Day 305: Rough riding in Afghanistan (2 September)

Chaghcharan

Afghanistan from the air

The airport was about 1 km from town, an easy walk, if dusty, across the river by way of a bridge.  I was passed by all sorts of traffic – it seemed that my flight had also carried a local bigwig and that half the town had turned out to welcome him back.  Nobody stopped to pick up the foreigner.

The main street ran up from the bridge and all the action was on my left as I walked slowly up the grassless median strip. At the top of the street was a branch of the Azizi Bank – closed – and the Minari Jaam Hotel, also closed for Ramazan. I should've tried to find a cheap chaikhana (teahouse – most offer floorspace for the night if you eat there) but instead I paid the Pamir Hotel an absurd 900 Afghanis for sole occupancy of a room. They claimed to have a shower and hot water. Well, they had a shower-head, but it didn't work – I had to use a dipper and a bucket, and the water was cold. The toilets were all squats. The rooms were all windows and not secure, even after padlocking the door.  Any of the windows could easily be forced, and the outside windows could not be locked.

Main street of Chaghcharan

There no longer seemed to be a central place to manage transport. Instead I needed to wander around town looking for signs showing buses. I found about half a dozen bus companies. Regardless of the glossy coaches on their signs, the vehicles used were all unmodified Hi-Ace vans or similar. Also, regardless of what I had heard, vehicles departed for Kabul pretty much every day. The catch was to find a company that was really running a van tomorrow, as they would all cheerfully sell you a ticket then trust Allah to deliver them enough passengers. If they don't get enough passengers, the vehicle wouldn't run. This is what happened to me. They might ring passengers to advise them the bus was cancelled, but only if the passenger had an Afghan mobile phone number. So at 4:00 the next morning I was standing outside the bus office looking for a non-existent vehicle.

Services to Bamian were nearly mythical, especially during Ramazan, so I looked for a fare to Panjao instead, planning to change there. The fare to Kabul was 1200 Afghanis. Mysteriously, this was also the fare to Panjao, half the distance!  The guy would not abate the fare by so much as a single Afghani.  A guy with a few English words chipped in to help the negotiations, although most of the conversation took place on scraps of paper and comprised figures and diagrams.  At the end, when I finally capitulated on the exorbitant price, this second guy leaned across and took my lightweight space-age gel pen and gave me his heavy gold-plated ballpoint in exchange.  No sure what was going on there but the pen did make a nice souvenir.

One company possibly worth checking (it wasn't the one I used) is Arianis, at the top of the main street. It may be a fluke but at 4:30 they had a fully packed van (so no room for me) ready to go.

Afghan petrol station

I eventually departed Chaghcharan at 9:30 in a van with only seven passengers. We only departed after all the passengers agreed to pay an extra 300 Afghanis each to recompense the driver for the empty seats. So in the end my ride to Panjao cost me 1500 Afghanis whereas a fair price would have been perhaps 800. On the other hand with only two passengers in each of the three bench seats, we had lots of room.  I'd had nightmare visions of being crammed in with 20 sweaty, fasting Muslims for umpteen hours of bad road.

Time out for puncture repair

The road from Chaghcharan to Panjao was unbelievably bad. In fact it verged on non-existent in places. Once we left the relatively smooth road near Chaghcharan, the formerly comfortable van suddenly developed all sorts of hard corners. The dust sometimes became so opaque that it obscured the road beside my window.  We muffled our faces in our scarves to keep the worst of the dust out, but by the end of the day we had all developed the same muddy brown complexion.  The fine dust puffed up as the wheels rolled over it, and sifted in despite tightly closed windows.  Whenever the wind shifted and blew the dust away behind the vehicle, we opened all the windows to get the benefit of the wind from our passage.  The roaring gust of baking hot air from outside then quickly cleared away the stinking hot murk inside, until the next turn of the road would put the wind behind us or beside us and the windows would all snap shut again.

Mobile haystack

This leg was very nearly the most fun I had in Afghanistan (OK, I have a strange idea of "fun"). It was very much an adventure.  As I intimated a couple of paragraphs back, I certainly did not expect a smooth ride on a modern superhighway, but the sheer badness of the road startled me.

The road was as picturesque as it was bad.  It was indeed the "highway" for all the local and regional traffic, but most of that traffic took the form of caravans of camels or donkeys loaded down with goods, shepherded by grinning Afghans.  The donkeys were particularly startling when carrying hay, as they would be so burdened by mounds of the light-weight stalks as to resemble mobile haystacks, with perhaps the donkey's nose protruding from one side.  There were also donkey carts, and these were – if possible – even more burdened than the donkeys, plus they usually bore several Afghans.

The road ahead

The road generally climbed, but with many descents.  The views from the top of a hill could be magnificent.  At the bottom of a hill the road might cross a stream.  There was generally no bridge, although in some places the ground had been concreted so as to form a wide shallow ford that the van could cross without being flooded.  Water over the floor was not the problem, but water in the engine.  A few vans were equipped with snorkels, but most had their exhausts and air intakes at the usual places and if the water ever came across the floor, the vehicle would have stalled.

