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The Places in Between Hardcover – Import, January 1, 2004

by Rory Stewart (Author)

4.3 3,311 ratings

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In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.

Through these encounters-by turns touching, con-founding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.

Editorial Reviews

From AudioFile

In 2002, in the midst of war and a typically harsh winter, Rory Stewart embarked on the seemingly insane undertaking of walking across Afghanistan. That it was madness was explained to the accomplished Scots journalist, but he was not to be dissuaded, especially since the journey was part of the larger scheme that he had already accomplished: to traverse the Muslim world on foot by way of Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Thankfully, he lived, and nearly as marvelous a reason for celebration is the book that resulted, a glowing achievement in the rich history of travel writing. Stewart's narration of his own work further reveals a traveler of deep insight and humility (without a trace of sentimentality), and a man of rare courage and grace. M.O. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From Booklist

Stewart, a resident of Scotland, has written for the New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books, and he is a former fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In January 2002, having just spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, Stewart began a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul. Although the Taliban had been ousted several weeks earlier, Stewart was launching a journey through a devastated, unsettled, and unsafe landscape. The recounting of that journey makes for an engrossing, surprising, and often deeply moving portrait of the land and the peoples who inhabit it. Stewart relates his encounters with ordinary villagers, security officials, students, displaced Taliban officials, foreign-aid workers, and rural strongmen, and his descriptions of the views and attitudes of those he lived with are presented in frank, unvarnished terms. Nation building in Afghanistan remains a work in progress, and this work should help those who wish to understand the complexities of that task. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

We never really find out why Stewart decided to walk across Afghanistan only a few months after the Taliban were deposed, but what emerges from the last leg of his two-year journey across Asia is a lesson in good travel writing. By turns harrowing and meditative, Stewart's trek through Afghanistan in the footsteps of the 15th-century emperor Babur is edifying at every step, grounded by his knowledge of local history, politics and dialects. His prose is lean and unsentimental: whether pushing through chest-high snow in the mountains of Hazarajat or through villages still under de facto Taliban control, his descriptions offer a cool assessment of a landscape and a people eviscerated by war, forgotten by time and isolated by geography. The well-oiled apparatus of his writing mimics a dispassionate camera shutter in its precision. But if we are to accompany someone on such a highly personal quest, we want to know who that person is. Unfortunately, Stewart shares little emotional background; the writer's identity is discerned best by inference. Sometimes we get the sense he cares more for preserving history than for the people who live in it (and for whom historical knowledge would be luxury). But remembering Geraldo Rivera's gunslinging escapades, perhaps we could use less sap and more clarity about this troubled and fascinating country.(May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The New Civil Service

I watched two men enter the lobby of the Hotel Mowafaq.

Most Afghans seemed to glide up the center of the lobby staircase with their shawls trailing behind them like Venetian cloaks. But these men wore Western jackets, walked quietly, and stayed close to the banister. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the hotel manager.

“Follow them.” He had never spoken to me before.

“I’m sorry, no,” I said. “I am busy.”

“Now. They are from the government.”

I followed him to a room on a floor I didn’t know existed and he told me to take off my shoes and enter alone in my socks. The two men were seated on a heavy blackwood sofa, beside an aluminum spittoon. They were still wearing their shoes. I smiled. They did not. The lace curtains were drawn and there was no electricity in the city; the room was dark.

“Chi kar mikonid?” (What are you doing?) asked the man in the black suit and collarless Iranian shirt. I expected him to stand and, in the normal way, shake hands and wish me peace. He remained seated.

“Salaam aleikum” (Peace be with you), I said, and sat down.

“Waleikum a-salaam. Chi kar mikonid?” he repeated quietly, leaning back and running his fat manicured hand along the purple velveteen arm of the sofa. His bouffant hair and goatee were neatly trimmed. I was conscious of not having shaved in eight weeks.

“I have explained what I am doing many times to His Excellency, Yuzufi, in the Foreign Ministry,” I said. “I was told to meet him again now. I am late.”

A pulse was beating strongly in my neck. I tried to breathe slowly. Neither of us spoke. After a little while, I looked away.

The thinner man drew out a small new radio, said something into it, and straightened his stiff jacket over his traditional shirt. I didn’t need to see the shoulder holster. I had already guessed they were members of the Security Service. They did not care what I said or what I thought of them. They had watched people through hidden cameras in bedrooms, in torture cells, and on execution grounds. They knew that, however I presented myself, I could be reduced. But why had they decided to question me? In the silence, I heard a car reversing in the courtyard and then the first notes of the call to prayer.

