I’m sitting in Abu Dhabi International Airport, where I never expected to be. I was supposed to be in London right now. It’s been a busy few days.

On Friday I had hoped to go to Darra Adam Khel, an area in Pakistan famous for its gun manufacture. The craftsmen there are said to make astonishing copies of weapons using only the simplest of tools. It’s a restricted area, but my guide thought we could bribe someone and get in. After further inquiries, he determined the place was sensitive enough that doing so could get us in jail.

As a consolation prize, we went to the Khyber Pass. I was not particularly fired up for this, but we had already been to Takht-e-Bhai, there was nowhere else to go. As it happened, it was a pretty interesting trip, with the mountains making for excellent scenery. The driving was insane, though, with huge trucks overtaking one another on hairpin turns. I told the driver that my wife would be very unhappy with him if I died in Pakistan, and he laughed and drove like a maniac anyway.

The Khyber Pass is in the Tribal Areas, over which the central government’s control is pretty limited, so you need a permit and an armed government-supplied guard to go there. I asked if the guard would mind if I got a picture of me holding his AK-47. I was a little surprised when he said it was fine.

After the guide took a few shots of the mujahed in yellow plaid, he talked the guard into letting us fire the Kalashnikov at a piece of red cloth sitting on a mountain about 50-75 meters away. We took turns shooting and watching puffs of dust emerge from where the bullets hit. It was astonishingly loud. Everyone was surprised at how well I shot, including myself – I got closer to the target than even the guard.

“You’re a player, Mr. Robert,” said my guide, whose English was otherwise merely workmanlike.

We returned to town, I settled the hotel bill, and we headed out to Islamabad so I could catch my flight to Dubai and thence to London. The guide dropped me off at the airport and I went through security and customs, only to be told when I got to the desk that my flight did not exist. It turned out the travel agent had booked me for 28 July instead of 28 June, and I had not noticed because this had been an adjustment from my original itinerary which had me coming back on 30 June.

I had to book a hotel in Islamabad and call the travel agent. There was much hemming and hawing and calling me back in the middle of the night to ask if I could get to Lahore in the next three hours. I spent much of Saturday at the Gulf Air offices trying to get cleared on a waitlist. I finally did, and got on a flight for Sunday morning, today, via Abu Dhabi. Because I do not have my onward ticket to the United States, they charged me a fortune in excess baggage. (Baggage allowances to and from the US are much higher than they are for other places, in recognition of the fact that Americans are fat bastards who carry too many gadgets when they travel, like me.)

So I am killing time in Abu Dhabi, definitely a poor cousin to Dubai, waiting for my flight to London. I won’t be home until Monday night.

I spent my morning trying to open a bank account. Opening bank accounts in developing countries is always a fun way to while away the hours. There are effectively no banks in Afghanistan, so the only checks that anyone accepts are drawn on the Standard Chartered Grindlay’s branch in Peshawar.

After that, I hired a car to take me to Takht-e-Bhai, a Buddhist monastery that I am told is one of the stellar attractions in the area. I have been to many overrated historical sites, but none quite as underwhelming as this. The monastery has many niches and stupas to hold statues of the Buddha which the guide assures me are spectacular. I have to take his word for it as they have all been taken to the Peshawar Museum, presumably so they can avoid the fate of their bretheren in Bamiyan.

It’s also hard to get excited about anything you have to climb hundreds of steps to get to in the 115 degree heat. The caretaker opened the visitors’ book for me to sign, showing me the glowing reviews of the site penned by tourists who surely must have been there in the winter. “Nice place. Hot,” I wrote, large drops of sweat spattering the page from my forehead as I did so.

On the way back to Peshawar we stopped for a lunch of fresh fish by a huge, swift-flowing river. We dipped chunks of fried fish wrapped in naan into cups of hot sauce and chewed them while we watched local men cavort in the river. The driver tells me that this river claims about 10-15 lives a year.

I spent a few improbably hours this afternoon trying to find a carburetor for an 80’s-model Mercedes. Through a complex chain of events, my boss came into the possession of a Mercedes built especially for use in the subcontinent. The carburetor is on the fritz, and it is impossible to get a replacement in the US. Rather than keep you in suspense, I will tell you that it is impossible to get in Peshawar, too; I will look in Islamabad tomorrow.

Driving out of the section of the city where all the car shops are, we got on an overpass and I saw that the roofs of many of the buildings in this area were crowded with bumpers, hubcaps, and other automotive miscellany, as if the structures were full to bursting with unsorted car parts.

