The remains of twisted tanks, wrecked military vehicles and bits of metal whose purpose Mansur can only guess at, lie thrown around. A lonely man walks behind a plough. In the middle of his patch lies a large tank. He walks laboriously around it – it is too heavy to move.

The car drives fast over the pot-holed road. Mansur tries to spot his mother’s village. He has not been there since he was five or six. His finger constantly points to more ruins. There! There! But nothing distinguishes one village from another. The place where he visited his mother’s relatives as a little boy could be any one of these heaps of rubble. He remembers how he ran around on paths and fields. Now the plain is the most mined place in the world. Only the roads are safe. Children with bundles of firewood and women with buckets of water walk along the side of the road. They try to avoid the ditches where the mines might be. The car with the pilgrims passes a team of mine-clearers who systematically blow up or render the explosives harmless. A few metres are cleared each day.

Over the death traps the ditches are full of wild, dark-red, short-stemmed tulips. But the flowers must be admired at a distance. Picking them means risking blowing off an arm or a leg.

Akbar is having fun with a book published by the Afghan Tourist Organisation in 1967.

‘“Along the roads children sell chains of pink tulips”,’ he reads. ‘“In the spring cherries, apricots, almond and pear trees jostle for the attention of the traveller. A flowering spectacle follows the traveller all the way to Kabul ”.’ They laugh. This spring they spot a lone rebellious cherry tree or two that have survived bombs, rockets, a three-year drought and poisoned wells. But it’s doubtful whether anyone can find a mine-free path to the cherries. ‘“The local pottery is amongst the most beautiful in Afghanistan. We recommend you stop and take a look in the workshops along the road, where artisans make plates and vessels following centuries-old tradition”,’ Akbar reads.

‘Those traditions seem to have suffered,’ says Said, Akbar’s friend, who is driving the car. Not a single pottery workshop can be seen on the road up to the Salang Pass. They start to ascend. Mansur opens the third Coke, empties it and throws it elegantly out of the car. Better to litter a bomb crater than mess the car up. The road crawls up to the world’s highest mountain tunnel. It narrows; on one side the sheer mountain cliff, on the other running water, sometimes a waterfall, sometimes a stream. ‘“The Government has put trout out in the river. In a few years there will be a viable colony”,’ Akbar reads on. There are no trout in the river now. The Government has had other things on its mind than fish-farming in the years since the guide was written.

Burnt-out tanks lie in the most incredible places: down the valley side, in the river, tottering over a precipice, sideways, upside down or broken into many bits. Mansur quickly arrives at a hundred when he starts counting. The majority originate from the war against the Soviet Union, when the Red Army rolled in from the Central Soviet Republics in the north and thought they had the Afghans under control. The Russians soon fell victim to the Mujahedeen’s shrewd warfare. The Mujahedeen moved around the mountainside like goats. From afar, from the lookout posts in the mountains, they could spot the Russian tanks snailing along in the valley bottoms. Even with their homemade weapons the guerrillas were virtually invulnerable when laying an ambush. The soldiers were everywhere, disguised as goatherds, the Kalashnikov hidden under the goat’s belly. They could make surprise attacks whenever needed.

‘Under the bellies of long-haired goats you could even hide rocket launchers,’ Akbar relates, who has read everything available about the war against the Soviet Union.

Alexander the Great also struggled up these mountain roads. Having captured the area around Kabul he walked over the Hindu Kush on his way to central Asia on the other side of the Oxus river. ‘Alexander is supposed to have composed odes to the mountains, which “inspired mystic thoughts and eternal rest”.’ Akbar continues to recite from the Tourist Organisation guidebook.

‘The Government made plans for a ski centre here,’ he suddenly shouts and looks up at the steep mountainsides. ‘In 1967! As soon as the roads have been tarmacked it says!’

The roads were tarmacked, as promised by the Tourist Organisation. But not much is left of the tarmac. Plans for the ski centre remained on the drawing board.

‘That would have made for an explosive descent,’ Akbar laughs. ‘Or maybe the mines can be marked with slalom gates! Adventurous Travels! Or Afghan AdvenTours – for the world-weary.’

They all laugh. The tragic reality sometimes presents the appearance of a cartoon film, or rather a thriller. They visualise colourful snowboarders being blown to smithereens down the mountainside.

Tourism, once an important source of income for Afghanistan, belongs to a bygone era. They drive along what was once called ‘the hippie trail’. Here progressive and not so progressive youths came to enjoy beautiful scenery, a wild lifestyle and the cheapest hashish in the world. For the more experienced, opium. In the sixties and seventies several thousand hippies came to the mountain country every year, hired old Ladas and set off. Even women travelled alone around the mountain country. In those days bandits and highwaymen might attack them, but that only added to the thrill of the journey. Even the coup against Zahir Shah in 1973 failed to stem the flow. It was the Communist coup in 1978, and invasion the year after, which eventually put an end to the ‘hippie trailers’.

The three boys have been driving for a couple of hours when they catch up with the backlog of pilgrims. The queue is immovable. It has started to snow. Fog rolls in, the car starts to slide. Said is not carrying chains. ‘You don’t need chains with a four-wheel drive,’ he assures them.

An increasing number of cars start spinning in the deep, icy and snow-filled ruts. When one car stops they all stop. The road is too narrow to overtake. Today the traffic is all from south to north, from Kabul to Mazar. Next day it will be the opposite. The mountain road doesn’t have the capacity to take cars driving in both directions. The 450-kilometre road from Kabul to Mazar takes at least twelve hours to travel, sometimes twice or even four times as long.

‘Many of the cars that have been taken by snowstorms and avalanches are only dug out in the summer. Most of them disappear in the spring,’ Akbar teases.

They pass the bus that has caused the queue; it has been pushed right on to the side, while its passengers on their way to Ali’s tomb thumb lifts with cars that snail past. Mansur smiles when he sees what is written on the side of the bus: ‘“Hmbork-Frankfork-Landan-Kabal”,’ he reads, and shrieks with laughter when he sees the lettering on the windscreen: ‘Wellcam! Kaing of Road’ is written in fresh red paint. ‘What a regal tour,’ he screams. They do not pick up any passengers from the Kabal-express. Said, Mansur and Akbar are wrapped up in their own little world.

They drive into the first gallery – solid concrete pillars covered by a roof to protect the road from avalanches. But the galleries too are difficult to negotiate. Because they are open to the elements they are full of snow, which has blown in and turned to ice. Deep frozen ruts are a challenge to a car without chains.

The Salang tunnel, 3,400 metres above sea level, and the galleries, some of them up to 5,000 metres above sea level, were a gift to Afghanistan when the Soviet Union tried to turn the country into a satellite state. Work was started by Soviet engineers in 1956, and completed in 1964. The Russians also started tarmacking the first roads in the country in the fifties. During Zahir Shah’s reign Afghanistan was considered a friendly country. The liberal King was forced to turn to the Soviet Union, because neither the US nor Europe were interested in investing in his mountainous country. The King needed money and expertise and chose to ignore the fact that ties with the Communist superpower were becoming increasingly tighter.