RORY STEWART WALKED ACROSS WITH JUST A LAZY DOG (orofanity alert):

If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be the Taliban: Ride along as an international group of up-for-anything clients gets schooled on tourism's wildest frontier: Afghanistan. (Damon Tabor, 12/10, Outside)

In Mazar-e Sharif, which felt like the frontier town that it was, we quickly located a seedy expat café serving green $4 cans of Tuborg beer, likely trucked in illegally from Uzbekistan. A large TV blared CNN. A worn-looking blonde, a Western man with a shaved head, and a Maori security contractor with an oily perm and tattooed forearms were drinking at another table. They blew plumes of smoke and talked about an aid project. Our group had been reduced by two: Kent had flown back to Thailand from Kabul to run his two hotels. Valerie's camera was stolen in Herat and she'd flown back to Saskatoon without a word to anyone.

Hann hired two taxis the next morning and we drove to Haji Piyada, a stucco mosque that is the oldest in Afghanistan and now sits covered by what looks like an enormous protective carport. The building's caretaker, a bent-legged man with a long scar across his jaw, squatted in the dirt. Two Afghan policemen sat under a rough-looking shack by a stream. A field of marijuana plants grew nearby. We walked quietly through the mosque, and I asked Bithi what she thought of the journey.

"There is rise and fall of terrorists all the time," she said. "It's a kind of adventure to see one of the Taliban."

"What would you say if you met one?" I asked.

"As-Salamu Alaykum," she said, smiling a little wickedly. It's an Islamic greeting that means "Peace be upon you."

One of the policemen approached Bithi and spoke to her in Hindi. He was young-looking and wore a jaunty white scarf with his green uniform.

"He says the Taliban's attitude is to kill no matter who it is," she translated. "They want to have the pride that they have killed someone. They are very near, 10 to 15 kilometers." As we were leaving, she handed the proprietor 100 afghanis, which Hann protested was too much.

The next morning, Hann hired a rickety minibus to take us west to Andkhoy, a town near the border with Turkmenistan. Our driver was an Uzbek named Abdullah, and he drank black tea and smoked cheap cigarettes during the holy month, which made me trust him. Hann had never been to Andkhoy before, but he'd heard they had good carpets. From there we would drive to a village called Daulatabad, then return to Mazar-e Sharif through the Dasht-e Leili desert. This was the last, and potentially worst, leg of the trip. A one-eyed taxi driver had warned Hann that Daulatabad was teeming with Taliban.

On the outskirts of Mazar, a graveyard of T-62 Russian tanks and Katyusha rocket launchers sat by the road. Goats lounged in the shade of a gas pipeline. Off to the right, a road led to Qala-e Jangi, a sprawling 19th-century military fortress and the site of a seven-day prison uprising led by the Taliban in November 2001. Earlier, Peter and I had taken a side trip there, tried unsuccessfully to bribe the guard to let us in, and were then passed off to Jeff and Stan, two cops from Texas who were helping train Afghan police at a nearby military base. "Maaannn," Stan had said, looking concerned when I told him we were tourists.

"Y'all be careful. It's like the fucking Wild West out there," Jeff said, scribbling our names on the back of a business card in case something happened.

At midday, we drove into Daulatabad, a small village with tree-lined streets crowded with donkey carts and kaleidoscopically painted, three-wheeled rickshaws. Abdullah parked on a side street. The plan was to quickly explore the town, then return to the bus. I followed Hann, Sue, Peter, and Cameron into a market of crowded stalls selling tools, shoes, and scraps of cloth. A young boy led a camel caravan through the street. Another boy laughed at my shalwar kameez and called me farangi, or "foreigner." I trailed Hann down an alley and into a courtyard filled with wood. Afghan men, squatting in the dirt, turned and stared.

"I think we better go back," Hann said, after walking quickly through the courtyard. Back at the minibus, a crowd had gathered around the vehicle and Abdullah was discussing our route through the desert with several men. "Too dangerous, not safe, Taliban," one of them said.

Hann had climbed into the passenger seat and turned around to look at us. "Who's up for going through the desert?" he asked. "He says that it's not a problem for him but could be a problem for us."

"I think it's up to the driver," Sue said.

"We go back to Andkhoy then," Peter said.

"I was trying to find rare carpets just to have a look, but nobody seems to know where they are," Hann muttered. He looked unhappy to be retreating again.

Tactically, our vacation had begun to feel similar to a military raid—rush in and rush out—and it was both exhilarating and unsatisfying. You were trying to be a tourist in a place that didn't allow for it. You could strike up a conversation with a shopkeeper, but he might be a Taliban informant. You could wander down some beckoning side street, but you might not be seen again. It was the central paradox of a Hann trip: we were in Afghanistan, but the country still felt just out of reach.