KANDAHAR

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We made it to the bus depot early and drank chai in a filthy, fly-ridden café with faded pictures of Russian lorries, roughly torn from old magazines, stuck to the walls.  After purchasing apples and a large slab of fruit cake for the trip, we loaded our bags on top of a vehicle that didn’t look like it would make it to the end of the street, never mind the 370 mile trip to Kandahar.  The bus was constructed from pieces of tin nailed to a wooden frame that sat on top of a lorry chassis with huge tyres.  We departed an hour late and headed south-east on the Russian-constructed road that cuts across the south of the country.

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The vehicle was packed.  Even the roof was piled high with an assortment of goods including two women in jet-black burkhas and three goats that bleated unhappily all the way to Kandahar. There was no obvious suspension and the hard wooden bench seats quickly brought on maximum buttock-discomfort.  For most of the day the landscape was vast and empty desert punctuated by an occasional mud-walled settlement or dark-tented nomad camp with camels and herds of small, black sheep.  I kept seeing mirages of distant lakes shimmering in the heat waves.  Our bus driver was a grim-faced, bearded Pashtun with a hooked nose, who held the steering wheel with a white-knuckled grip and stared straight ahead at the road as if in a trance.  His assistant, a young boy of ten or eleven, periodically decanted water from a five gallon drum into a plastic funnel attached to a red rubber pipe, which carried it directly into the radiator.  We drove for five hours without a break and only stopped at a remote chai-khana so that we could all relieve ourselves in the desert and the Afghans could roll out their mats, face Mecca and pray.  We sat in the sun drinking chai and eating Pakistani-made banana cream biscuits, so old that they crumbled to dust in our mouths.  After a whole day of being tortuously jolted, jarred and bounced around, the bus eventually rolled into Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, at 9:30pm and we were dropped off on the outskirts at the Pamir Hotel.  We presumed that this was a regular and mutually beneficial arrangement between the hotel manager and the driver.  The building was vast and apparently empty apart from us and the two other westerners who had travelled on the same bus.  After a few minutes friendly haggling over the price of 60Afghanis for a double room we agreed on 40Afghanis, approximately 48pence.  Our room was very spacious with three beds, a sofa, coffee table, a single hard-backed chair plus a wardrobe and dresser.  We found our way to the dining room hoping to find some food, the only item available was eggs so we had fried eggs and stale nan followed by chai.

the landscape was vast and empty desert punctuated by an occasional mud-walled settlement or dark-tented nomad camp

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Later, the other travellers, Suzie, an American and Don, a Canadian came to our room.  We smoked some hash and swapped travelling tales but as we became more stoned Suzie started acting very weird.  For no apparent reason she began doing yoga as if it was the most normal thing in the world to suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, begin contorting her body in front of us.  Was she trying to impress us?   If so she didn’t succeed.   All she managed to do was make herself look bloody ridiculous and irritate the shit out of me.  She was one of those strange creatures who was going to India to ‘find’ herself.  It seemed to me that there wasn’t anything much worth finding.  Eventually, around midnight, and to our enormous relief, they left and we were able to get some much-needed sleep.

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Unfortunately we ran into them again at breakfast.  We ordered salad, chips and chai and waited.  And waited.  The other couple had ordered sometime before us and Don was getting really angry at being made to wait for his food and was very offhand with the waiter.  He seemed to think that the Afghans were stupid, uncivilised people and I wondered why he hadn’t just stayed at home.  The waiter, with a wonderful air of diffidence, ignored his arrogance and rudeness and soon enough the breakfast was served.  Apparently the hotel didn’t keep a stock of food on the premises, (we appeared to be the only guests) but sent a boy down to the bazaar to buy in whatever was ordered, so although the service may have been slow at least the food was fresh.  After eating we had good news, Don and Suzie had decided to move to the Peace Hotel, a place that was more used to catering to impatient westerners.  I pitied the poor old Peace Hotel, but perhaps they were used to disrespectful dickheads who thought that they were somehow superior because they came from the affluent west.  Anyway, we were relieved to see them go.

Having travelled south from Herat the weather in Kandahar was considerably hotter.  We walked slowly into the city centre down long, quiet, tree-lined avenues of the usual one and two-storey mud-brick buildings.  We needed to change some money and, as the black market exchange rate tended to be considerably better than the banks, we asked around and found a guy in a shop who gave us 490Afghanis for 10US Dollars.  From beneath his jacket he produced a small bird, the size of a sparrow, with red jewelled eyes which at first glance appeared to be carved out of dark wood but turned out to be made of black hash.  He also offered us cocaine, opium, heroin and morphine.  As we made our way through the bazaar we found that there seemed to be a plentiful supply of all these commodities.  The area around Kandahar was well known for its opium cultivation and smuggling across the Pakistani border was a traditional and respected occupation.

Finding ourselves quite lost in the bustling streets while looking for the post office, we were taken under the wing of a friendly, turbaned guy in baggy pants and western suit jacket.  He led us along an alley given over solely to metal workers where the din of hammers on metal was like some strange avant-garde concert.  We came out of the backstreets into a wide open square.  In front of us stood a large concrete building, the post-khana, where we spent an hour buying stamps and watching while they were franked.  At least we would be sure that the stamps wouldn’t be peeled off and reused.  Back in the centre we came across the ‘Your Bakery’ (Apple Pie and Frish Eggs) where we bought two apple pies and two doughnuts and were given free samples of biscuits.  This shop was obviously set up to appeal to western dope smokers, it was full of irresistible sweet munchies, we returned later and came out with more pies, ginger biscuits and half a fruit cake.  Food was gradually becoming an obsession, no doubt due to our increased cannabis consumption.  Needing to book on a bus to Kabul, we visited a couple of offices but we couldn’t seem to make ourselves understood.  Finally we came upon the Saidkhan Taransport Bus Company who said that for 90Afghanis each they would pick us up outside the Pamir Hotel at 6:00am the following day and we would arrive in Kabul at 2:00pm.  Hot and dirty, we returned to the hotel and made our way down the long, echoing corridors with their archways and small windows with shafts of bright sunlight, up to the flat roof where we had a view of the city.  We were joined by a diminutive, moustachioed man in a dirty blue shirt and the usual baggy pants who appeared out of nowhere.  He had been doing this since we arrived.  I couldn't work out whether he was attentively awaiting our orders or simply fascinated by us.  Later we sat in the restaurant and had rice, vegetables, nan and chai (food again) and retired to our room to get an early night.  Just as we were preparing for bed the little man appeared once more, carrying the hotel register which he asked us to sign.  I struggled to convey to him that we needed to be up at 5:00 in the morning to catch the bus and he made a big thing of showing that he understood, but we weren’t totally convinced.