7-Day Afghanistan Cultural Tour with Bamiyan, Balkh and Band-e-Amir

Arrive in Kabul, a high city ringed by mountains, and transfer to the hotel for a briefing before your first afternoon in the capital with our local guide. Begin your introduction to the country at the Sakhi shrine, continue to the terraced Gardens of Babur, where the first Mughal emperor chose to be buried while looking out over the city, and climb Bibi Mahru hill for a long view across the rooftops as the light fades.

The road west climbs out of Kabul into the central highlands and the valley of Bamiyan, the heart of the Hazarajat. Here, two colossal Buddhas stood in their cliff niches from the 6th century until they were destroyed in 2001. The empty niches remain, immense and silent, while the surrounding rock is honeycombed with caves where monks once lived and painted. Above the valley stand the ruins of Shahr-e Gholghola, the City of Screams, sacked by Genghis Khan.

Set out on a full-day excursion to Band-e-Amir, Afghanistan's first national park, a couple of hours west of Bamiyan. Six lakes of a deep, improbable blue lie held back by natural dams of travertine, mineral walls built up grain by grain over tens of thousands of years, at 3,000 metres in the bare mountains. There is time to walk the rims, take in the colour against the rock, and understand why Afghans have made pilgrimages here for centuries before the drive back to Bamiyan.

Enjoy a long and spectacular drive north over the Hindu Kush to the plains of the north and Mazar-e-Sharif. The route runs through the Tashkurgan gorge and the 2-kilometre Salang tunnel, bored at 3,800 metres by Soviet engineers in the 1960s, and passes Takht-e Rostam near Samangan, a complete Buddhist monastery and stupa cut down into the rock of the hillside. It is a full day on the road, with the mountains for company.

The day belongs to the north. The Shrine of Hazrat Ali, the Blue Mosque, sits at the centre of Mazar-e-Sharif in a haze of turquoise tilework and white doves, the spiritual heart of the region. A short drive away lies Balkh, the Mother of Cities, once a capital of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism and the birthplace of Rumi. Among its ruined earthen walls stands the 9th-century No Gombad mosque, the oldest Islamic monument in the country.

A morning flight back to Kabul shortens the long road of the previous days to under an hour. The afternoon is for the old city on foot: the lanes of the bazaar, the restored quarter of Murad Khani, and the Koh Faroshi bird market, where men have traded songbirds and fighting partridges in the same alleys for generations. A final dinner in the capital rounds off the day.

The expedition closes with breakfast and a transfer to Kabul airport for onward flights, out over the ring of mountains that has guarded the city for three thousand years, with one of the great crossroads of Asia behind you.