Caravan of Kuchis

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00:00
George Gavrilis
This episode was recorded some weeks before the Taliban entered Kabul. A bit down the road, we will talk about the current situation of Afghanistan's museums and heritage sites. We know that many of you are wondering. For now, this episode provides essential context.

00:23
George Gavrilis
Imagine that your kids are older and they’re listening to this. What would you tell them if they’re sitting where I am and they’re listening to you speak this?

00:32
Laura Tedesco
I would thank them— thank them for participating in my professional life, in their way of just being mostly supportive, and even the little guilt trips, by being like, wow, Mom, that’s great, or have fun.

00:51
George Gavrilis
This is Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Today we are continuing on Laura's journey into Afghanistan. If you are new to this podcast, we recommend going back to start with Episode 1. For everyone else, welcome back. Let's jump in.

01:09
George Gavrilis
From a distance, it doesn't look like much. The ruins of the city fade into the parched yellow brown mountains. As you get closer, Mes Aynak reveals its vastness. In any other country, it would be a Top Ten tourist site. This ancient Buddhist city was at its height 1,500 years ago, thriving as its artisans and workers processed the natural copper deposits that were just below their feet. And for reasons we aren't yet sure about, it was abandoned and covered by years of dust and soil, until 2009, when French and Afghan archaeologists started to excavate the site.

01:44
George Gavrilis
Mes Aynak is wildly atmospheric. It's the kind of place many people might put on a bucket list. But it seems so far out of reach. Roads to the site are harassed by Taliban fighters. It's surrounded by tall fences to keep out looters, and it's also threatened by a modern-day Chinese mining investment. It's a sad dilemma for Afghanistan, a country that doesn't always have the luxury to both preserve its past and raise money to pay for its future. In this episode, Laurie, our archaeologist, takes us to Mes Aynak. She takes us there on mined roads, past caravans of nomads, and she explains what's at stake.

02:27
George Gavrilis
So, gosh, are you ready to start, Laurie?

02:30
Laura Tedesco
I think so. I've been in a grumpy mood all day.

02:32
George Gavrilis
Excellent.  

02:33
Laura Tedesco
I'm just saying that upfront.

02:35
George Gavrilis
Okay. We have a grumpy Monuments Woman before us. Laurie, why are you grumpy?

02:39
Laura Tedesco
I'm grumpy because someone requested to have a work call with me this morning and I blocked out an hour on my schedule. And while we were on the call, I think they were, like, renovating their garage at the same time as talking to me. And I was like, Look, if you've got something else to do, no big deal, but don't ask for an hour of my time and then multitask very loud activities at the same time you're talking to me. It just sort of set me off.

03:10
George Gavrilis
Well, you know, I don't know what Syrian refugees are complaining about. I know they didn't have the day you had. Right?

03:19
Laura Tedesco
Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Fair enough.

03:20
George Gavrilis
But we will get to Syria.

03:25
George Gavrilis
So today is the Mes Aynak episode. And this is gonna be exciting because this is a cool place. Mes Aynak is kind of like Pompeii, right, in terms of its size and its importance?

03:38
Laura Tedesco
So let's start with your analogy. You say Pompeii, that's great, because it evokes images for people right away. But I would say Mes Aynak is maybe five times bigger.

03:51
George Gavrilis
Wow. Okay.

03:53
Laura Tedesco
And at Mes Aynak you don't find bodies in mid-action having been suffocated by volcanic ash. You don't find that like you find at Pompeii. But what you find is also fascinating at Mes Aynak.

04:10
George Gavrilis
Why don't you start by telling us how Mes Aynak even became a thing that you did?

04:14
Laura Tedesco
So how did I get started working there? It was a matter of timing in that when I started working in Afghanistan in 2010, the awareness around what was going on at the site and the risks involved of what potentially could be lost culturally— were starting to get a lot of attention internationally, as well as the millions and millions of dollars of foreign investment that were also going into Mes Aynak.

04:48
Laura Tedesco
So there were these multiple factors happening concurrently, with major Chinese investment, international, other NATO countries looking at Mes Aynak from an archaeological and cultural standpoint. And then, we need to say at the outset, it's not only an enormous Buddhist archaeological site, it's co-located with the world's second largest copper deposit. And that's not an accidental co-location. The ancients were there for the same reason the Chinese were investing in copper in 2010.

