Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan
Bamiyan Buddha
Matthew Power
Rebuilding the Bamiyan Buddhas
Friday, July 23, 2004
It takes 10 hours by car to travel 90 miles on the nauseatingly bad road to the Bamiyan Valley. The first stretch of the highway is quite smooth—it was built recently to shuttle American troops between Kabul and the massive military base at Bagram—but thereafter it turns into a rutted, cratered nightmare over a mountain pass. Both sides of the road are heavily mined, so I asked the driver not to swerve off the shoulder for oncoming cars. The landscape is stunning: craggy, treeless mountains tower over valleys of mulberry and walnut orchards with crystal-clear rivers. Women in burqas turn away as cars pass, and Hazara children, descendants of Genghis Khan's armies, hold out bags of fresh apricots and apples to sell to passing tourists.
Yes, tourists. It's been 25 years of war, and Bamiyan is currently the only semi-functioning travel destination in Afghanistan. A steady trickle of aid workers, archeologists, and tourists travel there to see the massive niches carved into the valley's cliff face that once held the 1,500-year-old Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in March of 2001...
