Afghanistan, By Road

Travel by road through Afghanistan usually starts at the airport. At the airport you are not waiting for a flight; you are waiting for a flight to be cancelled. The general rule is that a UN Humanitarian Air Service flight will go as scheduled unless there is the presence or absence of wind, dust, or weather (any kind), pebbles on the runway, ice, snow, hail or the rumours thereof. Hearsay, whim, or any other type of thing that may be deemed threatening or mildly inconvenient, such as military manoeuvres (any, anywhere) are also sufficient to cancel a flight, as is the time being before, after, or exactly, say, 2pm or any other time. Another, simpler, way of determining if the UN flight will go is to book yourself on it and arrange your schedule so that all your plans will fail unless it goes. This will almost certainly guarantee that it will not. In this case you will have go by road …

The airport today is like a reunion. People keep coming in through the metal detectors to an increasingly loud hail of greetings from those who have already made it through “security.” In most airports the security guards don’t just smile at you when you set off the scanners or play “eeny-miny-moe” to decide who to search, but at Kabul International they throw employees into the job before they are fully trained, forcing them to rely on their native hospitality rather than the usual power-trip employed by fully-trained security personnel. Also, here it is assumed that foreigners are here to do some good, rather than import havoc. I don’t know where they got that idea. Maybe all of these white NGO and UN vehicles zooming around give the humanitarian effort an illusion of productivity. In any case, at the moment several representatives of the humanitarian effort, myself included, are sitting in the newly spiffed-up lounge of the Kabul airport talking about our holidays and complaining about the UN.

“The flight will be cancelled. I don’t know why they always make us wait to hear it. It will be cancelled for sure.”

“I heard it’s raining in Kunduz, so they won’t fly.”

“UN pilots are wimps, they never fly if there’s even a little cloud in the sky. It’s not like Kunduz is full of mountains; you can just drop down through the clouds and there it is. I don’t see the problem.”

“Ok, they should just tell us now, and then we will drive.”

“You have a car?”

“You’re so lucky. I have fill out all these requests for transport in advance. It would take me a week to get a car.”

A man comes in and waves a paper and says the flight is cancelled. He couldn’t be more bored. We all groan and exchange “I-told-you-so” looks, then filter back through the airport to collect our luggage. Back outside, the cell phones and satellite phones and radios come out as everyone tries to make alternate plans. I position myself near the people who said they had a vehicle. One of them is Sherine from AKDN. She’s going to try to make it to Taloqan tonight, and that’s where I want to go. My friend from Faizabad, Floortje, is interested as well, but she has to get permission. So do I, technically, but my country director is out on leave, so I pretend I’m exempt. This is pure fiction, of course, and later I will be severely reprimanded for what I’m about to do. But right now, the idea of hopping into a car with a load of friendly companions and making a run for the north seems too good to pass up. We load things up and wait while Sherine’s colleague Nazeem makes irrelevant phone calls outside until she shoos him into the front seat and we head back into Kabul. The plan is to go to Floor’s office first and see if we can find someone to rubber-stamp her permission to go up by road. I’m feeling free and adventurous and I tell her she should hang it all and just go, but she’s not having it.

“They’d sack me for sure if I did that,” she says. Floor has a reputation for individualism and wildness. It’s why I like her.

At her office, we discover that her country director is at a meeting and can’t be reached. We try the radio, hoping to get the second in commands up in Taloqan, but when we finally do they tell us to hold on while they consult. I pass the time thinking of things to say to the radio operator, who is one of the most beautiful Afghan women I’ve ever seen, not that I’ve seen many. The decision finally comes back: Floor is not allowed to go. Apparently AKDN is not on her organization’s list of approved vehicles to travel with. She is fuming. She asks why, with a polite restraint that I admire. Apparently AKDN vehicles don’t have Codan radios, according to someone there. The fact that our vehicle is a fully equipped newer model Toyota Landcruiser with a very functional Codan doesn’t seem to impress them. It’s the kind of incomprehensibly silly decision that probably comes from one person’s sighting of one AKDN car without an antenna, a singular observation from which it has been extrapolated that their whole fleet must be similarly ill equipped. Floor uses up the rest of her impressive restraint trying to reason with her superiors and finally gives up in disgust and signs off. She’s not coming.

