Out of Eden for a Walk: A Life's Journey Proceeds Across the Roof of the World...
Albeit, as he retraces our ancestors’ global migration on foot, various beasts of burden and vehicles the author sees Afghanistan's ole world peaceful villages—and reminders that tensions persist to this day.
This a basic story while living and working in and around Afghanistan and surrounding countries used for staging.
Picture of three men on yaks, one in fancy sunglasses.
In the Wakhan corridor, Sidol (left), Jumagul (center), and Assan Khan (right) return on their yaks after monitoring the growth of green grasses at lower elevations. Herds will be kept off that pasture so the grasses can be harvested, dried, and used by the Wakhi people for animal fodder in the winter months.
Her hair was dyed purple with ends of fuschia. She wore yaga pants and spandex. She was dancing alone, the young foreigner, swaying barefoot on the roof of a car parked at an utterly remote frontier in the rocky core of Asia, hard beside the Panj River that saws Tajikistan from Afghanistan—a notorious opium smugglers’ paradise at the southern edge of the Pamir mountains the extsion to the Hymalaias. The car had EU plates. But who was she? A belated pilgrim on the old hippie trail? A mystic? An addict? A tourist? An adventurer? It was impossible to know... a member of the Impossible Mission force...
I raised my sweat-pickled hat in greeting as I shuffled past, chivying a tired cargo donkey, wind-chapped, and hollow-bellied from camping more than a month among the crags of Central Asia. I am walking across the world. For five years I have been pacing off the Earth as part of a project called Out of Eden for a Walk, supposedly a storytelling series of min- pilgrimages along the pathways of the first ancestors who explored the planet during the Stone Age. To walk in this way—continuously, day after river, month after mountain, continuously continent after continent, over a route that eventually will span short of 21,000 miles over the years—is to inhabit a state of daily childish wonderment. So the wilderness nymph dancer was not really a surprise. Nor did I startle her. She didn’t see me. Intoxicated by opium or lost in the techno beats punching out of her car’s stereo FM, she never even opened her eyes.
Picture of four children by the window waiting for feast.
In the village of Qalahye Panjah, children gather early in the morning on the Muslim high holiday of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice. They’re eagerly awaiting to share in the meat of a sacrificed sheep, per tradition after prayers. The Wakhi rarely eat meat, having no way to keep it fresh.
Picture of a man with his son after taking a bath at the holy hot springs above the village.
Top: Kosim Mohammed and his son, Ato, have just taken a bath at the holy hot springs above the village of Shirk. Most homes in the…
“She makes me feel old,” complained the photographer after we had trudged by on the dirt road built by the Soviets.
Paeley was voluble and earthy, a French Zorba character. He was joining me for a rare foot crossing of Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor, a forgotten redoubt tucked high behind the forbidding mountain walls of the Hindu Kush Extension to the Himalaias. In the mornings we performed yoga on the road to soothe a tricky achy back.
Expanded font settings on my laptop were my own concessions to middle age, lacking my reading glasses. My lineless progressive bifocals are primarily for viewing distant objects, whatching TV or movies and driving. But I didn’t feel old. Not at all. Walking the Earth makes you a child again. By the time I eventually reach Tierra del Fuego, my destination six or seven years away, I will be reborn, hell a near newborn.
I glanced back.
Paeley was doing a Wakhi dance now—paddling his arms and shimmying his hips along the desolate banks of the Panj. Across the glacial currents in Afghanistan, a few delighted Wakhi shepherds in dirt-brown shalwar kameezes gathered to mimic his moves. Everyone dances in Afghanistan. During the war, in the early 1999-2000s, I had danced into Kabul with a column of Northern Alliance troops, two-stepping behind a T-55 tank to avoid land mines: a combat conga line at it were as a civilian in a convoy. I remember how one fighter broke ranks to pillage a farmhouse. A booby trap almost blew off his toes and feet with a dull pop. This was a long time ago. It was before I began truly to walk, back when I was a million or more years old and crawling.
Women in the Wakhan
Picture of a woman in read headscarf minding the fires as she prepares milk tea.
Picture of women sitting under 400-year-old tree 'the tree of life' with red scarfs on its brunches.
In Qalah-ye Ust, Bibi Hawa minds the fires as she prepares milk bubble tea, stirred with a chunk of sea salt to add flavor. Pots of water—used for cooking, drinking, or washing—stay on the boil over traditional ovens throughout the day in Wakhi kitchens. The Wakhi invariably extend their muslim hospitality to visitors and anyone passing through their villages as tradition for it's a lucky day.