Chaikhana

Due to our late start we did not reach Panjao that day. Night caught us somewhere between Lal and Panjao and although we rejected one crummy chaikhana and forced the driver to continue more than another hour in the dark.  The ride across the night landscape, where the road often disappeared and streams would loom up suddenly beneath our wheels was hair-raising.  More than once we heard the crank-case clang against rocks.  We eventually pulled into a one-horse hamlet with a decent chaikhana, resuming at 4:30 the next morning when there was enough light. Dinner, a mess of rice and meat which most of the Afghans ate using their hands, cost 100 Afghanis.  There was no separate charge for sleeping over.  We simply rolled out our blankets (in my case my sleeping bag) and slept where we ate.

Toilet amenities at this chaikhana were as basic as they get.  In the dark I went out the front door, turned left, turned leftt uphill, and turned left again to get up and behind the building.  Fortunately I brought a torch, as the ground there was well carpeted with turds and other detritus.  In a corner of the building, modesty protected by the darkness, I dropped my trousers and added my contribution to the record.

Panjao to Yawkawlang

On the Yawkalang road

Although my guidebook didn't mention them, there were chaikhanas in Panjao. But the place was a shit-hole filled with yucking yokels, only worth getting out of. The van dropped me where the main road turned right. To find transport to Yawkawlang or Bamian I had to walk uphill and follow the road around to the left to reach the upper bazaar. There were three roads leading around to the left and without a map, I had to ask a local which was the best road to the upper market.

Although there were vans in the square, for some reason Ramazan meant there were no vans bound for Yawkawlang or Bamian. I sat in a "restaurant" above the bus yard for a bit hoping a local Mr Fix-It would turn up and help me make a deal for chartering a van or a car, but nothing happened.

Eventually I got tired of amusing the yokels and decided to try my luck hitching. I walked out of town along the Yawkawlang road. I stopped an hour out of town at a place where the road crosses the river twice in quick succession, an ideal spot for swimming and chilling out. I stopped at the second ford (upstream) as the locals sometimes used the path alongside the river as a toilet. I'd just washed my spare shalwar kameez and laid it out to dry when a van came along. They were delivering a door to a place just a few kilometres up the road, but the driver intimated that he could be persuaded to run me to Yawkawlang for a suitable number of Afghanis – 4,000 of them to be precise, a figure which ultimately proved to be non-negotiable. Implausible as it sounds, the regular fare for the 50 km between Panjao and Yawkawlang was apparently now 500 Afghanis ($12.50) per seat. As I was the only passenger, I was being asked to pay for 8 seats. I paid. I probably should've held out for 2,000 Afghanis as I'm pretty sure something else would have come along, and 2,000 would have rather more than covered the driver's costs. As I've said before, I'm a rather feeble haggler.

The road from Panjao to Yawkawlang was far better than the main highway and extremely scenic.

Yawkawlang

Yawkawlang sunset

The two chaikhanas posing as hotels in the Yawkawlang bazaar were still there and still cheap. Sole occupancy of the "Private" room in the Nowab Hotel cost me 500 Afghanis (i.e. 100 per bed, as the room would normally hold at least five guests). The local hamman – basically a shower block attached to a barbershop – had running hot water in private rooms, but a "shower" consisted of filling a bucket with water and using a dipper to douse yourself. Effective, but unsatisfying.

There wasn't much to Yawkawlang, although it was the largest town in the district.  The main street was an expanse of  filthy dirt running through the bazaar, which was as tattered and threadbare as the street.  Exhausted by the last two days of rough riding, I collapsed onto my chosen mattress soon after sunset.

Yawkawlang to Band-e Amir

My guidebook assumed I'd be getting to Band-e Amir from Bamian, but in fact the transport connections with Yawkawlang were better as most of the facilities in Band-e Amir were run by people from Yawkawlang, only 35 km away. Nevertheless I ended up paying an absurd 1500 Afghanis for this leg. My transport was a van bound for Kabul with a single passenger, so perhaps the driver's concern was understandable.  I caught it by the simple expedient of looking out of the door of my hotel at 4:00.  I saw the vehicle crawling down the street towards me, hailed it, negotiated the fare (capitulated to the driver's demand more like), grabbed my pack and was away in less than two minutes.

Travelling in Afghanistan during Ramazan

Since Ramazan will start in or extend into July during the next several years it's worth considering the effect on your plans if you are planning a summer trip to Afghanistan. Officially, Ramazan is taken very seriously there – though in practice many Afghanis eat in the back rooms of restaurants or in hotel rooms – and after Ramazan ends, the three days of the Eid-el Fitr are a dead loss if you want to see things. Although non-Moslems don't need to fast during Ramazan, it's obviously rude and potentially dangerous to eat in front of those who are fasting. You'll be awakened at 3 AM by people preparing and eating breakfast. Your transport will probably stop at sunset so passengers can stuff their faces. All these things will place unique strains on your journey.