Sherine, Nazeem, and I, so reduced in number, press on, but first we must wind around Kabul a little to find the house of some relatives of the driver, because he has talked Sherine into taking them along. When we get there, several minutes of greetings and invitations to stay for tea, for dinner, for the night ensue until Sherine’s patience finally erodes and she herds everyone back into the car. The two relatives climb into the back with the luggage and we blast off again. By the time we leave Kabul it’s after 12:30 pm, and it’s at least a six-hour drive to Taloqan. We’re not supposed to be on the road after dark, so this is going to be pushing it.

The outskirts of Kabul roll away behind us and we cross the Shamali Plains with the Hindu Kush Mountains looming up ahead of us, hazy behind a cloud of dust the wind has blown in. Nazeem is talking endless nonsense and Sherine makes a show of exasperation.

“He is like a baby,” She tells me. “He cannot do anything on his own.” Nazeem smiles impishly behind his glasses, and turns his head towards the back seat using his whole body as though his neck doesn’t work.

“Sherine Sherine are we going to stop for food?” He speaks like this, without a comma between the repetition of her name and the rest of his sentences, and he has a lisp that makes her name come out “Sthureen.” He probably can’t help it, but I get the feeling that he knows how irritating it sounds and makes use of this as much as possible. She rolls her eyes at me.

“You see? He is always like this! I’ve been with this man for a whole week,” she says and grins her huge smile at me. “He tried to sleep in the same room as me, but I said ‘No! Absolutely not!’”

“I justht wanted to be closthe to you Sthureen. Becausthe we are a team Sthureen.” His eyes roll to the edge of his head and glint at us through his glasses. This saves him the effort of turning his neckless body and makes him look impossibly cheeky.

In Charrikar we stop for food, and Nazeem, Sherine, and the relatives pile out and disperse into the market, returning with kufta, naan, and potato fries. I think it’s the tastiest food I’ve ever had in Afghanistan. It’s as if every other place in the country has forgotten about spices except this one. I rave about it as we hit the road again, eating as we go. Sherine tells me that when she worked in the Panjshir Valley, they would come down to Charrikar just for the food. Nazeem has bought kebabs and discovers at Sherine’s insistence that they are not as good as the kufta. “I told you, Nazeem, you should have bought kufta.”

“Yes Sthureen you are right,” he says ingratiatingly. She rolls her eyes at me.

“He is a baby,” she says.

We climb up through the town of Jabal-e-Saraj, and I remember my first trip through the Salaang when I arrived in Afghanistan. It was the dead of winter that time and there had been some accident on the pass so the vehicles were stopped and backed up through the town. Our driver brought us bread and eggs and oranges and we ate them in the truck while the milling crowd gathered to stare at us. This time we just sail through and the curious looks we get are brief.

The road winds up into the mountains and I’m leaning out the window of the Landcruiser, trying to take pictures. The Salaang pass has a kind of mascot who appears painted on every informative signboard on the way up, looking fruity in his big rubber gloves and telling passers-by to remember their snow chains and to obey directions of the road personnel (optimistically supposing there are any). He also cheerily points out that there are mines just off the road, which we would do well to avoid since “Mine is the Enemy of Humanity.” The series of avalanche galleries that foreshadow that actual Salaang Tunnel are huge cracking concrete structures that feel like the leftovers of a former civilization. I guess in a way they are. The Russians who built this road as a supply route for their occupation of Afghanistan have long since gone and left only their rusting tanks, their concrete, and their bad memories.

