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Published: November 26th 2004
Last time I wrote I was in a life or death struggle to obtain a Pakistani visa, and after 6 days of waiting, I was finally told I'd have to go to Kabul. I threw an enormous fit that I'm not particularly proud of, that included ripe phrases like "Fuck Pakistan!" and "The Consul General is full of shit!" There is only one thing in this world I hate more than bureaucrats, and that's nuclear war. Which explains why I particularly hate Pakistani bureaucrats.
In the time I'd been waiting, I'd been staying in one of the filthiest, most run down and all around unwholesome hotels I've ever had the dubious honor of staying in. Of course there are no beds and the walls are crumbling and covered in mold, and if you listen carefully at night you can hear hordes of rats scurrying around in the ceiling. It's called the Mujahed Restaurant. Here my camera was stolen, and I was forced to buy a new one, which ironically in turn was stolen from some poor foreigner in Kabul. It's a 400 dollar camera, the exact model I wanted to buy in the US but couldn't afford, and it was offered to me with none of it's accessories and on the condition that I be given no official receipt for it, for 200 dollars, from a shady pawn shop. When I got home I found a few photos in it of some European looking people, and then of a shady looking Afghan guy sitting in the shop where I bought it, looking anxious, obviously as the shopkeeper tested it. Quite a purchase for a man of my means, but I really like it, so maybe it's for the best. I look at it, wondering what poor soldier or aid worker left it unattended.
To give you a further idea of Pamiri kindness, a Pamiri woman living in Canada stumbled on my journal, and started an email correspondence with me. When she found out that my camera was gone, she asked if there was any way she could send me another one. Damn. I don't know, that just seems impressive to me from someone who's never even met me.
While staying at the Mujahed restaurant, I got pretty sick, and spent two of the days waiting lying in bed, visited only by a couple of friends I had met earlier.
One of them was named Sami. He lived at a construction site near my hotel, and had been helping me out, getting me used to Jalalabad. One of the funnier characters I met was an 85 year old man who worked at the site. He dressed very traditionally, with a big turban, long white beard, and coarse linen shalwar with a brown cloak wrapped around his shoulders. His face was tan and he was almost toothless, but still very strong. An old man even when the war started, he had fought against the Russians until he was too old. He speaks with this wobbly, high pitched, old man voice in Pashto that no one can understand, except for a select few relatives. When I first met him, Sami told me that the tradition for foreign guests is to kiss the elder, and this old man stood there looking at me expectantly. I really didn't want to, but I decided I had to respect the traditions of their culture, and I leaned in to kiss him, and suddenly everyone started laughing and holding me back saying "No! No! Not on the lips, on the cheeks!" The old guy lost his composure for a minute, and everyone was laughing at me, and then we kissed eachother on the cheeks, the proper way.
Pashto handshakes are a little different... I was a little slow in figuring out the procedure. Some people, close friends of Sami's, who I had met, had taken me in a bear hug when we were introduced. Other acquaintances touch their hand to your heart, and you do the same to theirs, and then shake hands. I can't imagine this handshake goes too well with the female visitors. I made another faux pas when someone went to do the hand on the heart thing, but I thought they were going for the bear hug, and aggressively wrapped my arms around them. It's always a little bit awkward, but I've got it pretty well down now.
So I finally headed back to Kabul to try and get the visa, which was a gigantic bureacratic mess, and ridiculously expensive. I went to the Pakistani consulate, but it was closed, they told me I had to go to the old British consulate. I went to it, and the guy at the foreigner's window told me that I had to get a letter from my embassy. For convenience's sake, the American and Pakistani embassies are on opposite sides of town, requiring a fifteen minute cab ride. I went to the American embassy, which is about as secure as Fort Knox, and a man came out and led me past the soldiers and machine guns to the consular section, where I proceeded to blow up in a fit of rage on a poor Afghani official who told me I couldn't have the letter. Luckily, a slightly fruitty American man named Russell, came to his rescue, and explained that the purpose of the letter was to discourage me from going to Pakistan, and he couldn't give me one. He was very helpful, and called the Pakistani embassy for me. Then he suggested that I lie about my residence and say that I am living in Kabul to get the visa. He also gave me the application, which helped a lot, since they wouldn't give it to me without the letter. I filled out the app with a fictional address in Kabul on it, and jumped in a cab. I told him to take me to the British embassy, now the Pakistani embassy, but instead he took me to the NEW British embassy, entirely out of the way. I had the guards at the gate write the address of the old one for me in Dari, which I gave to another cabbie, who took me there. I went in, but the visa processing hours were over. It was 10:30 AM. Some poor man was standing in front of the door, just milling around, and I started pouting and telling my sob story to him, and then to my surprise someone openned the door, after the acceptance hours. The people were in there processing applications, and decided to take mine. They shuffled it around, handed it back to me, and a man came out and told me they couldn't issue me a visa. I was about to explode, and he saw this, and then pointed out that he could issue me a transit visa. I was willing to settle for anything at this point, so I agreed. He went inside, briefly spoke with a man who took my passport, and in five minutes issued me a tourist visa, valid for much longer than the transit visa. When he told me the visa fee, I balked. 120 US dollars. Agh! I was sure it was extortion, but they showed me the official chart of what all citizens had to pay. At least I wasn't Tanzanian- they have to pay 300 dollars, even for a transit visa. Russians have to pay 240 I think. But they finally pasted the visa into my passport and the nightmare was over.... or was it?
