We stood on the edge of the bluff, my father with his morning cup of instant coffee, and watched the light creep down the cliffs on the far side of Bamian Valley. It would be some time yet before the light reached the two giant Buddhas carved into the rock wall opposite, longer still before it reached the valley floor. For now, both the statues and the mud-walled town below were obscured in the murk of dawn shadow and smoke from early hearth fires.

Every few minutes an Afghan man on foot or bicycle would appear over the lip of the bluff and pass by our campsite. They were workers at the ramshackle hotel at the far end of the escarpment, coming up from town to start their day, and even though we'd been in Bamian for less than 48 hours, my father seemed to know all of them by name.

"Hey, Amin. You're up early," he'd call out in his broad Western drawl. "Mornin', Mohammed. Damned cold last night, wasn't it?"

That none of these men spoke English, nor my father a word of Pashtu, didn't seem a problem for anyone. To his incomprehensible greetings, the men would grin and shout back something equivalently incomprehensible, to which my father, evidently working off some inscrutable set of visual cues, would either laugh or give a hearty thumbs-up signal.

"You got that right, pal!" or "You can say that again!"

During one brief lull in all the banter, my father turned back to the view, took another sip of his coffee, and his face settled into a more somber expression. "So you really got your heart set on this, don't you?"

I nodded.

"This" was Band-i-Amir, a string of five pristine lakes improbably set in the high desert some 50 miles (80 kilometers) to the west of Bamian. For reasons I couldn't fully explain, even to myself, I'd been obsessed with going to the lakes ever since we'd arrived in Afghanistan a month earlier.

My father had never been as enthusiastic about the idea and had grown markedly less so in recent days...