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Outside Magazine December 2003
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The Kabul Express (cont.)

ABSENT FACES: Bamiyan, where the Taliban destroyed statues of the Buddha, is still the top tourist draw. (photograph by Seamus Murphy)
THE DIRT ROAD WEST to the Buddhist caves of Bamiyan led into the stark and grand mountains at the heart of the Hindu Kush. Wide, parched valleys gradually withered into narrow gorges.

Bamiyan itself was a shock. After seven hours of brown on brown, we twisted up a narrow defile and spilled over into an immense valley, serene beyond description, with miles of pastel grass, all of it dwarfed by the 16,000-foot Koh-i-Baba Range. The rarest thing in Afghanistan—water—flowed in careless abundance.

On the west side of the valley was a huge wall of eroded red rock, pockmarked with caves and two colossal, empty niches. In March 2001, the Taliban had used artillery shells and dynamite to destroy two giant statues of Buddha here, an event of atavistic intolerance that shocked the world. Carved between the third and fifth centuries, the statues—125 and 180 feet tall, respectively—were among the first representations of Buddha in human form, blending Eastern and Western artistic traditions; the Enlightened One was wearing Greek robes. For centuries, pilgrims and traders thronged Bamiyan, a centerpiece in the chain of oases along the Silk Road. Despite once again becoming the top tourist site in Afghanistan, Bamiyan boasts no real infrastructure for visitors, but they keep showing up anyway. "There are backpackers, up from India and Pakistan, who try to come here," Guillaume Limal, the lone local staffer of Solidarité, a French NGO, told me late that night in his bare room. Lean and sunburned, Limal had been running irrigation projects here for eight months. "Sometimes there are three or four [tourists] at a time," he said. "Last week a couple came—Koreans. The woman without a veil."

According to Hessamuddin Hamrah, head of tourism at the Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism, the government plans to erect a fake nomad encampment at Bamiyan, like it had in the seventies, with cement yurts and plumbing. Then there will be a 100-room hotel at the foot of the niches. Under pressure from UNESCO, the Ministry of Information and Culture has agreed not to reconstruct the actual statues. But Hamrah brushed this aside, insisting the Buddhas will be rebuilt, quickly. "We will give them the same image as before," he told me when I interviewed him in his office back in Kabul. "I think we will start reconstruction in this year."

For now, Bamiyan remains bereft and timeless. There are almost no motors, pollution, or trash, no electronic hum. At dusk, the cry of the muezzin was the thin wail of an actual human throat, stretching to touch us from over the fields.


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