| Afghanistan wishes more of you were here The Chicago Tribune
08/31/2008
By Kim Barker
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KABUL - Sabrina Lou knew all the dangers. Insurgents in the south. Land mines in the mountains. Roads where even the potholes have potholes. She read the U.S. State Department warning, which strongly discourages anyone from traveling to Afghanistan and contains a litany of potential threats, from banditry to Al Qaeda. But Lou, a 5th-grade teacher from Oakland, saw something besides potential violence in this war-torn country--a summer vacation. She stayed in Kabul for 13 days, visiting the bird market, TV mountain, Chicken Street, Butcher Street and Money Street. She watched boys fly kites, wrote a blog about her trip, got sick for three days and even adopted a dog on her way to the airport. "I didn't tell my family until I got here," said Lou, 29, sitting at a restaurant in Kabul. "I mentioned it to some friends. Everyone freaked out." For the first time since the fighting started here in 1979, tourists are returning to Afghanistan, once famous as a hippie hangout between Iran and India. There are not many tourists, but enough have arrived to prompt the government and the country's fledgling travel business to come up with a plan. The government held its first tourism workshop Aug. 16. Last week, tourism consultants from New Zealand came for a conference at the Serena Hotel in Kabul, the only five-star hotel in the country. A writer from the Lonely Planet guidebooks is researching Afghanistan, once seen as a no-go by even the most rugged travel guides. Two private travel agencies--Afghan Logistics & Tours and Great Game Travel Co.--now cater to foreign tourists. "People are still nervous about coming to Afghanistan," said Andre Mann, an American who helped set up Great Game Travel, which has booked trips for about 40 tourists since opening in Kabul in April. "We have to reassure them that we're not going to take them to any place that isn't safe." The country's peak tourist season was in 1977, when 120,000 tourists searched for adventure, sometimes tracing the Silk Road trade route, sometimes looking for cheap drugs. But the war changed everything. First the Soviets invaded. After they were pushed out, the civil war exploded, settled only when the harsh Taliban arrived. Through it all, the doors of the Afghan Tourist Organization, the government-run tourist agency, stayed open, but aside from the occasional journalist, no one walked in. Once a boring job "It was a really boring job under the Taliban," said Abdulkhalil Oryakhail, the agency's deputy president. "We wore our turbans and sat in the office until 1 p.m. Then we put our turbans in our desks and went home." After the Taliban was toppled in late 2001, tourists occasionally showed up, often war junkies who traveled alone and seemed slightly off-kilter. But more arrived. Some had visited in the 1970s; others wanted to experience remote Afghanistan before it forever changed. In the Afghan year that ended in March 2004, only 165 tourists registered, Oryakhail said. About 4,000 tourists visited Afghanistan in the past Afghan year. "We're thinking for the future," said Nasrullah Stanekzai, the deputy minister for tourism. "We haven't got good services for tourists. We need to review laws for tourists. We don't have insurance for tourists. It's a real problem." The problems in Afghanistan are not difficult to find. In the volatile south, Taliban-led insurgents are fighting international troops and the U.S.-backed government, but violence, such as the deadly anti-foreigner riots in Kabul on May 29, can happen anywhere, any time. Old land mines, leftovers from the country's decades of war, still kill and maim Afghans and foreigners. The country is largely in ruins, and the landscape mostly beige. There is little infrastructure, whether sewers, power or, perhaps most importantly, roads. In Afghanistan, getting there is never half the fun. Instead it is often painful, a bone-jarring ride over rutted roads at a speed of maybe 20 m.p.h. Describing the hotels outside Kabul as "Spartan" is a compliment. Most feature cold showers, squat toilets, intermittent electricity and a steady diet of rice and kebabs. Traveling also is expensive for backpacker tourists--about $200 a day outside Kabul with one of the agencies. But Afghanistan has its charms. The mountains are stunning. Visitors can hike or ride yaks through the Wakhan valley and look for Marco Polo sheep. They can swim in the deep blue lakes at Band-I-Amir. The can climb the Minaret of Jam, the second-tallest brick minaret in the world. Historical monuments, forts and palaces are everywhere, although most are pocked with bullet holes or marred by war, requiring imagination, such as the coffinlike holes that once housed the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, which were blown up by the Taliban. Afghans are noted for their hospitality, sometimes carried to extremes. Here, feeding and housing strangers is normal. Guests must be careful not to compliment a piece of clothing or jewelry, or risk walking away with a new gift. "The people are incredibly friendly," said Andrea Baravalle, 41, a lawyer and one of three Italians visiting Bamiyan last week. "Everyone loves to have their picture taken. Some Afghans are like models. They stand, they want pictures and then they want to see them." Combining terror, tourism The challenge to rebuild tourism is huge. Some Afghan officials are planning for future tourist packages, perhaps combining the war on terror and tourism. For instance, tourists could see where Osama bin Laden or his family once lived or they could tour the caves of Tora Bora, where major battles have been fought. "It was a center for terrorism," Stanekzai said. "It could be very interesting for people." Although three tourists have been killed in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, they all traveled on their own, through the dangerous south. No tourist has been injured with either private travel agency in Kabul. Both agencies have complex security plans. Neither will take tourists to the south, although Americans in particular have asked Afghan Logistics to book terror tours. But peace is essential for any tourism here to succeed. Muqim Jamshady, who runs Afghan Logistics, said he was refused a visa for Germany after he said he wanted to go to a tourism convention there and spread the word about Afghanistan. "They [German officials] said Afghanistan was too dangerous to market," he said. "I know if Afghanistan is peaceful, lots of tourists will come. I just don't know when that will happen."
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