05:30
George Gavrilis
If one visits Mes Aynak today, what would they see? What would it look like?

05:34
Laura Tedesco
You would see a rather rocky barren landscape that's mountainous, very hilly, and architecture that's about 1,500 years old exposed on the landscape that's been excavated over the years. You would see a camp of blue-roofed metal containers that house Chinese workers who reside there. I don't know if they're still living there now, but they were there. If it were the season for excavation, you would see lots of Afghan archaeologists and workers.

06:15
Laura Tedesco
You would also see on the landscape on the sides of the mountains, what looked like massive bulldozer scars, where the Russians had explored the copper deposits when Russia had invaded Afghanistan in the '80s. One of the reasons I think that the Russians were interested to occupy Afghanistan was for some of the wealth of raw materials.

06:40
Laura Tedesco
You would also see some vacant caves in the landscape. You would see piles and piles of what's called slag. That's the residue from when copper was processed. And that slag is very old— 1,500 years old— some people think it goes back to the Bronze Age, even thousands of years old. So if you were to go to the site, you'd see a lot of different things. It would depend on what did you really want to focus on, what interested you.

07:11
George Gavrilis
Tell me about your first trip there.

07:13
Laura Tedesco
That first trip took place in September of 2010. At that time, you could still drive around Afghanistan, and or you could drive around parts of it. Mes Aynak is located not very far from the city of Kabul, like as the crow flies, it's maybe, I don't know, 20 miles, maybe even less than that. But to travel on the roads, it takes a little longer than if you were to drive 20 miles around here, like the roads are maybe partly unpaved, or there's roadblocks or whatever.

07:47
Laura Tedesco
My first trip involved riding in an up-armored SUV with a couple of security guards and a colleague of mine from the Embassy, who was accompanying me. And you drive out to the outskirts of Kabul onto what's called the Logar Highway, because you're driving towards the province known as Logar. And you're passing villages and livestock markets and old citadels, etc.

08:11
Laura Tedesco
And then you get to a town in Logar, so I think about 20 miles away, and then you make a left turn onto a dirt road. And you're on that dirt road for what feels like a very long time, because it's worn out from rivers having flooded and half the road has fallen out or that there's no elbow or what's the word shoulder on the road. And on the day that we were driving …

08:35
George Gavrilis
Hehe, you said elbow…

08:36
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, did I say elbow?

08:37
George Gavrilis
Sorry, go on.

08:38
Laura Tedesco
It seems like elbow. The day we were going, though, for some reason, the security guards who were in charge of the security for the trip— they decided they wanted to take an alternate dirt road, which they had deemed in advance to be more safe. And it was just a dried up riverbed. I guess from a satellite image that they may have analyzed to determine this route, they maybe hadn't realized it was a dried up riverbed.

09:07
Laura Tedesco
Or maybe they did, I don't know. And it doesn't matter now. But so we're driving on what's an incredibly bumpy, rocky, plateau, and bouncing along. And I felt this anticipation, like what are we going to get to the site, I want to see the site, and I've been reading about it, when are we going to get there.

09:23
Laura Tedesco
And as we're driving at what was like seven miles per hour, I look over outside the car and I see this caravan of camels, and nomadic people who are called Kuchis, moving with their camels and all their worldly possessions, and there must have been 20 camels in a row. And people and children sitting on top of the camels and the camels are decked out with colorful bling. And there's like bamboo containers hitched on the camels.

09:57
Laura Tedesco
And in the containers I see chickens and goats and babies. And there's women sitting on some of the camels and people walking along. And I'd never in my life seen anything like this. And it was utterly fascinating. I felt lucky that we were driving so slow on this very bumpy riverbed that I could observe this caravan of Kuchis just 50 feet to the right of me, who paid no attention to the SUVs just to their left.   

10:30
Laura Tedesco
We finally approach— after what might have been 20 or 30 minutes on the riverbed, the archaeological site of Mes Aynak, only part of which had been excavated at that time. So no one at that time understood the extent of how enormous and important this economic center would have been almost two millennia ago.

10:53
Laura Tedesco
We were greeted there by some French archaeologists, and several Afghans. And as I approached the site, I remember feeling so excited, I couldn't wait to get out of the car. And I was like a kid, like waiting to get the ice cream cone or something. But I wasn't allowed to get out of the car until the security guard opened the door for me. You can't open the door yourself, they have to check it, and then they open the door for you.

