A 2,000-km Journey Around Afghanistan by Road — or Tourism Under the Taliban

By Ben McKechnie

To the north-west of Kandahar, on a hill beside the Arghandab River, I climbed steps up through terraces shaded by pomegranate groves to the shrine of the Sufi pir (saint) Baba Wali Kandhari, a square single-story building with five turquoise-tiled domes. I walked counter-clockwise around the shrine and stopped on the northern side to admire the view of the valley below. In stark contrast to much of the Pashtun-inhabited lowlands of southern Afghanistan, both banks of the Arghandab are a verdant green.

Entering the shrine, I circled the marble-floored tomb, stepping around a young Afghan boy who had fallen asleep. The shrine’s bearded Sufi caretaker observed silently. Over a white robe, he wore a vibrant waistcoat made of various patches, stitched into a technicolor dreamcoat.

Outside, a group of young male pilgrims from the western city of Herat approached us to practice their English. This caused a crowd to gather, which attracted a group of Talibs in body armor, who advanced up the steps toward us. Their automatic rifles with laser sights looked American. They demanded to know who we were and what we were doing there. Our Afghan guides produced permits and letters, written, signed, and stamped for us just that morning by the governor for Kandahar. The men eyed the documents with suspicion. Dissatisfied, they ordered us into our vehicles to follow them onto a fortified base nearby.

As we drove behind the base’s meter-thick, blast-proof concrete walls, someone in the van voiced our fears: “If anything happens to us, nobody back home is going to have any sympathy.” We were ordered to sit in a dimly lit room lined with cushions placed atop dusty old carpets. Other Talibs entered the room and sat opposite us, staring uncomfortably as they studied each of us, occasionally exhaling sharply. Shortly after, a younger one entered the room with two flasks of tea and enough cups for everyone, but we were not offered any.

The local Taliban commander had taken issue with our presence outside of Kandahar. Despite us having explicit permission to be there from the provincial governor, he felt that he should also have been consulted directly for permission to enter his territory. When the provincial governor was reached, he reportedly yelled down the phone that we were to be released immediately. As quickly as we had been surrounded on the hilltop, we were free to leave. As we hurried out of the room, I saw the eldest Talib with the flasks of tea and stacks of cups look sheepishly at the floor. They had failed to act according to the Pashtunwali, the tribal code of honor of the Pashtun people, which mandates melmestia (hospitality).

This incident was an exception on my 15-day loop around Afghanistan by road in May 2023. But it exemplifies the misunderstandings that sometimes arise in a country that the Taliban leadership have declared open to tourism but has few rules or regulations for handling tourists.

There are also ethical concerns, the obvious one being about putting money in the hands of an internationally reviled regime. To mitigate this somewhat, I visited with the small adventure travel outfit Untamed Borders, which prioritizes interacting with locals to put money directly into their hands, not those of the ruling, mostly authoritarian, regimes of the countries they specialize in taking people to.

The second ethical concern is the Taliban’s treatment of women. I spoke to Paris Hailwood, a 27-year-old international tour guide from Sydney, Australia, who in July 2023 had led the first women-only, not-for-profit tour around Afghanistan for the company Young Pioneer Tours. “I know some people think that now is not the time to travel there,” she said, “but I truly believe in continuing to story-tell in these places and to make sure that these people [Afghan women] are never left behind”. Her women-only group had experiences that my group, which was three quarters men, could never have had. For instance, they were invited into the women’s section of an Afghan wedding party and had the chance to interact with numerous young women for hours away from the male gaze.

My trip was one of two distinct halves. For the first half, we traveled by 4×4, taking in the Buddha niches of Bamiyan, the lapis lazuli-blue lakes of Band-e Amir National Park, ultra-remote Ghor Province, the precariously leaning Minaret of Jam (one of the world’s most difficult-to-access UNESCO World Heritage sites), and the oasis city of Herat. For the second half, we looped back to Kabul through the south of Afghanistan, passing through areas affected most heavily by the war, including Lashkar Gar in Helmand Province (next to the British armed forces base Camp Bastion), Kandahar, and the city of Ghazni, before entering Wardak province to reach Kabul—a nearly 2,000-km loop.

