Dismounted Mission

Your correspondent visited Khogyani, a kind of out-of-the-way district in Nangarhar Province, and it was a definite highlight of the whirlwind N2KL journey. First of all, it was definitely different to be in the middle of nowhere on a relatively small (but much bigger than it was just a few months ago) installation. And the view of the mountains of Tora Bora was nice. But the real peak was going on a "dismount mission," which in the military's typically complex way of saying things, means: We walked instead of driving to the district governor's office. It was only a 20-minute walk, but that's more walking than I do most months around here. Above, about twenty of my closest friends setting out from the base for the leisurely stroll.

Zaranjes

These little motorcycle pickups, often called Zaranjes (which may be the brand name), are all over Afghanistan. They seem like a really handy thing. For carrying vegetables to market or for getting five or six people around, they seem perfect. I'm sure they don't go very fast once fully loaded, but when the competition is taking a bunch of trips back and forth with a donkey, you don't necessarily need a F-150.

Cricket

OK, it's kind of hard to tell, but those little dots are guys playing cricket right outside the walls of the Forward Operating Base in Jalalabad. I guess that's how it goes when your country has been at war for 30 years or so; you just shrug off the martial scenery sometimes and go about your life.

Of Jalalabad

After Asadabad, Kunar, we hopped a helicopter to Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province. Our base there is one of the weirdest military installations your correspondent has seen. It's on what was once a Soviet R&R hotel - complete with a swimming pool that is now drained and has a makeshift basketball court at the bottom. Unfortunately, no pictures on the base. The staff photographer did take this picture over the wall, looking at the fields adjacent, but still far enough away to test the limits of the little point-and-shoot camera. Thus, the oddly impressionist effect.

Of Asadabad

President Karzai's picture is everywhere in this country. He's watching you as you cross the street!

Now Taking Applications for Greeters

Each of the bases out here has a few stores run by the local Afghans. The stores come in two varieties: The first sells a limited array of supposedly Afghan souvenirs, like clunky marble tea sets or wooden trays or carpets. The second sells stuff you might actually want if you were stuck out on a base in the middle of the desert - batteries, small electronics, pirated DVDs galore. This "Wal Mart," being a super-store, may have offered some of both.

Back in Kunar

After a quick stop in Nuristan, your correspondent returned to Kunar. We have a great team of civilians out there, so it's always a pleasure to be there. One feature of the FOB there is a spot with a couple old soviet tanks. Exactly why remains a mystery. Did they move some tanks here to remind the Afghan contingent on the base of their military history? Did they build the base around the tanks, which have been there for years? Did they just put them there so visitors could get a few feet off the ground to improve their cell phone reception?


Oh and while we're talking about stuff that didn't seem to fit on a Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan, they had a little patch of grass with some donkeys, some dogs, and this ram. I guess the donkeys are for carrying stuff, and the dogs might be guards. I asked what the ram was for: "Fighting," said one of my hosts. I guess some other local group also has a ram, and they get them together every once in a while and let them run into each other.

Of Nuristan

Nuristan is kind of a crazy place. It's a famously remote and mountainous province, home to the Nuristani people, an ethnicity apart from the dominant Pashtuns, Tajiks, and Uzbeks of the rest of the country. It was the last part of the region to be converted to Islam, and a center of the resistance to the Soviets. Now we're there, but it's hard to tell anyone else is. This is the view form one of our bases in Nuristan. Visible is the district center, where we hope some government is happening, and... well, and nothing else. It's really pretty out there, and I am assured there are actually thousands of people living there, but from what one can see from the base, it's pretty hard to tell.

Out and About in N2KL

Your intrepid correspondent has been on a whirlwind tour of Eastern Afghanistan, the provinces of Nuristan, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Laghman - or N2KL for short. At several different Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), your correspondent was treated to VIP accommodations. At FOB Fenty, at Jalalabad Air Field, we had the pleasure of staying in two different "hotel" rooms on different evenings. These guest accommodations are really quite fabulous in that you get a plywood box all to your self, which is not something everyone gets. So we shouldn't make fun. But it must be pointed out that these austere but still relatively luxurious rooms might be better left unadorned. Instead, each room features a striking diagonal arrangement of three pictures of the military in action - such as airlifting supplies or training Afghan soldiers... or changing a tire... or standing around a volleyball court.


That was a little silly, but more comfortable than the truly bizarre lodging at FOB Connolly, which is inside an old Afghan brick building, sectioned into multiple rooms with plywood, and featuring crib-like wrought-iron beds and the most aggressively patterned mattresses and pillows you can imagine. Again, I shouldn't complain -- the soldiers are putting up with a lot worse than ugly pillows. But I feel like I have a journalistic duty to let you know about these little details.

