The truth is, I only got into Kabul today – my Arianna flight from Dubai was cancelled yesterday – not the best when you’ve got up at 3am to catch the flight. I hung out with some ex-pats at the airport and found that it was the second day in a row for cancellations – apparently they’d sent the plane to Delhi. I found this out after a few Afghanis (who I’d been exchanging mutually frustrated “isn’t this awful” type conversations with) came up to me and asked me to ask the representative – as they thought I was more likely to get a full answer than they would. Unfortunately for post colonial cultural advancements, they were right.
Still, I got to hang out in Dubai for another day with my new friends - friends of friends who put me up and took me to the airport (and back again, yesterday)- and who had a pretty crazy valentines party on Friday – where I was even persuaded to do a bit of Karaoke, which everyone regretted.
Run for the hills! Leons got the microphone!
So flying into Kabul was a pretty big shock – first it was the snow – our flight was delayed – I’d bought a Kam Air ticket after thinking that it was pretty unlikely that I’d get on a Arianna flight after two days of cancellations (and paid another $200 for the privilege), but Kam Air were a bit jumpy about flying into Kabul in bad weather – it’s totally surrounded by mountains, and last year they managed to fly into one of them in the exact same conditions – though I misheard and thought that they’d crash landed in a mine field. So I was totally confident about the flight, as I’m sure you can imagine.
In actual fact, the flight was pretty good – and the landing was excellent – although we did fly at quite a leisurely pace. The terminal, however, was something else. It was like someone had thrown a grenade into a half-built garage – no ceiling, wires hanging all over the place, no lights and no heating. Kind of like Luton airport on a bad day, really.
The face says it all, I think.
The qeues for passport control were pretty incredible as well – and once I’d inched past and into the non-functioning baggage hall, I managed to find my bag in a dark corner surprisingly quickly. I’d lost my baggage reclaim ticket (well, the ex pat who I’d hooked up to buy tickets with had it, and she was a bit behind me) – but I managed to bustle my way out of the terminal, past the x-ray machine, past the attentions of locals trying to take my bag for me, through the mud and past the armed guards to where I finally saw my driver, who was holding up a picture of me that I’d sent at the beginning of the week.
The fetching mugshot that greeted me
Still, the English wasn’t great and I wasn’t entirely convinced I hadn’t been kidnapped until we got to the **** compound after about half an hour driving through crazily pot-holed roads full of mud, dirty rainwater, slush and rubbish; past buildings which seemed to be in states of both demolition and shanty building at the same time, and stalls struggling for business in the mud, construction with concrete and what looked like long twigs, and locals traipsing through the slush and mud in open sandals.
It felt like being in a really hard-boiled film – and I loved the chaos, and squalor, and energy of it – part of me was itching to get out and take a million pictures, part of me was thinking “how can these people keep on living like this” but the most part of me was just totally excited that I’d finally landed in somewhere completely, totally foreign and alien, about as far from being a tourist as possible. Though, lets face it, that's kinda what I am out here.
The fact is, I’m going to have to make those impressions last – because once I was delivered into the (unmarked) **** compound, and met the local and ex-pat staff, I re-realised that I’m not going to be seeing too much of the outside world – though we will get out and see a bit, I’m pretty certain. I just hope I’m busy enough to keep cabin fever at bay.
At least we have a pretty good broadband connection here, which is going to make my life a lot easier!
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