Kabul
We spent a couple of days in Kabul, visiting the local attractions, especially the world famous Khyber Restaurant.

Jim Lindsay's diary:

11 August

On the way out of Kandahar, what should we see on the outskirts of town but the assembled contingents asleep by the roadside. By that time it was 0600 and too late to be tempted, so we carried on. After a night without sleep I dozed most of the time but woke up in Ghavzin at the American equivalent of our Russian chai house of the previous night. If the Russians had built with an eye on prestige and grandeur, the Americans had erected a functional slab but with visible remnants of the creature comforts their expatriate workers expected. There were still signs saying things like "Recreation Hall" and something that must have been a mutant descendant of an American breakfast was offered by staff who had not been expecting guests in such numbers. This was one of these odd cultural shifts, like the buttered white bread we met later in Pakistan under the name of "toast".

At this stage we were far ahead of everyone else except probably John Covell and Kent. The road across the plain to Kabul was monotonous and there was not much to see except occasional villages. Ignorant as we were of Afghan culture, we wondered about the ragged white flags projecting from many of the houses.

There was another fiasco shaping up in Kabul, where John Covell had quite reasonably opted for a better campsite than Greg's choice, something for which he was blamed later in Greg's book. While this issue was simmering we hung around western Kabul. There were some interesting sights. We were puzzled by the big black objects swinging over the counters of butcher's shops, until someone got too close and great clouds of flies lifted to show the meat underneath. There were cafes selling soft drinks in Coke bottles, but the strange colours showed that it was certainly not Coke. No doubt the bottles were relics of the American presence and were being recycled again and again.

Eventually we got to Quarga Dam, not a bad site even if the on-site restaurant was asking bandit prices. The ground was a bit rough but passable, and there was even a lake in which bolder spirits were risking the local range of water-borne diseases. Of course Cuddles the coach disappeared promptly on a sight-seeing trip, leaving Jim Moyes and myself muttering bad-temperedly to each other over our fate as guards over the contingent's belongings, too poor to afford the restaurant and just conscientious enough not to leave the kit unguarded.

12 August

Somehow or other, every time we stopped for more than a few hours the shadier local traders gathered to sell us cool drinks and change money. At Quarga the café guarded its soft drink monopoly but the money-changers arrived in force and even set up their own little tents.

We had a fairly idle morning, but this did not last. One of the perks of being a navigator was being able to avoid some of the other routine jobs like food shopping, but I got caught by these around this time and also asked to go into town to buy paraffin and a water container. We had heard all about the Khyber Café from the explorers of the night before, and it seemed a wonderful reminder of the comforts we had left behind, with air conditioning and clean attractive food at surprisingly low prices, although the magnificent gateaux were beyond the reach of a poor student with a pitiful supply of dollars. But there were free water dispensers and we would probably have eaten curried socks just for the sake of the air conditioning. The Khyber seemed to be where the beau monde of Kabul came to see and be seen.

The American Embassy made their outdoor drinking water tap available to Comex, something they probably came to regret, and it was important to get at least one big container so that we could store water on the move. Plastic jerry cans did not seem to be available but I had a good time exploring the ironmongery quarter of Kabul before opting for a big galvanised drum with a tap. There was a little performance in which the shopkeeper summoned a boy with water to swill round the interior to show that it would hold water.

At that time most of the goods on sale seemed to be Russian, Chinese, or Pakistani. In a poor country like Afghanistan, street vendors sold tiny quantities. Even cigarettes - Pakistani brands like Blackbird and VIP - were sold singly by street vendors and it paid to check that you were buying an intact packet. There were professional scribes with piles of air letters and aerograms writing out letters for their illiterate customers.

The pavements were made of vast flagstone leaning at all sorts of angles, and every so often they were crossed by sewer runnels emerging from shops and houses and disgorging into the flanking ditches. These were real hazards for careless sandal-wearers.

A group of us treated ourselves to a horse-taxi that evening to make sure that we got to the central rendezvous to pick up a lift back with one of the contingents. I got the choice seat next to the driver with the horse's arse right in front of me, and it was hard to tell which smelled worse.

There was a certain amount of mild jealousy back in the camp because Gordon was being made much of by Dr Homayun, an old friend of his father's, and a small group was taken out to a beautiful hill-top restaurant and then given hospitality in the Homayun home.

13 August

How things change! A bunch of us had showers in the morning and afterwards we sat on the lake parapet talking while we idly surveyed the scene. The view included a woman from one of the other contingents soaping away in one of the showers, which were all open to public view. A few weeks earlier a display of public nudity like this would have attracted serious attention.

I went in to Kabul in the afternoon with Johan and Liz. Yeats. The theory was that they did the shopping and I haggled and paid. In reality they were more interested in taking photographs and I had to keep steering them towards the goods. The vegetable market was a wonderful labyrinthine affair by the river divided into specialist areas - vendors of potatoes in one corner, aubergines and peppers in others. We had heard grim tales of melons being pierced and left soaking in the street sewers to plump them up, so we inspected them carefully, but the few we saw that had been tampered with had great craters in them, so subtlety was evidently not the order of the day.