Happy Thanksgiving

We managed to celebrate Thanksgiving here with a fairly complete Thanksgiving meal. We pre-ordered a turkey that turned out to be maybe six or seven pounds - the size of a chicken, really. We ordered cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie ingredients - none of which arrived in time. In response, we had to go potluck style, which resulted in contributions of some less-traditional (for us) Thanksgiving dishes, like matzo-ball soup, but also great mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce.

The best addition to the evening was when The Lovely Katherine's boss announced that he had been gifted a fresh turkey by the Minister of Tribal and Border Affairs. Said boss, a former CNN correspondent of some renown, showed up at our door Wednesday evening to drop off the box above. It turns out it had taken some convincing to persuade the Minister that we really didn't want live turkeys - we had nowhere to put them and nowhere to slaughter them. So we got this very freshly killed and dressed turkey, which was just a bit scrawny but still certainly bigger than the tiny turkey we had shipped in.

The staff photographer has some pictures of the turkey out of the bag, with it's big creepy neck flopping all over, just beside the knife and scissors your correspondent had been using to hack out all the giblets from the inside. The picture is actually stunningly unattractive, and we've declined to publish it in case any of our loyal readers is reading this just before lunch. In any case, I don't know what professional turkey-cleaners' or hunters' secret is, but I can say with certainty that there must be a better way to remove turkey giblets than the one your correspondent resorted to.

In the end, we got it cooked, and it was, somewhat surprisingly, not more delicious than our American factory-famred Turkeys. But it was fine, and we had plenty of good food and good company, and most precious of all, a holiday that we didn't actually have to work through at the Embassy.

More from the Egyptian Field Hospital

The Egyptian Field Hospital is actually a great endeavor. The Egyptian contribution to the Coalition effort, it's a full-service clinic, including primary care, surgery, dentistry, ophthalmology, a pharmacy, and more. It is on the Bagram Air Field base, but it treats the Afghan public from the surrounding area at no cost. As a fellow Muslim nation, the Egyptians are well-placed to be especially aware of the sensitivities of the local population. They've treated hundreds of thousands of patients, presenting a clear good-news story. It was also interesting that most of the guys waiting in line at the hospital seemed totally unfazed by the U.S. Ambassador and his huge entourage passing through and asking them what they were there for.

Of Bagram, Take 2, Part 2

This is the Ambassador touring the hospital. In the foreground, that is. Ahem. In the middle ground, in focus and all, is one of the many people lined up seeking medical care that day. I'll admit that I'm not yet inured of the turbans and beards around here.

Of Bagram, Take 2

After returning from our R & R, we were dispatched to Bagram Air Field in fairly short order. Mostly it involved the insides of conference rooms. One of them is actually kind of photogenic as conference rooms go, but that's not saying much. The one part of the trip where the staff photographer got to work a little was a visit to the Egyptian Field Hospital. Before the briefing and tour with the Egyptian commander, we were greeted by these guards in what is apparently a salute. Why any army would decide that the salute position is to hold your rifle pointed at your own head is one of the subtleties of military culture that this civilian may never penetrate.

Kunar 7

Flying home.

Kunar 6

Kunar 5

Kunar 4

Kunar 3

I have been asked to remind readers that this is a historical trip that happened a month ago. Nobody shot an RPG at us when we were there.

Kunar 2

This was our purpose for being in H.K. Kunar. This is a scene from the governor's office, which like all Afghan offices, is ringed with couches where various hangers on can sit while the VIPs pontificate and various people with cameras document the scene.

Kunar 1

As promised yesterday, a picture from Asadabad, H.K. Kunar, obscured by RPG cage.

A Week of Kunar

Remember this image, from way back, before we left for a few weeks in Tanzania? It was from a quick spin through Highly Kinetic Kunar province. Judging from any number of discussions on the topic, the US Government has unilaterally renamed "Kunar" to "Highly Kinetic Kunar." For those of you who don't know your military lingo, "kinetic" in this context means, "filled with active battle" or "violent" or "dangerous."

The truly devoted may also recall when we declared our adherence to the budding aesthetic of photography-through-bulletproof-glass-in-motion. Well, Highly Kinetic Kunar pushed it to the next level because the MRAPs have these special cages all around them to make RPGs detonate before they actually hit the MRAP. So you get pictures like the one above, which both shows you the kind of vehicle the staff photographer was in, and the photographic challenges of shooting from one. Despite this, we'll be presenting a week's worth of pictures from Highly Kinetic Kunar this week... at times without further comment.