11:21
Laura Tedesco
And I said something out loud that was utterly inappropriate. I don't even know why I said it. But I was so excited to be at the site. I was like, This is better than sex. 

11:34
George Gavrilis
[laughing uncontrollably]

11:38
Laura Tedesco
And the two security guards and my companion from the Embassy, I know they all heard me. I don't remember if they looked at me or not. But I was then immediately a little bit embarrassed, like, Oh, my God, why did I say that out loud? That's so goofy. Anyway…

11:53
George Gavrilis     
I think you've discovered a great motto for Afghanistan's travel ministry or tourism industry: "Afghanistan: better than sex".

12:01
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, let's see how that goes over. I wonder how that translates?

12:09
George Gavrilis
And it is somewhat related to the caravan of Kuchis. But we'll come back to that later.

12:17
Laura Tedesco
Visiting the site made tangible for me, in the moment, my genuine love of archaeology. And I felt absorbed in a sense of wonder and exploration and possibility that was all converging in this one visit. I've been to Mes Aynak a number of times, maybe 10 times in total. But for this first visit, it was just so full of excitement for me. The French archaeologists escorted us around what they had been excavating, and I had never seen anything like it before. It's standing stupas, and we can get to what a stupa is later.

12:57
George Gavrilis
Say it now. What's the stupa?

12:59
Laura Tedesco
There are different sizes. Some are small, say the size of a Cooper Mini, or some could be really big, like multi-storey buildings. They're often built on a rectangular raised platform, which you'd call a plinth, or you can just call it a platform. Usually it's a dome structure on top of the platform. And that dome structure represents a kind of place of veneration, where one would go to meditate or I call it circumambulate, to walk around it.

13:29
Laura Tedesco
Some stupas are said to have remains of the Buddha in them and those are very holy places for Buddhists, like in Kandy, Sri Lanka, that's one of them. At Mes Aynak, the stupas that I was seeing that particular day were, let's use the analogy, the size of a Cooper Mini, to the size of a two-storey townhouse in Arlington, Virginia. Just to give you a sense of what I'm talking about.

13:58
George Gavrilis
Why did you choose Arlington?

14:01
Laura Tedesco
I don't know. Because I think of Arlington and townhouses. Like lots of townhouses there.

14:05
George Gavrilis
[chuckles]

14:08
George Gavrilis
All right. So why were the French there?

14:10
Laura Tedesco
Haha. So the French were there at the request of the Afghan government. The French have been an archaeological presence in Afghanistan since the 1920s. Since 1922, precisely when the then King of Afghanistan gave the French government the sole concession to be the foreign archaeologists active in Afghanistan. And the agreement was whatever the French excavated, they could keep 50%, and Afghanistan would keep 50%.

14:44
George Gavrilis
It's a good deal.

14:45
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, not a bad deal. And the French have maintained that presence for the most part. There have been periods of absence during the Civil War and the Taliban years, but for about 100 years. So it was natural for the Afghan government to ask the French archaeologists, who was just really a team of two, to come help them excavate Mes Aynak to help preserve what was there before the Chinese started mining the copper.

15:14
George Gavrilis
Right. And that's a really important point that time was ticking because the Chinese weren't just gonna mine for copper near Mes Aynak or next to Mes Aynak. But they were going to have to raise and destroy the archaeological site to dig out the copper.

15:30
Laura Tedesco
Yes. So what I was looking at that particular day, the stupas that I described, they were sitting right on the mother lode of copper. And the idea was: excavate them, document them, and then they're going to be destroyed.

15:28
George Gavrilis
I wonder if you can paint a picture. What would Mes Aynak have looked like at its height, when people were living and working there?

15:52
Laura Tedesco
Some estimates are that Mes Aynak supported a population of as many as 70,000 people. And that's not just Buddhist monks and the keepers of these devotional locations. They were there doing industrial level copper extraction in the third, fourth, fifth century AD. And that copper was part of a much larger international network of economic transactions that was part of the Silk Road.

16:24
George Gavrilis
But in the 500s, how do you mine copper?

16:27
Laura Tedesco
Good question. I don't know how they did it. But they must have been doing it quite efficiently. And you can tell by the sheer quantities of slag, this copper processing residue that's accumulated on the site. So it was probably being mined at a very high level.