I just saw a chilling photo in Christina Lamb’s The Sewing Circles of Herat. It is a photo of a man hung by the Taliban from a makeshift gallows in Kandahar just before the Taliban fled. The setting is clearly recognizable as Herat Square, which was just outside the door of the hotel where I stayed in Kandahar.

I just found out that one of the UN charter planes made a crash landing on Friday after it turned back from Bamiyan when the pilot discovered the landing gear would not go down. The pilot circled for 90 minutes to expend the fuel and skidded to a stop on the runway in Kabul. Everyone was safe, but I am glad I did not know about this before I took my last UN flight!

I have been in Peshawar for two days now, and there is not much to report. I have been doing quite a lot of work in offices with inadequate Russian air conditioners. What do Russians know about air conditioning?

I arrived late on Monday night and was looking forward to checking into the Khan Klub Hotel in the Old City. This is a well-known place, inside a converted old house, that I had heard a lot of good things about. Unfortunately, when I arrived I was told they had been closed for three months, for security reasons. The government is afraid that the well-known tourist hotels make good targets. Why they took my reservation two weeks ago without telling me this was not explained.

I was sent instead to a guesthouse not far from where I am working. Unfortunately that means it is also far away from anything even remotely interesting in Peshawar. It also has all the atmosphere of a Super 8.

So I have done little but work for two days. Even dinner last night was out of the question because of some travellers’ problems I have developed. The restaurant at the Khan Klub is open, and I hope to at least make use of that later in the week.

I am sitting in Kabul International Airport waiting for the battery in my laptop to die. I don’t expect to have long to wait.

After a busy day at the office I am headed to Islamabad, from where I will hire a car to Peshawar so that I can audit one of our subcontractors. Peshawar is said to be insanely hot. I checked one day before I left the States and the anticipated high was 129 degrees. I did not realize it got that hot on Earth.

This morning we went for another walk on the hill behind our neighborhood and got some good shots of me manning the defunct anti-aircraft guns and standing astride a burned-out APC. I picked up some spent anti-aircraft shells – not shells, exactly, but bit of chain that carry the ammunition through the gun – and marvelled that nobody else had done so before me. They showed up on the X-ray here at the airport and the staff protested weakly that these were the property of the Ministry of Defense, but quickly realized that it was a dumb argument and sent me and my souvenirs on our way.

Today was a good sightseeing day – by far my best in Afghanistan.

In the morning I had a meeting at the US Embassy. The Embassy in Kabul looks more like an elaborate gun emplacement than an embassy. I am used to elaborate security measures at US embassies abroad, but the fortifications on the Embassy in Kabul are like nothing I have ever seen. My colleague pointed out the lookout towers from which a group of Afghan soldiers were fatally shot by accident a few weeks ago.

Oddly, despite all the security measures and the insistence that we be escorted, nobody seemed bothered by the fact that the metal detector protested loudly when we went through. We both had quite a bit of metal on us, but nobody cared to see what it was.

We sat in the lobby reading magazines with titles like State: The Official Magazine of the State Department for 45 minutes but our man never showed up. We left our cards and cell phone numbers where we could be reached, but we never heard back.

We left to pick up my colleague’s wife at the airport. This was quite a production, but with the help of some connections we were able to be waiting on the tarmac when she arrived. The baggage claim “system” was overwhelmed by the arrival of three flights in close succession, and we waited in the airport commandant’s office (connections) for some time waiting for the bags to come through.

We then proceded to an Afghan colleague’s home where we were invited for lunch. An indescribable spread was laid for us on the floor and we all sat cross-legged around the food and enjoyed a remarkable feast.

After lunch we went to Dar ul-Aman, the once-spectacular old palace, which has been thoroughly wrecked by years of shelling and looting. Elaborate scrollwork was visible on the interior walls through the holes that had been blown in them. We resisted the considerable temptation to go inside, as “DANGER UXO” was spraypainted around all the doors.

After strolling around the grounds taking photos, we went to the King’s Tomb, a once-elaborate mausoleum atop a commanding hill which, unfortunately for the building, must have made for an excellent artillery position. I got some good photos of what was left.

After a brief respite at the office we headed back to Chicken Street where we bargained for more cheap tourist goodies. I could not resist a few trinkets from the Soviet era. Much of what is on offer here is likely from elsewhere – I have seen a lot of the same stuff in Damascus and Istanbul – but what the heck.

