“I want people to know about Afghanistan,” Sharanya Iyer tells me. “But I’m not promoting tourism there.”
Before I sat down to interview a woman who had travelled to Afghanistan purely for leisure, one image kept returning to me.
In October 2025, Indian women journalists were reportedly stopped from entering a press conference in New Delhi addressed by the Taliban’s acting foreign minister.
The decision was later reversed after the women refused to accept the exclusion, male colleagues stood in solidarity, and the episode drew widespread public criticism.
The women returned, took their seats, and asked questions about girls barred from schools, women’s rights and the shrinking space for female voices.
That episode was in my mind as I prepared for this conversation.
How does one travel through a country where hospitality and heritage exist alongside severe restrictions on women?
What does a visitor witness, and what remains beyond the reach of the traveller’s gaze?
Can documenting beauty also leave room for acknowledging the realities that shape everyday life?
These were the questions I carried into my conversation with travel creator Sharanya Iyer, known online as Truly Nomadly, whose solo journey in November 2025, across Afghanistan has now drawn lakhs of viewers.
The conversation moved beyond ticking destinations off a map.
The Afghanistan we think we know
For generations of Indians, Afghanistan has often lived in memory through literature before geography.
There is the gentle fruit seller of Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwala, carrying with him the ache of distance, his little daughter, and home. Then there is Khaled Hosseini’s Afghanistan, where Amir and Hassan chase kites across Kabul, while Mariam and Laila find strength in each other amid war and oppression.
Sharanya’s account, too, holds together warmth, beauty and difficult realities.
Perhaps the strongest idea to emerge from our conversation was Sharanya’s take on separating ordinary citizens from political regimes.
Her videos move through Kabul’s crowded streets and mountain roads. She pauses at checkpoints and travels along roads where permits are checked.
“The reality on the ground can often be very different for you as a tourist versus what it is for a local,” she says.
That distinction came up repeatedly throughout our conversation.
The privilege of being just a tourist
For Sharanya, travelling through Afghanistan meant learning very quickly that the country she could move through as a tourist was not necessarily the country an Afghan woman could move through in the same way.
Even something as ordinary as getting from one place to another came with rules. Tourism, she explains, is permitted only with authorised local guides, who arrange movement permits before visitors arrive.
“My passport always had to be in the car. At every checkpoint, my guide would show the documents.”
That difference became especially hard to ignore on the road to Band-e-Amir National Park. As they approached a checkpoint, her guide asked her to pull a scarf over her head because local women are not permitted to enter.
Sharanya, however, was allowed through.
“I am a tourist,” she said. “Male or female doesn’t matter. I have different rules.”
The more Sharanya tried to understand Afghanistan, the harder it became to fit the country into one neat version of itself.
It is a small moment, but one that changes the way you look at everything that follows. The same road, the same checkpoint, the same country, but a different set of freedoms depending on who you are. Sharanya is careful not to confuse the access she received with the reality of women who live there.
And then, just as easily, Afghanistan could reveal another side of itself.
Her series, including what she called the “Kabul Express”, moves through Kabul’s markets, roadside tea stalls and busy neighbourhoods, stopping to notice people whose lives and crafts rarely make it into headlines.
Among them was a box photographer working with an antique wooden camera, whom Sharanya describes as the last practitioner of the craft in Kabul.
She came home carrying one of his portraits. It is an ordinary souvenir on the surface, but it also captures something her journey kept returning to: behind the checkpoints, rules and politics were people going about their lives, preserving skills, making things, working, talking and welcoming strangers.
Hospitality, chai and an Indian connection
After the checkpoints and permits, there were moments in Afghanistan that felt surprisingly familiar to Sharanya.
“As an Indian tourist, I felt very safe,” she says.
Sometimes, simply saying she was from India changed the conversation.
“The minute I said I was from India, their body language changed. They love India. They love Bollywood.”
And then there was chai.
“If there is a guest who comes to you, they will offer you chai.”
For an Indian traveller, the gesture needs little explanation. You sit down, someone brings tea, a conversation begins. For a while, you are simply a guest in someone’s country.
That warmth shaped much of Sharanya’s experience. At the same time, moving through Kabul and Kandahar made her notice who was often missing from the streets, markets and public spaces around her.
“The absence of women in public life is very conspicuous,” she says.
Once she noticed it, it was difficult to look past. Sharanya could travel with male guides, move through checkpoints and sit in public spaces. Afghan women around her lived with a very different set of rules. Girls’ education effectively ends after Class 6, universities no longer admit women, and restaurants often maintain separate seating.
It made the difference between being welcomed into a country and actually knowing what life there is like especially important. Sharanya had access because she was a visitor. The women who lived there did not automatically have the same freedom.
“One must never forget that what one is experiencing is purely as a tourist. It’s not the blanket truth for the country or the people.”
That is the tension she keeps returning to when she speaks about Afghanistan. The people she met could welcome her warmly, share tea with her and talk about India. And outside those conversations, she could still see how much smaller the public world had become for many Afghan women.
‘The people are not their government’
Perhaps the strongest idea to emerge from our conversation was Sharanya’s take on separating ordinary citizens from political regimes.
“You come back from countries like this knowing and internalising the fact that the people are not their government. The people are not their regime.”
She first began to understand this while backpacking through Iran, and the idea became even more pronounced in Afghanistan.
When she spoke with Afghan women, many described relief that decades of war had subsided. They also spoke candidly about the restrictions that now define their lives.
“There is stability now,” she recalls them saying. “They’re not living around bombs and rockets all the time anymore.”
The conversations extended beyond her trip. Today, Sharanya mentors a young Afghan girl through an international online programme, where they spend time discussing books, life and possibilities beyond formal education.
“My brief is to be a friend to this girl, to be a source of strength.”
‘Not a travel recommendation’
The more Sharanya tried to understand Afghanistan, the harder it became to fit the country into one neat version of itself.
Bamiyan added another layer to that picture.
The valley is home to the empty niches where the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan once stood, reminders of a time when the region was an important centre of Buddhist learning. Standing in front of them, Sharanya found herself overwhelmed.
“I was crying.”
For her, the moment carried the weight of everything that had existed there before, everything that had been lost, and everything about Afghanistan that still remained unfamiliar to her.
She is now researching a film on the site’s layered history, tracing Afghanistan’s past as a centre of Buddhist learning before later transformations reshaped the region.
That reluctance to flatten Afghanistan into one easy story also shapes what Sharanya chooses to share about the trip. Despite the attention her videos receive, she deliberately avoids sharing visa guides, itineraries or travel tips for Afghanistan.
“I want people to know about Afghanistan,” she says. “But how to go, when to go, or maybe why to go — you will not see that.”
She wants people to encounter the country through what she saw and heard, without turning that experience into an invitation to follow her route.
This is definitely not an endorsement, she reiterates.
Perhaps that is the point she is most comfortable leaving us with. Afghanistan gave her no single answer, and she does not want to give her audience one either. If the journey leaves people a little more curious about the lives, histories and people behind the headlines, that, for her, is enough.