The trip started in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. While Pakistan does not officially recognize the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate as the legitimate government of Afghanistan (as of January 2024, no country officially does), they allow the Afghan consulate in Peshawar to be operated by the Taliban to facilitate the cross-border flow of people and goods. One can also obtain visas for Afghanistan at a Taliban-run consulate in the UAE. Our visas bore the name of the toppled regime—the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan—which is still recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, but one that does not even operate in exile and thus no longer exists. While we’d been told to prepare $80 in cash for the visa, the Taliban bureaucrats at the consulate decided on a whim to increase the price that day to $150 per person. On our way out, I spotted hundreds of locals queuing by the consulate in the baking heat to obtain visa stamps to cross the border.

At Islamabad Airport, we boarded a Kam Air flight to Kabul. As the plane started its descent above snow-dusted peaks at the Pakistan–Afghanistan border, it was hard not to think of the chaotic scenes from August 2021 at Kabul International Airport, as thousands of Afghans desperately attempted to flee as the Taliban approached the city. On our arrival, the airport was calm and orderly. In the immigration line, I was surprised to see women working as uniformed immigrations officers, most of whom wore makeup and hijab with fully exposed faces. With the exception of a young woman teacher in a secret school for teenage girls, these were the last working women we’d see in our 15 days in the country.

From the airport parking lot, our Afghan guides and drivers whisked us to the Safi Landmark Hotel in Kabul’s downtown neighborhood of Shahr-e Naw. This self-proclaimed four-star deluxe hotel still boasts of having inches-thick, blast-proof Perspex windows. In February 2010 and February 2011, it had been the target of separate suicide attacks, the latter killing three guards at the entrance. My comfortable room was deep inside the building like a Pharaoh’s tomb. After rest and a shower, the group reconvened for dinner. We walked through the streets to one of Kabul’s popular restaurants, a two-story multi-cuisine joint named the Barg Continental. While we ate on the second floor, we were entertained by a man in a bootleg Donald Duck costume, who danced around for families with children on nearby tables. Meters away, behind a partition, Taliban special forces with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders helped themselves to a well-stocked buffet.

The next day, while waiting for permits to be issued, we explored the shrines and hilltops of Kabul. At the top of Wazir Akbar Khan hill, once the site of a giant national flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, a gift from India in 2014, an even larger Taliban flag—crisp white with the Shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, written in black across it—now billows in the wind. As women had recently been banned from all parks across Afghanistan, we waited at the entrance to the park on top of the hill while the guards considered whether to grant the three women in our group—one tourist in her sixties and both of our international guides—special permission to enter. Once inside, we all stuck close together as we walked the few hundred meters to the flagpole, passing scores of staring Talibs.

Breaking away from the group, I walked off alone behind a crumbling red-brick building to survey the cityscape and snowcapped peaks. While taking photos with my DSLR, I became aware that I was being watched. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a group of around a dozen Talibs sitting in a circle approximately 10 meters to my left stop talking and look over at me. After some moments, one made a suggestion that led them all to stand. Then, they slowly walked over, eventually forming a circle around me. The apparent leader, wearing a black turban and gray shalwar kameez, broke into a smile and introduced himself in English. He and his group were, as he put it, “visiting Kabul on a work trip from Jalalabad,” and when they learned I was from the United Kingdom, they invited me for tea and Kabuli pulao (the ubiquitous national dish). At that moment, my head guide Ana, a 35-year-old woman from Slovenia, ran over to see if I needed saving. I apologized and turned down their offer of hospitality, but as this was an unmissable photo opportunity, I asked them to line up for a photo, in which the leader flicked a V-for-victory sign.

The next day, we drove in two 4×4 vans through Kabul’s western suburbs toward the city limits. We entered Wardak province, which had been known as a volatile and dangerous place to drive through under the Afghan national government. At Maidan Shahr, the provincial capital, we turned right and headed for the high mountain pass that would take us into the Bamiyan Valley. During a snowstorm at the top of Hajigak Pass (11,407 ft / 3,700 m), we stopped for kebab and Kabuli pulao in a freezing room upstairs in a rustic eatery before continuing down the other side of the mountain into Bamiyan province.

