18/10/2019 0 Comments AfghanistanWe followed the Afghan border for more than 500km, from Kalaikum to the end of the Wakhan Valley. It was surreal to be just across the river from a country where both of our countries have gone to war.
A few times we saw something that confirmed our stereotypes of Afghanistan, a view that is largely formed by the news. We saw one woman in a niqab, on the road parallel to ours we saw a pickup truck with a machine gun on the back, and our first night camping on the riverbank we were woken up early in the morning by Tajik soldiers pointing to the other side saying "Taliban" and holding up their weapons as if to shoot. Needless to say, we got going pretty quickly. Locals assured us later that there was no Taliban in the region and that there never had been. The soldiers were actually being very friendly and were just asking us to camp on the other side of the road and not next to the river. Later on we did camp next to the river again, but much better hidden. We got to know Afghanistan just a little bit, because - and we have tested this - it was just a stones throw away. To us it's a country with very charming villages full of friendly people and kids playing on the beach. One man even tried to throw us some nuts, but Tajikistan for him was clearly more than a nuts throw away.
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