave. But then, as Hamlet remarks, the world’s a prison, albeit a goodly one. One part of the thrill of travel is the feeling of boundless freedom. And it’s a feeling that comes, if you’re paying any attention at all, with a feeling of tremendous privilege. I’m free to visit these places but I’m also free to leave. And travel is a rich reminder of just how expansive my own range of possibilities is. I thought back on the taxi driver in Termez for whom Termez was his entire world.
On the drive back, our taxi was passed by a Toyota pick-up whose truck bed held four or five Taliban with Kalashnikovs, rapidly weaving in and out of traffic. I saw another similarly loaded pick-up at the side of the road. I decided not to take a picture.
Getting out of Afghanistan proved to be more complicated than getting in. At a first security check on the Afghan side of the border, the young man with a sprightly face searched my bags and asked me insistently where all my money is. I can’t remember the rule exactly, but there’s a limit to how much money you’re allowed to take out of Afghanistan with you. I knew it was at least $200 so I showed him the $100 bill I had in my concealed neck wallet and another $100 bill I’d stored between the leaves of a book but decided not to help him find the rest of my money (I’d brought $500 with me in total, just in case). He was unsatisfied and wanted to see more money. I showed him the Uzbek som that I was bringing back into the country. Leafing through those bills he decided to take the equivalent of $16 for himself, smiling and putting a finger to his lips as he took it and then shaking my hand conspiratorially. I suppose he was hoping to take a $100 bill but couldn’t get away with it if I only had two.
The search on the Uzbek side was very thorough. At two separate points, I got patted down and my bag searched. Both these guys and the Afghan thief seemed to think I was very clever for concealing money in a book but really it was just a way to keep the bill flat. None of them found any money I didn’t want them to find.
Once I was through Uzbek border control, I found a taxi and soon I was back in the air-conditioned comfort of my Termez guest house. I was tired and had an early start the next day so I was getting ready for bed around ten when Akbar found me and insisted I come have a beer. He’d clearly already had a few and wanted to invite Harry, Olivia, and Sean as well. They’d turned in early, and it took some remonstrance from me to keep him from waking them. Instead of getting an early sleep myself, I dutifully drank a beer with Akbar and his brother-in-law, who’d studied in Turkey for a couple of years. Akbar wouldn’t let me go to bed until I’d eaten some of the slow-cooked lamb on the table. Three days in a row of eating meat for this vegetarian.
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