Kabul, Afghanistan The making of an antique rug

It was May or June of 2009.  I rode in another Toyota Corolla.  We were on our way to do some shopping.  We also needed to download some files online.  The connection at our office just wasn’t fast enough for what we needed to do.

All the foreigners I know in Kabul ride around in Big Black Suburbans (military contractors) or Big White Suburbans (NGOs).  Me, I’m always in some beat up old gray colored Toyota.  But I think it makes my life more interesting this way.

As always when I’m out in public in Afghanistan, I had on an Afghan style hat.  I was slouched low in the seat, so I wasn’t easily visible from outside.  For a small city, Kabul has some terrible traffic problems. 

From what I could see, the congestion was caused by various embassies and other big government compounds whose security forces closed off the roads that at one time passed by those compounds.  This indiscriminate closing of roads has left parts of central Kabul heavily congested.

To avoid some of this traffic congestion, our driver used side roads.  On one of these unpaved dirt roads a large reddish brown rug lay in the middle of the road.  All the cars and trucks just drove over it.  Big puffs of dust billowed from beneath the rug with each passing car.

I couldn’t understand why someone would throw a seemingly new rug into the road.

My friends laughed when I asked them why the rug was there.  “Keith, my friend, they are making an antique Afghan rug there.” 

I joined the laughter, thinking this was a lot like the Chinese sculptors who bury swords in the earth to make them into antiques.

Author Bio:

Keith Jones is the founder of Baja Jones Adventures, Jones Adventures, Tigress Tours in Thailand and Butanding Tours in the Philippine Islands and has led thousands of people to Mexico and other interesting locations around the world. He specializes in gray whale tour, blue whale tour, gray and blue whale combo tour, giant panda bear tour, walk a tiger tour, shark tour, African safari tour, African gorilla trek, arctic narwhal tour and Magdalena Bay whale watching tour. He also writes about Baja travel and gray whales. Keith Jones is the author of Gray Whales My Twenty Years of Discovery.