Magic Bus

by Rory Maclean

  ‘I hear you’re writing a travel book,’ the Norwegian says to me, his mouth puckering at the irony. ‘Do you want to ruin Kabul?’

  ‘Tourism is the future of Afghanistan,’ the driver, a local man, interrupts. ‘And Afghans are the most hospitable people in the world. Chans-e khub.’ Good luck to you.

  ‘Just don’t write about the beaches,’ advises the Norwegian, deadpan again. ‘The surfing here is rubbish.’

  The LandCruiser drops me at the Mustapha. A US soldier in full battle kit strolls by its iron-grille entrance. Around the corner is the Chelsea Supermarket where bin Laden used to shop. Above me rises the country’s single billboard: ‘Enjoy the Taste of America – Pine Cigarettes’. I step inside Afghanistan’s only surviving Intrepid hotel.

  In 1970, Penny stayed here. Two years later, the Mustapha was Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s favourite place in town, ‘new and built around a central courtyard, more like a college residence than a hotel’. Rudy was a frequent guest, his busloads unrolling their sleeping bags on its roof. The Mustapha caught the first wave of independent travellers, was closed during the Soviet occupation and for most of the Taliban years, then reopened when the owner’s son returned from twenty-one years’ exile in New Jersey.

  ‘Where the hell’s the security guard?’ an AP stringer complains on the stairs. He and a fellow journalist wear identical flak jackets and rimless peaked karakul caps. Both are off to find a Pulitzer-winning story before lunch. ‘There’s supposed to be a security guard at the door.’

  In the sixties, there were no guidebooks to Asia, at least none that suited young shoestring travellers. No one on the hippie highway carried a copy of Fodor’s Islamic Asia. The route to spiritual enlightenment wasn’t revealed in the pages of the latest Baedeker. Intrepids were on a journey of spontaneity and reinvention. Kids simply arrived in a town, dropped by the freak hotel, hit on other Westerners for advice and checked out the travellers’ noticeboards. Don’t pay more than twenty Afghanis for the ride to Jalalabad. The Crown Hotel in Delhi smells of roses. Bhagwan Rajneesh has moved his ashram from Bombay to Pune. If the best bus didn’t run for another day or three it didn’t matter; the Intrepids just hung out, went with the flow, absorbed the moment – and were absorbed in it. Few were ever in a hurry. Most spent months, even years, on the road.

  Come the seventies, travellers had less time but more money. They were less inclined to leave arrangements to the vagaries of chance. They weren’t as trusting either, and with reason. The Vietnam war and the commercialization of the East hadn’t only disillusioned them. The promise of fast money had drawn rip-off artists and passport thieves to the fringes of the trail. People were robbed and raped. Curries were made with dog meat. Hashish was cut with horse manure. The seventies overlander needed guidance.

  Let’s Go was first published in the early sixties as a pamphlet for Harvard students heading for Europe. Almost a decade passed before it reached over the Bosphorus. Likewise, Europe on $5 a Day and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe (subtitled How to see Europe by the skin of your teeth) didn’t raise a thumb towards the east either.

  The first travellers’ guidebook to step into Asia was printed on a Gestetner in a derelict squat in Notting Hill. BIT – from Binary Information Transfer, the smallest unit of computer data – was an information charity on Westbourne Park Road co-founded by the irreverent social inventor Nicholas Albery. Freaks and runaways dropped by his ‘energy centre of the Alternative Society’ for free advice on crash pads, legal aid and cheap food (when available, the girls who did the cooking were often out bringing kids down from bad trips). Its precarious, hand-to-mouth existence was sustained by donations from Paul McCartney, The Who and the Gulbenkian Foundation, as well as by sales of fake student-cards (issued in the name of the imaginary ‘London Institute of Structural Anthropology: Department for External Studies’, Albery being a follower of the French social anthropologist Lévi-Strauss).

  The charity’s idiosyncratic magazine BIT man – ‘a survival manual for activists and deviants’ – disseminated do-it-yourself information on matters ranging from rebirthing and plumbing a squat to independent travel. In keeping with the ideals of an alternative lifestyle, many Intrepids wrote to the magazine on their return home from India, sharing their anecdotes and advice. One of BIT’s volunteers – a Yorkshireman named Geoff Crowther who had done the trail himself – collated this material with his own experiences and in 1970 printed the BIT travel newsletter. Its first edition, printed in purple ink in a dingy room smelling of meths and running to a dozen mimeographed pages, sold out as soon as it hit the street.

