Afghanistan

Band-e-Amir, in the Hazarajat highlands at 2,900 metres, became Afghanistan's first national park in 2009. Six natural lakes — separated by travertine dams that the high carbonate content of the water has slowly built up over millennia — sit one above the other, their colour ranging from milky aquamarine to deep turquoise against red sandstone cliffs. Long considered one of the most singular natural panoramas in Central Asia, Band-e-Amir is one of the great destinations whose accessibility the political situation has put on hold.

The Bamiyan Valley (UNESCO World Heritage) was a major centre of Buddhist culture along the Silk Road for centuries. The two giant Buddhas — 55 and 38 metres tall, carved into sandstone cliffs in the sixth century — were destroyed in 2001; their empty niches, the surrounding monks' caves still bearing fragments of mural painting, and the ruined citadel of Shahr-e-Gholghola (the City of Screams, sacked by Genghis Khan in 1221) tell more than 1,500 years of layered history through Buddhism, Islam and the Mongol invasions.

The Minaret of Jam (UNESCO World Heritage) rises 65 metres from the floor of a remote gorge at the confluence of the Hari Rud and Jam rivers, built around 1190 by Sultan Ghiyath al-Din of the Ghurids. The intricate terracotta and turquoise glazed-tile inscriptions covering its surface — Quranic verses and geometric patterns — are considered a masterpiece of medieval Islamic architecture. Its inaccessibility, reachable only by mule track until very recently, has paradoxically helped preserve it.

Herat was one of the high points of the Islamic world in the fifteenth century, when Timurid rulers like Husain Bayqara and the poet Jami made it a centre of Persian art, calligraphy and miniature painting. The Friday Mosque (Masjid-e Jami) with its blue-tiled iwans, the Citadel of Alexander, and the surviving Mussallah minarets bear witness to that golden era. Until 2021, the old city, with its bazaars, caravanserais and traditional copper workshops, remained one of the most evocative urban landscapes in Central Asia.

The Wakhan Corridor — Afghanistan's narrow finger between Tajikistan and Pakistan — was Marco Polo's overland route into China in the late thirteenth century, and remained until recently one of Asia's most demanding trekking destinations. Visiting the semi-nomadic Kyrgyz communities of the High Pamir at 4,000 metres, glimpsing Marco Polo sheep (Ovis ammon polii) — whose horns are the largest of any wild sheep — and crossing the Hindu Kush passes was an experience of geographical and cultural intensity rarely matched anywhere on earth.

Kabul, at 1,800 metres and ringed by mountains, carries the layered history of its many rulers. The Babur Gardens (Bagh-e Babur) — laid out by the Mughal founder Babur in the early sixteenth century and his burial place — were carefully restored before 2021 and remain a defining urban green space. The National Museum of Afghanistan, despite the heavy losses of decades of conflict, still preserves treasures of the Bagram ivories and Greco-Bactrian coin collections that bear witness to the country's extraordinary historical crossroads.