16:46
Laura Tedesco
My personal theory is that one of the reasons Mes Aynak was abandoned at some point, so maybe around 800 AD, is that the area had been so deforested from all the wood that was needed to smelt copper, that the industry could no longer be supported. And that explains the abandonment. Sometimes you'll hear stories of oh, Afghanistan converted to Islam and all the Buddhists were forced out. I'm like, No, I don't really think that's how it worked. There was a period of a couple hundred years where Islam and Buddhism coexisted just fine. But that's a topic for another time.

17:22
George Gavrilis
Yeah, you've said lots of interesting things. And one of them is about deforestation, because now when you look at the area as far as the eye can see, all you see are these dry, barren mountains. I mean, the place kind of looks like the Mojave Desert.

17:36
Laura Tedesco
It does. Yeah, it's very hard to find a tree within sight. You might find some fruit orchards in irrigated fields nearby, but fruit trees were definitely not the source of fuel for processing enormous quantities of copper on the Silk Road.

17:57
George Gavrilis
You told a funny story when we were chatting the other day aboual qt the Italian who broke a Buddha.

18:05
Laura Tedesco
Oh yeah ...

18:06
George Gavrilis
So what's that all about?

18:10
Laura Tedesco
Okay. So, sometime about a year later from this first visit we're talking about, I was accompanying four or five European journalists who the U.S. Embassy had invited to come to Afghanistan to do a tour of cultural heritage sites across Afghanistan. So these European journalists could report on this.

18:32
Laura Tedesco
One of the participants was this journalist from RAI, the Italian network. He was both a journalist and his own cameraman. And he didn't speak much English, so I didn't speak with him much during the course of a week together. And there was a Turkish journalist who was part of it. Anyway, it was this hodgepodge group.

18:51
Laura Tedesco
I watched the Italian in one of these rather small chapels where there were large standing Buddhas in very sharp relief against the wall. Not a lot of room to move around carefully and not bump into anything.

19:05
George Gavrilis
Yeah, ancient Buddhas...

19:06
Laura Tedesco
Oh yeah …

19:07
George Gavrilis
...from the period?

19:10
Laura Tedesco
From the period, ancient Buddhas— very fragile for how they were molded out of clay and straw. And they were painted. I watched the Italian journalist set up his tripod, and one of the legs of the tripod bumped the bottom portion of a robe. Each of the Buddhas was wearing a different kind of robe that was part of— they actually weren't Buddhas, they were Bodhisattvas. But I won't split hairs with you here, George.

19:34
George Gavrilis
No, no, let's split hairs. What's the difference? Because of the 10 people listening to this podcast, only eight might be Buddhist. So ...

19:42
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, so for the other two who are not Buddhists who might be listening to this podcast. A Bodhisattva is a spiritual figure who hasn't quite yet reached enlightenment. So it's on the way to becoming an enlightened Buddha. That's the best and most simplistic way that I can describe it.

20:04
George Gavrilis
Okay, but if that statue is 1,500 years old, it is still invaluable.

20:10
Laura Tedesco
Oh, yeah.

20:11
George Gavrilis
Enlightened or not.

20:13
Laura Tedesco
Enlightened or not, doesn't diminish.

20:15
George Gavrilis
The Italian did what to it?

20:16
Laura Tedesco
His tripod broke a not small chunk of the lower portion of this Bodhisattva's robe and leg. And he didn't think anybody saw him do it. He didn't realize that I watched him. He continued to film. Then he packed up his tripod as if nothing had happened and left the chapel.

20:36
George Gavrilis
What did you say?

20:36
Laura Tedesco
I couldn't talk to him because I don't speak Italian. He doesn't speak English. I told another person in charge of wrangling these European journalists. And they're like, well, what are we gonna do about it now? So...

20:49
George Gavrilis
Right, who sends the bill, and to where?

20:52
Laura Tedesco
Right.

20:53
George Gavrilis
Right?

20:54
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, exactly.

20:55
George Gavrilis
Wow.

20:56
Laura Tedesco
Who picks up the tab for that one?

20:57
George Gavrilis
Having said all that, this place is awash in statuary, right? I mean, you basically stretch your leg and you kick a statue in this place?

