Mazar-e-Sharif is just 30 kms across the river.  You can see Afghanistan through the barbed wire… barren, uninhabited brown land, the only living things dull green shrubs. In the distance sand dunes…

This morning, we flew 1 hour 40 minutes to Termez in the south of Uzbekistan. Not many tourists fancy coming here because it’s remote and too close to trouble. But we’ve come because of  the Archaeological Museum, ‘Fayaz Tepe’ – an Uzbek-Japanese excavation site of a 5th century Buddhist temple and the Mausoleum of the Sufi saint Al-Hakim al-Termizi.

To get here, we boarded a Soviet era propeller aircraft that had clearly seen better days. Zahid insisted we were fortunate – a couple of years earlier and we’d be boarding the kind of planes that require you to enter from the rear!

Termez airport was spanking new. But for some reason, when we got off the aircraft, we …