During this process, Russell had pointed out that my Afghani visa, only valid for one month, had expire five days ago. He told me that I had to go handle it at the Central Passport Office, or I could be arrested when I tried to leave the country.
The next day I went to the Indian embassy, but I didn't want to stick around for three days for the processing of that in frigid Kabul, so I walked down the street and found the passport office. There was a huge crowd of people fighting to get into the gate, and two soldiers were doing their best to search everyone for weapons before letting them in. I pushed through the crowd, and as a foreigner, they didn't even bother to check me, but signalled me in.
I know the phrase 'a writhing mass of humanity' is over used... well, maybe it isn't, but that's what the inside of the office was. At least a few hundred, if not a thousand, people stood inside of the walled garden, milling in crowds around the walls, appearing to be doing nothing, but waiting. I wandered around as the stream of traffic entering and exiting the garden jostled me, and finally found a soldier who was busy talking to people, who pointed me to the foreigner's office. I went inside, and the man told me that I had to get an extension in order to exit the country, and in order to get the extension, I had to go to the Afghan Tourist Organization. He gave me directions, and after a twenty minute cab ride well outside of the center, I arrived at a drab looking building. Some soldiers gestured me over to a strange man sitting at a desk in the middle of the field in front of the building, labelled "Ministry of Civil Aviation" and he gestured me around the back of that building. Behind it was another even shoddier building, and behind that was a field full of wrecked vehicles and garbage. Next to a garbage pit, a man talking on a cell phone gestured me over. This guy seemed to me obviously insane, but was actually pretty funny. He made me wait while he finished talking on his phone, and then asked me what I wanted. I told him I needed an extension on my visa, and he told me to follow him. He asked me absently how long an extension I wanted, and I said a week. He turned around and told me that I wanted a month long extension, and he seemed pretty serious, so I just agreed. He took me inside the building, which looked like a run down converted school house, that hadn't really been converted at all, and left me standing in the hall. He then came up behind me, and shouted "MOVE!" at me, making me jump, and move out of his way. He thought this was really funny, and led me into his office. He then yelled at me "Give me ten dollars!" so I said "A please would be nice." He got all huffy and said " You give me money fast, I make you letter fast." I gave it to him, and he filled out the letter. Half way through, his mobile rang with a musical ring tone, which he jumped up and started singing and doing a goofy, insane dance to, and looked at me as if he expected me to join in the singing... but I didn't know the song, so I just sat there staring at him in disbelief. When he finally answered the phone, he talked for a minute with someone in what sounded a business like conversation, but then started howling like a female opera singer into the phone, singing different notes as loudly as he could. I could hear the other guy talking on the phone while he yelled these notes into the phone, and finally he hung up on him mid sentence. I was beginning to wonder if this guy even worked at the tourist office, but he finally stamped my letter with an exaggerating stabbing motion, like in the movie Psycho, and told me to get out. What a lunatic, but it was pretty comical. So I took a cab back to the passport office, where I thought my ordeal would be over, but no, I had to go to the central afghanistan bank and pay ten dollars. He gave me a slip of paper, and I wondered why I couldn't pay there, but nope, I had to go to the bank. I wandered around Kabul for nearly an hour, going to several 'Afghanistan' banks, but none of them the right one, and no one seemed to know where the so-called 'expatriates office' was anyway. So I finally wandered back to the passport office, and ashamedly told him I couldn't find the bank. Everyone in the office stopped working, and looked over at me and started laughing, especially the other foreigners who were waiting. He looked at me like an unfortunate retarded child, and told me that I could just pay him there. I was starting to get irritated by now, but he told me to come back at 1 o'clock. I came back, picked up my passport, and finally it was over... just typing it pisses me off.
