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Gandamack Lodge Kabul, Afghanistan |
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Home – History
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– Contact Us Post your comments REVIEWS Gandamack Lodge has featured in a number of articles and
diary pieces by visiting journalists and authors. You can publish your own
comments on our Bulletin
Board. Here is just a small selection of extracts from pieces in
The Spectator, The Times, The New York Times and others. Peter Oborne's Diary - Kabul, The
Spectator, 2003 The place to
stay in Kabul is beyond a doubt the Gandamack Lodge. It would be idle to
pretend that it possesses all the creature comforts of the Paris Ritz, but it
is far more interesting. Until the fall of the Taleban,
Osama bin Laden used it as home for his fourth wife and family. They all left
suddenly in the middle of the night, and there is still an angry landlord
next door who claims to be owed $500 in back rent by the bin Ladens. After their departure the property was acquired
by the war cameraman Peter Jouvenal, a legendary
Kabul figure. Jouvenal’s many interests include
collecting rusty weaponry — the room next to mine has an impressive arsenal
of old guns, while propped up in the front hall there is an enormous
single-barrelled Holland & Holland elephant gun. Picked up by Jouvenal in north Pakistan, it is soon to go for auction
in New York, estimated value $60,000. I suggested there was a danger that
someone might pinch this valuable item, but was assured that the thief
‘wouldn’t get through the front door’. After taking a look at the
machinegun-toting guards at the entrance to the guesthouse, I felt no desire
to test the proposition. The Kabul Express, Outside Magazine, 2003 THE
GANDAMACK LODGE, in Kabul, was full of excellent loot. The proprietor, a
veteran British cameraman named Peter Jouvenal, had
just returned from Iraq, carrying a carpet from one of Saddam's palaces over
his shoulder. His gun collection had also expanded, as his regular dealers
delivered an armory of loosely stacked trophies to
the Victorian manor's front hall. One hot noon, I found the bathroom blocked
by a dozen Americans in tan vests and army boots—a grinning Special Forces
A-Team—busily racking imaginary rounds on ancient Czech Mausers
and vintage Lee Enfields. Anthony Loyd, The Times, 2004 Mr Jouvenal, a
legendary figure among the small wartime media community on account of his
daring exploits during the era of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,
served in the British Army before embarking on his media career. He traded in his cameras to open the
Gandamack Lodge guesthouse in Kabul in 2002. Named after the residence of
George MacDonald Fraser’s fictional Victorian anti-hero Harry Flashman, the building was formerly home to one of Osama
bin Laden’s wives, and has since become the
favoured haunt of Afghan journalists. Kaboom Town, October 2005 It’s election
time in Kabul and a motley assortment of carpet-baggers, do-gooders and
telephone salesmen are gathering for the big day. Eric Ellis reports. IT’S FRIDAY MORNING AROUND the breakfast table of the Gandamack Lodge
in Kabul, and I’m worrying about the prospects for Afghan democracy. Tucking into greasy eggs is Ed, an American election official with a
combover as unwieldy as Afghanistan’s politics. As Ed loudly tells it, he has
just sorted out Iraq and now he’s deeply important to the preparations for
Afghanistan’s first presidential election on October 9, a poll which –
despite the sudden appearance of 17 opponents – Washington’s man, Hamid
Karzai, is expected to walk away with. Ed is setting his fellow breakfasters straight on local history, in
one of Kabul’s grander homes recast as a $US150 ($212) a night B&B with
strategically placed copies of Country Life and The Spectator strewn among
ancient guns and Afghan memorabilia for that elusive colonial pile feel. “You know, they signed the Treaty of Gandamack in this very room,” Ed
offers breathlessly, and we nod with due solemnity. “This is living history,
you know, the Great Game and all that.” (Evoking the Great Game is an old chestnut trotted out by
five-minute-old Afghanistan experts to illustrate 1. the region’s
geopolitical significance; 2. their suddenly acquired knowledge of it; and 3.
how it relates to 9/11, the reason Kabul suddenly became Asia’s latest
boomtown, and why we’re all here.) But Combover Ed clearly hasn’t read the Scottish writer George
MacDonald Fraser and his Boys’ Own tales of Sir Harry Flashman, the Zelig of
British history, the made-up version. Fraser placed Flashman in colonial
conquests from Abyssinia to the Zulus, and of course the first Afghan war.
The Gandamack – set up by BBC cameraman and obvious Fraser aficionado Peter
Jouvenal – is an ironic tribute to the fictional Flashman. The 40-year-old house fizzes with his derring-dos and don’ts, total
nonsense of course, but entertaining nevertheless. And lost on Ed, who loves
that he’s staying in “one of the great houses of colonial history”. The Gandamack is the place to be in Kabul, the preferred digs of
Bright Young Media Things from London, deputy assistant producers called
Caroline and Emma and Simon and Jeremy just down from Oxbridge. Two were at
brekkie the other day, Arab keffiyehs (er, very wrong country) fashionably
slung around their shoulders as they argued in cut-glass accents about their
Thuraya satphones, the foreigner-in-Kabul’s accessory de rigeur. A CBS-TV
crew waits and plays cards, waits and plays some more. They’re some of the many hacks on Osama Watch, just in case George W.
