15th September
Sorry for the long wait between blogs! I have had plenty of interesting things happen to fill you all in on though.
On the 7th we went to a place called Band-e Amir and it was absolutely amazing! Band-e Amir is a region inside Bamyan and it has these 6 lakes that are pretty big. Nobody has ever measured how deep they go though because there are trenches that just go down and down, zig-zagging on the way. I guess it is like the terrain on the surface but just transposed underwater. We went to have a picnic there and we found a little outcrop that had a great view of the area.
On the way back we visited the rangers' cabin for the Band-e Amir National park. The only wildlife reserve in Afghanistan. And it isn't even funded by the government - I have no idea who pays the rangers. They have to cover tens of thousands of square metres of hilly terrain with no vehicles whatsoever.
Sorry for the long wait between blogs! I have had plenty of interesting things happen to fill you all in on though.
On the 7th we went to a place called Band-e Amir and it was absolutely amazing! Band-e Amir is a region inside Bamyan and it has these 6 lakes that are pretty big. Nobody has ever measured how deep they go though because there are trenches that just go down and down, zig-zagging on the way. I guess it is like the terrain on the surface but just transposed underwater. We went to have a picnic there and we found a little outcrop that had a great view of the area.
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| The first we saw of the lakes |
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| The whole lake is raised up above the ground by an outcrop of rock, It is about 30 metres tall at the highest point and there are some amazing pictures of it in the winter. |
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| The lake is at the top of that cliff... |
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| Fish! |
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| Lunch time! |
On the way back we visited the rangers' cabin for the Band-e Amir National park. The only wildlife reserve in Afghanistan. And it isn't even funded by the government - I have no idea who pays the rangers. They have to cover tens of thousands of square metres of hilly terrain with no vehicles whatsoever.
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| Ibex on the far left and Marco Polo ram skulls along the bottom in the rangers cabin |
Other than that we have had lots of work to do, I've been doing some 4 wheel drive off-road up and along the ridges that we are putting solar panels up on. It's been great fun doing that. We were going to be going to see the buddhas yesterday, and the City of Screams, but because of that anti-Islamic tape we decided that it was prudent to stay at home, there had been protests in the bazaar earlier that day. So instead I just sat inside the whole day on my computer.
I'm getting pretty close to the end of my time here, in fact, I was supposed to be back in Dubai on Friday! We are having a lot of trouble getting flights out of here because there aren't any commercial airlines. You have to be registered with the UN or another service like USAID if you want to get out. The person who was supposed to register me for flights last Sunday instead decided to resign, so we have been trying to register some other way. As well as that, you have to give at least 48 hours of notice before catching a flight.
We registered on Thursday evening but Friday and Saturday are the weekend in this part of Afghanistan and so the pilot will have had his list of passengers already. We are going to try and catch the flight in the afternoon tomorrow (the 16th) but it is very unlikely that we will get on it. The next one is Tuesday, which is when my flight leaves Dubai to come back to New Zealand...
This means that I'm going to have to reschedule my flight home and I probably won't get back until Friday or Saturday.
It is incredibly frustrating!
Links to places I talk about:
-Band-e Amir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band-e_Amir
-The Buddhas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan
Wikipedia links because school can't tell me what not to do.
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