“Let’s go,” said the man in the black suit. He told me to walk in front. On the stairs, I passed a waiter to whom I had spoken. He turned away. I was led to a small Japanese car parked on the dirt forecourt. The car’s paint job was new and it had been washed recently. They told me to sit in the back. There was nothing in the pockets or on the floorboards. It looked as though the car had just come from the factory. Without saying anything, they turned onto the main boulevard.

It was January 2002. The American-led coalition was ending its bombardment of the Tora Bora complex; Usama Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar had escaped; operations in Gardez were beginning. The new government taking over from the Taliban had been in place for two weeks. The laws banning television and female education had been dropped; political prisoners had been released; refugees were returning home; some women were coming out without veils. The UN and the U.S. military were running the basic infrastructure and food supplies. There was no frontier guard and I had entered the country without a visa. The Afghan government seemed to me hardly to exist. Yet these men were apparently well established.

The car turned into the Foreign Ministry, and the gate guards saluted and stood back. As I climbed the stairs, I felt that I was moving unnaturally quickly and that the men had noticed this. A secretary showed us into Mr. Yuzufi’s office without knocking. For a moment Yuzufi stared at us from behind his desk. Then he stood, straightened his baggy pin-striped jacket, and showed the men to the most senior position in the room. They walked slowly on the linoleum flooring, looking at the furniture Yuzufi had managed to assemble since he had inherited an empty office: the splintered desk, the four mismatched filing cabinets in different shades of olive green, and the stove, which made the room smell strongly of gasoline.

The week I had known Yuzufi comprised half his career in the Foreign Ministry. A fortnight earlier he had been in Pakistan. The day before he had given me tea and a boiled sweet, told me he admired my journey, laughed at a photograph of my father in a kilt, and discussed Persian poetry. This time he did not greet me but instead sat in a chair facing me and asked, “What has happened?”

Before I could reply, the man with the goatee cut in. “What is this foreigner doing here?”

“These men are from the Security Service,” said Yuzufi.

I nodded. I noticed that Yuzufi had clasped his hands together and that his hands, like mine, were trembling slightly.

“I will translate to make sure you understand what they are asking,” continued Yuzufi. “Tell them your intentions. Exactly as you told me.”

I looked into the eyes of the man on my left. “I am planning to walk across Afghanistan. From Herat to Kabul. On foot.” I was not breathing deeply enough to complete my phrases. I was surprised they didn’t interrupt. “I am following in the footsteps of Babur, the first emperor of Mughal India. I want to get away from the roads. Journalists, aid workers, and tourists mostly travel by car, but I—”

“There are no tourists,” said the man in the stiff jacket, who had not yet spoken. “You are the first tourist in Afghanistan. It is midwinter—there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee. Do you want to die?”

“Thank you very much for your advice. I note those three points.” I guessed from his tone that such advice was intended as an order. “But I have spoken to the Cabinet,” I said, misrepresenting a brief meeting with the young secretary to the Minister of Social Welfare. “I must do this journey.”

“Do it in a year’s time,” said the man in the black suit.

He had taken from Yuzufi the tattered evidence of my walk across South Asia and was examining it: the clipping from the newspaper in western Nepal, “Mr. Stewart is a pilgrim for peace”; the letter from the Conservator, Second Circle, Forestry Department, Himachal Pradesh, India, “Mr. Stewart, a Scot, is interested in the environment”; from a District Officer in the Punjab and a Secretary of the Interior in a Himalayan state and a Chief Engineer of the Pakistan Department of Irrigation requesting “All Executive Engineers (XENs) on the Lower Bari Doab to assist Mr. Stewart, who will be undertaking a journey on foot to research the history of the canal system.”

“I have explained this,” I added, “to His Excellency the Emir’s son, the Minister of Social Welfare, when he also gave me a letter of introduction.”

“From His Excellency Mir Wais?”

“Here.” I handed over the sheet of letterhead paper I had received from the Minister’s secretary. “Mr. Stewart is a medieval antiquary interested in the anthropology of Herat.”

“But it is not signed.”

“Mr. Yuzufi lost the signed copy.”

Yuzufi, who was staring at the ground, nodded slightly.

The two men talked together for a few minutes. I did not try to follow what they were saying. I noticed, however, that they were using Iranian—not Afghan—Persian. This and their clothes and their manner made me think they had spent a great deal of time with the Iranian intelligence services. I had been questioned by the Iranians, who seemed to suspect me of being a spy. I did not want to be questioned by them again.

The man in the stiff jacket said, “We will allow him to walk to Chaghcharan. But our gunmen will accompany him all the way.” Chaghcharan was halfway between Herat and Kabul and about a fortnight into my journey.