Did I mention that I am sick of Central Asian food? I've been yearning American food so badly that I started buying contraband US army rations in the market... with flavours like Thai Chicken, Beef Ravioli, Chicken, ah Terrazinni, I think? and traditional Meatloaf with Gravy. This was actually really a treat for me-each ration is like openning a Christmas present, with different desert, appetizers, and snack packs, with special drinks like french vanilla espresso, or vanilla milk shake. It's amazingly good, we treat our soldiers well. All for 10 afghanis, or about 22 cents. You can buy these at military surplus stores in the US, but they are a lot more expensive. So for my thanksgiving dinner I ate beef ravioli and read a book about the Great Game in Central Asia I had bought. It was fascinating how similar the first explorers to the region and my experience in rural Afghanistan was, even though 200 years have passed. Not much has changed in the countryside.
Of course, I could have gone out to dinner with one of my minor heroes. When one starts to do research about the most remote countries on earth, one runs into the individuals who have been to them. There is only one person who has been to every country I want to go to... well, he's been to every country recognized by the UN, and most of those not recognized, even the territories. He's an Italian political scientist and journalist named Maurizio Giuliano, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and he's written a number of books and articles. I had read some of his posts on Lonely Planets thorn tree forum about Tokelau and Somalia, two destinations high up on my list.
While I was waiting for my visa, a man walked in an Oxford-looking blazer with large, round glasses, and the nerdy manner of an academic. With what seemed like little self confidence, he asked quietly "Is this where I- oh, okay." and walked through a door into the waiting room. After a minute, a man gestured that I should wait there too. Inside there was an absolutely gorgeous Afghani woman, the most beautiful I'd seen in Afghanistan, though I was careful not to stare too much. She was sitting a fair distance from him, and at first glance he seemed like many brilliant academics... slightly out of touch with reality, not too concerned with his physical appearance, and fairly small in stature, probably due to the immense ammount of time he spends studying and writing, keeping him from too much physical activity. I started to enquire if he knew about Indian visa regulation's, and he knew everything... about every single embassy. He started to ask me about my trip, starting off by assuming that I'd come through Tajikistan. "What makes you think I came through Tajikistan?" I said, "Well, if you're going through to Pakistan, it's the only logical way." He had apparently pegged me as an overland traveller by my dirty hiking boots, but I pointed out that I could've come from Iran, or from Turkmenistan on a transit visa from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, or the Caucausus. And then he proceeded to give me one of the stranger and more flattering compliments I've received in my life, if it was indeed a compliment- "Yes, but you look like a Tajikistan kind of guy." And of course, he was right. We talked about the Tajik border for a while, until my visa was finished, and I headed out, still not realizing it was Maurizio. Eventually, I remembered the photo of him I had seen when reading through his website, and I went to an internet cafe to confirm. Sure enough, it looked like the same man. I emailed him asking if it was indeed he, and he replied back, saying that yes it was, and if I wanted to get together for dinner or drinks some night I could call him, and he gave me his mobile number. I wanted to, but unfortunately after a month in Afghanistan I was about ready to get out, so I headed out the next morning. He also told me that the beautiful girl was his Afghan girlfriend, which he was understandably trying to keep a secret from the locals. He is certainly a most brilliant man, because to be honest with you, and I mean no offense to him, I admire him very much and would gladly swap lots with him, he looks like he could come from the cast of 'Revenge of the Nerds.'
I would have stuck around just to talk with him and get valuable travel advice, but I was so eager to get to Pakistan by now, I decided to let it wait. I'm fairly confident that we will meet again, probably sooner rather than later, and now that I'm in contact with him, I'll know when our travels intersect. From what I can gather, it seems that in the last month he has been taking a leisurely holiday in Mexico, then to Iraq for some kind of a political mission, and now to Afghanistan, for what reason I'm not sure. Amazingly, he's completely freelance. But what luck to meet someone that I admire so much, by pure coincidence. Well, this is important to me, but probably boring to the readers, so I'll move on.
I finally crossed the Khyber pass, after an unbearably cramped 7 hour ride in a mini bus. It was worth it though, because it was timed just so that I crossed the historic Khyber pass, invasion route of Alexander before me and at least a dozen other greats, littered with the bones of ancient soldiers(It's estimated Alexander lost more men here than on all of his other campaigns combined) and amazing scenery that was truly exhilirating for me, especially in the twilight. I thought about the awe and excitement when I entered Afghanistan in Ishkoshim, and I thought that that feeling, coupled with the feeling of entering through the Khyber pass were coupled, it would be one of the defining moments of my life. As it is, it was slightly less overwhelming, but still amazing and beautiful.
