Bamiyan’s Buddha niches
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in Afghanistan.
Read MoreBand-e-Amir’s turquoise lakes
A closer look at one of Afghanistan's most rewarding experiences.
Read MoreThe Hindu Kush foothills
Where to go next once you have seen the headline sights of Afghanistan.
Read MoreAfghanistan sits at one of history’s great crossroads, where Silk Road caravans once moved between Persia, India, and Central Asia through valleys the Hindu Kush still guards fiercely. I approach any discussion of travel here with real caution — the security and logistical realities are serious and change constantly, and this is emphatically not a country to visit without expert local arrangement and current guidance. What draws travellers who do go, under careful escort, is a landscape of genuine, undiluted grandeur: the turquoise lakes of Band-e-Amir strung across a high plateau, the Buddhist niches of Bamiyan carved into cliffs that once held two colossal standing statues. Afghan hospitality, in the accounts of those who’ve experienced it, remains fiercely generous even amid hardship, rooted in a tradition of welcoming travellers that long predates the country’s recent decades of conflict.
Chapter One
Bamiyan’s carved cliffs
The Bamiyan valley once held two towering Buddha statues carved into its sandstone cliffs in the sixth century, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, and the empty niches that remain are now, in their own stark way, as affecting as the statues themselves must have been. The surrounding valley, ringed by the Hindu Kush, was a key waypoint on the Silk Road for centuries, and the honeycomb of monks’ caves cut into the cliff face nearby speaks to a Buddhist community that thrived here long before the region’s later religious history. Any visit to this region requires specialist arrangement and a clear-eyed understanding of the current security situation on the ground.
“Afghanistan’s beauty has never been in question; only the circumstances of reaching it have.”
Chapter Two
Band-e-Amir’s lakes
Band-e-Amir, Afghanistan’s first national park, holds a chain of six lakes at high altitude, their water an intense, mineral-fed turquoise held in place by natural travertine dams that have built up over millennia. Photographs from the site show a landscape of near total stillness — red cliffs, blue water, and almost no infrastructure interrupting the view. It remains, by all accounts from those who have travelled there under proper guidance, one of the most striking natural landscapes in the entire region, precisely because so few outside visitors have seen it in recent decades.
The Short List
Do not miss in Afghanistan
At a glance
Afghanistan in numbers
- Capital
- Kabul
- Language
- Dari and Pashto
- Currency
- Afghan afghani
- Best time
- April to June and September to October, though travel currently requires specialist guidance
Did you know
Band-e-Amir’s lakes are separated by natural dams of travertine mineral deposits built up gradually over thousands of years.