Afghanistan

Kabul has come a long way since the Taliban's 2001 ouster. Once a stop on the old hippy trail to India, then ruined by the civil war, the city has boomed in recent years, with endless new buildings being thrown up, fancy restaurants, busy bazaars and an air thick with the sound of mobile phones. But scratch the surface and things aren't always so rosy – the infrastructure creaks, electricity and clean water remain an aspiration for too many, and the background thrum of security alerts and road barriers remind you that Kabul's path to reconstruction continues to be rocky. As an introduction to Afghanistan it's exciting, frustrating, inspiring and shocking in equal measure.

Once a place of Buddhist pilgrimage, Bamiyan is now more closely associated with the destruction visited on Afghanistan's culture by war. The two giant statues of the Buddha that once dominated the valley now lie in rubble, victims of the Taliban's iconoclastic rage. Despite this, the Bamiyan Valley remains one of the most beautiful (and stable) places in Afghanistan, and a must-see for any visitor. The valley was made a Unesco World Heritage site in 2003.

Bamiyan is a one-street town, dominated by sandstone cliffs that form the northern wall of the valley. The Buddha niches are visible from everywhere in Bamiyan; they are a short walk over the river from the town centre. Bamiyan sees heavy snow from November through to spring, and nights can be cold even in the height of summer. Take care with well-marked mined areas.

The first annual Bamiyan Silk Road Festival was held in July 2009, attracting many visitors with music, art and other cultural events.

One-time capital of the Timurid empire and seat of learning and the arts, Herat has flourished throughout history as a rich city-state, and been repeatedly fought over. The city is as much Persian as it is Afghan, and wears an air of independence as the country's old cultural heart.

Herat's place in history has often been overlooked in favour of Samarkand and Bukhara, but its inhabitants are proud of their past and the city's reputation as a place of culture. Many of Herat's historic monuments are in a sorry state, ruined by British and Russian invaders, but with its Friday Mosque the city still possesses one of Islam's great buildings. The insecurity of the Herat–Kandahar highway occasionally ripples back to disturb the city, while a long-term Iranian influence is never far from the surface.

North Afghanistan's biggest city, Mazar-e Sharif was long overshadowed by the power of its neighbour Balkh. It took a 12th-century mullah to change that. He claimed to have found the hidden tomb of Ali, the Prophet Mohammed's son-in-law, buried in a local village. Balkh declined and Mazar grew as a place of pilgrimage. Its shrine today is the focus of the national Nauroz (Navrus) celebrations, and is a great place to see buzkashi (a traditional polo-like game played with a headless goat carcass).

Afghanistan's Wakhan District is a narrow strip of land jutting eastwards 350km between Tajikistan and Pakistan to touch the Chinese border. It has two distinct parts – the Wakhan Corridor and the Afghan Pamir. The deep valley of the Wakhan Corridor is formed by the Panj River as it courses between the lofty mountains of Tajikistan to the north and the snowcapped Hindu Kush to the south. The Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Pamir Ranges converge in the Afghan Pamir, known in Persian as the Bam-e Dunya ('roof of the world'). Pamir, U-shaped, high-elevation valleys with lush seasonal meadows and vivid blue lakes, are renowned as summer grazing grounds, but lie snow-covered more than six months of the year.