10-Day Grand Afghanistan Group Tour

Landing in Kabul — a city 3,500 years old and 1,800 metres up — you meet your founder-guide and the rest of the group at the hotel. The first afternoon visits the Sakhi Shrine, one of the city's great Friday pilgrimage sites, then the Kah Faroshi Bird Market and the mausoleum of Timur Shah Durrani. Take the first evening easy and drink plenty of water; the altitude asks for a gentle start.

A morning flight brings the group to Herat. The Friday Mosque is the afternoon's centrepiece — first built in the 12th century and continuously enlarged and retiled ever since, so you are reading eight centuries of decoration in one courtyard. You also climb through Qala Ikhtyaruddin, a citadel with more than 3,000 years of history that served as a military barracks until 2005, when it was handed to the Archaeological Institute of Afghanistan. Overnight in Herat.

The morning is for Gazurgah, the shrine of the Sufi mystic Khwaja Abdullah Ansari (1006–1088), completed under Shah Rukh in the early 15th century and still an active place of pilgrimage — bring a headscarf and dress modestly. After the flight back to Kabul, the day ends with sunset from Wazir Akbar Khan Hill.

This is the longest travel day of the tour, seven to eight hours including the Ghazni visit, and it starts early — have your bag packed the night before. Ghazni was the capital of the Ghaznavid Empire, which between 977 and 1186 ruled from eastern Iran to northern India, and the minaret of Mas'ud III is counted among the finest Seljuk-era brick decoration anywhere. You also see the Soviet tanks and aircraft left after 1989 at the Military Open Air Museum before the mountain road carries you on to Bamiyan for the night.

A full day on foot in the Bamiyan valley at 2,550 metres — the first three days of the tour double as acclimatisation, so most people find the walking comfortable by now. The cliff holds hundreds of monastic caves carved between the 1st and 9th centuries CE around the two vast niches whose Buddhas stood until March 2001. You also climb Shahr-e Gholghola, the city Genghis Khan destroyed in 1221, for the best panorama in the valley. Good walking shoes matter more today than on any other day.

The group spends the day at Band-e Amir, Afghanistan's first national park, declared in 2009, where six lakes sit behind natural travertine dams at 2,900 metres. At Band-e Haibat, the grandest of them, legend holds that Hazrat Ali created the dams with a blow of his sword. There is a boat crossing, a visit to the lakeside shrine, and a picnic lunch before the return to Bamiyan.

The long drive north to Mazar-i-Sharif is broken at Samangan by Takht-i Rustam, a stupa of the 4th to 5th century CE cut downward into solid bedrock and ringed by a circular trench — the name, 'Throne of Rustam', reached it through the local Zoroastrian population's devotion to the Persian hero. You reach Mazar in the evening after eight to nine hours on the road. Load up on snacks and water before departure; lunch stops are simple on this stretch.

After a morning at the Blue Mosque you drive out to Balkh — ancient Bactra, a city with 4,000 years behind it. Alexander the Great wintered here in 328 BCE and married Roxana in its citadel; tradition claims it as Zoroaster's birthplace, and it is the documented birthplace of Rumi. You walk the ruins left by Genghis Khan's destruction of 1220 and stand in the 9th-century No Gonbad Mosque, one of the oldest in the Islamic world. A headscarf is needed at the shrine, and small afghani notes are useful in the Mazar bazaar afterwards.

The return to Kabul takes seven to eight hours including the stop at Kholm, where you walk the royal pleasure garden of Bagh-e Jahan Nama. The road then climbs to the Salang Tunnel, driven through the Hindu Kush at 3,400 metres by Soviet engineers in 1964 — in winter this crossing runs slower, which the itinerary allows for. Evening arrival in Kabul for the final night.

Before the airport, the group visits the Shewaki Buddhist Stupa, a Kushan monument of the 2nd to 4th centuries CE, and Bagh-e Babur, the garden laid out before 1530 where Babur's tomb lies under an open marble canopy. Then it is the transfer to the airport and farewells. Book your outbound flight for the afternoon so you can enjoy the morning without watching the clock.