Peshawar by Andrew Mueller

It doesn't take long to decide that Peshawar is going to be worth the long, uncomfortable and agonisingly slow train ride up from Rawalpindi. When I wander out of the station and ask someone who looks like they're in charge about a taxi, they gesture at a gnarled, turbanned man with a long beard and no teeth sitting in a brightly-decorated two-wheeled cart, to which is harnessed a scrawny grey horse covered in lurid, painted psychedelic swirls. Filling the sky behind the car park is an apocalyptic sunset, full of the sort of violent reds and oranges that you could well imagine giving the government of a budding nuclear power ideas. It's a strange moment. I feel uncomfortably like I've got off at the wrong stop and have somehow managed to arrive in the cover artwork of Cream's ‘Disraeli Gears’.

"I take you," announces the old boy on the cart, "to Green's Hotel."

I'm too tired to argue, so I tie my pack to the shelf on the back of the cart, and climb up on the seat next to the driver. It rapidly becomes clear that he has exhausted his reserves of conversational English. "Green's Hotel," he states again, and again, roughly twice a minute until we get there. I'd prefer it if he watched the road - Peshawar's streets are instantly and lastingly terrifying. Huge, grotesquely decorated trucks compete for space with open-sided buses and buzzing swarms of the silver-plated and muralled three-wheeled motor-scooters that serve as Peshawar's taxis. There is nothing regulating this chaos - no roads, no lights, and the only signs offer such helpful advice as ‘Work Hard’ and ‘Smile’. This latter instruction is a difficult one to go along with, especially when your clearly cross-eyed driver is encouraging his horse towards the narrowing gap between two converging buses, both of which have windscreens so full of stickers that the drivers can't possible see where they're going (it will take me a few days to realise that this is the only way you could possibly drive in Pakistan and stay sane).

Green's Hotel turns out to be a large, middle-ranking kind of place with friendly staff, a decent restaurant, cable television, surprisingly reliable plumbing and cockroaches which, while spectacularly large, have the decency to be slow. It also has a shop which sells postcards of Afghanistan, so the people back at home can be fooled into thinking you're a lot harder than you actually are.

Peshawar's proximity to Afghanistan has made it what it is, for better and for worse. Peshawar is the last outpost of something resembling civilisation before the ungovernable tribal areas of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and the perennially lawless Afghanistan beyond. As such, Peshawar has spent its history as a combination of market, safe haven, staging post and recruiting centre for centuries of merchants, soldiers, mercenaries, refugees, journalists, diplomats, spies, adventurers, missionaries and, all things considered, unsurprisingly few tourists.

Peshawar, however, is altogether less intimidating than its reputation might have you believe. It is often written up as a kind of occidental Dodge City and granted, Peshawar's English language newspapers (The Frontier Post and The Khyber Times) relate an impressive tally of violence and banditry (most of it inevitably blamed, on the letters pages, on the 1.6 million or so Afghan refugees who live around Peshawar in small cities made out of mud). But nobody can remember the last time a foreigner got kidnapped ("And anyway," reassures the chap who runs Green's tourist office, "they always used to give them back"). In recent years local authorities have taken steps to discourage the once commonplace public wearing of guns, with such success that the only armed people on the streets now are the police, though on two nights out of the seven I stay in Peshawar, I am woken in the small hours by volleys of automatic fire from nearby houses. The first time it happens, I ring reception to ask what's going on. "Don't worry," they say. "It'll only be a wedding".

Peshawar is essentially three towns - Peshawar Cantonment, University Town and the Old City - connected by the sclerotic arteries of Jamrud Road, Khyber Road, and Grand Trunk Road. University Town is, as you'd expect, home to the university, as well as to dozens of guesthouses, most of Peshawar's more up-market private residences and the offices of the dozens of aid agencies who operate in neighbouring Afghanistan. Peshawar Cantonment contains shops, several hotels - including Green's - and the Saddar Bazaar market, which isn't at all like the oriental bazaar of popular imagination and more like an entire suburb consisting of nothing but corner greengrocers. The old city, dominated by the glowering presence of the mighty Bala Hisar fortress, houses the Khyber Bazaar; exactly like the oriental bazaar of popular imagination, and where I first go after flagging down a three-wheeled motorcycle taxi (they're known locally as rickshaws).

