Emerging from more than thirty years of war and conflict, it’s perhaps hard to imagine any county with a recent past more traumatic and tumultuous than Afghanistan. Its unlikeliness as a viable travel destination today has been bolstered by the continued warnings of international agencies, while any journalist will tell you that the situation on the ground is far from ideal.
That said, Afghanistan’s wealth of supreme natural beauty have done well to bring it a little closer to the intrepid traveller’s fold in recent years, and the vast highlands at Koh-i-Baba and the Hindu Kush are once again slowly opening their doors to the most daring of hikers.
What’s more, the country is still home to a veritable array of different religious hotspots, from the somewhat emotional and culturally loaded ruins at Bamiyan (where the grand 6th century Buddha statues were destroyed so unceremoniously by the Taliban in 2001) to the azure façade of the Shrine of Hazrat Ali in the Islamic pilgrimage city of Mazar-i-Sharif.