The Fann Mountains

The Fann Mountains are a truly wonderful place. If they were in Europe they’d be overrun. As it was, we were the only people at our wild camps, and we saw very few other tourists….

The Buddhas of Bamiyan

The city of Bamiyan is a beautiful, mountainous place sited at the Western edge of the Hindu Kush and at 3,000m was a blessed relief from the stifling temperatures of Ghazni and Kandahar.

Helmand through to Kandahar & Ghazni

There are few places in our recent military history as evocative as Helmand province, the principal base for British troops fighting the Taliban insurgency from 2006 to 2014. The fighting here was intense at times, particularly in the late 2000s where it seemed the death of a soldier was an almost daily occurrence.

The Ancient City of Herat

We started our Herat tour at the massive Citadel that dominates the city and, unlike Kabul, we could enter this one. Huge towers rise above the fortified baked-brick walls with just a few fragments of the blue tile, which once covered the sides in Kufic script, remaining.

Kabul

To be honest, we couldn’t decide whether we liked Kabul or not. Security issues, segregation, aggressive & grabbing street kids, heat and noise do not necessarily make for everyone’s dream destination. But It would have felt wrong to have started our Afghanistan trip anywhere else….

(We’re out of Afghanistan now but will publish our thoughts over the next few days, once we’ve recovered..!)

Polo, Peshawar and police protection

We were fully expecting to be collared by the security forces on arrival in Peshawar and assigned a guard for protection, but to our surprise no-one materialised. Hotels are obliged to report foreigners to the police, but we saw no evidence of this at ours. We were certainly not complaining though – reports from other travellers suggested your escort goes absolutely everywhere with you and cannot be shaken off for love nor money.

Over the Shandur Pass

The Shandur Pass is probably most famous for it’s annual polo tournament- a three day festival held in July with teams from Gilgit and Chitral competing for honours in fiercely contested matches. The grounds were established in this most unlikely of places by a British major in the 1930s, apparently based on his predilection for playing polo by moonlight.

Rakaposhi Base Camp

One of the things I was really keen to do when researching Pakistan was the Rakaposhi Base Camp hike. Rakaposhi, in the mighty Karakoram range, is the 27th highest mountain in the world at 7,788 metres, and reaching the base camp from where climbers make their bid for the summit is considered to be one of Pakistan’s ‘easier’ multi-day hikes.