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The Places in Between by Rory Stewart: book review



The Places in Between (2004, this edition 2014) is a travel memoir of Rory Stewart’s 2002 journey, on foot, in almost a straight line through the central Hindu Kush mountains, from Herat in western Afghanistan to its capital, Kabul, in the east. Stewart, from Scotland, had just walked for 16 months across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, so he was no novice.

The reason? Partly because it was his ‘missing section’ between Iran and Pakistan: ‘the place in between the deserts and the Himalayas, between Persian, Hellenic and Hindu culture, between Islam and Buddhism, between mystical and militant Islam. I wanted to see where these cultures merged into one another or touched the global world.’

Any travelogue is not only of the places, but of the people. In the previous two months, twelve foreign war correspondents had been killed in Afghanistan – but Stewart was a writer focusing on ‘history and culture’ he said when being introduced – and he was ‘armed’ with a knowledge of the language. The people he writes of include everyone from foreign reporters to foreign aid workers, from children to government officials, from Taliban commanders to poor villagers, to people who help him to those who try to deceive him. There were also many who laughed at the man crazy enough to put himself in danger.

Travelling by day and staying with local people to sleep, he had a habit of writing in his journal for two hours every night. ‘Every night, in over five hundred villages, I interviewed people about their possessions, communities, and history … My notebooks were filled with facts about places that I could rarely find again on the maps.’ In his notebook he also made sketches, which are included in the book.

He befriended a dog, whom he named Babur (meaning Tiger), after Afghanistan’s first emperor who also made the same journey on foot in medieval times. Dogs were not liked, and travelling with Babur made his journey more difficult.

The Places in Between is an easy-to-read account of Rory Stewart’s travel in Afghanistan, both insightful with historical narratives, and humorous with ideologies that Stewart finds confounding, in which each culture tries to understand the other. This edition concludes with an Afterword written in 2014. His journey of 36 days in 2002, was just after 25 years of civil war. It was also the year of my first work assignment in Afghanistan. My latest was this year – 2017. I agreed with much, but I expected a more in-depth account of his trek. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting read.







MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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