© Michael Obert

At Kabul’s Bird Bazaar travel journalist Michael Obert experiences the unbelievable – he meets Osama bin Laden. He learns that by now in Afghanistan the synonym for all evil is “Guantanmo”. And finally Obert has to answer himself the question why he didn’t think of bringing a bathing trunks.

Perhaps it’s the silence that wakes me up the following morning. Friday, the Islamic Sunday. The traffic that normally rumbles by my window in the Mustafa, today produces only a soft murmur. In the blue morning sky, doves glide peacefully over the city. Then, something strange happens: As if in response to a hidden signal, a flock of forty, perhaps fifty birds makes an abrupt right turn toward the south. A split second later a dull boom jingles the crystals on the lampshade in my room.

When I arrive in the breakfast room, other hotel guests are crowded in front of the television. Breaking news: CNN shows rubble lying around, clouds of smoke rising. A suicide bomber has hurled himself into the middle of a convoy. In Kabul, Afghanistan. The doves, the boom – still, it seems as if the news is coming out of some far away place. It’s only then that I start to feel goose bumps crawl over me.

Later the same day, I meet Osama bin Laden. In the Bird Bazaar in Kabul, behind the Pul-e-Kishti Mosque, in a narrow side street, little more than a dirt road, crammed with the booths of traders: There are hundreds of cages, chirping at every pitch, the sharp smell of droppings. The ground is littered with grain and seed. Thrushes, canaries, and parakeets, favored for their songs, puff themselves up. Partridges and pigeons ruffle their feathers. Flies, dust, and down ride a current of oven-hot air through the bars of the cages out into the street.

A bird dealer offers me a budgie imported from Germany: a thousand afghanis for it, roughly twenty dollars. He sees that I’m not interested but invites me anyway into a cave-like back room for tea. “Allow me to introduce myself, I’m Osama bin Laden”, he says and points to a second man holding a finch between each of his fingers. “And this here, this is Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban.” They double over with laughter. The most wanted man in the world, who in Kabul is called simply “OBL”, pours me a tea and yells in the direction of the other bird dealers out in the street, “And all of them – al Qaida!” Big laughs. “They all belong to al-Quaida!” The birds join in.

Is this gallows humor? Sarcasm? Ridicule? Difficult to say. In Kabul, jokes about the protagonists of the crisis in Afghanistan are popular. As I’m leaving, the bird dealers inform me that in Dari and Pashtu, the two most important languages in Afghanistan, a new Spanish word has come into use of late: Anything that one perceives as horrible or unbearable is called “Guantanamo”.

© Michael Obert

Beneath an enormous pack of cigarettes with the slogan “Enjoy the taste of America!” I flag down a taxi and head out of the pulsing downtown into Western Kabul – into a completely different world. It’s quiet. Dead quiet. Whole districts, destroyed in the civil war by feuding Mujahidin, lie in ruins. Houses that have almost become stone and desert again remind me of an archeological dig.

On a hilltop above the field of rubble, the Darul Aman Palace once flaunted its neoclassical magnificence. Now it’s a shot at, bombed out, and burned up shell of its former glory. Afghanis in rags, despite the danger of landmines, rummage for anything usable. In an archway blackened with soot, emaciated youths shoot heroin into their arms with rusty needles. A young woman clings to life in the delirium of some horrific skin disease that eats away her face.

Not more than 10 minutes later, I have to ask myself, how, when I was packing for Kabul, did I somehow forget to think about swim trunks. On Street 4, in the part of the city called Qala-e-Fatullah I find myself in L’Atmosphére again, yet another of Kabul’s parallel worlds. The “Latmo” is, according to the brand new Lonely Planet, one of the most beloved international meeting places in the city, a place for the young and the beautiful, a place one simply has to have experienced as a visitor.

Next to a swimming pool in a secluded garden, foreign bathers are able to relax, laying their bulletproof vests aside, for a moment, next to tropical cocktails, sun creams, and the newest Vogue. Two American women glide through turquoise green water. French people slurp Pastis. Journalists sit in the shade of pomegranate trees, typing stories about the attack this morning in their laptops in swimming suits, occasionally sipping a gin and tonic… heavy explosion… sip… one dead, countless injured… sip… terror, al-Quaida, Taliban.

An army helicopter flies in from the west and circles around the pool, the only place in Afghanistan with a lot of half-naked women. The pilots prefer to cruise the Latmo on Friday, the Muslim Sunday, when the most beach babes are out. Afghanis? They have to remain outside. Because of the ban on alcohol for locals – so the owners claim.

Camping in Kabul, Part III: „Watch out, dude!“
Camping in Kabul, Part II: „Every hippie loved my super Payan Camping“
Camping in Kabul, Part I: Afghanistan – hot off the presses from Lonely Planet

Michael Obert, born in 1966, is a German book author and journalist who writes for Geo, Stern and other periodicals in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well for Courrier International (Paris), The Journal (New York) and Himal Southasian (Katmandu). He reports mainly from Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia, and has written books on the Islamic world. Obert currently lives in Berlin. „Camping in Kabul” was also published in his book „Die Ränder der Welt“.