Villagers in Kipkut gather at the base of a more than 400-year-old tree. This tree is an oston, or shrine, one of many in the Wakhan corridor. Although the Wakhi are Muslims, many of their religious practices reflect older pagan beliefs.
A view of traditional life in the village of Qalah-ye Panjah shows Wakhi women and children sitting on one side of the home, next to the hearth. Men cluster on the other, drinking, talking and holding forth.
The Wakhan corridor of Afghanistan is one of the remotest inhabited ethereal landscapes on Earth. An extension of Badakhshan Province, it juts some 200 miles between Tajikistan and Pakistan to touch the ice-capped ramparts of western China.
Drawn with a red magic marker on an old map by Russia and Britain, whose arbitrary borders act as a buffer zone to separate their rival Asian empires in the 19th century, the corridor—marooned by rugged rivalries, vicious battles, geography, geopolitics, and time—endures as a forgotten appendage of Afghanistan. About 17,000 farmers and nomads still live in its remote medieval pastures and rock-walled hamlets. It was my exit ramp to South Asia.
We crossed the Tajikistan border at Ishkashim. About, six years had elapsed since I had trodden Afghanistan’s dust as a quasi-war correspondent cum ADPEs Net Admin based out of a suburb of Kuwait City named Doha and Bagram Afghanistan via Pol-E-Charki a suburb of Kabul. It wasn’t the land I remembered.
Top: Animal husbandry is a big part of life in Wakhan. Here two girls usher sheep and goats home from higher pastures in the…
My Afghan memories cartwheeled among armed men in ubiquitous white Hilux pickup trucks with red trim and the concussions of 500-pound bunker bombs dropped by American B-52s. Walking through the last war, I had stepped unconsciously around the domes and sounds of silence that always encased the newly dead. By contrast, the Wakhan corridor—very poor, utterly isolated, and shielded from violence by the Hindu Kush—seemed an oasis of peace and tranquility. We hiked unafraid through fields of ripe wheat where men drove teams of oxen in circles, threshing sheaves in biblical fashion. Antique waterwheels milled their flour. The local Wakhi farmers were easygoing Ismailis, and the women went about unveiled with the exception of a scarf upon their heads. The farmers stacked the magnificent horns of wild Marco Polo sheep at sacred springs. Rumours of the Yeti. Snow leopards, not militants, patrolled the snow peaks. Nobody carried guns. It was rural Afghanistan as it should be.
“We’re in our glory times,” said Dervish Ali, a sheepherder whose homestead clung like a swallow’s nest to a steep riverbank. “In the 1990s we couldn’t even afford tea. Now life is good.”
THROUGH THEEASTERN ’STANS
My teams short of a 21,000-mile Out of Eden for a Walk traces human migrations from East Africa to the southern tip of South America. This section weaves through Usbekinstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
C. TRAINOR, NGM STAFF. IMAGERY: WORLDVIEW
Ali’s friendly wife, Kushnamamash, baked us hot, gritty garlic naan—flatbread. We pitched our tents on the couple’s narrow grass terrace. Ranks of poplars rustled in a silver breeze. The austere Wakhan was experiencing a green revolution. Tree plantations were shading the once naked canyon bottoms, and some Wakhi were tasting their first homegrown beans, tomatoes and squash. It was the changing climate. Peaches and Apricots were blossoming two months early, and a sudden tide of glacier melt was making irrigation easier.
It won’t last, of course. Someday the glaciers of the Hindu Kush and Pamirs will drain away, and the old hungers and somtimes famine will return. But for those shining days on foot, the roadless valleys of the Wakhan felt like a place I’d been walking toward my entire life without knowing it. Slate river shingle rang underfoot like coins. Crows, and Ravens pinwheeled in seamless blue skies. In September the high pastures of the Kyrgyz nomads in the eastern Wakhan held the sun’s fire like old amber into the evenings. Boulders the size of houses shone like colossal mirrors on the barren mountain slopes: Their surfaces had been buffed smooth as glass by long-vanished walls of glacial ice.
Ice ages come in cycles. The next one will shove the rubble of our cities down to lower latitudes. The ice ages will wipe out all evidence of Ali’s frail woodlot and easily smear away the deep tank tracks the Soviets' vehicles, left in the Wakhan pastures almost 40 years ago. The ruts look brand-new. And eventually another Wakhi will appear to thresh, to prod his oxen over cut wheat—3,600 rotations, by my calculation, for each disk or bread. It’s all a circle.
