# Posted 7:59 PM by Patrick Belton  

LETTER FROM KABUL: OxBlog's Afghanistan bureau chief is likely the only Evangelical in the world to be keeping Ramadan fasts at the moment. With the extra time he's saved by not eating (and also by not brushing his teeth), he's written us this:

One of the many ways for bored expats driving around Kabul to pass their time is to speculate about which of the foreign restaurants are actually brothels. All new restaurants immediately fall under suspicion, especially those attached to new guesthouses. Chinese restaurants draw a wildly disproportionate share of hearsay. I've heard rumors from several sources about the curtained Croatian place across the street -- including from my housemates, who have managed not to eat there in the entire year they've lived on Taimani Street. My disappointment at discovering these particular rumors to be false was more than outweighed by discovering what is almost certainly the best calamari in Kabul. The welcoming yet slightly dictatorial proprietress (probably the inspiration for many of the rumors) starts off every table with a tray of dough balls fried according to an old Dalmatian recipe; and her chocolate walnut crepes are the best dessert I've had in this town.

I've had a number of good chats about ISAF, the King, and the future of Afghanistan over beers and Zadar Authentic Croatian Cuisine during the last week, but I think I'll wait and try to put my impressions of Afghan politics and economics into one big package next week. (Knowing that not everyone I send these updates to will be interested in those impressions, I'll send that one out only to known foreign affairs junkies, Oxbloggers, and readers of The Economist. Plus anyone who asks for it). Instead, this dispatch will be about adventure, appalling recklessness, and really good views. I'll thank you all not to forward it to my mother.

The city of Kabul is divided by a pair of mountains, Asmayi and Sherdarwaza. The Kabul River trickles through the ravine between the two, and the city runs a surprising way up their arid, craggy slopes. A drivable road leads up to the summit of Asmayi, which bristles with TV and radio antennae. The higher mountain, Sherdarwaza, is the anchor of Old Kabul -- a tight-packed, mostly treeless maze of small brick and stone houses spreading out from the mountain's skirts. On the eastern slopes is Shohadayi Salehin, the largest cemetery in a city full of graves. There are no roads or antennae atop Sherdarwaza; instead, the thousand year-old wall of the old city runs along the serrated summit ridge, from an imposingly dilapidated British fort on one end to the abrupt plunge to the Kabul River on the other.

When I told the gang at Zadar that I was planning to hike the length of the boundary wall, their first response was, "Aren't there landmines up there?" In all-too-recent memory, the twin mountains of Kabul were the poles of the mujahidin's civil war, with Ahmad Shah Massoud's faction dug in on Asmayi and Gulbuddin Hekmetyar fortifying Sherdarwaza. They shelled each other and the streets of Kabul below until Hekmetyar was finally forced to retreat. Like much of Afghanistan, the Kabul mountains are plagued with mines and rumors of mines. "I dunno if I've ever seen anyone grazing sheep up there," said one refugee worker doubtfully. But I'd heard other rumors that people had hiked the wall end to end, and I figured we'd stick to well-maintained trails, keep our eyes open, and ask the locals to steer us clear of any particularly dangerous slopes.

So on Friday morning, I arrived at the Kabul River side of the mountain with my grizzled Alaskan co-worker Ray and our gruff, long-suffering Afghan driver Basyir. Basyir had proposed that we drive up one of the foothills of Sherdarwaza and hike the relatively gradual slope up to where it intercepts the wall; but Ray was
dead-set on following every inch of the wall, which meant starting at the foot of the ravine and heading straight up. "It's like sheep hunting in Alaska," Ray said cheerfully. "The cliffs always look impossible from a distance, but when you get there, you realize you can haul yourself up." I thought he had the right idea. "Course, getting back down with the sheep again can be a little tricky," he added a few minutes later, but I didn't find that too upsetting.

The village headman told us that a couple Westerners had climbed up to the base of the old wall, but we were the first he knew of to try hiking all the way up. He also assured us, to our relief, that there were no mines along the wall. That first ascent was a good scramble, with a little light rock climbing and much vertigo. Basyir began to cough heavily -- I can't imagine that spending your work day on the Kabul roads does anything good for your lungs -- and eventually drifted away to take a gentler path up. Ray went straight for the wall, climbing up thousand-year old, eroding adobe. I stuck with the steep rocks just to the left of the wall. The lower slope of Sherdarwaza was densely inhabited, with sturdy mud houses built on tall stone terraces; as the hill grew steeper, the houses fell away, save for a scattering of small stone buildings balanced on rocky outcrops. We quickly left the houses behind, climbing a sheer, jagged gorge that the locals clearly deemed most useful as a toilet. Spent 22mm shells clattered underfoot, and Ray once beckoned me over to inspect the bones he'd found half-buried in the wall, but I declined.

Basyir rejoined us at the crest of the first ridge, where the wall leveled out and began a more gradual ascent to the peak. Now above the smogline, we could see the snow-capped Paghman Range to the west, which Basyir identified as his ancestral home. To the north was central Kabul, barely visible through the thick, brown morning haze (though as we continued to hike, much of the smog burned off, and by noon our view over the city was reasonably clear). Thistles bloomed all along the rocky hillside. For a couple hundred yards the wall was merely a mound of toppled earth and stone. "Massoud did this," Basyir explained, pointing across the ravine to Asmayi. "To chase out Gulbuddin. The artillery was set up there, and there."

