Canoeing Afghanistan

A streamside view of the high-altitude Ghorband in early spring flood.

The next morning we leave Bamiyan and head toward Ghorband, driving away from our comfortable cliff-side hotel with an unparalleled view of the Buddhas. It remains unspoken, but we all also know we are leaving the safety net provided by this Hazara community.

On the road we pass groups of women wearing bright blue burqas, perhaps on their way to a funeral. The mud houses hugging the side of the valley look 1,000 years old—their only modern amenity is brightly painted windows. Rusted green Russian tanks lay on the roadside every 20 miles--remnants of the failed 1980s Soviet occupation.

I pull out my GPS unit and tell Amir Shah we’ve dropped 1,000 feet from Bamiyan’s 8,100-foot elevation, explaining to him how satellites pinpoint our position. A jolly 49-year-old with a graying beard, tightly cropped hair, and the hint of a potbelly, Amir Shah is a father figure for me. An ethnic Hazara, his face carries wisps of eastern Asia. He picked up his broken English as a taxi driver who quickly learned that visiting journalists pay well. He eventually worked his way into a staff position for The Associated Press. Huddled in the basement of the AP’s Kabul office as American bombs fell around the city in 2001, Amir Shah used a digital camera and satellite phone to relay the story to the world—an illegal act that could have gotten him executed. The AP rewarded his bravery with its highest employee honor in 2002. Nonetheless, he still exudes wonder at my GPS. "Ooh, that is very high technology,"he says. "The satellites are staying in the sky by balloons or something? In all of Afghanistan we do not have technology like this."

We take a fork in the road and start climbing again, topping out at 9,600 feet over a pass east of Bamiyan. Beside us is a trickle that will empty into our next river. As we hurtle down the mountain, Amir Shah first raises his doubts about sleeping in Ghorband village, the Pashtun enclave for which the Ghorband River is named. Before our trip Amir Shah told me we could safely stay with the top government administrator there. But now, at the final fork in the road, he lobbies for a right turn 15 miles up a side valley, to Lolange, the last Hazara village.

Amir Shah dances around the issue, but it soon becomes clear our Hazara friend has no interest in bedding down with Pashtuns. After a short debate, Katie and I agree to the change. The options—a mine being laid specifically for us (Ghorband) and "100 percent safe"(Lolange)—make for easy choosing.

Lolange’s 53-year-old district chief, Ali Jan Hashami, warmly welcomes us at his newly built government center, a U.S.-funded project. Hashami’s eyes smile a profound happiness, giving a comfort to Katie she rarely felt on our trip. We sit on a floor of red pillows, drink tea, and talk about the recent flooding here. Hashami warns us that the Ghorband is very fast. Afghanistan is in the midst of the wettest spring in 50 years, which accounts for the wicked, half-mile-long sets of Class IV-V rapids we’d seen along the lower river. We explain to Hashami that we have PFDs and a lot of experience and that we would find a manageable section to paddle.

"Yes, but you can still hit your head on the rocks,"he says. Seeing our determination, he offers to drive us up the Lolange, a tributary of the Ghorband, to scout the river.

Lolange’s valley is lush green and spiced with flowering apricot, mulberry, and apple trees. Dusty mountain peaks tower overhead. Its river is swift and gnarly, and Katie and I immediately judge the gradient too steep. We continue upriver until we come upon a typical Afghan cemetery--dirt mounds marked by stones and colorful cloths tied to long sticks, the symbol for a martyr. Hashami stops the car. In 1997, he says, Taliban fighters invaded the region. Though the Hazaras put up resistance, eventually their front line broke and the Pashtun militants entered town. Some men fled, but the Taliban gave chase and killed them--32 in all, including Hashami’s younger brother. The story is a stark illustration of Amir Shah’s deep desire to avoid nightfall in Ghorband.

"My brother was so young, 22,"Hashami said with a sad sigh, the spark in his eyes fading.

An elderly man gets a short ride across a flooded stream.