The villagers with whom I was hoping to stay would be terrified by a secret police escort. This was presumably the point. But why were they letting me do the journey at all when they could expel me? I wondered if they were looking for money. “Thank you so much for your concern for my security,” I said, “but I am quite happy to take the risk. I have walked alone across the other Asian countries without any problems.”

“You will take the escort,” said Yuzufi, interrupting for the first time. “That is nonnegotiable.”

“But I have introductions to the local commanders. I will be much safer with them than with Heratis.”

“You will go with our men,” he repeated.

“I cannot afford to pay for an escort. I have no money.”

“We were not expecting any money,” said the man in the stiff jacket.

“This is nonnegotiable,” repeated Yuzufi. His broad knee was now jigging up and down. “If you refuse this you will be expelled from the country. They want to know how many of their gunmen you are taking.”

“If it is compulsory, one.”

“Two . . . with weapons,” said the man in the dark suit, “and you will leave tomorrow.”

The two men stood up and left the room. They said good-bye to Yuzufi but not to me.

Copyright © Rory Stewart 2004
Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Rory Stewart

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work
should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact
or mailed to the following address:
Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

"Stupendous . . . an instant travel classic."—Entertainment Weekly

In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan—surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers’ floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion—a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following. Through these encounters—by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny—Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.

Rory Stewart has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and the London Review of Books, and is the author of The Prince of the Marshes. A former infantry officer, diplomat in Indonesia and Yugoslavia, and fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the British government for his services in Iraq. He now lives in Kabul, where he has established the Turquoise Mountain Foundation.

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

RORY STEWART is the best-selling author of The Places in Between and The Prince of the Marshes. A former director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and Ryan Professor of Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services in Iraq. He is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Penrith and The Border, a constituency in Northern Cumbria, where he lives with his wife. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Review

PRAISE FOR THE PLACES IN BETWEEN
"A striding, glorious book . . . Learned but gentle, tough but humane, Stewart . . . writes with a mystic’s appreciation of the natural world, a novelist’s sense of character and a comedian’s sense of timing . . . A flat-out masterpiece . . . The Places in Between is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true."—The New York Times Book Review "A splendid tale that is by turns wryly humorous, intensely observant, and humanely unsentimental."—Christian Science Monitor "Stupendous . . . an instant travel classic."—Entertainment Weekly "Stewart’s 36-day walk across Afghanistan, starting just weeks after the fall of the Taliban, sets a new standard for cool nerve and hot determination . . . His description of the landscapes he traverses makes you feel you’re accompanying him through a shifting, sculpted painting . . . Sublimely written."—The Seattle Times "Stunning . . . That he has written a remarkable memoir of his trek might contribute greatly not only to our reading pleasure, but to our understanding of Afghanistan in the 21st century . . . The Places in Between effectively depicts the spectacularly stark landscape, the utter poverty and the devastation of decades of war. But far more interesting are the men . . . Stewart met along the way." —The Plain Dealer

"A splendid tale that is by turns wryly humorous, intensely observant, and humanely unsentimental."
(Christian Science Monitor)

"Stupendous...an instant travel classic."
(Entertainment Weekly)

"Remarkable...Gripping account of a courageous journey, observed with a scholar's eye and a humanitarian's heart."
(Kirkus Reviews)

"Engaging and eminently readable...A masterly job."
(Library Journal)

"Sets a new standard for cool nerve and hot determination...Sublimely written."
(Seattle Times)

"A flat-out masterpiece...In very nearly every sense, too good to be true."
(The New York Times Book Review)

"Stunning...Contribute[s] greatly not only to our reading pleasure, but to our understanding of Afghanistan."
(The Plain Dealer)

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; First Edition (January 1, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0330486330
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0330486330
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.03 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #7,470,224 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #340 in Afghanistan Travel Guides
- #3,045 in General India Travel Guides
- #13,291 in Travel Writing Reference

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Rory Stewart has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and the London Review of Books, and is the author of The Places in Between. A former fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the British government for services in Iraq. He lives in Scotland.

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Xoanon

Absorbing read

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2024

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Set in 2002, this account of a walk across Afghanistan is an intriguing read. Village by village, the author shows us Afghan society with a close-up view - revealing its diverse cultures and local practices. It made me see how difficult it is to construct a single nation state from these (often traumatised) local communities. Fascinating and educating book.

