Trip to Mehtar Lam - 1
Thursday, November 9th 2006 - 6:42 AM
I managed to escape from Kabul again the day before yesterday. It was only a day trip, but it was nice to have a change of scenery - even if it meant sitting in the back of a car for seven hours or so.
The trip was to Mehtar Lam, the capital of Laghman province, which is the next province east from Kabul. To get there, you head out of town on the Kabul to Jalalabad road, which you stay on for most of the journey. If you follow this road past Jalalabad, you end up in Peshawar, Pakistan, which is apparently about a six hour drive.
Jalalabad road, as it leaves Kabul, is an ugly, industrial and military strip - not unlike the roads leading out of many large cities (apart from the military bases, of course!).
There are several army camps along here and a large proportion of the suicide bombings that have happened in Kabul since i've been here have happened on Jalalabad road.
Like the roads leading out of Sydney and London, this one seems to go on for ever. It's busy and the surface is bad. It's smoggy, dusty, and ugly. But before too long, you find yourself out of the city.
The Kabul River a little upstream from Soroobi.
Not long after leaving the last fringes of Kabul behind, the road starts to wind downwards, through what must have been a treacherous mountain pass until the road was built. It's still a dangerous stretch of road, with low parapets in some places and no parapets in others, and sheer hundred meter drops from the edge of the road for anyone unlucky enough to lose control of their car.
In some ways this bit of road is reminiscent of the various range roads along the east coast of Australia - and the altitude you descend is roughly the same (nearly 1000m). But the big difference is that, here, the slopes are bare - in Australia, they're all forested.
After the road levels out a bit, you're driving alongside the Kabul river - which is a very different river here to what it's like in the dirty, dusty, and crowded city up above. Here, it looks clean and the water is blue. In Kabul, it's just a murky, muddy ditch at the moment - although no doubt it will change dramatically when the winter snow is melting in two or three months time.
After a few kilometers of this, the road passes through Sooroobí bazaar - which is the main town in the Sooroobí district of Kabul province. The road here is lined with shops of all sorts - but most notably, at the moment, there's a whole row of shops and stalls selling pomegranates.
As well as pomegranates, Sooroobí is also the source of a lot of fish - as the town is on the edge of a reservoir.
There's still a bit of downhill travel to go, from Sooroobí, but the road starts gradually levelling out after this point and before long we were driving along a fairly flat river plain.
Every now and then, we'd pass a village - mainly on the river side of the road. These villages seemed to be mainly agriculture based, and most had extensive fields of green crops around them. Occasionally there were sheep grazing. But more frequently, we passed shepherds herding their sheep along the busy main road.
A section of wall at the edge of a village near the road to Jalalabad.
Around the villages, it was generally quite green - with lots of small trees, and fields of crops. But when you looked beyond the villages and the fields, the landscape was almost entirely grey coloured bare earth, littered with stones, and maybe the occasional clump of tough grass or shrubby plants.
The houses in these villages are almost all made from earth - either mudbrick construction, or what's called pisé (or rammed earth). This makes the villages blend in with the overall greyness of the landscape and adds to the effect.
In a weird way, it was a little bit reminiscent of the grey of the river estuary in Maldon, where i come from. Sometimes, when it's cloudy, the sky is grey, the water in the river is grey, and the river mud is grey - and you get a whole "rainbow" in shades of grey.
To be continued
You can see some of my photos of Afganistan at
WillKemp-Photos.com/afghanistan