  That same year, less than a mile away across London, another Englishman, Tony Wheeler, met Irish-born, would-be stewardess Maureen on a park bench. Wheeler had been bitten by the travel bug during his time as an engineer at Rootes Cars in the Midlands. Rootes had modified a Hillman Hunter for the Daily Express London-to-Sydney marathon. On its front seat lay an open map of Iran. Wheeler had seen it and was captivated by the unfamiliar place names and swathes of desert. Maureen had caught her first glimpse of the greater world through the Indian pedlars who called at her Belfast front door.

  The young couple fell in love and decided to go travelling together. They bought a 1964 Minivan for £65 and drove it across Asia, reaching Sydney penniless the day after Christmas 1972. Wheeler pawned his camera to buy food. Maureen refused to sell her typewriter. ‘I bet we could do a book,’ he said and, in a month, he wrote Across Asia on the Cheap.

  Lonely Planet’s first guidebook had a print run of 1,500 copies. Wheeler flogged them to Sydney book shops and, like the BIT newsletter, it sold out in a week. He then did two more print runs, flying some of them in suitcases to Melbourne. He caught the airline bus into town and peddled the lot in a day, writing out invoices while eating his sandwiches in a park. The ninety-six-page pamphlet provided basic and practical travel advice in an enduring and chatty style. Wonder whether to buy supper from a certain Asian street-hawker? ‘If he looks like he’s about to drop dead, eat elsewhere.’ Thinking of smuggling dope into Iran? ‘Forget it; Mashhad has a large, new and unpleasant jail especially for foreigners.’ Considering soliciting locals for spare cash? ‘The Indian spiritualism drug freaks begging in Delhi from people who know about real poverty do enormous damage to the overland scene.’

  The overland guides were not exclusively an English or Australian phenomenon. In the same month that the Wheelers left London, a French student, Philippe Gloaguen, began to hitchhike to India. His Guide du routard was printed within days of American Bill Dalton’s first Moon Publication handbook. Stefan Loose returned home from Kathmandu determined to encourage fellow Germans to question their values by writing the Südostasien Hand-buch. Mik Schultz’s Asia for the Hitchhiker came out in Copenhagen just as Douglas Brown’s Overland to India appeared in Canada. In his introduction Brown wrote of – and for – his readers:

  There’s two or three of them sitting on the platform of the railway station in Istanbul, calmly waiting for a train, wearing Moroccan jellabas, carrying cooking pots, playing flutes. If the crowd goes away they’ll probably smoke some dope in a chillum. Maybe they come from a communal house in Copenhagen; or from the caves in Matala on Crete; or from Essaouira near Marrakech; or from Berkeley or Toronto or Paris. They’re going to India. It’ll probably cost about thirty dollars or so. If you sat with them, you’d find out how to make it too; how to cop in Afghanistan, where to stay in Tehran, how to say thank you in Pushtu. This book is a result of lots of days of travelling and talking and smoking with these people.

  Each guide was distinct, and their authors were on individual quests, yet the synchronicity of their vision was extraordinary, as if a single ideal had been plucked out of the air.

  ‘Lorsque vous étes à l’étranger, l’étranger, c’est vous,’ wrote Gloaguen in his first Guide du routard. Speaking for a generation of travellers, he went on, ‘Sartre said, “One changes the world by revolution.” But le Routard’ – th
e archetypal, open-minded Intrepid – ‘tries instead to better understand the world by reaching out to its people, their customs, and understanding their right to be different.’

  No established publisher had foreseen the importance of the alternative, budget-travel movement. It was kids themselves – Crowther, the Wheelers, Gloaguen, Brown, Dalton and, in 1982, Mark Ellingham of Rough Guides – who recognized the potential, because they lived it, they defined it, they sold it.

  ‘All you’ve got to do is decide to go and the hardest part is over,’ enthused Wheeler. ‘So go.’

