Finally in Bamyan!

27^th August 2012

Arrived in Bamyan on the 26^th! Went straight to the hotel we were staying at while the house we are now staying in got finished, not that it has even been finished now that we are staying in it. I shared a room with a New Zealander guy called Tem, who joined us at Dubai on the way to Kabul and is a nice guy, knows his stuff in his field and has really got into the work here with enthusiasm.

We went to another hotel for dinner, where they had a buffet style service. I had this rice dish which is very popular here I think. I’ve had it 3 times in two days! The rice is quite different to anything I’ve had before, it must be a sort of rice that we either don’t have in New Zealand, or one my Mum just doesn’t cook with. It was cooked with lemon/orange rind, raisins and goat! The goat was quite tough, but not bad tasting really. The naan bread is amazing too, especially if you get it off a street vendor and it has just been made, which it usually is because they are churning them out all the time.

In the morning Tem and I both woke up at around 5.30 (though the staff did not speak very much English at all), so we went to the restaurant to get something to eat but there was no one there! We had been told they open at 5 so the timing shouldn’t have been an issue. We went back to our room though and I checked again at 6, there were other people having breakfast there so we came back and sat down. Naan bread and some of my favourite ever carrot jam and happy cow cheese were brought out for us. We saw that the other customers had some omelettes though so we tried ordering those, and eventually got our meaning across. It was a really nice omelette! Quite oily though. That cost 50 Afs, which is about US$1, so about NZ$1.25 I guess (not too sure about the exchange rates at the moment), but when you realise that the average wage in Afghanistan is about US$5 per day the locals must really be amazed how much us foreigners spend.

We had a tour around Bamyan at about 10, which was a lot of fun and very interesting. We went up to the top of one of the hills were we could see a panoramic view of the valley that Bamyan is in. The unsealed airport on the far left, through to the poorest part of the town, which is in one of the poorest regions of Afghanistan, which is one of the poorest places on Earth! They still had satellite dishes on their roofs though! Some even had little solar panels! This place used to be on the Silk Road, which was the biggest trade route in the world for quite some time, so it used to be really rich (comparatively). There are these two amazing outlines cut into the cliff faces in the area, called the Buddhas. 

According to legend though, and many, many people believe it is true, there is a third Buddha (named “The Lying Buddha” - not sure if it is meant like lying down or telling untruths) that had been hidden to protect it from plunderers because there was more gold than in Tutankhamen’s tomb hidden in the Buddhas and surrounding area. This is so widely believed to be true because there are many accounts of its existence from lots of places around the world. Many people have tried to find it – you need special permission to do try – but no one has ever found it.

We moved in to our permanent house in the afternoon. We hadn’t done that yesterday because the workers had poured too much concrete into the walls of the septic tank and so it hadn’t set properly when they tried to take the plywood containing walls out, letting the unset concrete spill out over the whole thing. Luckily, today that was fixed and, while the house is habitable, we are probably going to be finding faults with it for a while. For instance, tonight we could hear a tap running – one of the upstairs showers had started going by itself! That wasn’t the biggest problem though, while we didn’t get flooding because we caught it in time, we did find out that some of the drains around the house were clogged. The Afghan workers had let so much glue spill into the pipes that it had hardened and completely blocked them off! Luckily for us we don’t have a house made of mud, because those things start to dissolve very fast in water. You need to make serious repairs on them every 3 years, and completely replace the house in 15. This is a place where it hardly ever rains too! If you get a leak in one of those houses though, you can wake up and just have your wall completely gone!

At the moment we are running a generator for power, and that’s getting shut off very soon so I’ll have to stop writing now, and it’ll be my job to rig up solar to our house!

I’m going to upload all my pictures to Facebook, just a few of them here, because I took a lot! I’m also going to be getting a new camera to use soon, 14 megapixels instead of the 5 megapixel one on my phone, has optical zoom too so should get some much better pictures soon!

The city of screams!