Stopped at the Internet café to get emails and Julie has sent word that she is safe in Baghdad. Excellent news.

Top it all off with another excellent Indian meal and it was a very satisfactory day.

Took another UN charter from Kandahar back to Kabul this morning. The Kandahar airport is crawling with US troops, and it was odd to sit with them while I waited for the plane to come in from Kabul. One of my colleagues from the Helmand field office was with me, and he was having trouble comprehending the idea of female soldiers. “I think they are not as strong as men,” he said, “how can they train in the Army?”

I am glad to get back to toilets I can sit on. The sit-down toilets here have an odd little shelf, so that you can more easily examine your excreta for parasites. A relic of the British Raj, I am told.

I went out just twice today; once in the morning and once at dusk. it was too damn hot otherwise, and frankly there just is not that much to see. It was also hard to judge how welcome I was.

Kandahar was Taliban central; Mohammed Omar’s capital and the last city to fall to the Northern Alliance. I did not see many women about, and those I did see all wore the burqa. In Kabul this is not common; many women wear no veil at all or only a shawl loosely wrapped around the head.

Early this morning I walked toward where I thought the Shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet Mohammed should be. This building is supposed to be magnificent, and is where the only picture of Mohammed Omar was taken. Omar came to the Shrine to parade the cloak around and declare himself amir al-mu’mineen, Commander of the Faithful.

I don’t think I found it, though. I found what I think was the Mausoleum of Ahmed Shah Durrani, the founder of modern Afghanistan. I am not entirely sure because the tourist signage in Kandahar leaves a lot to be desired.

The building was pretty striking, and I dared to take out my camera and snap a few photos. I took my shoes off and went to go inside, and a small boy shook his head to indicate I should not. An old man, though, waved me in, and I decided I would go with age rather than beauty. The interior was similar to many mosques I have visited, except for the mirrors inlaid in elaborate patterns on the walls; something I had not seen before. I stayed only for a few moments, because I was attracting attention.

On my morning walk, about two hours long, I drew many curious stares from children but the adults seemed to pay me little mind. Nobody said a peep to me. I saw no other ferengis. My afternoon walk was rather different. Many people smiled and shouted “how are you?” – mostly to show off their English; a reaction like what one gets in Egypt. I returned the greeting and was feeling a little more welcome in Kandahar. I even engaged one boy in a conversation until a woman in a burqa berated him. His mother? His sister? Sally Struthers? Impossible to tell under that thing. A few teenage boys mocked me for the benefit of their friends, again a familiar reaction.

On the way back I was stopped by a teenage boy with good English who chatted me up. He told me that he had a shop – would I like to see it? Again, this was familiar territory, but unlike when this happened in Egypt, this was novel and I went with him. I let his father sell me a cheesy AK-47 carpet, an old Pakistani padlock and a shawwal kamiz for entirely too much money. I am sure I was his best – if not only – customer this month.

Remember when I said yesterday that I only then understood the phrase “middle of nowhere?” Scratch that. Early this morning I rode with our subcontractors to see the work they have been doing in the village areas. This involved about an hour of driving offroad through the desert, to a place which is a much better candidate for the title.

The irrigation works that bring water from Morrison Knudsen’s canal have accumulated silt, vegetation and other obstructions over the last 25 years of war, when it was unsafe to go and do regular cleaning. We have hired an NGO to supervise the rehabilitation of these works. They hire day laborers from the villages to clean the drains with shovels and, in more difficult areas, picks. The pay the villagers receive for this work is intended to kickstart the local economy.

I spent the morning touring various sites where about 3,000 people are cleaning out the drains. We spent hours and hours tooling around the desert to various drains, where I inspected equipment our subcontractor had purchased and got a sense of the scale we are working on. By the time we were done I was thoroughly tired, though I had not even picked up a shovel. I cannot imagine how these men – some of them fairly old – work from six to one in the desert heat. I felt a little embarassed at how much they were getting for their work and how much I was getting for riding around in a pickup truck and looking at them.

After a hearty lunch of bread, stews, rice and warm Iranian soft drinks, I returned to Kandahar. The room that was supposed to have been reserved for me was not, and instead I was directed to the Noor Jahan Hotel, which was romantically described by author Christine Lamb as "grimy" and "the only hotel in town." Through a complicated jury-rigged system I do not really understand, it has a measure of air conditioning. This is the first A/C I have had in Afghanistan, and it is most welcome. My room also has an en-suite bathroom – albeit with a squat toilet – also the first I have had in Afghanistan. So I suppose I should not complain.

