Joe Bob's America - Visit to Kabul

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There's never been a better time to get Super-Saver Getaway Specials, like this week's deal of the century, "Starry Kabul Nights and Steamy Kandahar Days," a seven-day six-night package tour that normally goes for 48 million afghani gougous, now available for only 230,000, or $49.95 all-inclusive, with complimentary sub-continental breakfast.

Your tour will begin with first-class cabin service, including a live goat butchered and charcoaled at your seat, on Ariana Afghan Airlines, departing from Baghdad, Beirut or Samarkand -- you decide! -- and landing just seven hours later at Kabul International.

Remember that when you buy a ticket on Ariana Afghan, all your assets will be automatically frozen back in the states, so you'll have a fun way to teach the kids big new words like "international sanctions" when you get home.

Coming from the east you'll cross the fabled mountains known as the Hindu Kush, or "Killer of Hindus." From the west you'll see the vast Dasht-i-Margo, or "Desert of Death."

The names will linger on your lips and lodge in your mind as you begin your immersion into wondrous Afghani culture. The familiar outline of the country lies before you -- there's the squashed potato pancake, there's the little oozy grease spot connecting it to China, and hey, is that the outline of a Sufi mystic poet spitting fire on the border of Pakistan?

Millions before you have tried to make it out!

The drive in from the airport, in your private Russian-made military troop carrier, is a thrill in itself as your native Afghan driver demonstrates the local art of "boulder-induced wheelies," and before you know it you'll be checking into one of the three best hotels in the country -- Hotel Spinzar, Hotel Kabul or Hotel Yama -- chosen by el-cheapo-travel.com for that most desired amenity: they're open!

(Travel hint: when you check in, ask for a room that still has walls.)

Unfortunately, your room won't have cable TV. In fact, it won't have ANY TV because of a quaint local custom that regards television as "a source of moral corruption." Don't worry, though, because you can pick up two eight-track tapes in the lobby featuring Afghan folk music.

And speaking of the ladies, el-cheapo-travel.com has arranged for all female travellers to be outfitted with a stylish fall-season rayon burqa, complete with eye slits and calf-length ankle protectors, all in basic black. After all, we wouldn't want to lose a foot!

But who wants to stay in the room when this ancient land beckons? Don't miss the Museum of Kabul, where 10 percent of the Central Asian artifacts have NOT been looted. It will whet your appetite for the rest of the collection, which can now be seen in art galleries and private collections from Tokyo to London. Pause for a moment to marvel at the museum's crumbling walls, the result of the famous 1993 "bomb" that is well known to all devotees of Afghan history, then linger in the Garden of Babur, which is almost entirely cleared of land mines.

If you're lucky enough to be in Kabul on a Friday afternoon, you'll want to head over to the sports stadium for the ceremonial hacking off of thieves' hands and stoning of adulterers. You can sample the local snack carts between mutilations, with a dazzling choice of potato turnovers, yoghurt sauce, or the rare tiger kebab. Those sporting Afghanis love their food so much that, when the last two Caspian Tigers in the world were spotted in the eastern mountains in 1997, they shot them!

But there's so much more to learn and see.

Currently the chief export of Afghanistan is rubble. They've cultivated the production of rubble ever since 1220, when Genghis Khan spent four years reducing Balkh, Herat, Ghazni and Bamiyan to rubble. In the 1380s Timur rubbled the place again. At various times in history, everyone from Alexander the Great to Mikhail Gorbachev has shown the locals how to create rubble, but if you want to see the most recent rubble, take a short day trip to Bamiyan, where the two tallest Buddha statues in the world are . . . WHOOPS!

There they go again -- even the current leaders of modern Afghanistan are busily manufacturing rubble.

Many tourists make the mistake of limiting their Afghan adventure to Kabul, but nothing could be more short-sighted. Sure you'll need a land-mine metal detector and a four-man armed death squad to travel there, but no trip to Afghanistan is complete without a spin down the Kandahar Road.

(Be sure to stop at the Office of Ethnic Cleansing on the outskirts of the city to pick up your "infidel" identification patch.)

If you're nostalgic for the days when hippies used Afghanistan as a crossing point for their journeys to India, you'll wanna make the long trip out west to Herat, the third city of Afghanistan, which is known for the 10th-century Friday Mosque, a thousand-year-old monastery, and some of the best goldang hash and opium in the world.

The population has seemed a little nervous here lately, so you might want to scope the weed and then hurry on to one of the festive local Grab-the-Cow-Carcass horseback riding competitions.

Circle through North Afghanistan on your way back to the hotel, though, and don't miss Mazar-i-Sharif, where that Zoroaster was born.

Hikers will want to stop off in Jalalabad on the way to the Khyber Pass where the most modern city of them all was built in 1570 by Akbar, grandson of Babur, founder of the Mughal empire of India. Today the place is a veritable cornucopia of rubble. Then make one more stop, at the famous bazaar in Ghazni, where you can pick up some souvenirs (we would recommend the hand-carved Stinger Missile miniatures), and before you know it you'll be collapsing onto the charming exposed wire springs of your hotel "bed."

As you doze off to sleep, your Afghan Adventure all too brief, you may be lucky enough to hear the familiar midnight serenade of the random Kalashnikov rifle, and if you do, then go ahead and turn off that alarm clock. You won't be returning to the airport after all!

(Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his website at joebob-briggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.)