This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.

... strong bonds are forged in high emotional temperatures.

With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology.

apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India.

Each human spirit is immortalfor time cannot destroy

Is this something else our age does - on the one hand make communication easier than ever before, while on the other hand widening the gulf between those who are 'developed' and those who are not?