21:08
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, that's not that's a fair way to describe it. I mean, it's incredibly rich, archaeologically, historically. Mes Aynak fills in a whole chapter of history of the region that was only partially written before. When you start to excavate a place like Mes Aynak and you understand a bit about the economy of the place, and its attachment to copper, and where you can source the copper, and see where it was traveling on trade routes, what kind of agriculture would have been needed to support the population of the metal workers and the copper—

21:47
Laura Tedesco
When you start to really flesh out what was happening there for hundreds of years, you get a much more full picture of that time period. That's what archaeology can reveal. It's not just pot sherds and broken Bodhisattvas. Each of those has a portion of a story. When you put those little pieces of the story together, you get a much more full picture of history and culture and economy and social life.

22:16
George Gavrilis
It was, by all accounts, a stunningly advanced society, both in terms of the economy and how people were living, it sounds.

22:26
Laura Tedesco
I try not to make the qualifier of advanced or not advanced. It was the society that it was at the time, but it was very complex.

22:34
George Gavrilis
I get you, but what was happening in Europe in the 500s, there were millions of Europeans living on the continent in squalor, without any advanced manufacturing, some of them living in caves. And so, it wasn't a happy time in Europe. And it's really interesting that this was such an advanced pocket of civilization in this place.

22:55
Laura Tedesco
That's a great analogy you just made, trying to put it in a global context, what was happening in the 500s in China, in, in North Africa, in Central America? That's a great way to think about it.

23:09
George Gavrilis
But here's the thing about the site. We'll talk more about the splendor of it and the complexity of getting it out of the ground before it's destroyed. But the site has been in all sorts of risk before, including very recently. During the Taliban period, it was an Al-Qaeda camp.

23:29
Laura Tedesco
It was. Some of the caves I had mentioned earlier, when we were talking a few minutes ago about some of the vacant caves. And those caves were used as Al-Qaeda training camp for close combat. So it has quite a storied history, not just the Gandharan period of the third, fourth, fifth century. Yes.

23:54
George Gavrilis
Was there active Taliban during the time that you were visiting in the area?

23:59
Laura Tedesco
Yes. Would I have known them if I'd seen them? I probably wouldn't have. Could there have been some Taliban watching our visit? Probably. Did they know our big white up-armored SUVs on the dried up riverbed were not locals? Yeah. But it was, as I mentioned, you know, it was a safer time. Like we could drive. Maybe I drove a few times. But I remember going by helicopter far more frequently than driving, because helicopter was just simply safer.

24:33
George Gavrilis
Not just because of the potential of roadside attacks or kidnappings. But also because some of the side roads, especially these dry riverbeds were probably still mined. Right?

24:43
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, it's good that you mention that. So on the drive back, after visiting Mes Aynak that first day where it was so terrifically eye-opening for me, as we're leaving, the vehicles decided to retrace their steps on the way out on the dried up riverbed rather than take what's considered the proper road, which is an unpaved kind of goat path.

25:06
Laura Tedesco
So we're out on the dried up riverbed. And about midway through the trip out on the riverbed, our car stops, there's two vehicles, I'm sitting in one, and then there's another vehicle with us. And one of the security guards, he's like, we're going to have to get out of the car and you're going to have to move to the other car.

25:26
Laura Tedesco
Okay, you don't ask why, you do what you're told when the security guard tells you to do something like that's part of the deal. You don't argue; you do what they tell you. He says he's going to carry me to the other car and that I'm not to walk, but he'd carry me, because it had evidently become known to them through their earpieces, you know, they're wearing these little earpieces that are attached to a radio that someone can talk to them, that the dried up riverbed was still mined, it had not been de-mined.

25:59
George Gavrilis
[laughs]

26:00
Laura Tedesco
And that there was quite a risk. Fortunately, he was much bigger than me and very strong that he could lift my body and then move it to another car. I don't know why that was considered safer. I'm sure there was a logic to all of this. But I went into another car, and then we were driven back to Kabul. And everything turned out okay.

26:23
George Gavrilis
Have you stayed in touch with these guys?

26:24
Laura Tedesco
I have not. During that time period, this particular guard— he seemed to like going to the cultural sites. So whenever I had one of these site visits, he was one of the guys who would come along. He seemed genuinely curious. I don't know his real name. I only know his handle. And his handle was Bandit.

26:46
George Gavrilis
Great handle.