When I first saw the Salaang Tunnel over a year ago, it looked like the mouth of a monster gaping out of the mountainside, fanged with icicles and dribbling huge pools of mud. They’ve apparently been working on it since then. Now it is a nearly respectable thing with lights and ventilation fans and a road surface that doesn’t pitch cars like corks in a storm. I feel a little wave of nostalgia for a more wild and adventurous time when the road was by no means sure. With no exciting unknowns or darkness to distract me this time I turn my attention back to Nazeem, who is explaining how he is planning to get a Canadian passport. The idea is to have some accounting firm sponsor him by offering him a job.

“But don’t they have to prove that no other Canadian could do the job first?” I ask.

“Yesth of coursthe this is right but you need a lawyer,” he says.

Sherine jumps on him. “Yes Nazeem, you need a lawyer so that he can tell lies for you.”

“Yesth Sthureen honesthty is always the bestht policy. He will sthay that they need an Indian accountant like me.”

Sherine’s comment on this is a bit vulgar.

“Yesth Sthureen honesthty is always the bestht policy and sthometimes it is not.”

Sherine turns to me. “Nazeem is trying to collect passports for every country,” she says, washing her hands of him then thinking better of it and launching a breathtaking five-minute attack on his every motive. He settles himself in his seat and loves the attention. While she is at full steam he fumbles with his can of Pepsi until her patience snaps and she snatches it from him, opens it, and hands it back. “You can’t do ANYTHING on your own!”

“Sthureen I have sthixty-stheven points on my testht for Canada and they are sthaying now that sthomeone needs only sthixty-five stho it is no problem if I want I can go.”

She gives up. The country rolls by, the villages, the old men sitting by the roadside, the workers trilling their donkeys along, mud houses with electric blue window frames, little groves of trees bright green and cherry blossoms against the brown rock hills. Sherine says she has had enough of the Hindi music in the cassette deck and puts on something in Arabic. We settle into the jolting rhythm of the road. Hours pass.

We are getting closer to Pul-e-Khumri. Nazeem wants to stop and see a friend of his at the office there. But it’s getting late and Sherine wants to keep going. “No. No. Nazeem. We are not going to stop. Do you think we are going drive in the dark and violate our security rules just so you can see your friend who you talk to every week? No Nazeem.” But he is oblivious. He wanders off with the satellite phone at our next bathroom break and talks for five minutes to his friend assuring him that we will certainly visit. Back on the road Sherine retaliates by poking the phone out the window and calling him herself to say we cannot come. Undaunted, Nazeem prevails with his innocent clueless act until Sherine give in and we pull off in Pul-e-Khumri. The Codan radio crackles and after a lot of shouting into it, it is revealed to us that yet another person wants a ride. Sherine threatens him. “If you are not at the office with all your things when we get there we are not waiting. We are leaving. Nazeem, I’m just going to leave you there with your friend. I’m not joking. You always break security rules and then say you didn’t know. You know perfectly.”

“Sthureen when do I break sthecurity? Sthureen?”

Before we arrive at the office we encounter the guy who wants a ride rushing home to get his laptop. We stop, blocking traffic in the middle of the street so Sherine can yell at him.

Our stay at the office lasts for about one cigarette. Nazeem sees his friend, fulfilling a purpose that remains veiled since they hardly say anything to each other. The laptop guy rushes in at the last minute and Nazeem pauses at the car door to say goodbye to his friend or possibly just to infuriate Sherine. She tells the driver to start driving away. It’s almost five by the time we leave.

The journey slowly lapses into silence as the light leaves us. By the time we reach Kunduz - still almost two hours from Taloqan - it is twilight. Half an hour later it is fully dark. From time to time Sherine takes a moment to abuse Nazeem for making us drive at night. He makes sycophantic apologies and looks very, very pleased with how everything has turned out.

They drop me at the Mission East guesthouse in Taloqan. The relatives help unload my bags and scrabble around on the floorboards looking for a bottle of soy sauce I’m missing. I thank Sherine for the ride. She tells me to come visit them anytime I’m in Baharak. Before the door closes I hear Nazeem start up again. “Sthureen …”

Sherine treats me to another of her Cheshire grins and turns to blow up at him again as they drive away.