Rory Stewart walks from Herat to Kabul in Afghanistan not long after the fall of the Taliban. He does the walk in the winter months, stopping off at the villages and towns along the way.
The book is much more about the people and places on the journey than about himself, he doesn’t go into much about why he’s doing this other than talking about retracing the steps of the first Mughal emperor Babur.
I knew almost nothing about the places, and found the description of the Minaret of Jam in particular fascinating. His encounters vary from being welcomed with food and shelter, to a particularly tense meeting with people from the Taliban. Some of the contrasting of his experiences with the out of touch state building were very eye opening.
I felt pretty uncomfortable with the amount of times he comes across as entitled to what little food and shelter these people have, despite the difficulty of the task he set himself.
Through a lot of the journey he was joined with a dog he met along the way that he’d named Babur, at one point making it pretty clear that the dog had stopped him giving up and drifting off in the deep snow.