Two of Us

We have two weeks to go.  This picture of us sitting at a street-side cafe is not from Afghanistan. 

Wingman

I managed to lean forward once without completely falling out to take a photo of the second Huey, the one that was flying a couple of seconds ahead of us.

Huey Close-Ups

 As I mentioned, Hueys fly low, and I had nothing else to do.  I have no idea what the first thing is, some sort of semi-destroyed kiln maybe.   The second is over a junk yard; I tried to get a shot of what must have been over a thousand rusted-out car shells, but the helicopter kept bouncing.  Finally, a bunch of trucks at a container depot.

More on Walls

 Here was another thing I don't believe I've seen before.  In a handful of the rectangular plots people had set up tents.  I don't know if this was because it was their plot but they weren't able to build the house yet, so the family was living in a tent; or perhaps these were squatters or nomads.  Did I mention Afghanistan was extremely poor?

First You Build a Wall

This was about as high as got, after we cleared the mountains; the land dropped below us and we didn't immediately adjust altitude.  This is something you see nearly everywhere here with Afghan rural residences.  First, you build the wall.  You always see these painstakingly laid out rectangles where the family compound will eventually be.  People build the walls before they even have the building materials or the money for the house.  So you find these empty rectangles lined by mud walls all over the country.  In the case of this village, given the complete absence of any buildings and the fact that there was nothing anywhere near it, I don't think it's a new settlement; I think it's an abandoned one.  The river bed looks completely dried out and filled with stones, too, so agricultural failure may have driven the entire village to re-locate.

More Huey Photos

 Look, when you're on an hour-long helo ride and the roar of the rotors is only drowned out by the wind whipping past your ears, and you're in the middle of nowhere so even if there weren't counter-measures activated, you'd get no cell phone coverage so you couldn't check your emails, but you do have a camera, you might as well take a bunch of pictures.  I don't recall seeing rocks like those in the bottom photo.  Usually the landscape is a variation of gray or brown, though the iron-rich mountains are clearly red, and you can see streaks of green minerals in others.  But I don't know what would make them white like this. 

Views from the Huey

 As I mentioned earlier, Hueys don't fly that high.  I shot these from the helicopter with my mediocre camera, not the one with the high shutter speed.  Probably half the pictures were too blurry to really use.  Also, every time the Huey caught an air current, which happened pretty frequently, it would dip or rise up so that your seat and your butt parted ways, and you were hoping you buckled the belt more or less correctly.  For purposes of photographs, that meant that I jerked the camera and now  have a dozen photos of either my feet or upper part of the helicopter frame.