The Bamiyan Valley is home to the Hazara ethnic group, the majority of whom practice Shia Islam and are relatively more liberal than much of the country. It has for long been a safe spot in the country, and looming over farmers’ fields and village mosques are the Buddha niches of Bamiyan. In March 2001, the Taliban destroyed the giant Buddha statues in the two largest niches after Mullah Omar, the group’s founder, declared them to be idols.

That evening at dinner, the group started to gel and talk at length after a timid start. I sat next to Ken Edwards, an 80-year-old British man who had lived in Perth, Australia, for the last 40 years. In the 1970s, he had pioneered and led overland group trips down through Europe and North Africa to West and Central Africa in 4×4 trucks, and his travel stories from the era were enthralling. As our pizzas arrived, Ken leaned over: “Help me finish this, Ben, won’t you? I’m not very hungry.” Then, he dropped a quiet bombshell: “I just finished chemo- and radiotherapy for aggressive prostate cancer the other week. Spread all over my body through the blood. It’s terminal. Few months to live.” He had kept this a secret from the company when he booked the trip, and now that we were past the point of no return, all we could do was ensure that he had a comfortable trip.

At Band-e Amir National Park, we hiked around remarkably blue lakes that, due to the water’s high mineral content, are the color of lapis lazuli, the semi-precious stone from Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province. Band-e Amir was named Afghanistan’s first national park in April 2009. Kerstin, the only female tourist in the group, unpacked her pack raft and left us for a couple of hours to get out on the water, which was her number one goal for her time in Afghanistan. Just three months later, in August 2023, the Taliban would ban all women from visiting Band-e Amir.

Driving further west, the landscapes became increasingly dramatic, with vast open expanses of Central Asian steppe occasionally punctuated with ancient caravanserais. Over further mountain passes, we left the Bamiyan Valley and entered the incredibly remote province of Ghor, where the road was sometimes nothing more than a thin muddy track. After reaching the provincial capital Chagcharan to obtain permits to proceed west, we stopped to rest for the night at a chaykhana (teahouse).

The next day, we drove for 10 hours to reach the Minaret of Jam (213 ft / 65 m), a solitary monolithic structure in Ghor’s Shahrak District that towers over the Hari River, which we crossed on foot using a wooden footbridge with no handrails. Across the river from the minaret, a Taliban brigade live in a series of huts. I along with one of our Afghan guides hiked up to them to announce our arrival. As he exited the main hut to greet us, the Talib commander checked his appearance in a pocket mirror. When he asked where I was from, I responded “Inglestan” in Dari, to which he looked unhappy. “Please, we should speak Pashto,” he said. I corrected myself. Satisfied, he continued: “You are our guests here and you do not have to worry in any way about your safety.” I’d heard this exact line several times by this point in the trip. “My men will patrol the campsite every hour after dark tonight to ensure your protection,” he reassured us. The next morning, after a cool night spent on rocky ground, Ken was in a sorry state—stiff, aching, and dazed and confused. The river had swelled overnight, and Ana led him slowly by the hand back across the now treacherously swaying footbridge.

From Jam to Herat, it was an exhausting 15-hour drive along unsealed roads. The main town along the way is Chisti Shariff, where a kind old caretaker unlocked the shrine and mausoleum of the Sufi saint Maudood Chishti, whose descendant Moinuddin Chisti would later settle in Ajmer in what is now Rajasthan, India. In fact, I had visited Ajmer Sharif Dargah, the Sufi shrine in Rajasthan dedicated to Moinuddin Chisti, just a few months previously in January 2023.

After approaching Herat on what must be one of the world’s worst roads, an abandoned infrastructure project started under the toppled national government, the city felt like being back in civilization. Being a major trading city so close to the Iranian border, it also felt uncannily like Iran. After a tour of the Jihad Museum, which has exhibits dedicated to the mujahideen who fought the Soviets in the 1979–1989 Soviet–Afghan War, we drove to Khwaja Abdullah Ansari Shrine, a Sufi shrine dedicated to a poet on a hilltop overlooking Herat to the north-east.