  I take a room at the Mustapha. The owner’s son – Wais, the fast-talking ‘Fonz of Kabul’ – doesn’t want to be my guide. He doesn’t even want to speak to me. He has a stomach ache-cum-peptic ulcer, as well as a tendency to toy with the pistol on his desk. His minder tells me that Wais never met Wheeler, Gloaguen or the Dutchman who wanted to be a doctor. His concerns are now those of day-to-day survival. The Mustapha is an obvious target, full of shady carpetbaggers and fixers and serving alcohol. Stetson-wearing British builders and big-boned farm boys in combat fatigues clutter the foyer. The hotel is also the unofficial residence of the Afghan president’s bodyguards, stocky ex-US Marines who wear two shoulder holsters and prop up the marble bar. Their Operation Enduring Freedom tankards hang from hooks on the glitter-mirror wall.

  My single room is basic, divided from its neighbours by painted glass panels, but it gives me a chance to organize my thoughts. No Afghanistan handbook has been written in a generation, apart from Bradt’s slender Kabul Mini Guide, which was conceived as a primer for NGO workers. I skim it, draft a list of highlights and book a driver at the desk. I want to travel into the heart of Kabul. But I resign myself to follow in Crowther, Wheeler and Hilary Bradt’s well-worn footsteps, at least until I find my own compass bearing.

  Alone, I step back out into the heat. Narrow lanes climb away from the road between a dense mass of baked-brick, flat-roofed houses, mounting the flanks of denuded hills. To the north rise mountains where the snow never melts, to the south spread deserts where snow never falls. I duck into the hand-painted Datsun and spread out my notebooks on the backseat. No passing motorcyclist takes a pot-shot at me. No crazed Islamist throws a grenade into the new Zalmai Weeding Cake Center.

  ‘Chicken Street,’ I say to Ashaf, my driver.

  Chicken Street has been a magnet for Afghanistan’s visitors since the days of the hippie trail. Back then, ‘the scene’ revolved around hash shops, dimly lit haunts and Siggi’s eating place, with its outside chessboard and outsized schnitzel. As we cruise past the souvenir shops, I ask Ashaf, ‘Did you ever hear of a German named Siggi who lived here in the sixties?’ Ashaf has just returned to Kabul after ten years’ exile in Pakistan. ‘He had some connection with the royal family.’

  ‘Everyone who knew the hippies either left the country or was killed,’ he replies, looking at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Everyone with money, an education, a guest house. The Taliban years were an unimaginable hell.’

  Outside the window, the pavement undulates without warning or purpose, its edges snapped off like dry biscuit. Every metal street lamp is scarred by bullet holes, bent by shell fire or cropped into stubby posts. ‘The mine museum, please,’ I say to him, shuffling through my papers.

  I visit the OMAR – Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation – Landmine Museum (with Russian butterfly mines designed to be mistaken by children for plastic toys). We stop by the walled Garden of Babur, created in the sixteenth century by the first Moghul emperor and restored by the Aga Khan Foundation. I see the Ariana graveyard. As I fleet between the guide’s ‘must sees’, a strange unrest creeps into my blood. I’m both unsettled and frustrated with myself for narrowing possibility.

  In their search for answers, the original Intrepids took the time to plunge off the beaten track. Their ambition was to be transformed by the journey. Most tried to learn a smattering of Hindi, to live in a Nepalese community, to become a Buddhist. Then, guidebooks began to spoon-feed itineraries to time-poor travellers who could afford neither doubt or a year away. More and more, travel became entertainment not travail, a change of scene not a life change.

  Rather than inspirational, the travel market is now aspirational, meaning readers aspire to do as the writer; to walk alone in the Hindu Kush, to find a forgotten house in Provence, to discover that secret, deserted Thai beach. No writer dares to point out that there are no more undiscovered beaches. That the world has been mapped. That every country on the planet is described in one or other book.

  Over the next days, as Ashaf drives me around Kabul, I begin to question if guidebooks, written to a formula, still open doors for travellers, or just direct them between holiday ghettos along a beaten track. We may go further, faster, but have Lonely Planet and Guide du routard in fact limited our horizon by describing one road towards it? Fewer kids now take the risk of staying in an unknown flea-pit or accepting the hospitality of strangers. We still move through an alien society against which our identity can be cast into relief, but often we talk only to other Westerners at safe, familiar spots. Of course, hazards remain – bags get lost, bungee cords snap, the vulnerable are abused – but at the first whiff of danger, most modern ‘global nomads’ (myself included) whip out their gold card or Rough Guide travel-insurance policy.

