Don’t let all the buzz about David Carr’s heartbreaking book excerpt in the latest New York Times Magazine distract you from another terrific story in the same issue, Kristin Ohlson’s Lives piece Watching TV in Kabul. Ohlson, co-author of “Kabul Beauty School,” reveals a slice of life in a Kabul kebab shop, a scene that reveals “the drama of ordinary lives that rocks households but doesn’t blow buildings or buses apart.”

Related on World Hum:
* Dispatch from Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province
* Blogging in Afghanistan: Getting Online, Off the Grid

I’d never really thought about the logistics of blogging in a quasi-war zone until I read this Slate piece about one of Afghanistan’s most high-profile bloggers, Nasim Fekrat. The article shows a Kabul that has been simultaneously thrown back in time by war and launched forward by technology: Fekrat blogs from a laptop powered by a car battery, while teenagers download the latest videos on their cell phones even when all the lights are off.

Photo by TKnoxB via Flickr (Creative Commons)

You never know when you might find yourself in eastern Afghanistan in need of a little ice cream. Try Pakiza in Jalalabad, which is lit up like a casino. NPR’s Ivan Watson recently sampled the handmade, cardamom-flavored ice cream, which comes plain and topped with a tangle of thick white noodles (an Afghan specialty called jalla). His verdict? “It melts fast, but for a sweet moment offers a much-needed escape from the Jalalabad heat.”

Photo by zoonie via Flickr (Creative Commons).

I’ve been irked lately by the increasing attention Afghanistan is getting as a reemerging tourist destination. Yes, some visitors are returning to Kabul. But in the south of the country, the war is still being fought, and recent travelers’ reports of cheery residents beginning to pick up the pieces are much harder to find. So I was pleased to find a dissenting perspective in David Common’s recent dispatch from Kandahar, where NATO troops are still involved in heavy fighting and the Taliban sometimes seems to be gaining ground.

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If Mohammad Afzal Abdul was Kevin Coster, the Kabul Golf Club would be his Field of Dreams. Never mind that the nine-hole course in Afghanistan is a barren patch of earth and the greens are actually “browns”—a mixture of firmly packed sand and oil. And forget that most golfing vacations are usually in the beachy lands of glossy travel brochures instead of war-torn countries. As Mr. Abdul’s website states, this is “extreme golf with attitude.”

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That realization hit Cassie Biggs 40 minutes into her flight to Afghanistan, which to me seems, oh, at least 40 minutes too late. Afghanistan is, after all, a war zone. Yet among a certain breed of curious travelers it’s showing signs of returning to popularity—Lonely Planet just released a new guidebook—and even for those who, like Biggs, are just looking for “something unusual to do” for a birthday. In a story for the AP about her trip, Biggs writes about a country where the signs of war and destruction are all around, yet she still finds things one might see on an “ordinary vacation.” She writes: “[W]hat I found on a week-long trip was a surprisingly green country with incredibly welcoming people. Often peeping from beneath those enveloping burqas I saw strappy high-heeled sandals and crimson-colored toenails.”

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Indeed. The San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn leafed through it recently for kicks. He writes: “The accommodations section for Kabul lists guesthouses meeting the United Nation’s Minimal Operating Security Standards, and there’s a helpful list of acronyms: Car bombs are called VBIEDs, for vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices. And then there are DBIEDs—donkey bombs. That these are common enough to qualify for their own acronym is a little troubling. Rather than the typical lecture about the advantages of traveling light, the guidebook advises visitors to pack a ‘quick run (or grab) bag.’ This, it explains, ‘is to be kept with you should you have to leave in a hurry.’ All this raises the question: What in the name of Mullah Omar was Lonely Planet thinking?” LP’s short answer: Stability will come, and with it a market for the book.

Related on World Hum:
* Q&A With Paul Kvinta: Travels with Rory Stewart in Afghanistan
* Rory Stewart on Afghanistan: ‘The Problem is That We Act on the Basis of Our Own Lies’
* No. 17: ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ by Eric Newby

To report his inspired profile of Rory Stewart in the latest issue of National Geographic Adventure, Paul Kvinta ventured where few Western travelers are going these days: Kabul, Afghanistan. Stewart, the author of the books The Prince of the Marshes and The Places in Between, now leads a nongovernmental organization in Kabul called the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which is working to save the Old City. His exploits as a writer—“Places” is based on Stewart’s solo walk across Afghanistan—and, as Kvinta writes, his “significant clout and talents” have enabled him not only to help focus the world’s attention on Kabul, but put him in a position to affect real change in the country. 

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When he was just 14, Scott Anderson embarked on a nearly yearlong journey through Europe and Asia with his father in a VW bus. In Afghanistan, the two took a detour up a remote, bumpy road to a place called Band-i-Amir. His father wasn’t sure the detour was a good idea, but the younger Anderson insisted the pair go. He recalls the trip In a beautifully written essay in the latest issue of National Geographic Adventure. “I think my desire to go to Band-i-Amir had less to do with actually seeing the lakes or with whatever it was I imagined I might find there, than it was a symptom of how I’d changed since reaching Afghanistan,” he writes. “The land had roused a fascination in me, an engagement with my surroundings. On this trip, I was no longer merely along for the ride. For the first time, I was pointing the way, leading my father.”

Rory Stewart, whose book about walking across Afghanistan, The Places in Between, was hailed as one of the best travel books of 2006 by the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, began a stint as a guest columnist for the Times this weekend. His first column, which, unfortunately, resides in the TimesSelect pay-only section, addresses what he sees as the dangers of the international community’s rhetoric about Afghanistan. “Afghans, like Americans, do not want to be abducted and tortured. They want a say in who governs them, and they want to feed their families,” he writes, “But reducing their needs to broad concepts like ‘human rights,’ ‘democracy’ and ‘development’ is unhelpful.”

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Further evidence that some of the most compelling newspaper travel stories don’t appear in the travel section: Paul Watson’s front page account in the Los Angeles Times last week of his seven-day drive along Afghanistan’s Ring Road. “On the way,” he writes, “we managed to avoid a Taliban ambush, a potential kidnapper or highway robber, a suicide bomber and a gunman who fired close enough to take off one of our heads.”

It’s rare that the New York Times reviews a travel book, and even more rare when it reviews the same travel book twice. And I can’t remember the last travel book that made the cover of the Sunday Book Review. This weekend the paper hit the trifecta. Last Sunday, Lawrence Osborne’s The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall landed a spot in a roundup of summer travel books; yesterday it got a full review from William Grimes, who called it a “a biting, highly amusing and occasionally profound inquiry into travel and its discontents.” Today, the cover of the Book Review features Tom Bissell’s stellar review of Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, which chronicles the writer’s walk across Afghanistan in 2002. “Even in mild weather in an Abrams tank, such a trip would be mane-whitening,” Bissell writes. “But Stewart goes in the middle of winter, crossing through some territory still shakily held by the Taliban—and entirely on foot. There are some Medusa-slayingly gutsy travel writers out there—Redmond O’Hanlon, Jeffrey Tayler, Robert Young Pelton—but Stewart makes them look like Hilton sisters.”

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