To the Afghan border
The Afghan border is close to the eastern Iranian town of Mashed and we planned to hitchhike the 1000 km. The first ride was to the Caspian Sea town of Bandar Shah from two well-educated middle aged Iranians. They were not married, as marrying is expensive in Iran due to the large dowry to be paid by men. Ironically, in India, the woman’s family pays the dowry but in Muslim countries a man can have up to four women and women are too some extent treated as a man’s asset. Note the English joke that if you want to know if a word in English is female of male, anything men would like to possess is female like e.g. cars and boats. Many Iranian men could not afford a woman of their own status but they had a system of a shared "mistress", a woman a few men would share and pay for in return for spending a full night at regular times. It sounded like they got value for their money, aimed at intimacy, and even more important, the feeling of having a normal relationship with a woman, unlike the Western system of spending only minutes for surrogate sex. They said that this system has been around for centuries. Indeed I did see it twice in Nepal. Married Sherpa Mountain guides who were considered as being rich, had one or two "girl-friends" or mistresses in the high mountain hamlets in exchange for gifts like silk scarves. This is considered, among men, as perfectly acceptable and I saw it was encouraged on one occasion by the girl’s parents. It seems to display a sharing of wealth, not macho behavior. Richness in such cultures is shared with others, certainly with men and to perhaps also with women, resembling a "taking care of" as also preached by Mohammed after he saw so many impoverished women being harassed by men in Medina.
In Bandar Shah we visited the Shah’s park-like summer resort which is open to the public and touched the water of the Caspian Sea, a strange feeling as this was a land-locked sea, very far away from home. Also the land in this area was very green to my surprise and the weather was cloudy with occasional rain. This area is the green belt of Iran, separated from the dry desert area to the South by the East-West Elboers mountain range you cross between Teheran and Bandar Shah going North.
The next ride we got from a small Deux Chevaux, a popular small two cylinder 450 cc car and the cheapest at the time, that was already packed with a young family, a young men with his wife and two children but the driver insisted offering a ride. At the next gas station he stopped and he asked us to pay for gasoline in return for the ride which took a while to comprehend as he spoke no English. This is a common habit in the Middle East but we had no idea at the time, bluntly refused and our driver could not negotiate with us. Perhaps he only wanted us to share it but we were sure he asked for the full amount. After hours of waiting, we had to take the bus to Mashed, as hitchhiking was again hopeless.
Mashed is "the city" for buying Persian carpets and the blue Turkoise semi-precious stones. Here I got a high fever as the Smallpox vaccine on my left arm from a week earlier in Sivas developed into a classical Smallpox wound. For the next 24 hours I had a high fever and I still remember the gray high ceilings of the simple hotel room. I now realized that as a child I never received a proper Smallpox vaccine. I never understood why I had no Smallpox scar and my mother’s reply to inquiries was that the Belgium doctors told her I was already immune to Smallpox.
The Afghan border is less than two hundred km and we took a minibus to the border. Behind the Iranian border there was a zone of several km of no man’s land resembling a war zone. The Afghan customs building was very simple and Afghani soldiers with primitive rifles guarded it. We now entered medieval Afghanistan, our prime target.
To Herat and Kandahar
Herat is a relatively small town with mostly dirt roads. Although the tribes living here are related to Iranians and their language is similar, the cultural difference is very large.
Women have a different position in Afghanistan. In Herat you first noticed the very common usage of the Burka for women, a dress that covers the entire body and hides the face behind a net such that you cannot see the eyes. I noticed this already at the border where an Afghan man displayed his passport to the customs and this had pictures of his two wives with covered faces. Only poor women who could not afford a Burka and female beggars who need to attract attention, showed their face. This is the first time I saw so many beggars and most were women.
Afghanistan is the Walhalla for hashish and Antonio soon made contact with an Afghan man promising us first grade quality. I never smoked hashish or even cigarettes before but Antonio was here for the second time and he was the expert. We tried it in our dimly lit primitive hotel room with no windows. Antonio kept on saying, "I feel something" after another deep inhalation but finally gave up. I could not comment and was coughing after every puff. The man must have sold us real shit. The next day we found a better dealer and we got high easily, not an unpleasant feeling.
Travelers concentrated in specific hostels and restaurants and we met several going to and coming from India. Two Swiss nurses, one blond and one brunette were an exceptional female presence. They were neatly dressed, very polite and of course very bourgeois. Other girls wore the typical hippie dress and they fitted better in the current fashion trend.
After switching to a traveler hotel, we met a Spanish hippie in our dormitory. He spent nine months in India and was wearing the Indian style clothes with long curly and dull, unwashed hair, the very hip dress code for that time. He looked a bit beaten up but to us he was very interesting. The next morning he came back to the dormitory with tired but shiny eyes and a big smile, telling us he got laid by the blond Swiss girl. This made him even more interesting and the Swiss girl quickly became less bourgeois. Later on I found out that especially girls who had several sex partners along the road to India suffered from untreated venereal diseases.
One evening we were invited by an Afghani man to attend an Afghan wedding of the young son of an important man in town. Though I never found out who this person was but possibly he is now one of the WarLords of Afghanistan. We entered a big house with a large enclosed courtyard. A band was playing Afghani songs and the male guests in the courtyard put dozens of tape recorders in front of the band. The second rank visitors like our host were watching from the upper floor balconies surrounding the courtyard. A very young boy, around 12 years old, dressed in white was the groom. I did not see the bride or any women and they had their own party somewhere else. Another example showing how different the Afghan Medieval culture is from the other, modern Middle Eastern countries.