  Back in 1964 when the first wave of Intrepids hit town, the Afghans didn’t have the facilities. But the surfeit of hospitality and the nights when the moon spilt silver over the city’s hills far outshone the absence of creature comforts. Visitors felt at home and extended their stay, not only because they contracted amoebic dysentery. Then, a Year of Tourism was declared in 1967. The promotional posters trumpeted tourism as a ‘Passport to Peace’. When the second wave of backpackers washed across their land between 1970 to 1979, Afghan resourcefulness had filled the gap. You like pancakes for breakfast? No problem, we give you pancakes. You want music while you eat? Then we smuggle in the latest pop cassettes. You like muesli? We make it for you, whatever it is. It was an honest exchange. A golden era. But it transformed culture into a tourist experience. By the mid seventies, an astonishing 90,000 visitors a year came to the country.

  In the same spirit of hospitality, Ashaf now takes me to the Deutscher Hof, which offers Afghanistan’s only Oktoberfest, to sing ‘Es gibt kein Bier auf Hawaii’ with former Taliban officers. He shows me the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding across the wall of the Lai Thai, a restaurant which also has branches in Kosovo and East Timor. He points out Ching Ching, one of the sleazy Chinese eateries-cum-brothels serving Westerners. We even stop at Zarnegar Park to buy stolen US Army ‘Meals Ready to Eat’ from the market traders.

  As I’d heard in Turkey, the overland trail spawned an industry which packaged the globe. The commercial benefits of tourism can’t be disputed. Worldwide, the travel industry churns over $500 billion and employs 195 million people. But, in such a world, can independent, intrepid travel even exist any more? Perhaps the only way to experience real wonder and freshness today is to travel without a guidebook. But, then, if you do that in Afghanistan, you’ll probably end up dead.

  To discuss the trials of modernity, I call by the Afghanistan Tourist Organization on my fifth morning in Kabul. I am welcomed as a lost son. I don’t think another foreigner has stopped by the office in months. I want to ask the kindly staff about the seduction of foreign ideals. About the poisoning of tradition. About the banality of the material life. But they seem to have run out of those particular brochures.

  In fact, the only printed material available is a personally signed pamphlet from the government’s new Minister of Tourism. It assures me that many parts of the country are safe for visitors. Unfortunately, the minister is unavailable for interview. He was recently assassinated. As was his predecessor last year.

  ‘The Kabul Museum,’ I say to Ashaf on my last morning in town.

  18. Eve of Destruction

  The women crouched aroun
d the spring, their veils cast back, their men in the fields. Plum and wild apple trees grew around the shallow pool. The winter’s fodder, dew-green and freshly scythed, dried between the mud houses. Fariba, first wife of Said, was teasing her aunt.

  ‘Tell me again why your teeth are so white?’ Fariba asked her.

  ‘Praise to Allah, because my soul makes them clear,’ the old woman replied.

  A little part of God was said to dwell in every man and woman.

  ‘Then I do not understand, Aunt,’ she went on, ‘why Uncle’s teeth are so yellow?’

  The women bubbled as they filled their pitchers. They were in high spirits. The rush of water – unusual at this time of year – meant there was no need to walk the twenty minutes to the well.

  Fariba was next at the spout. She held her pitcher under the stream and, as it filled, heard the clink of a pebble against clay. Once. Twice. Three times. She complained out loud, yet when she looked into the vessel she saw not pebbles but silver flashing in the dusty blue sunlight. The other women pushed forward, holding their pitchers under the spout, too, until each of them held more metal than water. Within minutes, the bottom of the pool glittered with coins.

  ‘Praise God’s protection and blessing.’ Fariba’s aunt was the first among them to speak. ‘But now we will have to walk to the well after all.’

  ‘No, Aunt, now we will ride there on a mule.’

  That year, over 10,000 ancient coins were recovered from the spring. But the Mir Zakah discovery paled in comparison with the massive hoard uncovered in a nearby waterhole in 1993. Then, three tons of silver coins and fifty kilos of ancient gold jewellery were unearthed by Khoriuri Mangal tribesmen. The second largest treasure trove ever found included gold earrings as thick as tablespoons, silver Buddhist statues, classical Greek tableware, Scythian necklaces and Turkic bangles. The antiquities ranged in age from the fourth century BC to the first century AD. Several local people were murdered during the excavation. And because the nineties were a time of factional fighting – in 1994, 25,000 people were killed in Kabul alone – the entire find was smuggled over the border to Pakistan.