Two Afghan women waited at the shrine entrance looking forlorn, having traveled all the way from Kandahar to pray there. However, they had arrived to the news that a new decree had been issued by the Taliban, which stated that women could now only visit on a Wednesday, while only men were allowed at the shrine on any other day. Today was Saturday, and they had to return to Kandahar the next day. We arrived, showed our permits and letters from the governor of Herat, and breezed through security. Seeing the three women in our group allowed in without resistance triggered one of the Kandahari women to launch an impromptu one-woman protest. She yelled at the top of her voice at the young AK-47-wielding Talib at the gate, gesturing wildly in his face, then at us, and then back to him again. I understood the word for “Americans,” which she screamed repeatedly (only one of us had an American passport). The Talib suddenly aimed his gun at the woman’s head and began barking orders. After an incredibly tense stand-off, the women were allowed into the shrine for all of three minutes.

After two nights in the Tejarat International, one of Herat’s best hotels, we drove south into the desert. Leaving Herat province, the road took us through Farah province, briefly passed through the tip of Nimruz province, and then entered Helmand province. Not long after I saw what had been the British army airbase Camp Bastion to the right of the main road, now dotted with white Taliban flags, we turned south to the provincial capital of Lashkar Gar, situated at the confluence of the Arghandab and Helmand rivers. Our lodging for the night was the Helmand Star, Helmand province’s only hotel, which felt like a youth detention facility. There was to be no exploration of the city on foot, and we were instructed to rest in our rooms after dinner. However, I couldn’t sleep and could hear a wedding party downstairs, so I sneaked down to the parking lot, where hotel staff gave me a cup of tea and a chair to people-watch as scores of wedding guests arrived. After a while, I showed the staff some pictures from Band-e Amir and the Minaret of Jam on my phone, which they seemed to enjoy. However, one man then showed me videos on his phone, one of which was of a lake with somber music playing. He said to me in English, “My family, there… bomb… die.”

The next morning, we visited the governor for Helmand, who made us wait outside the building in the heat for two hours. This was a different experience than in Herat, where the cheerful governor had prepared a speech for us and provided a spread of snacks, candy, and tea in his comfortable office. While we waited outside the governor’s office, two young men arrived claiming to be a journalist and cameraman from Kabul, and they said that they would be accompanying us sightseeing to Qala-e-Bost (Bost Castle) in the countryside of Helmand. One of our Afghan guides took me aside and said, “Be careful what you say. He’s not a journalist.” Out of anyone in the group, the minder posing as a journalist seemed particularly keen to talk to me. He stated that he would interview me on camera later, which did not sound optional.

The 3,000-year-old Bost Castle, a hilltop fortress, is impressive in a way that could one day make it a world-class tourist attraction. Ken was pulled up the steep hill by local boys, and he later kindly volunteered to be interviewed alongside me. Essentially, we were wanted on camera saying positive things about Helmand province’s tourism potential and, most crucially, the security situation around the country under Taliban rule.

The afternoon drive to Kandahar was brutal. During the war, the road had been blown out by IEDs every few hundred meters, which now necessitated nausea-inducing maneuvers by our driver to navigate the craters. On top of that, the van’s air conditioning had broken down. Mercifully, I passed out in the stifling heat. Kandahar is a surprisingly modern city, bustling with activity, with uniformed police directing traffic and giant slogan-bearing billboards. Our visit to the Taliban governor’s office was more agreeable, with a visit to an art gallery and a museum in the same building thrown in. This was of course balanced out by the experience of being detained at the Baba Wali shrine later that afternoon.

Less than an hour outside of Kandahar, we passed into Zabul, a deeply conservative province that was always a Taliban stronghold throughout the war. Along a quiet stretch of the main road, we stopped for snacks and a bathroom break. Three teenage boys emerged from the neighboring field and approached our vans. Ana attempted to talk to them and offer them some food, but they said that they would not speak to non-Muslims. Fooled by my beard, they were less wary around me as well as some of the other men, so we continued to attempt communication. After they’d let their guard down, one of our Afghan guides asked them what they wanted to do when they were older. “I want to travel to Panjshir Valley and perform jihad to bring it under control,” said one boy, to which the others nodded in agreement. Then, another said, “Yeah, or go to Pakistan to perform jihad there!”

Down a lane across the road, men from the village had spotted us and started walking over. Our drivers suddenly instructed everyone to get into the vehicles, and we were gone before the men reached the road.