Yesterday was largely uneventful, being mostly taken up by work which even I am not particularly interested in, so I don’t see why you would be. I did have another excellent meal, though, this time at an Indian restaurant. Actually, it was an Indian-Chinese-Mexican restaurant, but we stuck with the Indian and were well rewarded. A colleague once told me that the best time to go to a country was when things were settled down enough that good restaurants had a chance to open, but were still unsettled enough to get danger pay. I thought it was a terribly mercenary thing to say, but sitting here in Kabul it is hard to argue.

I spent most of today in an epic journey to Lashkar Gah, in the southern Helmand Province. I got to the airport early in the morning by making airplane noises to the cabdriver, who spoke no English. After a somewhat chaotic check-in and a long wait, I was ushered aboard a very small and very noisy UN charter airplane that took me to Kandahar.

The Pashtuns say that when God was done making the rest of the world, he still had a bunch of rocks left over, so he made Afghanistan. From the air the origins of this legend are pretty clear.

The Kandahar airstrip is well outside the city and is guarded by US troops, which I still find a little unsettling. A rickety but pleasantly air-conditioned bus then took me and my fellow passengers on a long trip into the bustling town, where I was met by a driver from our project office. We then proceeded to drive for an hour down a poor paved road and then for an hour and a half on a spine-jarring dirt road throught the desert to get to Lashkar Gah. I thought I understood the meaning of “middle of nowhere” prior to this, but I now realize I was wrong.

Lashkar Gah is a primitive town consisting mostly of mudbrick buildings. Our office and guesthouse, while simple, is one of the fanciest buildings in town, with concrete floors and walls, and glass windows.

Once upon a time this area was known as “Little America” because of all the US contractors here in the 1950s. Morrison Knudsen was building a vast irrigation system to distribute the waters of the Helmand River and make the desert bloom. I assume back then they had a road; I cannot imagine getting heavy construction equipment here the way I came.

There has been unrest here in recent days. A car belonging to an Italian NGO was blown up a few days ago, with no injuries. And I was told that just yesterday, the chief of police’s car was also destroyed. It’s a shame; I would like to walk around the town and explore a bit, but I don’t really feel safe doing so.

Damn, it's hot.

Had dinner at an excellent Thai restaurant a few blocks from the guest house. The place is run entirely by Thais, mostly for the benefit of the ferengis. The place was packed and we had some trouble getting a table.

Rumor has it that the owners of this place had opened a restaurant in Kosovo and did such good business that they decided to set up shop in Afghanistan, to take advantage of the same crowd. If you’re ever in Kabul, it’s highly recommended: Lai Thai on 15th Street.

Started the day with a walk up the hill behind our neighborhood for a good view of the city. Most of the buildings are low-lying, and the few taller buildings have a definitely Soviet architectural cast about them. The hill is home to a variety of defunct military equipment, no doubt owing to its commanding view. Growing up as a boy in suburban Boston, I never guessed I would climb on the remains of a Soviet tank in Afghanistan, but that is what I did this morning.

After making a trip to one of Afghanistan’s four Internet cafes to send and receive email, we took a short trip to Chicken Street, Kabul’s famous shopping district. There, merchants tried to sell us carpets and all manner of other items. Antique rifles and pistols, ornate knives, lapis boxes, watches, Red Army belts and bayonets (wonder how they got those?), photos of Afghan heroes, and much more is enthusiastically peddled, to the city’s large and growing ferengi (foreign) community. Crude tapestries depicting fighter jets, tanks and small arms were common items. One particularly chilling one was a rendering of the twin towers of the World Trade Center with a plane flying into them and stick figures leaping from the windows.

Across the road from Chicken Street is Flower Street, where the offerings are a little more modern. The grocery stores on Flower Street have a bewildering array of foreign goods, and this is allegedly where bin Laden and company used to shop. I cannot help but imagine bin Laden swilling a bottle of V8 in Tora Bora. My colleague bought a box of Sugar Smacks. The guy ahead of us in line bought a can of Red Bull.

Down the road a small shop sold pirated VCDs, the poor man’s answer to the DVD. A wide selection was on offer, including films as recent as The Matrix Reloaded and 2 Fast 2 Furious, which has only been in American theaters for about a week. I picked up a copy of Reloaded, and the quality is not bad.