26:48
Laura Tedesco
I don't think I ever knew the name on his driver's license.

26:52
George Gavrilis
But wait a minute, you guys were driving on the mined riverbed-slash-road that the Kuchi caravan was drifting across. So the Kuchis were unaware that it was mined or it's just the risk of being a nomadic population in Afghanistan getting from one place to the other?

27:09
Laura Tedesco
That's a great question. I don't know what the Kuchis knew. I would be inclined to give them a lot of credit for knowing their landscape and their routes of movements.

27:20
George Gavrilis
Maybe you should tell our listeners who the Kuchis are.

27:23
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, why don't you go ahead?

27:25
George Gavrilis
Should we? I'm going to give you the extent of my knowledge. But the reason why I know is because one of the times I was in Afghanistan was to serve as a monitor or an observer. An observer—  monitor is a bad word when you talk about elections. And that's another story, too— was to serve as an observer for the parliamentary elections in 2009, the Wolesi Jirga elections.

27:34
George Gavrilis
When we were getting trained, we were seeing the lists of, or the numbers of polling stations all across the country by district where people would vote. What was fascinating is that there was this separate entry. And I was like, why is this separate entry for these Kuchis— like, what is that? They're like, Oh, these are nomadic people. And so we have reserved hundreds of polling stations that only they can go to. And so I was intrigued.

28:19
George Gavrilis
And so I learned a little bit more about them. I learned that it's this nomadic population that has traditionally gone back and forth across the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in recent years, as borders have become more closed, more insecure, many of them have decamped and have stayed permanently in Afghanistan.

28:39
George Gavrilis
Many of them have settled permanently, but the ones that continue to migrate, migrate internally within Afghanistan, and they're tremendously disadvantaged. I was looking up poverty rates. The national poverty line is something like 54–55%. But for the Kuchis, it's about 10 points higher. That's how bad it is. So about 64–65% of them live below the poverty line. It's pretty staggering.

29:05
George Gavrilis
And because these are largely nomadic populations, they keep animals. They hold the lion's share of the sheep and the goats and the small cows that people buy in Afghanistan. It's how they make their money. It's how they survive. And it's one of the things that makes them, despite their poverty, a little bit more secure when it comes to having food to eat.

29:24
George Gavrilis
But there's a lot of deprivation, and they're super poor. And I think that that's one of the reasons why they dress so beautifully and so colorfully because it is such a stark contrast with the poverty of their existence and some of the very barren landscapes that they have to live on.

29:42
George Gavrilis
When Kabul had its first polio case, after the fall of the Taliban, it was a young Kuchi girl that had contracted polio. And it was quite sad. Because, of course, it's going to be one of the poorest, most marginalized populations that get the polio case in a city where you otherwise don't have it. But that's the story of the Kuchis.

30:04
Laura Tedesco
Seeing the Kuchi caravan, I felt so lucky to be able to watch slowly. What were the camels wearing? How did the women look so colorful? Wait, that's a baby in a bamboo bassinet on top of a camel. Who thought of that? That's ingenious! Oh, there's chickens in the other one! Wow. Oh, my gosh, there's a goat. It was visually so fascinating. I still remember it quite well.

30:29
George Gavrilis
And quite the contrast too, because you have this population that constantly moves. And they're moving across or near this archaeological site, that is necessarily a place that doesn't move.

30:47
George Gavrilis
You've been listening to Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. To stay in touch, also follow us on Instagram, at the_monuments_woman. Join us next week when we dive deeper.

31:03
George Gavrilis
This show is produced by Christian D. Bruun and May Eleven Projects. It is recorded by Audivita Studios, and edited by Shaun Hettinger and Greg Williams. The theme song is This Love by Ariana Delawari, featuring Salar Nader.

Ep 7: Caravan of Kuchis — Mes Aynak, Part 1 of 3 

Topics Covered in this Episode 

Mes Aynak and Pompeii

Mes Aynak 2010

Mes Aynak today

First trip to Mes Aynak 2010, caravan of Kuchis

Meeting French archaeologists, "better than sex"

Love for archaeology

What's a stupa?

The French archaeologists

The Chinese mining copper

Mes Aynak at its height

The Italian journalist, buddhas vs. bodhisattvas

The significance of Mes Aynak

Al-Qaeda training camp

Mines, Bandit

The Kuchis, again

Recorded on June 11, 2021