As we approached the summit ridge, the wall sprang up again, with occasional holes and craters. Soon we could clearly see the fortifications at the top. At this point, however, we also noticed that there were three young men running up the hill after us. Ray asked Basyir to find out what they wanted, and strode boldly onward toward the summit. I hung back a bit, and thus was close enough to hear Basyir rather matter-of-factly say, "Mines?" I looked up and saw Ray about to climb into the fortifications at the summit. Running up to where he was standing, I said, "Ray, I think I heard them say..."

"Mine!" one of the young men yelled as he crested the wall below us, and illustrated his point with an explosive noise and gesture. Basyir craned his neck to face us and clarified helpfully: "He says there are mines up there." I froze. Ray looked around rather doubtfully, then continued at a slow, deliberate pace in the direction he'd been going. This elicited a frantic burst of Dari from the three young men; I began walking back down, and Ray was finally convinced to follow. Our benefactors informed us that there were mines everywhere up here, and that a man had been killed by on just a few months before. Ray tried to convince them that there were only a few mines, and that we would be perfectly safe if we just stayed to the main trails. The young men understandably felt that they knew better than Ray on this point.

At length, one of them tentatively led us up to the summit fortifications, with glorious views on all sides. Old machine-gun nests were littered with fallen stones, shells, and (a little incongruously) kite string. The old wall ran off along the summit ridge to the southeast; a smaller, parallel wall and ditch had been constructed by Gulbuddin's men during the war. We realized that the highest peak was a short ways farther along the ridge, and was even more heavily fortified than the one on which we stood. As we watched, a small silhouette walked up to that peak from the far side of the mountain.

This was more than enough to convince Ray that we could go there too. He interrogated the young men (by way of Basyir) as to whether we could safely take the large, clear trail that ran some ways downhill of the fortifications to the east. They seemed to sort of agree that we could maybe do so, and Ray forged ahead, me and Basyir in reluctant train. About three minutes later, Ray's eyes began to wander back to the wall; it was clear that the magnetism that had drawn him back on the cliff was still in full effect. "I think we should try to stay closer to the wall," Ray said decisively. "Try not to step on any loose piles of rock." And he stepped off the path -- behind us, the three young men threw up their hands and stalked away -- and began moving in the direction of the old wall. I started to protest, then realized that if I let him get more than a few steps ahead, I would lose track of exactly where he'd put his feet. "You figure if they mine anyplace, it'll be the area right in front of the wall," Ray commented as we walked gingerly onward. "So we should try to get in between the two walls. We'll be safe if we walk on the wall." This was wildly unnerving as we walked ever closer to the fortifications, from the outside. I tried to recall if I'd ever heard of Afghans using the mines with timers set to explode when the _second_ guy in line stepped on them.

We made it safely to the low wall built by the mujahidin -- Basyir and I exhaled windily -- and hiked on to the peak, hopping across the ditch once or twice to the ancient boundary wall to look down into West Kabul. To our surprise, the fortifications on the peak were inhabited. A bunch of Afghan soldiers emerged from a dugout to look at us with some curiosity. They had a well-oiled Russian 22mm gun on a tripod, a fence of old shells and mortar casings, and a very unfriendly off-white dog. We chatted with them for a while, and they reassured us that the trails were in fact safe, and that all the mines were on the West Kabul side of the mountain. We surveyed the hills off to the south, and were told where the minefields were there as well. The views were amazing, and I had a sudden vision of taking a few soldiers out to mark out "Mine-Free" hiking trails for tourists -- once the tourists start coming, anyway.

The downhill hike was terrific, too -- the battlements of the old wall are essentially intact, and as you walk down them you can peer out through the old arrow slits into the valley below. The great cemetery is down there, as is Kabul's largest lake (completely dry now, after the five year drought). On the other side, you can see and hear the whole old city of Kabul, with the laughter of children, the clangor of metalsmiths, and the chanting from the Shi'ite mosque reverberating up through the clear, dry air. About halfway down Sherdarwaza, the old boundary wall finally collapses into a mound again, with a single pillar of brick and stone rising like a crooked finger from the last rampart. When you think of the effort it must have taken to build so long a wall to the peak of the highest mountain in Kabul -- much of the stone and all the water carried up from the valley below -- it's nothing short of astonishing. Far below, people today are quarrying the foundations of the wall for granite for their homes.

In the shelter of some large rocks, we came across a group of gamblers, surreptitiously crouching in a ring around a stack of crumpled afghani notes and tattered playing cards. They cheerfully hailed us in Dari, then Urdu, then broken English. "They hide out here because the police will stop their games otherwise," Basyir explained. "Yes, this gambling is illegal. It is a bad use of money." I asked whether this was really the best place for the gamblers to hide out, with soldiers hiking up the ridge every day. "Oh, the soldiers will not stop them," Basyir laughed. "They do not care. Only the police."

We descended at last to the old British fort, Bala Hasar, where the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum holed up during the civil war. By this point, Basyir's enthusiasm for pointing out the various sights of Kabul was at its peak; so after dropping off Ray at the office, he drove me across town to Bagh-i-Bala, the hilltop palace built by Amir Abdurrahman a century or so ago. It's a small and now slightly shabby building, closed and shuttered when we were there, and its grounds have suffered greatly from the drought and war. There used to be countless grapevines here, Basyir informed me, and fruit trees. There are still several scattered pines -- "very old trees" -- but most of the rest have dried up. We stood looking over the empty swimming pool (built in the 70s to replace the wading pool of Abdurrahman), and the rehabilitated but still dry irrigation channels dug in the newly raked gardens. "When I was a young man," Basyir said gruffly, "there were flowers everywhere here. And many trees. It was very beautiful."

It still is.

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