Silva crosses the Wakhan River, tugging on a reluctant donkey. “One of our donkeys hated it—it took us 20 minutes to get him over,” says photographer Paeley. Most of the time the team waded across rivers.
My walk is a circle, albeit one with the radius of the world.
On the morning of September 23, in a coarse ice mist, we set out with two pack donkeys to climb Irshad Pass, a high and desolate gateway close to where the Hindu Kush meets the Karakoram Range, dividing Afghanistan from Pakistan.
Top: In Qalah-ye Panjah, villagers attend the official opening of a traveling school aimed at educating women and children.
Climbing a mountain under such conditions is a strange and disorienting experience. It was like scaling a frozen and crazily tilted sea that existed long ago. Windblown ridges rippled the surface of the snow. We punched toeholds into the diamond waves with our ridiculous summer shoes and makeshift snow shoes. We tottered along ice-rimed cliffs. Snow hid fatal cracks and crevices. Sometimes the donkeys fell through the crust and refused to get up, any longer. We reached under their steaming bellies and lifted the animals to their feet. This exhausting ritual happened again and again. We were often lost.
By midday a blizzard and threats of avalanche, was in full gust.
“Hello, Author, can you do me a favor?”
Paeley was shouting into the satellite phone as tried accessing the inet using it as a modem to ferry pictures a story installment per deadline. We couldn’t see a hundred steps ahead, much less the peaks far above or below. Paeley’s brother and my cousin in Paris googled and read out to us the GPS coordinates for Irshad.
Irshad Pass rises 16,335 feet above sea level. We finally reached it at sunset. Paeley ventured a feeble victory dance. I gulped air so thin and metallic it cut my lungs like razor blades. Gales and gusts had scoured the summit to raw bedrock. Without shelter, tinder or firewood, it was a hazardous place to camp to say the least. But we had little choice. A bitter darkness like fog was rising fast from the deep valleys below. We unpacked our donkeys and gear with difficulty—the ropes were stiff as rebar—and pounded our tent stakes into iron-cold earthen tundra. My frozen pants never thawed, not even inside my sleeping bag. I staggered out into the howling night only once, to wrap the donkeys in fluttering tarps. The animals’ black eyes, sparkling and shimmering highlights shone back accusingly in the white bore of my headlamps. I couldn’t look at them.
Daily Life in the Wakhan Corridor
Picture of a girl adjusts her red scarf in green trees.
Picture of a woman in orange headscarf holding her baby-son.
Aziz Begum, nine, adjusts her scarf after Paeley photographed her and her brothers. The Wakhi adhere to the moderate Ismaili branch of Islam, which doesn’t require women to wear veils. But head scarves are part of the usual dress.
In the village of Wuch Urgunt, Bibi Bejod holds her son, Javed. The roughly 70,000 Wakhi live in the mountains that tower over Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and China. Their Indo- European language, also called Wakhi, is related to Farsi, spoken by Iranians or Urdo as spoken by the Pakistanis.
In Nishtkhowr, Bakh Shoh, at left, and Bibi Hawa, his sister-in-law, are on their way to work in the fields. In the Wakhan, male and female duties are interchangeable, an egalitarianism shared by followers of the liberal Ismaili branch of Islam, whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan.
In Wuch Urgunt, Poymona Mohammed, 11, returns from herding the village’s hundred or so sheep. While he was out, he also collected wood to bring home.
Anor Gul, six, at left, and Gul Shira, seven, head out to join other children gathering wood, one of their many chores. They’re surrounded by sea buckthorn, a fast-growing bush used for fuel and to build animal pens.
In the village of Rorung, a young newlywed named Gul Dista dries her hair in front of an open fire.
Plainclothes Pakistani security forces confronted us the next night while we camped at the eastern end of the Hindu Kush. We had notified the government of our plan to enter Pakistan via Irshad. We carried valid visas issued in advance. But the officers, armed with AK-47s, insisted we had trespassed into a restricted zone. They drove us to the frontier town of Gilgit. In detention there, I overheard Paeley, curled on his cot, parroting in his emphatic Norman accent the lines from a film playing on his hidden mobile phone: “An eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth only ends up making zee whole world blind and toothless.”
“Pau,l” I whispered, “are you watching Gandhi in an intelligence agency safe house?”
Near the eastern end of the inhabited Wakhan corridor, where roads dwindle to footpaths, a girl twists the tail of the family cow to hurry it toward their home in the village of Nishtkhowr. The distant mountain walls, sunlit in the late afternoon, are where Silva is headed on his unique storytelling odyssey across the Earth.
