Kabul is ringed by mountains, great dusty giants looming over the city. The Air India plane dropped between them, turning circles until I had seen a full panorama of the city from the air - from the dusty mud houses to the newly built high rises. The airport was awash with UN planes and helicopters; soot-blackened Russian choppers and US supply planes sat waiting. The rusting hulks of old helicopters, cannibalized for parts, lay rusting nearby.
On the plane, were British soldiers returning from leave, Russian spies (or so I thought), a party of expat Afghans returning for a wedding (the twenty-somethings with American accents), aid workers… and me. We had been frisked and searched in Delhi and sat in a half-full plane eating a curry breakfast while India, Pakistan and the Hindu Kush flickered beneath the clouds.
Kabul from the air
The new terminal building was a surprise, clean, orderly, paid for by international aid. Against all stereotypes, the immigration guy was cheerful and friendly, stamping my passport and welcoming me to Afghanistan. I was in Afghanistan!
After a listless wrangle with the money changers and a fleecing from the guy-with-the-phone booth (who managed to filch my pen as well), I walked out of the airport and found a taxi. Or rather they saw me coming. I paid three times the going rate for a ride to my hotel. But what a ride - the famous blue burkhas, ice cream stalls being pedalled slowly through the heat, sandbagged gun placements, horsecarts, piles of firewood like discarded bones, dust, mud walls, destroyed houses, diesel fumes, watermelons, Hamid Karzai billboards, armoured car billboards, the Kabul Paris Wedding Hall, a lone red kite, a boy in a blue shirt walking between ruined walls, giant compressors, trucks laden with plastic buckets. I would have paid double for the experience.
And then to my hotel. A short half-hearted haggle with the manager. A noisy room facing the street so I could absorb the city in my sleep. A mindnumbingly complex shower with three separate water outlets (plus one leak gushing onto the floor), a foot massager, an FM radio and phone (not working) but, disappointingly, no hot water.
Back out in the street, I went to register myself at the Foreigner's Registration - a dusty walk along a cracked pavement strewn with beggars, sunglass shops and men hammering the green husks from piles of almonds. That done, I took a taxi into the Shahr-e Nau (New City) district.
Shoe seller, Baharstan bazaar
Road travel in Asia is often an eclectic mix of ignored rules, car horns and patience. Kabul city is the whole business magnified. The roads themselves are a dangerous blend of cracked tar and dirt. Nominally, driving is done on the right hand side but in practice three or four lanes tangle themselves, meet at right angles, run against the flow of traffic. Cars are mix of left and right hand drive; hand carts share the road, as do motorbikes, pedestrians and horse buggies.
In Sharh-e Nau, I find the Shah M Bookshop, its shelves stacked with every conceivable book about Afghanistan, some old, some new. I recognise the guy running it from the plane flight out of Delhi and it turns out he is a couchsurfer (see previous post) whose brother is the Couchsurfing ambassador for Afghanistan. I buy an old copy of Nancy Hatch Dupree's book 'An Historical Guide to Afghanistan' and a Dari phrasebook and dictionary which eats half my daily allowance.
I visit Flower Street, its shopfronts shaded from the sun by red sheets. A young boy trims the stems of bunches of red roses, flowers cascade onto the footpath. And at the end of the road - the craggy hills of Kabul remind me where I am.
Chicken Street was the old hangout when Kabul was part of the hippy trail in the 60s and 70s. Now it is crammed with carpet and trinket sellers promising bargains and practicing their English. As I turn out of Chicken Street, a British Army patrol swings down the road, the armoured cars draped with camouflage netting, soldiers with guns pointed at the streets. It was hard not to feel they are the invaders, strong-arming their way through this country.
It was dark when the taxi drops me off back at the hotel. I had to walk from the end of the street with the Lonely Planet's warning about not walking after dark, on high rotation in my head -more about the danger of falling into an open drain but still a security concern. At night the streets seemed to be taken over by food stalls, beggars and dogs. Big dogs that I heard are used for fighting.
Baharstan nan shop at night
At the hotel, I share a meal of Afghan bread, cucumber, melon and tomato with a group of Turkish electricians who have been working in Jalalabad. Between them, they have worked their way through much of Central Asia and Iraq. They are due to fly out the next day (as they have been promised every day for the past five) with Ariana Airlines, also called Inshallah (God willing) Airlines.
I talked with the cousin of the hotel owner, a locally born Indian who left when the Russians came in 1979. He talked about Kabul in the winter, of the snow and temperatures as low as minus 15C. He talked about Hinduism and books but fell silent when I mention the Taliban.
And then it was bedtime. It was 3am Melbourne time when I finally crawled in. The street outside was quiet. I closed my eyes on my first day in Kabul.
