The Bamiyan Valley is a calm retreat for Afghans and foreigners who can make the mountain ascent.
The Bamiyan Valley is a calm retreat for Afghans and foreigners who can make the mountain ascent.
Mark Sappenfield
up
  • The Bamiyan Valley is a calm retreat for Afghans and foreigners who can make the mountain ascent.
  • Young children like these Hazara youngsters playing on a soccer goal converted to a swing have known little of the tension that grips the rest of Afghanistan.
  • Afghanistan: A potato field is on the slope heading downward into the Bamiyan Valley.
  • Afghanistan: Afghan workers wait for tourists to rent small boats in Band-i-Mir lake, a tourist attraction in the Bamiyan Valley.
down

In Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, peace and a woman rule

Genghis Khan and the Taliban notwithstanding, serenity survives where peacekeepers haven't had to fire a shot since 2003.

Page 1 of 3

There is a check post at the entrance to the Bamiyan Valley – one of the scores of shacks set along the earthen roads of Afghanistan designed to provide some appearance of security or, at least, a quiet place for policemen to sip their green tea.

But this one is different. It's not merely that the building marks the blessed end to an eight-hour ride over unpaved roads that shake the body like a box of matchsticks. It is that this shack seems to mark the entrance into an Afghanistan of which the world has never dreamed.

Beyond it, flowering fields stretch between stark gray mountainsides like a green carpet interspersed with the gold of wheat ready for harvest.

In an unpretentious governor's residence sits the only female governor in Afghanistan's history – appointed to rule over a province where 52 percent of the registered voters are women, 10 percent higher than the national average.

And on a rocky plateau, behind knots of barbed wire, stand international soldiers who say they've drawn the long straw in the Afghan war. The area is so safe, they haven't needed to fire a shot since they arrived in 2003.

All Afghanistan reveals surprises upon closer inspection, but no place more than Bamiyan, where history and geology conspire to produce a people and place of incomparable beauty.

To drive to Bamiyan is to earn it. Granted, it is no wagon train across the Continental Divide, beset by snow, starvation, and wild beasts. But by the measure of 21st-century convenience, it's not too far removed. It is to rattle along roads unfit for goats, skipping though pockets of questionable security, until at last you arrive in the cool vales of Bamiyan, coated in dust. Upon arrival, my hair had the properties of a light-brown helmet.

Yet there is something almost spiritual in the drive. Nearly 1,400 years ago, a Chinese pilgrim named Huien-Tsaing made a similar journey, cresting what he called the "Snowy Mountains," that he might come to this valley where two towering Buddha statues had been carved into sandstone cliffs and dozens of cave-monasteries honeycombed the ruddy rock beside them.

Today, those Buddhas are gone, destroyed by the Taliban in an act that, ironically, brought Bamiyan more global attention than it had ever enjoyed. But the echoes of those pilgrimages remain. I've never been to Lhasa, the former home of the Dalai Lama, but this is how I imagine one would approach it: a slow and winding climb through flat-roofed villages, clinging to bare mountainsides that scratch the watercolor sky.

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | Next Page

Get Monitor stories by e-mail:
(Your e-mail address will be protected by csmonitor.com's tough privacy policy.)

In Pictures
Fireworks: A party in the sky

ELECTION '08 Patchwork Nation
The American voter beyond red and blue

FISHERIES Empty Oceans Series
The sea is no longer so vast.


Daily podcast

Monitor Reports

Discussions with Monitor reporters from around the world


Today

Peter Grier

Honduras has two presidents, but no solution to the country's political crisis.




Making a difference
Making a Difference

What happens when ordinary people decide to pay it forward? Extraordinary change. See how individuals are making a difference, finding solutions, overcoming adversity, and giving back globally.

Jeremy Gilley, founder of the nonprofit Peace One Day, talks with students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School in Cambridge, Mass.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

People making a difference: Jeremy Gilley

This actor and filmmaker envisions that world peace begins with just one day of peace.