November Again

As we say each year: Another November, another Marine Ball. And yet again, The Lovely Katherine pouted and cried until I took her picture with the Marine Security Guard detachment here. One difference from previous years, which is kind of evident in the picture, is that rather than an embassy of 30 or 100, we're at a mission of 1,000. Unfortunate result: We barely know these guys. It's really our fault, we get kind of lazy and don't always go to the Marine House parties. Sorry, guys.

In any case, the Ball was a good time, as every year. Noteworthy this time for having a Major General as the keynote speaker rather than a Lieutenant Colonel (no offense to Lt. Colonels), the Ambassador's address interrupted by Blackhawks flying overhead, and a musical playlist apparently tailored to the tastes of the over-60 set. Fortunately, despite a location not conducive to alcoholism, there was an open bar, so we struggled through and had a fine time. Thanks, Marines!

Of Dubai, Again

So on our way back "home" to Kabul, we had to go through Dubai again. We had planned to stop for a night this direction (unlike on the way out of Kabul) -- it's pretty hard to avoid, and therefore Uncle Sugar was paying for a night of hotel for us. Since the Government has a ridiculous system of official rates that they'll pay for hotel in each city, we had no incentive to pay any less than the maximum the government would shell out. In the case of Dubai, that gets you a pretty nice hotel. We were staying at Raffles, which came recommended by colleagues. We arrived and found we had been upgraded to a completely ridiculous suite - the above is the living room, there were also two balconies and two bathrooms in addition to the bedroom, which was in itself what you would get at a normal hotel. It was the poshest, biggest hotel we've ever stayed at.

The only downside? Due to our friends at Ethiopian Airlines cancelling/delaying flights again, we arrived at 3:00 in the morning, and had to leave at 10:00 to catch our flight. So we didn't get to lounge around in all the chairs in our huge room. You'll no doubt be relieved to know that I took care to use both bathrooms, to make sure taxpayers got their money's worth.

Of Stone Town, Continued

So our plan to bust through our vacation stuff quickly and get back to the Afghan stuff failed both because we couldn't edit aggressively enough and because then we got too busy with work to post for a few days.


But we're pretty much at the end now. Our vacation ended with a few days in Stone Town, the olden part of Zanzibar's capital. It's historic. It's charming. It has lots of crooked narrow streets that put old European cities' streets to shame in the narrowness and crookedness departments. And all the buildings have this moldy motley appearance that is very atmospheric.


Due to all the above factors, it was easy to take a lot of pictures we quite like, but we'll save most of them for some other time.

Of Stone Town

Created with flickr slideshow from softsea.

Of Zanzibar

Our next stop in Tanzania was Zanzibar, completing the Kilimanjaro/Safari/Zanzibar trifecta that we only realized once we were there is the official routine tourist trail in Tanzania. Sometimes, the tourist trail exists because that's where the good stuff is, and we certainly endorse that theory as it regards Tanzania.


We stayed at a beautiful, small beach-front hotel on the east side of Zanzibar island. It was run by a friendly Italian couple, and our fellow guests were 80% Italians. And we went scuba diving with an Italian guide (and some dolphins, who I think were local but may have been Italian) for two days. Your correspondents never knew that the Indian Ocean coast of Zanzibar was an Italian colony, but that's why one travels: to learn about new places. Or to sip fruity drinks by an insanely white-sandy beach. The other noteworthy local denizens were the native Africans, dressed in blankets and carrying sticks a la the Masai from the post a couple days ago, but hanging out on the beach and wearing wayfarer shades. No photographic evidence of them exists -- only photos of the local fisherman, such as this gentleman carrying a reed basket out to go fishing, or of the traditional canoe-with-a-sail dhows that other fishermen use.

Of Mto w Mbu

Also not far from one of the national parks we visited was a more ordinary market. Still colorful, but the same piles of fruit and assortments of dry goods as you find in developing-world markets anywhere. This one however, is in a town with the unfortunate name "Mto w Mbu," which means "River of Mosquitoes." Hopefully the market keeps doing well, because I doubt the tourist trade is ever going to flock to River of Mosquitoes, for some reason.

Of the Masai

On our way to Tarangire National Park, home to a whole lot of elephants, we passed by what our guide called the Masai Market. If I recall correctly, our guide, whose English was generally excellent but occasionally ran aground on more complex concepts, told us that this happened once a month, and we were lucky to happen upon it. He also told us that the Masai, holding on to their traditional lifestyle, mostly don't use money; they hold wealth in cattle. And this market is where they get together and buy and sell cattle.


