In 2002 Rory Stewart, author and former British diplomat, walked across Afghanistan. The country had been at war for 25 years, its government in place for just two weeks, there was no electricity, no TV, and nothing on the road between Herat and Kabul, Stewart's intended route.
The reason for this improbable tour was that he had just spent 16 months walking 40 km a day across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal. He had wanted to make every stop of the way, but the Taliban refused to allow him into Afghanistan, sections of which it then controlled, and so he had to leave it out. Now he wanted to complete his unlikely tour, and see "the places in between."
That was one reason, but he had another as well. As he later told a friend, he wanted to see the places between the deserts and the Himalayas, between Persian, Hellenic and Hindu cultures, between Islam and Buddhism. "I wanted to see where these cultures merged into one another."
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