John Stevens had been busy organising the Scottish Choir as far as was possible and this was the day we had our first (and as it turned out only) full performance. After a shambles of a rehearsal we gave a performance that was generally agreed to have been dismal to an audience that was politely bored and included the Crown Prince.

Impressions of Afghanistan by Liz Y

In the years since we visited Afghanistan, it has been torn apart by war, but in 1969 my impression was of a peaceful, immensely beautiful country with a slow pace of life. The population was sparse, a little over ten million in a territory nearly three times the size of Britain. There were spectacular landscapes with miles of pristine deserts and rugged mountain ranges. We saw dramatic sunsets, clear night skies and a breathtaking canopy of stars.

In ancient times, Afghanistan was known as Bactria, the land of camels, and sometimes it felt that little had changed since the days of Alexander. We saw nomadic encampments and caravans of camels silhouetted against the horizon. Once a caravan swept across the road in front of us. In the West, camels are sometimes seen as ungainly animals, but here it was clear they were elegant creatures, their shape and movements harmonious with their desert surroundings.

We knew Afghanistan was a poor country, perhaps one of the poorest. In 1969, average life expectancy was just 36.5 years. There was widespread illiteracy and infant mortality was high. Despite this, we saw no beggars or other overt signs of destitution. Occasionally we saw workmen and children without shoes, but otherwise adequately dressed. There was a quiet dignity about the people.

The country had a largely pre-industrial economy. Camels, horses and donkeys were routinely used as working animals and traditional non-mechanised equipment, such as wooden scales with stones as weights, was employed in shops and other places of work. Horses and even goats were sometimes adorned with red pompoms and animals looked well-nurtured.

Nothing seemed to be wasted. Old rubber tyres were cut up and reshaped into buckets and sandals. Broken glass tumblers were repaired and riveted together. There was an orderliness about displays of goods in shops or the materials on building sites, such as the mud bricks lined up for the construction of a windmill near Herat. Open water gullies ran along the side of main urban streets. Men would gather here to chat and relax squatting on their haunches, a physical position which we Comexers could never sustain for more than a few minutes.

In 1969 Afghanistan had a constitutional monarchy and there was an election between our outward and return journeys. The new government as before tried to take a non-aligned stance in world affairs, but the country was reliant on foreign investment from both the Soviet Union on its northern border and the U.S.A.. The pace of modernization was clearly slow, although roads had been improved under the competing auspices of these superpowers.

The most obvious cultural difference for us lay in the separated domains of Aghan men and women. Public spaces, the streets and highways, were the realm of men. People serving in shops and market stalls were men. Women went heavily veiled in these places. A few Afghan women did participate in public life at the time, but we had little opportunity to meet any. There had been a small number of women in the outgoing parliament, but they lost their seats in the 1969 election. I did see a column of smartly-dressed, young schoolgirls in Kabul, most likely from a few privileged families.

As we strolled around towns and villages, we were often followed by groups of children. The children were friendly and respectful, simply curious about who we might be and what we were doing. These groups included both boys and girls, but mostly little boys. There were few motor vehicles and children could quite safely play in the streets. It was interesting to see a child playing with familiar traditional toys, bowling a wooden hoop with a stick or another with a kite.

There was a trickle of travellers on the trans-Asian trail at that time, but we rarely met other western people. Some of us visited an American information centre, linked to the embassy in Kabul, to watch a film of the Apollo landing on the moon. The landing had taken place a few weeks earlier while we were travelling across Europe. On another occasion I talked to some sort of western herpetologist collecting snakes in the desert.

The custom of gender segregation and the wearing of all-enveloping burqas were a particular curiosity for the girls. To cover our faces, not to feel sunshine, wind or rain on our skin or to be able to interact directly with the world around us, appeared a major deprivation to us, although we did understand that in the privacy of all-female or family environments the Afghan girls did not cover their faces, excepting in the presence of older, more senior men or male visitors to a household.

We were aware that our clothing must appear immodest by Afghan standards, but there did seem to be an acceptance that we came from a place where things were done differently. It is doubtful there would be the same tolerance in today's conflicted political climate.

Afghan clothes were intriguing, both the flowing burqas of the women and the turbans and loose fitting clothes of the men. Most of the burqas were of a dark charcoal colour and the men's clothing of chalky white and muted pastel tones, seeming to mirror the colours of the landscape. In a desert landscape, the fluidity of the burqas added a certain grace to the movements of the women. The men's clothing too gave an aesthetic style to their appearance.

Our lack of a common language was a barrier, but for simple transactions in shops or tea houses this could be overcome with smiles and gestures. As travellers our journey took us through areas mainly the domain of men. We had no way of engaging with women in these public spaces. They could see us but we could not see them, as their veils hid their eyes.

We had a brief glimpse of how life was lived along the Silk Road in Afghanistan. We didn't visit more remote areas. Like other countries we visited, Afghanistan has a rich history. We only scratched the surface in understanding what we saw, but I think we did learn a little about Afghan ways of life.