Which of course leads inevitably to the question: If you use cattle as your form of currency, and you're at a market buying or selling cattle, then what are you paying with? Are they actually just trading one cow for another? Our guide explained that some of them were certainly moving away from that and asking joining the money economy, but one has to assume the old, pure version of Masai culture also had a cattle market, before they were corrupted by money.


So anyway, these are the pictures the Staff Photographer took of various groups of Masai at the market, which our guide assured us was fine as long as we were taking a picture of a group, even though the Masai generally aren't real big on having their picture taken. We still feel kind of bad about it. But the crime was in taking the picture, which is done - not in actually posting the picture online, right?

Discount Lion Safari!

Created with flickr slideshow from softsea.

Or Perhaps it should be Discount Lion Safari! (or, "You're the fattest thing I've ever seen, and I've been on safari!" It's tough to pick a good Simpsons quote to entitle a post about safari.) Safari ain't cheap (neither is Kilimanjaro), but I guess that's why we're getting danger pay in Afghanistan. Or maybe we get danger pay because people here want to kill us... in any case, after Kilimanjaro, we went on safari and we saw a ton of cool animals, as demonstrated by the convenient slideshow above.

Safari is a great activity to follow up a week of walking up a mountain - since it involves basically sitting around in a jeep and having a guide point at animals for you.

The big surprise is just how many animals there are. You go to a National Park in the U.S. and if you spend a couple days driving around or hiking, you just might come across a moose or a bear. In the National Parks of Tanzania (we went to Tarangire, Manyara, and the Ngorongoro Crater), you mostly have to be careful you don't run into any of the elephants or ostriches or warthogs because they are everywhere. Also: zebras, wildebeests, impalas and various other antelopes, baboons galore, black rhinos, hip-hop-opotomuses, cape buffaloes, giraffes, birds, birds, birds, bats, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. It was seriously like the Lion King; there's just all sorts of animals running around all over the place hanging around each other. Highlights included adorable lion cubs and what looked like actually a kind of half-assed attempt by a lioness to catch a zebra.

Your correspondent managed to mostly keep Elton John's "Circle of Life" out of his head during all this. Mostly.

Walking to School

Sorry, we're behind on our publication schedule in many regards. So here's a picture we like from Tanzania - in fact shot out a car window, so the skills we've acquired in Kabul are really paying off.

The Stars of Kilimanjaro

For your correspondent, one of the highlights of Kilimanjaro was the fantastically dark night sky. We were at high elevation, distant remove from any city of any size, and had moonless evenings, culminating in a new moon for the summit night (one starts climbing the last stretch at midnight - either because the mornings are clear and the afternoons cloudy, or because the scree is easier to climb when frozen, or just because you need the time to do the long up and the even longer back down all in one day). The stars couldn't have been any better, and the gradual lightening of the sky at sunrise from the summit was one of the most beautiful things your correspondent can recall witnessing.


Our evenings, when we were stationary enough for night photography, were at the established camps on the route up, which range from a nice cluster of tents on a scenic ridge to an unpleasant jumble of groups packed into a small clearing that felt like yuppie refugee camps. They did provide something for the foreground of these star photos, but also routinely led to someone with a flashlight walking through the frame.

The Remaining Snows of Kilimanjaro

Pictures from the top of Kilimanjaro - yes, there's still snow. But if the label of Kilimanjaro Beer bottles is to be believed, it was once covered with snow, and now there are only glaciers in a few spots. They're still huge, but it's easy to forget when the only thing next to them for comparison is, uh, Mount Kilimanjaro.

The Guides of Kilimanjaro

Battling through freezing temperatures, bouts of violent vomiting, and efforts to tempt us off course with canned meats, your correspondents made it to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. We took a pretty leisurely route - a full seven days on the mountain when some do it in five - and the walking was pretty easy. Only the actual summit day was really strenuous, unless you count the strain of puking up cream of carrot soup and M&M's, which your correspondent did a couple days before summiting.


Not unlike Machu Picchu, while the actual climb was not that grueling, the humbling part is watching the porters zip by you, carrying forty pounds of gear in a canvas bag balanced on their heads. Of course the Peruvians did it while wearing handmade sandals -- at least these guys mostly had shoes or boots that they had inherited from previous climbers, many of whom apparently cast off much of their hiking gear at the end of the trek. (I wouldn't be surprised if these clothing donors were people not unlike the guy I met at the very beginning of the climb, decked out in new North Face gear and fancy gaiters, who struck up a conversation by asking me if I had ever climbed a mountain before - as this was his first.)