Bush gets lucky before the US elections in November and actually bags OBL.
Osama bin Laden used to rent this house from Kabuli businessman Saeed Hashimi
for $US150 a month, for one of his many wives. Saaed complains that OBL did a
runner before his Taliban hosts fell to US bombs in late 2001, owing $US500
in back rent. The Spectator, July 2004, by Radek Sikorski KABUL--Gandamack
Lodge is Harry Flashman’s fictitious address in the original George MacDonald
Fraser novel about the caddish officer, set at the time of the first Afghan
war. You can now stay at Gandamack Lodge, a handsome if dilapidated villa in
downtown Kabul. A lawn, wicker chairs, prints of Surrey on the walls: if it
wasn’t for the electricity cuts and the coffee, which the Afghans just can’t
get right, this would be a piece of England in the heart of the slum that is
Kabul. Two of Osama bin Laden’s wives, number one and number two, lived here
during the Taleban’s reign. In their haste to depart, as American bombs fell
in October 2001, they left behind an old bra and $450 in unpaid rent.
American agents knew about the villa, and were watching it at the time. It
appears that Osama wasn’t being a good Muslim, which saved him. The prophet
commanded that the faithful may have up to four wives provided they are fair
to all of them. Apparently he preferred new models to the old number one and
number two, although if he had paid the first ones more attention there would
now be a hole in the ground instead of a house. The place has come back to
life thanks to Peter Jouvenal, the legendary freelance cameraman who
liberated Kabul in 2001 together with John Simpson, walking into the city
ahead of Northern Alliance troops. Peter seems to be settling down at last
with a spirited young Afghan wife, and he has enough journalist, aid worker
and adventurer friends from his frontline past to give Gandamack Lodge yet
another life, and make it into a commercial success. The best
thing about the Lodge, though, is the company. Here you can bump into people
like the not-so-young fogey Matthew Leeming. In a country in which most
provinces are still no-go areas for foreigners, Mr Leeming--a regular Spectator contributor--has safely
guided several groups of tourists here, the ultimate adrenaline trip. His
life ambition seems to be to deliver a marshal’s baton made by Spinks to Mr
Fahim, Afghanistan’s corrupt, dog-faced defence minister. Intriguingly, he
also runs a project to discover whether many Afghans are indeed descended
from the soldiers of Alexander’s army--which passed here on the way to
conquer India--as many of them believe. Himmler used to be obsessed with this
stuff and sent expeditions to Nuristan and Tibet to find the real Aryans. Mr
Leeming has acquired DNA from Philip of Macedon’s skull and is now taking
samples of Afghan DNA from saliva, which involves putting cotton swabs into
the tribesmen’s mouths. The theory has always been supported by the fact that
there seems to be a higher proportion of fair-haired, blue-eyed Afghans in
some of the more remote valleys. But, actually, there is a problem: when did
you last meet a blond Greek? Paul Tough,
New York Times, 2005 The Gandamack
Lodge a neo-colonial-themed guesthouse owned by a former BBC cameraman and
occupied mostly by barrel-chested men who seemed to spend a lot of time in
the rose garden, sipping beer and talking on cellphones
about deliveries of body armor. A generally
charming though occasionally unkempt villa complex, bought by a BBC cameraman
after the fall of the Taliban and redecorated to make you feel as if you're
living in a Graham Greene novel. Popular with the aid-and-arms set. Manjeet Kripalani, 2003 I stayed in Kabul for a few days after Kandahar, and my
hotel, the Gandamack Lodge, was a beautifully restored colonial building that
used to be the favorite abode of Osama bin Laden
when he stayed in the city. He often visited with his fourth and youngest
wife, said to be his favorite. Declan
Walsh, The Guardian, 2004 Peter Jouvenal, the TV cameraman
who runs the Gandamak Lodge - bacon and eggs,
marmalade and muesli for breakfast, 19th-century rifles from Scottish
regiments in the lobby - where many journalists and aid workers stay, is also
about to open a new establishment. It will be called the Kabul Navy and
Cricket Club and its decor is being modelled on the Bear Inn near Stroud,
complete with old church pews. Vanity
Fair, Christopher Hitchens, 2004 Those of us who have tried to cover the new "Great
Game" as it has unfolded on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have
forgathered in Flashman's Hotel, situated in the
Pakistani Army's post-colonial garrison town of Rawalpindi, and in the Flashman Restaurant of the Gandamack Lodge, in Kabul
(Gandamack Lodge being old Flashy's ill-gotten
mansion in rural Leicestershire). These are places where the borders are
"porous," as the newspapers like to say, but where the boundary
between fact and fiction is the most porous of all. |