The next morning, the news on the radio is of six Canadian soldiers killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan. An Afghan translator kidnapped along with an Italian journalist was executed in the same dangerous region, grim reminders that despite the appearance of normalcy—already at 7 a.m., young boys wearing identical backpacks crowd the door of a nearby schoolhouse—ours is no ordinary camping trip.

Soon we are driving alongside the Ghorband, looking for a paddleable section. This river, too, is a muddy brown, and whitewater curdles on its many curves. Eventually we find a decent stretch and reassemble our Pakcanoe, again gathering an eager audience. A man warns us of danger ahead, pointing downstream at a sub-Class I ripple.

Our paddling is smooth at the beginning and the wide waterway is a welcome change from yesterday’s narrow tributary.

We pass an Afghan walking on river left with a hunting rifle. I’m relieved it’s not an AK-47, the Taliban weapon of choice. Minutes later we pass a herd of goats 100 strong. Will claims a first descent of the Ghorband on a stretch downriver--the section now swamped in roiling whitewater. We are three to four hours up the valley--and upriver of Ghorband village.

Katie is clearly on edge, both because of the water level and ethnic concerns. We execute one eddy turn well, but on our second my sweep stroke is ineffective, and we hang up sideways for a few precious moments. The glitch adds to Katie’s anxiety. We’re on a pushy, oversized river with no takeout points, limited scouting, in an unfamiliar soft-sided canoe, and surrounded by potentially hostile Pashtun tribesmen. And now she’s lost confidence in her sternman.

From our short scouting trip we know there is a vicious drop ahead that neither one of us wants to attempt. We’ve paddled less than an hour, drawing astonished gawkers from all sides, but we decide we’ve had enough, and carry our canoe out through a grove of trees.

Our mission even fails to charm the local children. While driving the river road Amir Shah invites three boys to ride in our boat, but the oldest responds: "No, they are infidels,"the kind of invective one might expect from an Osama bin Laden video.

The owner of a Pshtun tea shop after his first taste of peanut butter.

We strap the red canoe on top of our SUV and head into Ghorband village, where we again are clearly a spectacle. Everyone whips their heads around to catch a look, and by everyone I mean the men and boys. The women of Pashtun societies--the most conservative of Afghanistan’s tribes--are sentenced to life behind mud compound walls, and as few women as we saw in Bamiyan, there are simply none here.

We stop at the town’s teahouse and climb the rickety wooden steps to the second floor balcony. An old man with freckles and wisps of red hair greets Katie with the most loathsome look I have seen one human being give another. I attempt to diffuse his anger by uttering every greeting I can remember in Dari. "How are you? How is your health? Is your body OK? Is everything going all right?"Finally he breaks out in a smile, the sign I’d been looking for. It’s almost certain he’s laughing at my ridiculous pronunciation, but I hope somewhere he’s laughing at the idiocy of Afghan traditions, which demand that, "Hello, how are you?"be said five different ways before the conversation can progress.

Once inside we sit with crossed legs on an elevated floor, and young boys serve plates of rice and meat. I brought a jar of peanut butter to spread on the delicious flat Afghan bread. The old man is mildly annoyed. "My food is very clean,"he tells us. I stick with the peanut butter anyway and even offer him a bite. His other customers tell him it will likely kill him, but he gamely tries some. His expression tells me he’s not a fan, but his attempt fills the restaurant with laughter and dusts off some of my worry from our encounter outside.

We leave the canoe on top of the SUV for the drive home, ensuring we will be greeted with pointing arms and long stares the rest of the trip. An old man scans the length of the boat in an obvious effort to figure out what it is. Then two boys cover their heads as we drive by, sending Amir Shah into a minute-long laughing fit. "They think it’s a coffin,"he sputters between gasps. "They think the canoe is a coffin."It seems it is superstition among Afghan children to cover one’s head as a coffin passes, lest the spirit of the dead invade their body.

Perhaps that only makes sense. In a land still struggling through 30 years of war—beset by hunger, poor medical care, and horrific child mortality rates— even Afghans who have lived their whole lives beside a mountain-fed river mistake a canoe for a casket.