7-Day Bamiyan, Band-e Amir & Mazar-i-Sharif

Arrival day is deliberately unhurried. Your guide meets you at the airport, settles you into the hotel, then walks you into the old city: the Shah-Do Shamshira Mosque by the river, the Kah Faroshi Bird Market where songbirds have been traded since Silk Road days, and the mausoleum of Timur Shah Durrani, the king who moved the capital here from Kandahar in 1776. You end on Wazir Akbar Khan Hill as the sun drops behind the mountains that ring the city. Overnight in Kabul at the Khyber Kabul.

You leave early for the five-to-six-hour drive over the Unai Pass into the Bamiyan valley — the switchbacks are relentless, so take motion-sickness tablets if you are prone. The afternoon covers the ruined Red City of Shahr-e Zuhak, the hilltop remains of Shahr-e Gholghola, and the Buddhist niches of the Kakrak Valley. Then comes the cliff itself: the two vast empty Buddha niches and the hundreds of monastic caves around them, carved between the 1st and 9th centuries CE by Buddhist pilgrims travelling from China, India and Central Asia. You finish with tea in one of the inhabited cave houses, sitting on cushions with a local family.

The day belongs to Band-e Amir, a 4WD run west from Bamiyan to six lakes the colour of cut turquoise, dammed by natural travertine walls. You cross the water by boat, visit the mosque and footprint shrine of Hazrat Ali beside Band-e Haibat, and take a long picnic lunch above the lakes. The park sits at 2,900 metres — go easy on the walking and keep drinking water. You are back in Bamiyan in time to poke around the market before dinner.

This is the tour's longest drive, eight to nine hours north, so you leave Bamiyan at first light. The reward comes at Samangan, where you break the journey at Takht-i Rustam — a complete Buddhist stupa of the 4th to 5th century CE carved downwards into solid bedrock rather than built up from it. The nearby Samangan cave bazaar offers a good leg-stretch before the final run down onto the northern plains. You arrive in Mazar-i-Sharif in the evening and check in at the Arsalan Mazar.

You start at the Shrine of Hazrat Ali, the Blue Mosque, its 15th-century Timurid tilework alive with white pigeons — women should bring a headscarf for shrine visits. Then it is a 40-kilometre drive to Balkh, the 'Mother of Cities': ancient Bactra, where Alexander the Great wintered in 328 BCE, where Rumi was born, and which Genghis Khan levelled in 1220. You walk the earthen ramparts of the Bala Hisar, see the Khwaja Abu Nasr Parsa Mosque, and stand inside the 9th-century No Gonbad Mosque, one of the oldest surviving mosques in the Islamic world. Back in Mazar the afternoon closes with the Baba Mazari Mausoleum and the city bazaar.

The return south is a seven-to-eight-hour drive, broken at Kholm to visit Bagh-e Jahan Nama, the walled royal pleasure garden. From there the road climbs into the Hindu Kush and through the Salang Tunnel at 3,400 metres, built by Soviet engineers in 1964 and still the main artery between northern Afghanistan and the capital. Keep a warm layer in your daypack — even in summer it is cold at the tunnel mouth. You reach Kabul in the evening for a final overnight.

A relaxed last morning covers the Shewaki Buddhist Stupa on the edge of the city, Bagh-e Babur with its terraced gardens and Babur's marble tomb, and the Id Gah Mosque. Your driver then delivers you to the airport in good time. Book your departure flight for 17:00 or later and allow three hours for check-in.