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There were seven of us tourists on the trip, six Brits and me, an American, accompanied by an Irish guide and a local fixer. We had met just a few days before at Kabul airport. The first thing we asked each other was "Did your friends and family say you were crazy for holidaying in Afghanistan?" "Of course," everyone said.

We were now heading north and west into the heart of Afghanistan. Our threeSUV convoy was travelling to Bamiyan, the valley that had once been home to the world's two largest standing Buddha statues.

We were off to see what remained of them and what had once been an important stop along the EastWest Silk Road.

In March 2001, Afghanistan's thenhead of state, the Taleban's Mullah Omar, ordered the destruction of the Buddha statues as "un-Islamic idolatry".

During the sixth century, they'd been sculpted into the sandstone cliffs overlooking the Bamiyan valley.

After the frustrated Taleban vandals found tanks too clumsy a means of destroying the huge statues, demolition experts and dynamite were brought in from Pakistan. It took a month to erase all remnants of the images.

Conveniently for us, the one safe route out of Kabul was the northerly one, in the direction of Bamiyan. A few kilometres beyond the city limits in any other direction and we were likely to cross into Talebancontrolled territory. 

We entered the Shomali Plain, known for its vineyards and fruit orchards. The scenes were out of the Bible: men in turbans, women covered head to foot, donkey carts and mud huts.

But the rusting hulks of old Soviet T62 tanks and armoured personnelcarriers reminded us this had been battlefield for most of the last decade.

Up ahead loomed the Hindu Kush. This mountain range is the central topographical fact of Afghanistan. It sprawls diagonally across the land from Pakistan towards Iran. The craggy, arid peaks make the war against the Taleban that much more difficult.

Bamiyan was up there somewhere.

"Those are French soldiers coming back from a patrol up north," said Colin, our Irish guide, as a hedgehoglike armoured car swooshed past.

We gassed up at a filling station with a large tank farm behind it, where armed guards strolled along catwalks looking out for terrorist attacks. Other than our SUVs and some other vehicles, the facility was the only new thing I saw after leaving Kabul. The place had the only clean public toilet I saw in Afghanistan.

We continued north until we reached a crossroads where a sign announced "Bamiyan 130".

"This will take us about eight hours", Colin announced. It didn't seem possible -130 kilometres in a new fourwheel drive taking eight hours?

But he was right: From that point on, the smooth highway, recently retarred at US taxpayers' expense, was replaced with a washedout mud track lined with pot holes.

Most of the time it felt like the car had square wheels. Gears gnashed and the chassis knocked against rocks. Duncoloured peaks streamed into the sky on either side.

Patches of greenery appeared. In these low, watered areas, people raise crops and livestock.

"We're in Hazarajat now," said Colin. "The Hazara are the majority population around here, as you'd expect from the name. Hazara is Persian for 'thousand'. The Hazara are said to be the descendants of the Mongol warriors who Genghis Khan left behind in the 1220s to look after his conquests."

The Hazara are distinctly Mongol in appearance, strikingly different from the majority Pashtuns who claim ancestry or the Persian Tajiks, the nextlargest ethnic group.

The Hazara are also adherents of Shia Islam, not the Sunni branch followed by most Afghanis. As a result, the Hazara have been mistreated and marginalised by other Afghanis at various times in history.

The Taleban were the cruellest oppressors. While they ruled from 1996 to 2001, the Hazara were subjected to ethnic cleansing and wholesale slaughter.

After bouncing along the track for most of the afternoon through a landscape of dusty desolation, punctuated by occasional mud village, we came to an abrupt halt.

"Breakdown up ahead," Colin said. "It might be awhile, but I hope not too long. We don't want to be driving at night."

"Is it dangerous at night?"

"There's no Taleban around here. It's the condition of this damned road - it's dangerous when you can see it, much less at night when you can't!"

From a security standpoint, we were in the safest part of the country. After their persecutions, the Hazara weren't likely to tolerate any Taleban sympathisers in their midst.

Three hours passed before a swarm of men wrestled the brokendown bus out of the way and we could move on.

Late that night we arrived at a small hotel perched on the edge of a cliff. We sat down to eat the same basic meal we'd eaten since arriving in the country for breakfast, lunch and dinner: rice pilaf topped with carrot slivers, onions and lumps of fatty lamb.

Early the next morning I woke and walked to edge of the overhang. The view across the green floor of the Bamiyan Valley to the nowempty Buddha niches shooed away any memory of yesterday's discomfort.

Straight ahead, on the far side of the valley's chasm, stood the gaping, 55metretall hole where the Vairocana Buddha, built in 554 AD, had stood for a millennium and a half - until seven years ago.

About a kilometre further along the cliff face was the second niche where the Sakyamuni Buddha had stood from 507 to 2001.

The Chinese traveller Xuanzang passed through the valley in the seventh century and described the idols as being covered with gold and jewels. He said Bamiyan was home to 10 monasteries and thousands of monks.

We walked along the foot of the cliff and looked up into the dark, cool, empty spaces. We followed a series of walkways cut alongside them and stooped to view the little, bunkerlike cells the monks had once occupied.

Japanese and Swiss groups are planning to rebuild both of the Buddha images. One niche had scaffolding stitched across it in anticipation.

But whether these ambitions bear fruit or not, Bamiyan - with its stunning views, the tolerant Hazara people and its calm, away from the fighting and strife afflicting the rest of Afghanistan - still seems a fitting monument to the Buddha's teachings.