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M. A. Krul

Following in Babur's footsteps

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2010

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"The Places in Between" is the chronicle of Rory Stewart's journey by foot from Herat to Kabul, accompanied by nothing else but the occasional villager or passing soldier and his local dog, named Babur. This is a fitting name because Stewart, who would later be appointed to an important government post in occupied Iraq ( The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq ), not only wants to explore the beautiful Afghan landscape but also study the traces of its history in the present. The original Babur was one of the few leaders in Afghan history who had united the whole territory and who considered it central to his empire, and he is particularly interesting because he left an autobiographical text which is remarkable for its honesty, its objectivity, and its insight into the norms of those days. With these two Baburs, knowledge of local language and customs, and a bag full of medication, Rory Stewart sets out to traverse the sublime deserts and snow-capped mountains of central Afghanistan.

The tale is very well written and makes for easy and highly compelling reading. It is a telling fact that he makes his journey, which consists in essence out of endlessly repeated harsh day marches from one village chief's tent to the next, interesting to people who have never even been near the area. Stewart is very nonjudgmental overall, probably in part because he is entirely reliant on the kindness of strangers (who are often as hostile as they are hospitable to travellers) in the classic manner of travel writing. The book sheds some light on the highly complicated chain of political and ethnic conflicts within Afghanistan - almost every Afghan male has fought in at least one, if not more, war in the country. It is clear that loyalties are usually not quite as clear-cut as one would like them to be in order to understand them: very often the same feudal lords who had opposed the Taliban later joined them, and sometimes Iran-supported islamists are the greatest enemies of local chieftains, and so forth. Stewart's book does not really delve into political analysis, but certainly shows 'ad oculos' what the real meaning of politics is in Afghanistan.

All this is not to say that Stewart is necessarily an entirely reliable guide. The American edition of the book indicates that Rick Loomis took pictures of him along the way, but having a cameraman along is not mentioned anywhere. Moreover, it is clear from the facts that Stewart has been in the British Army, knows Dari as well as local politics thoroughly, has been involved with the Kennedy School of Government and finally his later appointment as governor in the occupying government in Iraq, that it is highly likely that he is a spy of some sort. Given this fact, the fact that Stewart was allowed to undertake his trip at all is quite remarkable, and it does seem some strings were pulled to make it possible. Of course, he himself says nothing about this. The result in any case is an insightful and highly readable book that will appeal to anyone interested in Afghanistan.

4 people found this helpful

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Been around this block, several times over

I'm so glad someone else did it for me, 'cause now I can have it to use as I will without having had to go though it myself?

Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2014

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Whether making a journey, or writing a book, I guess that in our internet era there will always be people who feel compelled to pass some sort of harshly overdone judgment. Slightly less that 20% seemed moved to pan the book. Why?

The author does something most of his readers would most probably not-- first, he undertakes a most unusual journey, and then he takes the time to share something about his experiences with the rest of us. What the caustic and uncharitable naysayer reviewers seem to have missed is that, by the time the author has done these things, their comments become sort of besides the point. Are they saying that he should not have undertaken his journey? Are they saying that once he did make his journey, he should have kept his experiences to himself?

It was HIS journey, and it is HIS book. We, on the other hand, get to explore what there might be in it for us without having to do anything but to sit in our easy chairs and read. But some people seem rabidly enraged that he did not undergo the journey THEY thought he should have undergone . . . or written the book THEY thought he should have written. Yet the fact is that it was HIS book and HIS journey, and the only way the rest of us could possibly get anything out of it is by exercising some interest in HIS experiences as HE saw them, and as HE has chosen to write about them.

Now, I know (and, as a citizen of the world, I blush at such narrow-minded McCarthian anti-intellectualism) that Rush Limbaugh is calling upon all his listeners to advance the cause by giving a mere one or two stars and writing scathing reviews on Amazon for any books they consider to the left of Genghis Khan; and I can't help wondering how much of this books raging 20% detractors could have come from such readership. That may not have been exactly what all these reviewers had in mind, but that style of book-burning hyper-judgmental thinking (and its "Rush"-to-judgment hostilism) about a piece of literature sure sounds at lot like that loud-mouth's style. It is as if he and they have to pass emotionally overwraught judgment on everything and anything that crosses their awareness! Like the communists of old, such people end up in a take-no-prisoners war with culture. IN THEIR VIEW, NOBODY CAN GET IT AT LEAST WORTHWHILE RIGHT EXCEPT THEM. One almost suspects the workings of naked ENVY!!!! I can just see them asking themselves: How come Rory Stewart gets to be read and talked about, and nobody gives a damn about the rumblings inside my head?

