Kabul To Peshawar
Monday, February 5th 2007 - 5:00 PM
I went to Pakistan for the evening yesterday.
Me, Gavin and Hanif - who we hired for a couple of days, along with his car - drove there from Kabul. We left at about 8am and arrived in Peshawar around four in the afternoon - just as the wedding we went there for finished!
We'd been told that the wedding would go on into the evening, so we thought we'd get there in plenty of time. But it didn't. There were a lot of guests from remote villages and they had to get home, so it ended at four o'clock. Still, we managed to catch up with Farooq, the groom, a bit later in the evening - and spent a bit of time with him, without hordes of people around, which was probably better!
The drive there was fairly uneventful, although it took longer than people say it should. Everyone here tells you "six hours" - and maybe they do do it in six hours. But we didn't.
The road to the border is the same road that goes most of the way to Mehtarlam, where we're building a couple of radio stations, so i'd been along that part a couple of times before. We stopped for lunch at Darunta, where i had lunch once before (see an earlier blog post). We ate fish, sitting on the balcony of a small restaurant overlooking the Kabul river dam there. I guess lunch accounted for one of those extra hours...
From Darunta, the road goes through Jalalabad which is a big town. Hanif has relatives there and we stopped briefly while he went to pray - as it was the midday prayer time. His brother-in-law invited us in for some tea, but we turned down the offer as we wanted to keep going.
After Jalalabad, for most of the way to the border, the road is lined with trees - avenue style, which is quite surprising in a way. So many of the easily accessible trees in Afghanistan seem to have been chopped down.
Arriving at Torkham, the border town, the first sight was a long line of trucks snaking their way from the road down the valley - parked and waiting for something. Customs clearance? After that, the road goes through a really weird bazaar - dozens and dozens of small second hand car parts shops. Small sheds, really, with piles of car parts in them. What this bazaar is doing here, i couldn't begin to guess. A border town seems a very unlikely venue for it - unless, of course, it's a front for an arms bazaar!
A friend of Hanif's is the head of the immigration control police at Torkham and the two greeted each other warmly when we walked into the office there. Me and Gavin got our passports stamped in a small room off the main office, by another officer, and then joined Hanif in the main office. This had a long counter - which Hanif's mate was sitting behind - and chairs along the wall on the public side of the counter. Hanif's friend offered us tea, which we accepted, and we sat down on the chairs along the wall.
A small table was produced and then some tea, biscuits, and sweets. I've crossed a lot of borders, all over the world, and this was by far the most friendly reception i've ever had in immigration control, anywhere!
Hanif arranged to leave his car there while we went to Peshawar. It's so difficult to take a car across the border, it's virtually impossible. So you have to leave your car and take a taxi on the other side of the border.
From passport control, we walked across the bridge over the Kabul river, which forms the border with Pakistan here - and which we'd been following ever since we left Kabul. On the other side was Pakistan - which, weirdly, was considerably more chaotic than the Afghanistan side.
There were loads of people in the street - most of them crossing the border. And we had to get through them and go into the Pakistan immigration office. Almost all the people crossing the border here don't pass through immigration control. Afghans don't need to. Most of them don't have passports anyway, and Pakistan allows them to pass freely between the two countries. So there were hardly any other people in the passport office.
Compared with the newly built office complex on the Afghanistan side, the Pakistan office was dingy and rundown. There were a couple of men behind a desk which had three computers on it. We put our passports on the desk and sat down to wait. After checking them and putting them up to what appeared to be a reader for the new biometric passport chips, and then writing details in a book, we were called up individually to stand in front of a little camera on a long stalk, which was connected to the computer. After a little more dicking around, we were led to another office, just up the street, where we had to wait for an armed guard to be arranged.
People crossing the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan at Torkham
All foreigners crossing this border into Pakistan are compelled to travel through the Khyber pass and the tribal areas on the other side with an armed guard. Hanif went and got us a taxi and me and Gavin and the guard joined him in it.
The infamous Khyber Pass, by the way, is a fairly unremarkable road through some hills. The terrain reminds me quite a lot of some of the drier parts of Australia - particularly far north Queensland, up around Laura.
There are boom gates on the road between the tribal areas, and at the first one our guard got out and a new one got in. The taxi driver paid the guard for us - a hundred rupees, i think. The new guard continued with us all the way to Peshawar, through the next three boundary gates. At one point, on the outskirts of Peshawar, he handed his rifle in to what appeared to be a gun shop, but was presumably a kind of "cloak room" for guns. He stayed in the car all the way to where we were going though.
You can see some of my photos of Afganistan at
WillKemp-Photos.com/afghanistan