Our two days in Kabul had been some of the most memorable so far. Leaving Kabul, the road climbed gradually to 8000 feet, before beginning the descent through Ghazni and on to Kandahar at about 3500 feet. The road, which had been built as an aid project by the Americans, was superb. Unfortunately the Afghans seemed to think that it was so good that a charge should be levied for using it. We had been paying toll fees periodically since we entered the country and this would continue all the way to Iran. The roads, however, were almost deserted.
The road followed the valleys of the Ghazni and Tarnak rivers for most of the distance, with bare, rocky ridges lining the entire route. The snow-capped peaks of the Kabul area were left behind soon after Ghazni. Nomadic herdsmen were very common along the way, with their rough, patchy tents and motley collections of sheep, goats, donkeys and camels.
The Afghan petrol was very cheap and seemed no worse than the Indian equivalent, but it had a peculiar, aromatic odour and was of Russian origin. An issue was that refuelling opportunities were widely spaced and we were carrying reserve supplies, which on one occasion we sold to another driver who had run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. The run from Kabul to Kandahar was 335 miles, our greatest distance in one day so far. From Kandahar to Herat would be even further, 395 miles.
Leaving Kandahar next morning, we were almost immediately into desert, undulating rocky country with virtually no vegetation. The road surface was now concrete and was the work of the Russians. By midday we had entered hilly country with steep, rocky ridges rising abruptly from the plain. Geologically, the country was very interesting. The mountains were formed of ancient sediment folded into an infinite variety of complex structures. In the hills nearing Herat, vegetation once more appeared and along with it the nomadic herdsmen. Large herds of camels were common in this area, but about the only other wildlife seen was the occasional dung beetle scurrying across the road with its little ball.
Throughout Afghanistan we were repeatedly offered hashish. When I had said ‘no thanks’ in Kandahar the previous day, I was offered morphine instead. Stuart was also approached by an Afghan offering to repair our car (although we had no need of it) in exchange for smuggling hashish into the United Kingdom. In Herat we stayed at the quite elegant old Park Hotel. We had covered 6000 miles since Colombo (not counting the side trip to Kathmandu), nominally half way to London, after almost two months on the road.
Herat has some interesting old mosques and tall minarets, but the morning was cold and bleak and we decided to press on heading, we thought, for the Iranian border. We continued to follow the concrete Russian highway, but I was concerned that the small compass we had fitted to the car indicated that we were headed more north than west. We soon came to a boom gate across the road which we initially assumed was another toll booth. Here we were informed in a mixture of Farsi and sign language that the road led to Moscow and was closed. It seems that the Russians, under their aid programme, had built this fine highway to the border of the USSR, and so, a decade later, its troops would have easy access to Afghanistan when they invaded. We returned almost to Herat before finding the American-built bitumen road west to the Iranian border. At the border were several other overlanding vehicles, one of which had crashed into the checkpoint gate in the dark the previous night.