Kabul Serena Hotel and The Reawakening of Afghanistan

Kabul Serena Hotel



Nat Geo Afghan Girl

It always amazes me when I hear about some new hotel under construction in a former war zone such as Afghanistan, but I was just pointed in that direction from an Afghan travel story in this week's New York Times.

A hotel company which chiefly specializes in African bush resorts is now building what looks like a three-star hotel in Kabul, due to open later this year or early 2006. What a trip.

Kabul Serena Hotel

The Reawakening
New York Times
By PAUL TOUGH
September 25, 2005

When you're looking for the perfect city to visit for a week or so, Kabul is probably not the first place that comes to mind. Travel to Afghanistan is firmly discouraged by the State Department, which warns prospective tourists about kidnapping, assassination, land mines and what the government's official advisory rather swashbucklingly refers to as "banditry." Even getting there can be risky: a Kam Air flight crashed into a mountain just southeast of Kabul in February, killing all 104 passengers. But Kabul was where I wanted to go.

Afghanistan has always seemed impossibly foreign and mysterious and beautiful to me. I remember looking at news photos from the war in 2001 and feeling as amazed by the landscapes in the background as by the violence in the foreground: rolling deserts that looked like the surface of the moon, snowcapped mountains that rose suddenly out of endless empty plains. Now, after 25 years of war, fundamentalism and occupation, Afghanistan was once again becoming a place where Westerners, if not exactly heroes, were at least said to be welcome guests.

In Kabul, luxury hotels were being constructed, quaint guesthouses remodeled, Internet cafes outfitted with milk frothers and wired with high-speed connections. If tourists were returning to Afghanistan, as rumored, I wanted to be one of them, to see the sixth-poorest country on the planet - what Tony Kushner, in his play "Homebody/Kabul," calls the country "so at the heart of the world the world's forgotten it."

My idea was to visit Kabul in the footsteps of intrepid 20th-century travelers like Bruce Chatwin, Eric Newby and Robert Byron, all of whom wrote stirringly about the city. But I wanted to do more than see the sights; I wanted to find out whether this alleged tourism boom was real. I wanted to talk to Afghanistan's travel visionaries, the optimistic souls who could look at bomb-ravaged sites and land-mined hiking trails and see tourist attractions just waiting to be born.

The Reawakening of Afghanistan