It is taken below the snowy peaks the mountains of Hindu Kush appear bare, stony and poor in vegetation. It was hard to get there, it has tough winter, the temperature can be expected to drop 25/30 degrees below 0°C throughout the winter season. All roads are getting closed approximately up to 4 months. If there are some health problems, people have no choice just to be lucky not to die.
Band-e Amir was to become Afghanistan’s first national park in the 1960s, but due to the instability of the Kabul government at the time, this did not happen. In 2004, Band-e Amir was submitted for recognition as a World Heritage site. In 2008, Band-e Amir was finally declared Afghanistan’s first national park.
Many of the impoverished families living in the caves say they are too poor to live anywhere else even though the government insists that they are doing damage to an the area, near the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, which is a rare archaeological site. All are refugees who fled areas of fighting during the Taliban era, and have now returned from the other parts of Afghanistan. The cave dwellers are all Hazara, who are religiously and ethnically distinct and survivors of intense persecution by the Taliban.
Band-e Amir (Persian: بند امیر, meaning “Commander’s Dam”–a reference to the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali, the first imam of the Shia Muslims and the fourth Caliph of the Sunni Muslims)) refers to five lakes high in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Central Afghanistan at approximately 3000 meters elevation, west of the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan. They were created by the carbon dioxide rich water oozing out of the faults and fractures to deposit calcium carbonate precipitate in the form of travertine walls that today store the water of these lakes. wikipedia
The so called Red City (Shahr-i-Zahak) is located about 17 km from Bamiyan. The three-tiered Red City – a fortress of sun-dried red clay from the 3rd century BC - clings to a cliff 1,500 feet above above the entrance to the Bamiyan Valley. The Red City was never rebuilt after attack in 1221 and nowadays you can see only the ruins of the Red City.
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