The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Dressed in drab overalls with calloused hands that labour long into the night, Zia Hassan Faqiri is an unlikely bastion of Afghanistan’s hippy heyday.
Yet for 45 years the father of eight has fixed the hippy’s motor of choice: the once-ubiquitous Volkswagen Beetles and Combi vans that filled the overland routes from Europe to Kathmandu.
Today his mud-walled workshop in a residential part of Kabul is the closest Afghanistan has to a Volkswagen garage. A handpainted sign proclaims his name, his trade and the circular VW logo.
“When Zahir Shah was on the throne (before 1973) there were thousands of Folooks in Kabul,” he said, using the local corruption of the German word Volks, which has become synonymous with Beetle in modern Kabuli dialect.
“Now, in the whole of Afghanistan perhaps there are 100 or 200 Folooks. The foreigners brought them here from Europe. Every day we’d have 10 or 15 come to our workshop.”
The men, Mr Faqiri said, had long hair and the women wore miniskirts. “We had a lot of freedom,” he said. “Things were better then.”
Free love for Mr Faqiri meant a time when he was free to teach young Afghan women how to drive, sitting together in the front of his four-speed Beetle. “Most of them are now in America,” he said.
In the early 1960s demand for VW mechanics was so high that Mr Faqiri, now 60, worked at the city’s main workshop during the day and set up his own stall at night. He remembers driving along new roads to Kandahar in the south and Laghman in the east, now hotbeds of insurgency.
He even drove a Beetle to Bamiyan, 2,800m (9,200ft) above sea level, then home to Afghanistan’s 5th-century Buddhas that were later destroyed by the Taleban. The air over the mountain passes was so thin and the tracks so steep that some early Beetles had to go up in reverse to get power from the low-ratio gearing.
Back then, he said, the cars on Kabul’s streets were a mix of Russian Volgas, French Citroëns, German Mercedes and American Jeeps. The first car that he worked on was an English Land Rover that the owner had crashed in the newly opened Salang tunnel — at the time the longest and highest in the world — which connects Kabul with the country’s north through the Hindu Kush mountains.
The Times has a special interest in his workshop because Mr Faqiri is in charge of reconditioning a 1969 rust bucket recently purchased by this journalist. “People love these cars,” he said. “Some people keep them in their gardens just for show.”
