Day 7 & Day 8 Jalalabad and Back

It is hard to talk about Jalalabad and not let the events of the journey back overshadow it, but I will try.

Jalalabad was lovely - warm, green, lush and very friendly. I met very interesting and experienced people who had been working for the same organisation for 20 years, providing safe water to Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan. I heard in detail all the work they did on drilling bore holes for pumps, using dry sand filtration to give people clean water, building reservoirs and lots of work on hygiene education. They also told me their gripes with the organisation: not paid enough, poor communication, slow to deliver materials; as well as what they liked - the quality of work, integrity and good leaders. This was all very useful for my mission to look at where admin is working and where it is not.

The Jalalabad office was a grand building - very oriental and wooden with my bedroom was on the top floor. I shared eating with the men, which involved sitting cross-legged on cushions with the food placed on mats for sharing round the room. As a guest I was loaded with food - fried fish, vegetable curry, rice, nan, beans, chips, fresh salad of mint and parsley and cucumber and never-ending green tea. Followed by local oranges and apples. This was so much nicer than eating by myself in Kabul.

I slept very heavily due to the food and warm weather. It even rained a bit which added to the fresh air.

I woke up in time for Sunday breakfast at 6.30 (Sunday is a working day) and had some more meetings before an early 'light' lunch of chicken, beans, nan, rice and chips. We then set back to Kabul for the expected 2 hour journey.

The 2-car convoy set off just after 11 and we expected a 2 hr journey. That was not going to happen.

Just after leaving Jalalabad we came across an enormous traffic jam as a very large US Army Convoy was on the road and blocking all traffic. This is the main road from Pakistan to Afghanistan which was already full of lorries and oil tankers. The journey I made down yesterday had been down very steep and winding mountain roads, cutting in and out of tunnels. So the same lorries on the way back were going to struggle up hill. After an hour we got past this convoy and speeded wildly ahead until... the next convoy. This looked serious, the road had simply ground to a halt. I received a text on my phone from the Security Officer

Attack on fuel tanker in the area Sarubi dist. kbl-jalalabad highway, puli astahkam area so staf is adviseded to avoid the area.

As we were already stuck on that highway in that area and had no chance of turning around or pulling over, and there wasn't another road to use we just had to plough on. Suddenly there was an explosion, I thought (hoped) it was thunder but my more experienced companions told me it was a shell. Everyone got out of their cars to have a look, apart from me.

At this point I was glad that I was wearing Afghan clothes, had a litlle woollen Afghan hat, had a 3-day beard and was sitting in the back of an old 4x4 with steamed up windows. I really did not want to be noticed in a crowd that was already pissed off that American convoys were taking over their road. So I sat still, locked the door and just rested. After over an hour the road was re-opened and we passed the remains of the tanker - it had burnt out but looked intact so I guess it was hit by bullets, not a bomb or shells. It was in a very narrow mountain pass so an easy target for any armed group. My more experienced colleague - a former mujahadein who had thought the Soviet soldiers in the 1980s pointed to various tell-tale signs of a gun battle.

After that progress was good and I returned to the more imminent danger of being in a car driven by a man who thinks a blind bend on a mountain pass is an excellent opportunity to overtake. We reached Kabul in the rain at 4.30. in one piece.

Looking back it was one of those days in your life when your chances of dying rose dramatically - whether through gunfire, being on the wrong end of an angry crowd or driving head-on to a similar madman who believes that car crashes happen when Allah wills it, his driving is irrelevant. The odds were much lower than normal, but still very much in my favour and in the favour of the tens of thousands of others making the same journey. Even so a day to forget and an experience to remember.