Afghanistan & Egypt in the time of the plague

[netllama]

Very cool stuff. I see in your photos that you got to watch a Buzkashi game. Quite the sport, no?

What's the deal with the "Truckers strike" photo in the sand and haze? I do like those traditionally painted old wooden bed trucks!

The Buzkashi game (in Mazar-i-shariff) was fun for a bit, but got boring after a while. Its rather chaotic, and most of the time, there were 30-50 men on horseback in a tight cluster fighting over the goat carcass for minutes. From a distance, it didn't look like much was happening. We stayed for about 90 minutes, then decided to leave. It was actually far more interesting watching all the food vendors (most of which were children under age 10) wandering about. Women donn't typically particpate or attend, so my wife was quite the attraction. There were kids gawking at the blonde woman in the stands.

The truckers strike was completely insane. We were driving on a road that was about an hour's drive south of the Uzbek border. Lots of trucks import goods overland from Uzbekistan (or vice versa), but they have to pay taxes on whatever they are importing. That's all fine & good, except both the Afghani govt *and* the Taliban setup road checkpoints where they charge the taxes, and the truckers were sick of paying double (or sometimes triple) taxes, so they decided to park and block the road in protest. At first, it was trucks on the shoulder. Then trucks on both shoulders. Then trucks blocking one lane/direction. Then trucks sort of blocking both directions, with a very narrow lane down the center of the road for both directions of traffic. Then they were completely blocking the road. All of this was in an area that was barren desert, with deep sand in all directions. The only way around was to leave the road, and drive through the open desert. Of course, as those of us who have driven through deep sand know, you need to air down and/or maintain enough velocity to avoid getting stuck. But most people had no experience with such driving conditions, so they were blasting through the open desert at high speed, and still getting stuck. The desert was littered with random vehicles stuck up to their axles in the sand, plus the chaos of so many vehicles driving in random routes through the sand. We got stuck for a while, and that drew a crowd, each with their own opinion of what we needed to do to extricate ourselves. It was kinda similar to the Mad Max Fury Road scene with the crazy vehicles racing through the open desert (minus the fire shooting from guitars). At the time, we assumed that was going to be the craziest part of the day, but later, we had to drive back to Kabul (due to a late/cancelled flight) through Taliban controlled territory, which was quite literally an active warzone with fortified army posts every kilometer and cratered roads from mortar fire (plus hoping we weren't stopped at a Taliban checkpoint).