Return to Mazar

I left Kabul yesterday, and am back in Mazar now. We had a lovely journey from Kabul over the mountains – the highlight was stopping for breakfast at the top of the Salang pass. We sat in a square tent with one flank open to the wind and overlooking a roaring mountain stream far below us, and we were each served platefuls of fresh fried fish and miniature bright lemons, with rounds of warm bread.
There were four of us: myself and Ed, Habibullah the driver and K from Australia, who lives with us in Mazar, but with frequent travel to minister to far flung vulnerable villages. We had a cheerful and very tasty breakfast, much livened by K who is one of the sunniest people I know, and Ed surreptitiously filmed it all, while ostensibly ‘just checking the lighting’.

Further along the road we stopped at a waterhole to swim – in a beautiful spot with steep bare mountain flanks rising on all sides, and emerald water. However, on finding the rim of the water surrounded by youths of the silently squatting type, and that our garments were thin and inclining to transparency when wet, we girls decided not to swim. But we paddled, and very soothing it was too. In fact, Ed was the only swimmer, as, it later transpired, our driver had volunteered himself to stand sentry so that we girls could swim. It seems it would have been indelicate for him to swim while the ladies were cooling their ankles. I admire greatly the modesty of Afghan men, and applaud their consistency. Not like these couples one seen quite often in parts of the Muslim world, where the wife is muffled in a big black sack and the guy is wiggling his bottom in tight jeans, sporting a spray-on T-shirt and speaking incessantly into his mobile, which has a naked lady screensaver were one to look closely.