The city of Ghazni, where we stayed at Hotel Uranus, was an unexpected highlight of Afghanistan. From the top of Ghazni Citadel, we looked out over lush agricultural fields of varying shades of green in one direction, while in the other, out on a plain under gray storm clouds, stood the Ghazni Minarets—intricately decorated towers from the 12th century. Local boys swung from the gun of a rusty old tank from the Soviet–Afghan War before introducing us to Jaik, their well-looked-after pet puppy. Later that evening, at a packed restaurant named Galaxy, perhaps worth a trip to Ghazni alone, we enjoyed kebabs, pizza, and sheryakh—chewy Afghan ice cream flavored with pistachio, rose water, saffron, and cardamom. Outside the restaurant, an affluent-looking elderly Afghan man wearing glasses and a turban approached us and shouted in a jubilant tone, “Welcome to Afghanistan! Finally we have peace! Peace! The war is over! How do you feel here? Do you feel safe? Welcome, friends!”

The peace and security are doubtless being used as propaganda (I and the whole group appeared on national TV and news websites during our time in the country), but I did not leave Afghanistan feeling that they weren’t real. The elderly man that night in Ghazni was genuinely proud to welcome us to his city and country. But as our Kam Air flight took off from Kabul for Dubai, it was hard to ignore the country’s less savory realities.

Somewhere along our 2,000-km loop around Afghanistan, we were invited to see secret schooling for girls in their early teens. Our visit was discrete and unscripted—no Talibs in sight. The classroom was in a room of a family home, inside which approximately 30 girls wearing hijab sat on the floor in orderly rows for English class. On the wall, I saw a manga-style sketch of two girls with exaggerated large eyes and eyelashes, with a speech bubble above them that said “We love our school!” The more confident girls had prepared speeches for us, and the teacher, only young herself, gently encouraged them to take turns. Invariably, they were delivered as streams of consciousness without regard for punctuation, although this did not detract from their impact. It was hard to see a room full of intelligent children, with so much potential, desperate to attend school and have their right to an education restored after having it stolen from them. When it was time to say goodbye, we gifted them large boxes of apples, and I asked the teacher and the girl whose speech had moved me the most if I could take a picture of her script. It read as follows:

In the name of Allah, my name is [redacted] and I am 13 years old. I’ve had many difficulties in my life. When I was 7 years old, my father didn’t want to enroll me at school because he had thoughts in his mind that girls can’t study, girls are disabled, girls are in this world just to become women and give birth to children. I was very sad about his thoughts. I really tried to change them, but I couldn’t. Instead, he always motivated me to do the housework in order to be a good housewife in the future. I couldn’t say anything to him because he is my father. I was so sad. Sometimes I was saying to myself why even I am alive? Really I was born in this world just to become a good housewife? I cried a lot, and I never gave up, because never giving up is the way to live. Fortunately, when I was 10 years old, my father said “If it’s not too late, you are allowed to go school.” I was very happy and I kissed my father’s pinky. Then he said “I am sorry, forgive me.” I just said “Thanks, father.” Then I went to the school and enrolled myself in grade 3. Now I am enrolled in grade 7, but school was banned [by the Taliban]. I am sure that it will open soon. I will continue to struggle with my life to achieve my goals and dreams. Nothing is too late to start.

In the months that followed, I kept in touch with Ken by email, who went on a safari trip to southern Africa with his children. He was deep into writing a book about our trip to Afghanistan, for which he was keen to use my photos. However, on August 7, he sent the following message: “I was really going well putting the Afghan book together before I went to Africa, but events have overtaken me […]. I now have a terminal lung condition, which means I only have 10 or so days to live. Therefore, the book remains unfinished.”

Four days later, Ken’s son and daughter messaged the group to say that he had passed away peacefully in his sleep early that morning, and that “he’d cherished the time in Afghanistan.” In early April 2023, Ken met his children and ex-wife for dinner in Perth, where he asked his ex-wife a question: “If you didn’t have long to live and could return to just one country for a final trip, which country would it be?” Without hesitation, she replied, “I’d go back to Afghanistan.” In the 1970s, when Afghanistan was on the overland “hippie trail” from Europe to India, the pair had backpacked around the country together as boyfriend and girlfriend, traveling by public transport, and they had fallen in love with it. “Me too,” said Ken. “I’m going back there in a few weeks.”

Dedicated to Kenneth Winston Edwards

1943–2023