At the Pakistani immigration booth I met a loud mouthed Nordic UN employee, who to my surprise had been working since what he called "the good old days" under the Taliban. He told me that on the whole it had been easier for girls to go to school under the Taliban in secret because the security in the country was so much better. Opium production was low too... but personally I think things are better now, certainly in the cities. Humanitarian workers tend to be scare mongers in my opinion, and he gave me all sorts of dire warnings about Pakistan, after unintentionally insulting me. He had said that solo travel in Afghanistan is walking the fine line between courage and stupidity, and sort of implied that I had crossed it. He told me about another American tourist, amazing, who had decided to ride his horse from Kabul to Pakistan. If you think I'm crazy... he eventually turned up in the Pakistani prisons, sans passport, money, horse, basically everything. Everything he owned had been plundered when he got lost, and he had tried to cross on foot at an illegal tribal crossing, and been arrested.
This man also told me about the smugglers bazaar in the tribal areas, where you can openly buy anything from kilos of heroin to a tank, he said. I have also read about this in articles on Pakistan. He said that to walk around in Pakistan was to risk ones life, as people will kill you for just a couple of hundred dollars... which was the same thing I had been told about Afghanistan, but you know, I seem to do alright. Of course this made me a little bit more paranoid, giving me a sort of 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' feeling about entering Pakistan, but of course humanitarian workers like him, obviously a sort of amateur adrenaline junkie, like to exaggerate the danger of everything they do so they can feel more important. One of his New Zealander colleagues even went so far as to say something along the lines of "When the hell are you going to shut the fuck up?" all of the other UN guys were obviously used to these kind of speeches, and just seemed kind of amused by it.
After immigration I was assigned a guard with a kalashnikov who rode with me to Peshawar, and 'protected' me in the lawless tribal area, for a tip of 200 rupees, or about 3 dollars.
Now, when I had talked with Afghani people about Pakistan, they get kind of an awed look on there face, and say things like 'Oohh, Pakistan is a developed country' and 'You can get ANYTHING in Pakistan!' While we don't really think of Pakistan as a 'developed' country in the west, I can really say that compared to most of Afghanistan, even the frontier town of Peshawar seems like the middle of Times Square. Pepsi signs line the road, and I even saw an advert for KFC... all you can eat chicken for 250 rupees or something like that. Tajikistan was Russified, Afghanistan was authentic, and Pakistan is Americanised, to put it simply. Of course, it's nothing like America, but after the relative drought of American culture in the last few countries I've visited, it's a surprise. A little disappointing, but everywhere is somewhat Americanised these days. Maybe I should say Pakistan is Anglified, since it's all kind of Anglified American culture, to some degree.
I should point out that there is not a single McDonalds in Central Asia; it is one of the few regions on earth that can claim this. I haven't even seen one since Moscow... but I expect to run into one in Islamabad.
I'm blown away buy the luxury of it all. I went crazy and got a just under twenty a dollar guesthouse... consoling myself that hostels in the US often cost twenty dollars, just for a bunk bed, and I feel better than I have in weeks. For one thing, I had my first shower in nearly a month. Now don't cringe, it's not so bad... I washed my face and hands every day, but I never did find any hot water in Afghanistan, especially on my budget, but I once rubbed cold water all over my body to clean myself... but needless to say when I took a wonderful hot shower in my en suite, beautiful, clean bathroom tonight, the water turned grey as it ran down my body. But now I feel incredibly clean. I guess I'd forgotten what it's like, only knowing the feeling of being 'relatively' clean. I even washed my hair. As it turns out, you still need to, even if you have short hair. News to me. So I am still eager to look around tomorrow. After all, this is still Central Asia- the Indian Subcontinent truly begins after you cross the pass to Islamabad. The focus of my trip, and still my real passion, is Central Asia, and after I leave it the day after tomorrow, all the travelling I from then on is just the long road home. Well, this internet cafe seems to be shutting down... and I don't want to be killed for the 80 dollars in rupees I'm carryin and the 30 dollars worth of clothes and sandals I'm wearing... so I'm off. Happy holiday or something
Alex
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anonymous
non-member comment
Jeepers!
My goodness, Alex. I don't blame you for throwing a fit right about then. You're already starting on your way home? Wow. Well, I hope you're feeling better. -Mandy