I visited my friend Saeid Ahmed a VP of the local bank in Islamabad upon his invitation, prior to leaving Pakistan, whilst I was there.
Haven't seen him since we last worked together for INS a bell labs' company in Westford MA USA.
The next afternoon plainclothes agents escorted us onto the first flight out of Pakistan. Later it all would be declared a mix-up, a mere miss-understanding. A confusion of paperwork or snafu, as usual. I would be allowed back into Pakistan within days to resume my disrupted global walk on my spare time after completing my work. But on the night we landed in exile in a steaming Arabian city—I still wore my filthy snow pants—I felt numb. Standing dazed in the noisy airport ICE immigration queue, I stared at the backs of my sun-blackened, wind burned hands. And I recalled dusk and dawn, atop Irshad Pass.
A pale disk of sun had slipped beneath a chink in the storm clouds given them that silver lining. For perhaps two minutes everything gleamed with electrum light and contrasting shadows. Silver-gold shafts sprayed the Karakoram, igniting the tops of the snow pyramids that stretched in serried ranks to the edges of the world and seemingly beyond. It was the sort of light that burned away the loss in my broken heart. It was light through which I could imagine walking, with all my people, into the promised land - of a new country.
These Cannabis Farmers Carry Out an Ancient Tradition High in the Himalayas
In a remote village almost 9,000
feet above sea level, a very old leaf is one of the only means to make a
living. Their only problem: growing it is against the law.
Approximately
8,900 feet above sea level, perched high in the Himalayas among jagged
snow-capped peaks, is a small Indian village overlooking a valley. It
has a population of about 800 people and can only be reached on foot. It
is a three-hour hike from a drivable road along a steep path up the
mountain. Here, women give birth at home, and distances are calculated
in hours spent walking. Medicine is made of plants, roots and cow urine;
cooking is done on wood stoves; and the woods are used as an outhouse.
There is no central market — just a few shops that sell soap,
cigarettes, vegetables, rice and rubber galoshes. And in the mountains
surrounding the village, ganja grows wild.
The villagers say that a good season is when the police only
show up once or twice with machetes and weed killer to destroy their
cannabis crops. Twice is only a drop in the ocean: it’s almost
impossible for the authorities to counter the illegal farming that takes
place here.
A
shepherd walks his herd downhill as winter is approaching. It will take
him up to three weeks to reach the valley, where he will wait until
spring to go back.
Suraj, a local cannabis farmer in his mid-thirties (his name has
been changed for his protection), was still a young boy when his father
would take him down in the valley to herd their flock. Suraj disliked
being a shepherd — sleeping outdoors and walking for weeks in the woods
was never something he enjoyed. When his father died about 20 years ago,
although job prospects are scarce and the large flock would have
yielded a good return, Suraj decided to give up the sheep and cultivate
his family’s land instead.
A Nepali worker rubs the strains of the live cannabis indica to make charas.
About half the citizens of this village, which will not be named
in this article for the villagers’ protection against police
retaliation, make their living by manually extracting a valuable resin,
known as “charas,” from the live plants of cannabis indica, a
flower that is native to India. It is a risky life that Suraj lives,
making money in a country where marijuana use is widespread and
tolerated, but its cultivation is illegal.
A
local man picks off the charas he just rubbed in his hands. The process
of producing charas, compared to the more widely used technique of
“beating” and “filtering” dry plants to produce other types of hashish,
takes more time, but produces higher quality resin.
In the 1970s India became a popular tourist destination for
Westerners leading an anti-conformist lifestyle. They arrived on
overloaded busses all the way from Europe to camp on Goa’s beaches in
the South. They traveled to the Himalayas, following the Hindu holy men,
or babas, on mystical, spiritual paths. Eventually, the
“hippies” arrived in Suraj’s village. “Children up in the Himalayan
villages still refer to tourists as ‘hippies,’” says Suraj, a smile
breaking over his face. “It is the only word they know for stranger.”
A man smoking a chillum, the traditional pipe for charas, surrounded by his family.
Hindu monks from all over India go to the Himalayas to meditate,
leading an ascetic lifestyle, traveling from one holy place to another,
surviving on alms. Back in the ’70s, the locals were already smoking
pot, but it was the monks who first perfected the technique of making
charas from the live plants. Both the locals and the hippies began
imitating them, rubbing the big strains in their hands to extract the
shiny resin, and the technique caught on. Today, this same practice is
used to produce large amounts of charas each year.
