Friday 9th March 2012 - last installment on first days in Afghanistan

Kabul, August 2002, was fantastic. You could feel the release of pressure following the departure of the black-bearded, black-turbanned Taliban. Music was everywhere; pirate copies of the most recent Hollywood and Bollywood movies on every corner. Aid agency 4x4s and armoured vehicles with confident gun-toting soldiers in wraparound sunglasses rushed through crowded street junctions. With my Afghan translator, Sami, I visited a restaurant called Khandahar. I had been warned there was no food in Afghanistan and told to bring powdered goods – and here I was eating the best kebab of my life. I admit some of the stares I attracted were hardly what you’d call friendly but I was too excited to care. At daybreak the next day, a blisteringly bright morning, I headed north. I had arranged to travel with a small UN convoy going to Bamiyan. I’ll never forget that drive – the landscape was breathtaking; the destruction from the centre of Kabul all the way to Bamiyan was endless and remarkable. Barely a building untouched. Barely a stretch of road without a rusting, upturned hunk of armoured vehicle. One small village through which the road passed had a broken-down tank in the middle of its main market street and no-one could move it. Most shocking of all were the endless red and white stones marking where one could or could not walk for fear of mines. Every so often, I would see in the middle of some vast field a group of three men on their hands and knees, poking a metal stick into the earth, slowly locating and dismantling mine after mine. You have to be desperately poor to want that job.

Nine hours, one flat tyre and one rushed kebab later and the bumpy gravel road led us into the valley of Bamiyan. It was worth every moment of spinal discomfort to get there. Even as I write this, I wish I was in Bamiyan gazing at the multi-coloured mountains, the dark greens of the fields and the piercing blue of the sky. I have travelled the world as a film-maker but few places are as beautiful. That made the destroyed tanks, the mines, the graves of fighters, the smashed houses, the shattered trees, the refugees living in caves, all the more distressing. Night was falling and I asked Sami where we were staying. “Oh”, he replied, “I haven’t organised that”. A night on the back seat of the 4x4 didn’t appeal so we set off to the compounds of the many Western NGOs (Non-Governmental Agencies) that reside in Bamiyan; it’s a popular spot because of its beauty and relative safety. We knocked on the metal gates of a British NGO – and were refused entry. A Japanese one: no. A Dutch one: no. It was dark now. “Sami”, I asked, “why don’t we ask the locals – I haven’t come all this way to mix with westerners anyway”. Sami, an experienced journalist and ex-Muhajaddin, took me to the local warlord’s house. Karim Khalili was no mere warlord either but the leader of the Hazara people and one of the most important politicians in this new Afghanistan. I was somewhat nervous in advance of our reception but it couldn’t have been warmer. We were ushered to his guesthouse without delay. It was a four-walled compound belonging to a family that had fled, like so many millions, to Pakistan. It was dark, we were famished and the meal we were offered was even more delicious as a result. Fresh bread, rice mixed with a few thin strips of meat and sultanas, once again washed down with warm Pepsi. I thought then, rightly as it turned out, that it wouldn’t be long before Coke made its way here. I crawled into my sleeping bag at exactly 10 o’clock when the generator was switched off and the compound shut down. The stars outside were like a wall-chart. Not one cloud, not one light on anywhere. As I stretched out, exhausted, exhilarated, a little frightened, little did I know that only hours later I would meet the subject of my film, a young boy with whom I would spend, one way or another, the next decade.

And so here I am dashing from one Australian city to another – showing on the one hand a film about Haydn and on the other showing or trying to show a film about that little boy that I met by pure chance ten years ago. Funny old world.