Mazar-i-Sharif and surrounds

There was one city in the country where I haven't been and could still go, Mazar-i-Sharif, home of a famous Shi'a mosque and near to Bactria of old. When the opportunity came to travel there for 48 hours with my colleagues' fun guest instead of by myself in October, I took it.

We made one small miscalculation - Mazar is the hottest place in the country. And we went in July. It was too hot to live without the fan. You wet your sheets IN THE SINK before going to bed and they'd evaporated in two hours. Why people have thought it a good idea to settle in the region for the past 10-15,000 years is a mystery.

It was not Herat (the city Abby, Ben, and I visited in May) for modern amenities, but everyone was so nice. I kept waiting for some young firebrand to come up and send us out of the province, but everyone who came up to us was friendly and welcoming. It was a lovely surprise.

The shrine of Khwaja Parsa, Balkh town, built by a lady some 500 years ago
Tiling detail
The ancient city of Balkh ("A town of prodigious antiquity where Zoroaster preached sometime between 1000 and 600 B.C. ....Alexander the Great chose it for his base from 329-237 B.C. ....For several hundreds of years scores of Buddhist pilgrims flocked to worship at the feet of 'a figure of Buddha, lustrous with noted gems'....Rumi was born in Balkh in 1207....Balkh's glorious history closed in 1220 when 10,000 mounted men fllowing Ghengis Khan rode through and left it utterly devastated" -Nancy Hatch Dupree, An Historical Guide to Afghanistan), now a dustbowl with gorgeous shards of pottery
Human bones sticking out of a wall of bodies that Ghengis Khan buried alive
Carving on a column at the mosque of Haji Piyada
A nest of fresh figs, the way they're packed
25 x 90 ft Buddhist stupa carved into a mountain in Samangan
Doric columns (Greek) in Buddhist cave from 300-400 A.D.
Recent Tashkurghan grave with forgotten fortress Bala Hissar in the background
Mazar Shrine, wherein lie the remains of Ali, cousin of the prophet
Of course I couldn't leave Mazar without a carpet
Back in Kabul, an embassy party we didn't exactly gate crash since I met the ambassador of the small country the week before, but we weren't exactly invited, either