After a week we left for the 12 hour ride to Kandahar, half way to Kabul. We were warned not to hitchhike in the barren land, not just because it was unsafe but you could be dropped off anywhere and stay there for days without food or water in the hot dessert. The bus ride was inexpensive and the two bus drivers were wearing sandals made out of car tires. Their feet had thick corns with deep cracks and they needed a treatment with pumice stone you could buy on the local markets. We traveled with other travelers including the two Swiss nurses. A Brit of around 25 who went to India before, had a lot of information on Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. These were the best persons to meet as they were living guidebooks. He was very travel wise, told us that on his last trip to India he sold his passport, bought a liter of Hash Oil, ensured he smelled dirty and looked filthy, and asked the British Embassy in Delhi for repatriation. Customs did not dare to touch or even check him and he sold the Hash oil in England at a significant profit. Even after repaying the expensive repatriation using a full economy plane ticket, he could travel again. He now traveled with a seventeen-year old boy, just 2 years younger than I was and so far the youngest I met next to myself. Most travelers were in their mid-twenties and claimed they were students but most already dropped out of school.
Kandahar is a desert town with many low clay and brick building along dusty roads. Here we had the best hashish ever in the middle of the street. Afghanis offered us to try a water pipe with a large amount of pure hash. The smoke was cool and clean so it did not make me cough and it quickly made me high. Kandahar was not very interesting and our group only stayed for a day. Kabul was another 10 hours by bus.
At the time there were only a few main asphalt roads in Afghanistan. The Americans built the southern road, from Herat to Kabul, and the Russians the norhtern road, from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif. Along the road to Kabul, young boys were herding camels and I was glad I wasn’t hitchhiking in this rough terrain. The sparse traffic mainly consisted of trucks and buses. Trucks were outfitted with colorful displays also common in Pakistan and India. Only the buses of the most luxurious bus lines were rather new and had the same quality of those in Iran and Turkey but most buses and other vehicles were badly beaten up.
Kabul
The capital of Afghanistan is a large town with a mix of traditional culture like the eye-catching women dressed in Burkas and modern girls wearing blue miniskirts and white blouses but the modern girls were a minority. Perhaps 1% or less of the women dresses in Western style but these are mostly from the small proportion of middle to upper class. Ironically, woman beggars don’t use a Burka either. A McDonalds was present downtown and Coca-Cola was again the real stuff with new lids instead of the imitation with rusty lids found in Herat and Kandahar.
We all checked into a low budget hotel for travelers and shared a mixed dormitory. Here an older German man, probably in his thirties, well tanned and already on the road for several months, had an irritating voice and presence and clearly was not seen as a hippie but a deranged hard working German. Within a day he and the brunette Swiss nurse shared his single bed. A few days later they already had the typical "husband and wife" quarrels and we kept at a distance.
June is a warm month in Afghanistan and as the shower in the hotel was primitive, we decide 11:16 PM 5/4/200311:16 PM 5/4/2003to go swimming in a lake outside Kabul. Unaware of the cultural difference we put on our skimpy bathing suite. The blond Swiss girl looked very sexy after the swim in her netted bikini with visibly large nipples. This turned out to be a favorite spot for Afghani men for watching undressed Western tourists as several men were observing us from a nearby hill.
I took a walk in the desert and noticed a small scorpion lifting its poisonous tail towards us. I covered it with a towel, trapped it with the inside of a matchbox and closing it slowly by sliding the other box along the inner box. I put the matchbox in my rucksack and did not look at it for days, feeling guilty for the capture. The scorpion must have died a few days later and completed dehydrated. I still have it.
On Friday night the American Embassy had its weekly drinks and we went along with a few Americans. Inside an American crewcut, probably a CIA agent as this was a very uncommon length of hair in those days, was showing us magazines in Russian on suburban American life. Outside, near the pool a big joint was passed around. In the seventies, the USA managed to ban hashish in Iran and Turkey and tried to do the same in Afghanistan but did not even succeed in their own embassy. On the way back, we got completely lost as we were all stoned from the embassy hashish and finally were taken back by a taxi.
Medieval Afghanistan
Afghanistan struck me as an agricultural society based on very simple tribal laws. The country has 55 tribes within the 10 major cultural groups and a multitude of languages. Elders rule the tribes and every tribe is like an independent state.
Already in 1974 Afghanistan started to become overpopulated resulting in people looking for work and a tiny fraction turning bandits. If only 1 in a 1000 of the people in a country turns to corruption or stealing, you have a major problem but this did not happen at that time. The emphasis was still on sharing and honesty explaining their hospitality. The common Western behavior of stinginess and greed is unheard of. I had the feeling that cheating and dishonesty was considered a capital sin.
Hippies trying to buy hashish in large quantities for shipping home were warned to be careful as quarrels over deals could result in death when this went out of hand and this was not uncommon as the Western dealers were definitely not to be trusted being true "freaks". The men I met were very friendly, inviting and completely honest and I never had any problems except the hassle of bargaining for nearly everything but this is more driven by economics. I did not think they took religion very seriously and their habit of dressing women in a Burka was based on something else. Even in rural Spain, Italy or Greece you still have the habit of married women dressing in black.