Tirin Kot Part 2: The Journey Is Half The Fun

Flying out of Kabul International Airport (KBL) is an interesting experience. Here's what happens when you drive up to KBL on a frigid January morning for a 7am flight to Tirin Kot:

1. You get out of your car about 500 meters away from the parking lot for the first search. At this checkpoint, you get out of the car for a pat-down by guards, who may or may not also search the car for explosives (it was 5:00 in the morning when we got to this point, so I was neither fully awake nor able to see everything going on, thanks to the lack of streetlights). After the pat-down, you walk up the sidewalk for a rather arbitrary distance until you meet their car again. Meanwhile, your driver (nobody drives by themselves in Kabul) also get out of the car for pat-downs, after which they get back in and drive up to meet you again.

2. Once you, now freezing cold, are reunited with your vehicles, your driver drives on until you reach a bizarre metal structure that looks something like a car wash. At this point, you part ways with your driver and, after another pat-down, you wait in line to enter a rather ramshackle-looking building. Inside the building, you are briefly relieved to see an x-ray machine, until you realize that it is not actually functional. You wait in line to have your bags searched by hand under the pale yellow light of a single, over-taxed light bulb, glorying in the body heat released by your fellow line-mates and calculating how much faster it would have been to do this whole process with the x-ray machine. After your duffel bag (but not your computer bag) has been cursorily searched, you head off to the terminal.

3. On the way to the terminal you enter a waiting area with a few of the sort of shops that you might expect to find in normal, First or Second World airports. Except that in KBL, these shops are tiny and closed when the airport opens. Compounding the indignity of being unable to get a decent (even by Afghan standards) breakfast, you discover that someone, in a flash of unspeakable genius, has decided to open both of the outside doors in this waiting room, such that the temperature inside is the same 25 degrees as it is outside. After scraping together what semblance of a breakfast you can find here, you hurriedly march on over to the main terminal building.

4. In front of the main terminal building, you wait in line to show your ticket to two guards who may or may not be literate, and who also may or may not get a chance to actually take a look at your ticket. Once past them, you are directed to a (functioning!) X-ray machine, where your bags are given the most cursory examination possible. You then find yourself at the domestic ticket counters--all five of them. Each one has a flight and destination listed on a board above it - three to Herat, one to Kandahar, and one to "TII," the IATA code for Tirin Kot, although nowhere is the city's name actually written (perhaps the airport authorities assume that you are either a Wikipedia addict or will just figure things out by process of elimination. Here you discover the most astonishing part of the entire endeavor. All you have to do is show a printout of an e-ticket to receive a boarding pass - YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY NEED TO SHOW AN ID TO GET YOUR BOARDING PASS. IN FACT, YOU ARE NOT ASKED FOR AN ID AT ANY POINT BETWEEN GETTING OUT OF YOUR VEHICLE AND BOARDING THE PLANE. What's more, the boarding pass you do receive is recycled from Kam Air Flight 014 (you are flying on Flight 119), which flies from Delhi to Kabul. You realize that Kam Air could not be bothered with indignities such as actually printing out boarding passes--this might require them to check IDs, after all--and as such, they have just crossed out the bits of information which are annoyingly irrelevant: the flight number, the routing, the date, the time, the gate; in short, just about the entire boarding pass. Shaking your head at the ineptitude on display, you line up for another screening.

5. After waiting in line and being subjected to something actually bearing more than a passing resemblance to a real airport screening, you collect your carry-on bags and head to the domestic gates. Except that you quickly realize that there is only one domestic gate, with only one gate area for people to sit in, despite the fact that there are five or six flights leaving at once.* The place is wall-to-wall people. Footsore from your dystopian oddysey, you ask the experienced Afghan traveling with you if there is a place to sit somewhere else. After arranging with a friend he ran into in the gate area to call you when your flight is announced**, you head up to the international boarding area to sit.

*The majority of the daily flights from KBL are scheduled to leave before 9am, for some reason known only to Allah--and I don't think he's in the revelation business anymore.

**Domestic flight announcements are not made in the international boarding area, providing yet one more piece of evidence that Afghanistan's national anthem really should be "With A Little Help From My Friends."***

***People here really do get by with a little help from their friends, and they do try with a little help from their friends. And they certainly get high with a little help from their friends.

6. Once you have been alerted to the announcement of your flight, you proceed back downstairs to the domestic area and fight your way through the crowd to the sliding glass door that leads out to the tarmac. After telling the guards there which flight you are on (remember, the boarding pass is clearly useless here, given that it says you are in Delhi at the moment), you are directed to an uninspiring bus, which will drive you to your airplane. You stop to wonder why the airplane is parked far enough away from the terminal to require a bus, since KBL is not exactly Heathrow in terms of aircraft movements, but you quickly return from your reverie and head to the bus. The bus ride is actually surprisingly short, but it ends in front of a similarly uninspiring Kam Air AN-24, a Russian-made propellor plane with about 12 rows of seats and, as you will discover to your dismay, an evidently non-functioning heater. But for the moment, you are blissfully ignorant of this fact.

7. And then you step into the plane, which you have been looking forward to all morning, since only the most incompetent of airlines would let a plane sit on the tarmac overnight in 25-degree weather and then not turn on the heater before letting the passengers board. As soon as you set foot in the plane, you reconsider that assertion, if only in the hope of reassuring yourself that the airline in whose hands your life will rest for the next 90 minutes is not really that bad. As you find your (unassigned) seat, you notice that the signs in the cabin are printed in Russian, while the safety card is written only in English; thankfully, you choose an exit row, which means that at least one person who will be responsible for facilitating a hypothetical evacuation is able to read the instructions for what they will have to do (how many Afghans know the word "depressurization"? Probably not many...). You try to put your (small) duffel bag onto the overhead rack (Antonov, the Russian company who brought you the aviation marvel in which you find yourself, apparently had no use for actual bins for carry-ons), only to discover that the space between the rack and the ceiling of the cabin is roughly eight inches, far too small for your bag. Under your seat it goes. The obligatory pre-flight announcement is delivered only in Pashto, but the cabin loudspeaker is so poor that even your Afghan colleague has no idea what was said.****

****When you ask your colleague what the announcement said, he replies that the only part that he understood was that the cruising altitude will be 3,500 meters. You nod and smile, then realize that 3,500 meters is well below the altitude required to clear the mountains that surround Kabul. Oops.

8. After making sure that your seatbelt is fastened and that your seat back is in its full upright and locked position, you sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight.

Tirin Kot Part 1

This is the first of what will likely be a series of posts about my five days in Tirin Kot (the capital of Uruzgan Province) this week. Given that I'm still there, this post will be short; those that follow will be longer. For the moment, though, I leave you with a list of what I have not seen in my almost 4 days here so far (remember, this is a provincial capital we're talking about):

1. A restaurant
2. A bank
3. A woman
4. People on the streets after 6:00pm
5. A book
6. A person not wearing a shalwar kameez
7. A streetlight (these do exist in Kabul, so I'm not setting my expectations *too* high)
8. Any evidence that there is municipal electricity (when the generator is turned off, the power immediately goes out)
9. Come to think of it, there don't appear to be any municipal services whatsoever. More on that in part 2...