Places in Between

This is the true story of an extraordinary adventure. Rory Stewart walked from Herat to Kabul, four weeks after the Taliban had supposedly been ousted from Afghanistan - in January!

Now I must declare an interest here. I walked some of these mountains in the spring of 1975 and know a part of the area covered by Stewart well. I too met unthinking kindness and extraordinary hospitality - but always tinged with a potentially lethal undercurrent.

To do this at the outset of winter is truly stupendous. Stewart discovers the true location of the old Ghorid Dynasty capital, the Turquoise Mountain, he sees the great tower of Jam, he picks up a wonderful canine walking companion, he lives on nan bread and not much more, he gets sick, he meets warlords, he is threatened by former Taliban soldiers, he sinks in snowdrifts and falls in rivers and he comes out alive at the other end.

He is so unpretentious about all of this - making light of his achievement and dismissing the very real dangers - that it is almost possible to take him at this word. Don't! These hills and mountains claim the lives of many of the local people and for someone with no proper map it's incredible that he did it.

But this is much more than a tale of one man's survival against the odds. It tells of the effects of 25 years of war, of the tenacity of the Afghan people and of the desperation of the present situation. I discovered that many of the people I met are almost certainly dead - killed in their droves by the Russians and then the Taliban. The Hazara were wonderful to me and I mourn them.

If you really want to know what life is like today in this god-forsaken land then read this book. It's one of the best travel stories I have ever read.