Really good book, would highly recommend to anyone. Rory Stewart is redicolosy hardcore and very lucky, there are a lot of places where he just could have so easily died, crossing a snowy pass alone where on the way he met some people brining back a half decayed body of am oldish man who had tried to do the same thing, pretending he was an Indonesian professor of history to the Taliban people at the end who said that the British dont come here cuz they know we will kill them, then at one point told he to go down to a river or something which he didn’t, then they laughed and said if he had he would have been killed (this was on the last day of the walk as well). Also the city of the turquoise mountain, that’s pretty crazy, so the Ghors were a mountain tribe around 1200s who conquered india. When another mountain tribe murdered the son of the king of the Ghors the king went to their capital, murdered all the men, burnt the city then made all the women and children climb to this really inaccessible place up in the proper mountains. They then killed everyone and mixed their blood with the soil to make bricks and build a city called the turquoise mountain which was the capital of their empire until it got destroyed by Genghis Kahn. The area could normally only support like 5 people. To get supplies to it they had a massive floating board walk on the river for hundreds of miles. The location of this city was unknown until around 7 months before rorys walk. The only surviving part was the minaret of Jam, a random tower in the middle of nowhere with scripture from the Koran written on it. The locals were digging up the remains of the city to sell destorying a lot of the archeological evidence, there was a lot still there as it was burned down but the UN refused to acknowledge it because of the war and didn’t step in until too late. Its really crazy stuff. Also support for the Taliban is pretty high in places they havent killed loads of people. The warloads that control the different tribes fight so much that pretty much any form of peace is good. There are a lot of different peoples up on the central route and they havent changed that much since the times of elphinstone. It must be a really interesting place to be. Rory was walking most days like 30km and surviving only on the hospitality of the random village folk, also he had dissentry for the second half of the walk.