Things to Do in Afghanistan in September

Six crater lakes in the western Hindu Kush, their water a shade of turquoise that looks chemically impossible until you understand the travertine dams, calcium carbonate barriers built up over millennia, that give them their color and their depth. The largest lake, Band-e Zulfiqar, stretches roughly 7 km (4.3 miles) and sits at 2,900 m (9,514 ft) altitude. September is likely your best month: the summer visitors (Afghan families, a handful of international aid workers) have thinned, the water holds its color from the summer sun, and the surrounding hills are beginning their turn from brown-gold to rust. The road from Bamiyan is unpaved and rough, budget a full day for the drive in and out. But the light in late afternoon when the cliffs go orange behind the blue water is the kind of thing that tends to recalibrate whatever you thought 'beautiful landscape' meant. Book through operators who know the Bamiyan road conditions in real time. This route can close with little warning after early autumn rains.

The two niches that once held the giant Buddha statues, blown up by the Taliban in March 2001, are now among the most haunting spots in Central Asia: two enormous cavities clawed into a cliff of red conglomerate. You only grasp their size when you stand at the foot and crane your neck. The bigger hollow once sheltered a figure 55 m high. The debris was never completely removed. All around, the rock face is peppered with monk cells dating from about the 2nd century CE; a few still carry scraps of red-and-blue mural paint. On the opposite side of the valley, the Ghorid citadel of Shahr-e Gholghola, called the City of Screams after Genghis Khan's 13th-century massacre, occupies a ridge above wheat fields with 360-degree views. September days hover around 20°C, good for walking, and the low morning light turns the cliff face every shade of ochre.

A slim corridor wedged between Tajikistan and Pakistan, widening into the Pamir plateau at its eastern end, is the most isolated reachable corner of Afghanistan, and arguably one of the most isolated reachable corners of the planet. The Wakhan River snakes along the valley floor. Above it, Kyrgyz herders still shift camps above 3,500 m in summer, yurts that an experienced crew can strike in twenty minutes. September is the final window before early snow blocks the high passes. The altitude, exposure, and total lack of rescue backup mean this is for seasoned trekkers who know exactly what they're doing, but the mix of river valley, Pamir peaks, and Kyrgyz communities living much as they did decades ago is unmatched. Expect to hear wind and your own boots. Little else.

Murad Khane is Kabul's old merchant quarter, a tight lattice of lanes where the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has been patching up courtyard houses since the early 2000s. The air smells of wood smoke and sun-dried fruit drifting from the bazaars. Upper floors almost meet overhead. Two kilometres southwest, Bagh-e Babur, the garden laid out by the first Mughal emperor in the 16th century, offers one of the city's few calm corners. Babur's white marble tomb sits in an open pavilion, the grounds stepping down in terraces toward the city. In September the last roses fade and pomegranate boughs sag with fruit. War stripped the garden in the 1990s. Restoration has brought back quiet, if not the 1970s look.

The Rawze-e Sharif, Shrine of Hazrat Ali, known as the Blue Mosque, is one of Central Asia's most striking buildings. Its tiles shift from turquoise to cobalt to lapis, appearing almost black at dawn and electric by mid-afternoon. Thousands of white doves have nested here for centuries. When the muezzin calls at first light their wings beat overhead like dry paper. Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan's fourth-largest city, has long been one of its more mixed centres: Uzbek, Hazara, Pashtun and Tajik food fill the bazaar, and the atmosphere is noticeably freer than Kabul's. September temperatures run a little warmer than the capital, the city sits at only 357 m, but summer's furnace has passed.

Herat has seen itself as a cultural capital since the Timurids turned it into a leading hub of Islamic art and architecture in the 1400s. The best proof is the Masjid-i-Jami, the Friday Mosque that builders have been tweaking for about eight centuries. Stand in the main iwans and the tiles slowly reveal themselves: cobalt, turquoise, white and gold locked into grids that keep subdividing, a geometry you only notice after a few quiet minutes. From the Ikhtiyaruddin Citadel you can look over the same rooftops Alexander's surveyors once mapped. The stone has been replaced and replaced again. But the view has watched the plain for two-and-a-half millennia. In September the carpet and metalwork lanes of the bazaar stay shady and comfortable, nothing like the 38 °C afternoons that can hit even at Herat's 964 m elevation.