Rory Stewart has written about the empty places between very empty spaces. Can't these nay-sayers bring themselves to believe that, from the perspective of our over-stimulated world, there could be people who have established what for us would be largely empty settlements in between long stretches of empty desert spaces? In fact, the emptiness to which they devote their life struggles to survive is what makes it so hard to reconcile their existences without our own cluttered, hording, and shopaholic life-style. As the author makes clear, at best we Westerners could visit such emptiness, but we would not likely get far trying to survive in it over the long haul.

So here's what I get from the book. I get the benefit of someone following the impulse to leave his world of plenty and visit a place where people make a living out of what to us might seem never having enough. And guess what? To them, they have enough in their emptiness to share a bit of it in their own way with this stranger who has arrived with no real purpose for being there. His own itinerant emptiness is sufficiently greater that theirs that they can make sense of his need for something to eat and a place to stay; hence the are willing to share with him some of the little they have in their relatively empty world. For the author to have shown up with anything more than his emptiness would have involved he and they sharing "stuff" with each other, and that would have made for a totally different book-- perhaps one on commerce and cultural exchange. But this author managed to enter their emptiness with so much emptiness of his own that they could not feel empty in his presence-- in other words, he had apparently made very few waves in that dry country!!!!

Think back of the Pacific Islanders, who were so traumatized by the chock full of "stuff" the WW II Americans who built air bases near their villages arrived with, that they became obsessed with having; hence, the natives developed a gripping Cargo Cult (where they prayed for and awaited the great bird in the sky to land on their island and open up its belly to become a bottomless cornucopia of "stuff").

Had the author of this book appeared anywhere near so Western, I dare say we might be hearing of his funeral rather than of his book. That's just what the Taliban fear: namely, that the indigenous populations that constitute the targets of their proselytizing will become irreversibly seduced out of their rigidly-adhered-to life-style of emptiness, a life-style of not having when compared to a Westerner's materialistic life of "good-and-plenty."

I think the emptiness of his voyage-- of which the book wreaks-- is the whole point of his narrative. As a clinician and social scientist, what I get out of this reading is exposure to how diverse diversity can actually be . . . and how diverse (in this case, "EMPTY" of stuff and of any recognizable ulterior motives, both of which I'm so used to expect as a Westerner) one must be to be "allowed" by those people to live even momentarily among them.

At bottom, these natives seem to be as rigidly judgmental (in a medieval kind of way) as Mr. Limbaugh and his crowd appear to me to be; and these natives would probably feel as compelled to pass as pointlessly harsh judgment on any foreigner or his collection of alien "stuff" as Rush would be of anything that deviated from his expectations. That's how travelers get robbed, off-ed, or decapitated by the natives they encounter along the way-- as any anthropological field worker will tell you. The first rule of field work: never . . . never . . . never try to show off how much more "stuff" the place where you came from has than does the place where you are doing field work (even if it's done innocently/thoughtlessly through the many things you might have brought with you for what you believed to be strictly a matter of your own private creature comforts). Field workers recognize how easily tempted and corrupted by the magnetism of "stuff" indigenous cultures can be, and they usually make it a habit to wisely bring as little of it as possible when they authentically seek the explore the way of life of others. Colonialists, on the other hand, have a very different purpose, and they use such dazzlement by "stuff" to immediately undermine those they would conquer.

So, in conclusion, relax and read the text as far and as long as it speaks to you at no direct cost to you(except for a few bucks for the book, but you can also get it free at the library); read it as a narrative about an emptiness those anxious 20%ers would probably not be able to take in terms of direct personal experience without getting very upset, angry, and rivalrous-- which, if you're a lone traveler in the Afghan mountains, could easily get you beheaded!!! It is the almost unbelievable survival tale of a strange guy on a strange trip to a strange place-- which can only serve to exercise our diversity muscles. Such an experience can never be riveting for everyone (and if you have ever read anthropological field monographs, it can often even be riveting to NO ONE) . . . and still such literature can be quite useful, and make a significant contribution to, any reader's personal development; however much one might have had to struggle to finish reading it. Than you.

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JLW

Sometimes difficult to read due to my poor geographical knowledge of Afghanistan.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 8, 2024

Verified Purchase

I've read another book of Rory's which was the reason for choosing this one. It was a remarkable journey, not least for the distance of 20miles (30km} plus often covered in a day.
I know very little about Afghanistan or any other Muslim country so learned a lot and clearly Afghanistan is not typical. The long history was apparent and the deep traditions of hospitality seemed to work for this traveller even when unpromising at first.
A few sketch maps would help the understanding standing of where he was { I read the book on Kindle}.
I'm glad I read this book.

Kindle Customer

Brilliant

Reviewed in Spain on September 3, 2023

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Beautifully written ,fascinating content ,a revelation ,his experience and his humility along side his walking with the dog ,unlike anything else .