The view of the snow capped mountains from one of the few shops of the village, which sells basic groceries.
Suraj, who learned to make charas from a French man, sells his
product to foreigners — Israelis and Europeans mainly, but also more and
more to wealthy students from Delhi and Mumbai. The demand is steadily
rising, and more fields are converted to cannabis each year. The valley,
with its guesthouses packed with backpackers every spring, has become
something of an “Amsterdam of the East.”
Business is on the rise — peasants now prefer it to apples or
beans, as it is clearly more profitable. Cement is slowly replacing the
stone, wood and cow dung of which houses in the village were built.
A village house made in the traditional local style is lit with a feeble light under the starry sky of the Himalayas.
Cannabis indica grows in many parts of India, particularly in
the Himalayas, making it difficult for the authorities to trace the
producers, who have been planting their fields at higher and higher
altitudes to escape police raids. In addition to this, policing and
trafficking mechanisms are bypassed through widespread corruption at all
levels; thousands of families survive on the illegal production of
charas with few legal problems. However, although the precious resin can
cost up to 20 euro per gram in Europe, cannabis farmers retain only
minimal profit margins. Dealers and traffickers make the biggest profit
from the illegal business, while farmers are forced to operate in the
shadows. Moreover, they risk a minimum sentence of 10 years if caught
cultivating cannabis or trafficking large quantities of charas, and can
be sentenced to death for repeated offenses.
Stripes
of fire burn the mountain next to the village in one of the biggest
blazes in years. Fires are common at the end of the dry season; this one
was exceptionally large.
In 1961, when India signed the cornerstone treaty of the UN drug control system—known as the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs,
which criminalized the use and cultivation of marijuana in
participating countries—Indian society did not actually seem ready to
abandon the use of cannabis, which dates back to sacred Veda texts and
has been part of Hindu rituals and festivities for centuries. In 1985
India passed the controversial Act on Narcotic and Psychotropic Substances
(NDPS), which criminalized cannabis like hard drugs but failed to
actually combat production and trafficking. Along with prices,
production and trafficking exploded as a reaction to the increasing
demand on the international market.
A farmer stares over the mountains and above a cloudy sky after the rainfall has disrupted his work.
“The obligation to eliminate cannabis in countries where there
was widespread traditional use is a clear example of the colonial
background of the Convention, and a violation of indigenous and
religious rights. It would have never passed nowadays,” says Tom
Blickman of the Dutch think tank Transnational Institute (TNI). “The
NDPS effect has been the criminalization of cannabis consumers and
producers, in a country where its use — for medicinal, spiritual and
recreational purposes — is millennial. It was also obvious that cannabis
eradication would have been impossible.”
Despite the snow and chilling cold, singing and dancing goes on in the village square on the occasion of a wedding.
“Before the ban, cannabis in India was regulated as it is today
in some states in the U.S.”, says Blickman, referring to it as “a system
of cultivation, production and sale regulated by licenses and taxes.”
But the debate on legalization is still a taboo in India, and despite
the plant being so widespread, there are no precise estimates on the
amount of cultivation and resin production. India has never conducted an
accurate survey — not even for the purposes of providing statistics to
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which tends to have the
strongest grasp of drug statistics around the world.
A
sacrificial goat tries to escape during a wedding; on the left, the
bride, wearing traditional wedding bracelets, is surrounded by the
relatives.
“Cannabis grows wild in nearly 400 out of the 640 districts in
India,” says Romesh Bhattacharji, a former narcotics officer in India
and one of the most authoritative voices promoting the revival of a
debate over legalization in the country. “The 1961 Single Convention is
an unnecessarily severe and falsely optimistic treaty,” he says. “It is
on this fragile basis that the NDPS, our draconian legislation on
narcotics, was conceived. Since then, illegal trafficking and addiction
have only increased.”
The
river that flows through the valley is named after a Hindu goddess
(whose name is withheld in this article to protect the local farmers
from police retaliation), an indication of the huge role that religion
plays in the valley, and in the lives of the villagers.
Two
men carry loads of freshly cut cannabis bundles uphill from the fields,
which are a several hours’ walk from their homes. They’ll rub them to
make charas later at home.
A
group of children play near the fields with bows and arrows made out of
cannabis stalk. They hang around the fields while their parents are
harvesting.
A
farmer’s family works in the house, where they collect dry plants they
did not manage to rub before snow came. They will be used to produce
another kind of hashish.
A boy looks out over the valley from the wooden balcony of his family home at the end of the harvesting season.
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