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A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush:
The Panjshir Valley, the Emerald
Mines and the Blue MountainThe Panjshir has always been most people’s introduction to Afghanistan. When Afghanistan was on the tourist trail, its nearness to Kabul combined with its astonishing natural beauty, made it most people’s first destination in the country. It was equally conveniently accessed from Pakistan by journalists covering the Russian and Taliban wars when its geographical situation, and the brilliance of its mujihadeen commander, the great Ahmed Shah Massoud, made it unconquerable. Massoud defeated the Russians here fifteen times, and so comprehensively that they stopped trying to capture it. Most of the television footage of the war shown in the West was shot here.
The hospitality of Panjshiris is legendary, even by Afghan standards. I first visited it in 2001 when I was entertained for a week at no charge at what was then Afghanistan’s only hotel, the Government Guest House at Astana.
The river has a narrow and extremely fertile flood plain and is famous for its fruit. It is best to visit during the mulberry, grape or apricot harvests when it is impossible to walk down the road without being invited to eat what is being harvested. I thought it was a sponger’s paradise. But the sides are steep mountains, which is why it is so defensible. In the spring, watered by the melting snow these mountainsides are dark green giving an impression of overwhelming fertility.
The characteristic Afghan hills, formed by the fertile alluvial dust
blown in from Central Asia, in the spring look like green sand dunes.
Picture by Luke Powell, www.lukepowell.comTravelling from Faisabad we go to Sar-el-Sang, the lapis mine at the Blue Mountain. This mountain was the only source of lapis lazuli in the ancient world. Lapis beads have been found in Mesopotamian graves that date from 5,000 BC and the mine’s number one shaft shows traces of prehistoric working with fire and bronze axes in caverns up to 150 feet high. The lapis for the Chinese carving celebrated in Yeats’s famous poem and Tutankhamun’s death mask was quarried here. The number one shaft is still being worked, making it the oldest continuously worked mine in the world.
‘Their ancient glittering eyes are gay.’
Yeats’s Chinese carving celebrated
in his poem Lapis Lazuli.From there the expedition will travel over the Anjuman Pass. This is the main pass over the Hindu Kush and marks the watershed between the Indus and the Oxus river systems, between India and Central Asia. Ibn Battutah, the fourteenth century Arabic traveller, gave the meaning of the Hindu Kush as ‘the killer of Indians’ from the Persian kushtan, to kill. The Anjuman provides the best vantage point I have found to see this spectacular mountain range.
From the bottom of the Anjuman, we will travel by horse and foot down the Parian and Panjshir Valleys. One passes Mir Samir on the border of Nuristan, the mountain that Eric Newby tried to climb in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush; the Khawak Pass, where Alexander’s army crossed in 325 BC and the emerald mines at Khenj. One expedition will be led by Gary Bowersox, the world’s leading authority on Afghan gemstones, who has been working with the Khenj miners and buying emeralds from Afghanistan for 33 years and who this year is using satellite data here to identify new emerald deposits.
It is difficult to do justice to the Panjshir without reaching for clichés. Pictures are probably better. The river is aquamarine and each village is surrounded by mulberry and apricot orchards. Everyone will have their own horse and horseman and we will proceed in gentle stages allowing enough time to appreciate the beauty of this astonishing valley. There will be optional day trips to the emerald mines and the Russian command bunkers in the mountains. Camp every night will be set up by the advance party.