Among the few other shoppers we saw on Chicken and Flower Streets was a group of American soldiers fingering their M16s. Oddly, they rode soccer mom-style SUVs rather than military vehicles, while a group of their French colleagues down the street had propoerly macho jeeps.

We got to the airport at 6:00 this morning to check in for the UN charter flight to Kabul. We had had trouble getting reservations on this flight, and counted ourselves very lucky that we got on. Ariana, Afghanistan’s national airline, had a flight at almost the same time, but nobody who has flown on Ariana has ever recommended it.

We got there early and had to wait for the check-in desk to open. The terminal began to fill with our fellow passengers, mostly NGO types. Many of the women simply could not wait to get to Kabul to wrap their scarves loosely around their heads a la Christiane Amanpour.

It was a comfortable flight, about three hours in duration. When we started the approach to Kabul, the pilot began banking wildly, turning like a corkscrew down towards the airport. One of the scarf-heads said this was to avoid any surface-to-air missiles that someone might choose to aim at us, but this did not really ring true – could not the Stinger-weilding assailant just stake out the runway, knowing that we would have to get there eventually? We later learned that because Kabul sits in a bowl surrounded by mountains, there are often trecherous air currents that prevent a straight-on approach to the airport.

The tarmac was crawling with security men of various descriptions, including at least one American with a gleaming M-16. His uniform included a baseball-style cap with a cryptic acronym on it; I assumed he worked for one of the many private contractors that do so much of our military work nowadays.

The passport control system was truly comical and it seemed to be designed to be as inefficient as possible. The baggage carousel looked as if it had not worked in some time. The baggage claim system consisted of an Afghan appearing out of the baggage door every once in a while, pushing a suitcase in front of him. Somehow everyone got their bags eventually, and we left the terminal to look for our ride.

Our ride never showed up, and we ended up having to take a taxi to the offfice instead. On arrival we found that some of the staff had expected us yesterday, and others had expected us tomorrow. Nobody thought to average it out and come today, even though the UN flight does not run on either Saturdays or Mondays. They apologized profusely. No matter, I told them. We were big boys and could take care of ourselves.

The house containing our office doubles as a guesthouse for visiting consultants, the hotel situation in Kabul being somewhat less that satisfactory. The guesthouse is basic but comfortable, and it would be hard to beat the commute.

I am sitting in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Dubai after a very long day’s journey. I had a layover in Frankfurt for a few hours, where a colleague and I went into town to get something to eat.

I was in Jordan on September 11, and I got stuck in Frankfurt on my way back. Air traffic had just started moving again, but there was a huge backup of people trying to go home and I had to spend four days in Frankfurt waiting for a flight to free up. I can think of half a dozen European cities I would not mind getting stuck in for four days; Frankfurt is not on the list.

But my basic knowledge of the Frankfurt train system came in handy, and we went into the city center and got wursts of some description or other.

On, then, to Dubai, where we are spending the night prior to taking the UN charter flight to Kabul in the morning. Dubai reminds me of Cairo’s Mohandiseen district, where I used to live, and I realize now that Dubai is probably exactly what they are trying to make Mohandiseen look like. It’s a lot cleaner here, though. And there are more hookers.

In another great victory for democratic values in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority™ is promulgating a “code of conduct” for the Iraqi press. “All media outlets must be responsible,” explains Mike Furlong, a Coalition™ advisor. And nothing promotes a responsible press like having to obey a “code of conduct” established by the Pentagon.

The article that the Administration must have been dreading appeared today in the New York Times: “Some Back Home Wonder, ‘Why Are People Dying?’”

The article describes puzzlement and frustration expressed by military families in particular that some 40 American soldiers have died since hostilities “ended” and that news of new firefights emerges every day.

This has got to be very worrisome for the Administration, because these incidents are just getting started and it is sure to be a long, hot summer. The American public seems pretty unconcerned at this point that the promised WMD have yet to materialize, but if there continue to be casulties, people may start to wonder if this was such a good idea after all.

Two Washington Post reporters teamed up to cover a routine US Army patrol through Baghdad. One stayed with the patrol and the other came through afterward to talk to the residents. The results are very interesting. The US soldiers assert that “everybody likes us.” Many of the Iraqis disagree.

The online journal Plastic is running a discussion on the History Channel's adoption of MTV-style editing in its programming. The brilliant part is the title of the story: “Dude, Where's Mein Kampf?”