Rory Stewart · 2004 · overland

Rory Stewart's account of walking five hundred miles across central Afghanistan in the winter of 2002, six weeks after the Taliban fell. He took the mountain route rather than the safe one, following Babur's line of march, and got through on Persian dialects, village hospitality and a retired fighting mastiff he named after the emperor.

1. 1
   Herat

   Stewart arrives in Herat in January 2002 to close the one gap in a walk that has already taken him across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal - and is permitted to go on foot only if armed men from the new government come with him.

2. 2
   Chist-e-Sharif

   East along the Hari Rud through villages emptied and burned in the fighting, sleeping on floors and eating what is offered - and the escort turns back, leaving him to walk the mountains alone in the worst month of the year.

3. 3
   The Minaret of Jam

   He detours south to the twelfth-century minaret standing two hundred feet in an empty gorge - a UNESCO site with no guards, being quietly dug over by looters, and one of the few things in the country nobody is fighting about.

4. 4
   Chaghcharan

   Chaghcharan, halfway and a fortnight in, is the provincial capital of Ghor and a place of competing commanders - and it is here that he is given the dog, half-starved and lame, that walks the rest of the way with him.

5. 5
   Yakawlang

   Into the Hazara country through snow three metres deep, over passes where the path is a guess and a night in the open would kill him - and among people who had been hunted by the Taliban and take him in anyway.

6. 6
   Bamiyan

   At Bamiyan the great Buddhas are two empty niches, blown out the year before - and beyond them the lakes at Band-e-Amir, improbably blue, in a valley almost nobody has visited for twenty years.

7. 7
   Kabul

   Thirty-six days out of Herat he walks into Kabul, into a city of aid agencies, compounds and white vehicles - having crossed a country that the people arriving to run it have mostly seen from the air.