In our group, we were joined by five Aussies, some of whom were likewise new to walking up mountains. I'm not sure how one picks Kilimanjaro as their first hill to go up, but they all made it to the top, aided by Red Bull and the premium ("heaps better than Spam") canned ham that they brought along for sustenance on top of what the tour company provided.


The amount of food that the tour company provided was ridiculous, and the very friendly guys who served us each meal were maternal in their efforts to convince us all to have a second (or third) helping of that night's meal. We had an excellent cook, who also cut a striking sartorial image with a plush stuffed snake toy worn as a scarf at all times. He was only the most flashy of a group of at least twenty guides, porters, and other helpers who accompanied the seven paying customers up the mountain. It's not generally the way I would prefer my hiking trips to work, but in our current situation, there was no way we were going to do the legwork to figure out the logistics of doing Kilimanjaro with less assistance. I find it a bit embarrassing to pay some other guy to carry my tent up the mountain for me, but then again talking with the guides, the competition to get those jobs as porters is pretty fierce - so I'm guessing that none of them as worried about the vaguely colonialist optics of hiring porters while on a trek as I was. Or at least they hid it well.

One last picture - Lucas fetching us hot water to wash up after hiking. It was a tough life:

Tomorrow: More from Kilimanjaro!

How I Spent My Fall Vacation, Part 1

We have returned after an extended vacation in darkest Africa. We will now endeavor to tell you all about it in a way that is comprehensive enough for our own purposes without being comprehensive enough to put readers to sleep. But if we err, fret not - we'll be back to the Afghan content soon.

So the above picture is not, in fact, from darkest Africa, but rather glitziest Dubai. Our transit time to Tanzania was significantly longer than expected.

First of all, it should not be a big surprise that Kabul International Airport (KIA) is possibly the worst commercial airport your correspondent has ever been to, beating out no small number of crummy developing-world airports. Perhaps not unreasonably, at KIA, one has to go through security to get into the airport. As in, there is only one door to get into the terminal, and you go through a full metal detector and baggage x-ray within a few feet of entering. This has the predictable effect of creating a line a hundred yards long just to get into the airport building. And then there is an equally long line to go through passport control where a couple immigration officers do a leisurely check that your visa hasn't expired, while another five or six immigration officers sit around and do nothing. Immediately after passport control is another security checkpoint.

We were still in the line for passport control when our flight was supposed to be taking off. (Thanks for the timely drop-off, motor pool!) But I guess Safi Airlines is used to this syndrome, since they held the flight at least an hour for those of us trapped in the passport line - which was great for us; maybe less great for others trying to make a connection in Dubai.

Eventually we made it though all the lines, got to our gate and were allowed onto the beat-to-hell bus that takes you out onto the taxiway to get on the plane. Which bus proceeded along, past all the planes in sight, away from the airport facilities, to the end of the pavement... and then proceeded to off-road along some dirt ruts for a while until we reached the next bit of pavement, where our plane was waiting for us. And the aviation industry is reportedly the second biggest source of revenue for Afghanistan.

In any case, with that ordeal behind us, the next stop would be Dubai, where everything would be modern and efficient and encrusted in diamonds. True enough until we went to check in for our 4:00 PM flight and were informed that it would be delayed until 4:00 AM. Ethiopian Airlines kindly bought us lunch at the food court and got us a hotel in Dubai. So we decided to do what people from all over come to Dubai for... shopping!

Well, sort of. We basically just started walking from the cheap hotel Ethiopian Air put us up in and came across perhaps the wold's tackiest gift emporium, featuring delights for young and old alike. Assuming the youngster in your life wouldn't be freaked out by these creepy dolls (they're probably somewhat less creepy when not presented as a wall of young hanging victims):


Or perhaps your creative youngster needs to be reigned in with these fascist coloring books that have one page that shows you the correct colors to use on the facing page and then a space for "evaluation" of their coloring skills on a scale of one to five stars:


Not that it was just for kids -- who doesn't have a special someone on their Christmas shopping list that might want a rhinestone-studded decorative spider for their home?



We giggled our way through the store (which was department-store huge), and spent another couple hours wandering around what seemed like a pretty ordinary Dubai neighborhood, with shops and restaurants catering mostly to the Filipino "guest workers" who do all the actual labor that the Arab oil barons won't. We then made it back to the airport and on to Addis Ababa and then Arusha, Tanzania without further incident, which is where the vacation was supposed to start in the first place, and where we'll pick up tomorrow.