pul-i-khumri

This morning I woke up at 1:30 and again and 3:30, called home and talked with M, D and Linc, and talked briefly with Claire but she was doing something so had to ring off. I packed and ate breakfast and the Land Cruiser came at 6:40 to start the journey to Pul-i-Khumri. The journey is supposed to take 5 hours or so. We took 9. This was thanks to a four-hour wait beneath the Salang Pass, underneath which a tunnel connects Kabul with northern Afghanistan.

Apparently, some VIPs (the story was that they included Karzai but I kind of doubt it) were going to visit the construction that's been going on around the tunnel. Fuck if I could tell why, there wasn't much to see once we got up there. But there definitely were some VIPs: a convoy of military, police and black Land Cruisers with blacked-out windows blew past the assembled trucks (lined up neatly on the side of the road in the hundreds) and cars (arranged in a giant clusterfuck of slow motion cutting each other off) at one point. We waited at a random checkpoint for a while, then moved forward to another one about a kilometer down the road. The latter was a real checkpoint, with concertine wire and two big armored trucks with machine gun turrets blocking the road and US and Afghan troops walking around and trying to keep the road clear.

Eventually the VIPs came back down and we could climb the mountain. The tunnel itself was very dark and very dusty, with all the same typical Afghan driver behavior present, but magnified because we were IN A FUCKING TUNNEL. I've never seen headlights look creepier or stranger.

This seems like a good time to mention that the quality of the road between Kabul and Pul-i-Khumri is shockingly good. As Kelly the consultant put it, "Your tax dollars at work." Get some of those dollars up to Badakhshan! Makes a huge difference to have a real paved highway that you can do 65 mph on.

Eventually, we made it through and descended into the valley where Pul-i-Khumri is located. The drive was another 2.5 or 3 hours but didn't seem bad after the interminable wait earlier. Went straight to the Focus office once we got here so that we could all get connected to the internet and check email and such. Iqbal, my Badakhshan guide from last year and the CBDRR program manager for that province, was there. Nice to see him. Getting online took forever; the AKF IT guy was useless and Tameeza was the one who finally figured out how to make it work. Here at the guest house the connection is fine and it was much easier to connect! But my room is in a different building so I'm writing from the TV room right now.

I'm tempted to rant for a minute about Indian TV, but it would be boring and I'm too tired.

Dinner's soon and then I'll go right to bed. Insh'allah, tonight I'll be on schedule sleep-wise. Really full day of work tomorrow. Would help to be rested. But I fear the heat.