Bala Hisar would be an imposing landmark in any city, but in a place as otherwise architecturally nondescript as Peshawar, it's as startling and impressive as a large iceberg in a desert. Bala Hisar was originally built by Zahur-ud-Din Babur, the first of the Afghan Moghul emperors who came thundering through the Khyber Pass from Kabul in the 16th century and established Islamic rule over India (it was the Moghuls who built the Taj Mahal, among other famous baubles). The fortress was demolished by the Sikh forces that vanquished the Afghans in the early 19th century, who clearly then thought better of their actions and rebuilt it. Today, it's a vast, gloomy citadel that hovers above the Khyber Bazaar like a storm cloud. It is also, unfortunately, still a functioning army barracks, which means that I am cheerfully but firmly turned away at the gate, and asked not to take any photographs.

There are no such problems in the market itself, which is a blessing, as Khyber Bazaar is spectacular. Every way I turn on the dusty streets choked with scooters, goats, cars, donkeys, trucks and camels, I find myself gaping at another scene that looks like it was cut out of one of those luridly illustrated bibles you used get given every Christmas by the aunt with the benzene habit: gnarled, bearded faces presiding over sacks of spices; young men labouring at forges; children scuttling with poles across their backs, suspending wooden cages of squawking, doomed chickens. Aside from the motorised traffic, a few electric lights and the occasional flickering neon strobe, this place can't have changed much since Alexander The Great came through looking for someone to fix his chariot.

The merchants of the Khyber Bazaar are quietly welcoming, and polite to the point of dereliction of duty (not one whose time I take does anything so vulgar as actually suggest I purchase any of his stock). They're either the most preternaturally hospitable people on earth, or I've just turned up on a very slow day. I get filled, to a teeth-grinding, knock-kneed state just short of bursting point, with endless cups of sweet, yellow Afghan tea. I am encouraged to recite, a dozen times or more, those autobiographical details that can be hauled across the English-Urdu/Dari/Pashtun linguistic divide - age, occupation, birthplace, home, family.

Those that can speak sufficient English to comprehend more detail seem perplexed to learn that I am unmarried at the grand old age of 29. Rather than trying to explain western attitudes to marriage over and over again, I take to inventing myself a wife and children, which is a curiously liberating tactic. Suddenly, I can have any life I feel like having - "Yes, her name is Winona, she's an actress"; "Three sons: Ezekiel, Jehosophat, and Susan - we're a bit worried about Susan". Even if it's only for a few minutes in the eyes of a toothless Pakistani saucepan welder, it's better than nothing.

Extraordinarily, at least if you believe anything you read in guide books, the Khyber Bazaar is far from being the most entertaining shopping experience Peshawar can offer. No self-consciously hardcore adventure traveller's repertoire of tedious pub stories is complete without recollections of Peshawar's Smuggler's Bazaar or of Darra Adam Khel, a village 42km south of Peshawar where the major local industry is the manufacture, repair and retail of firearms.

Both attractions are within those regions of Pakistan that the Pakistani authorities refer to as "Tribal Areas", which in real life means that the Pakistani government, police and army have no control over them, and if you're silly enough to go anywhere near them without permission, you're on your own. The people at Green's Hotel seem to think acquiring the permission - and the armed guard that goes with it - will be no trouble, and one staff member accompanies me to the office of the Ministry of the Interior, where we encounter all the efficiency and haste you'd expect of government departments in a country where everyone wears pyjamas to work. After an enthralling morning's sitting around in a variety of offices, wondering what the silent, motionless government employees in them actually do, other than gazing balefully into the middle distance, I am eventually granted an interview with someone who appears to be in charge. It does not go well.

"Why do you want to go to Darra?" I thought it might be interesting.

"You cannot go to Darra without an armed guard." Fair enough. How do I get one of those?

"You must get permission from this office." Okay then. Where do I sign?

"The road to Darra is closed." No it isn't. A bloke at the hotel drove in from there this morning.

"The road has been closed for one year." It wasn't this morning.

"You may not travel without permission." What if I just got on the bus?

"What is your job?" I'm a journalist.

"We will have you arrested." Naturally, by now, I am tempted to go anyway, more out of a desire to annoy this tiresome little bureaucrat than anything else, but I don't, as I am also in the process of trying to get a visa for Afghanistan, and the Afghan consulate is being tetchy enough as it is - I don't think my position would be stronger from inside a Peshawar police station. However the next afternoon, I meet someone who says he can take me to Darra or, by the sound of it, just about anywhere else.

He approaches me while I'm sheltering from the hideous, pitiless weather (48ºC and this is May) drinking one of the delicious mango milkshakes sold along Saddar Road. He's a grinning, bearded, furiously energetic human whirlwind, known to everyone as Poppa. He will be familiar to anyone who has read Fielding's "The World's Most Dangerous Places" and has been retained as a guide by several television news crews. He takes me for tea in a teashop with ruthlessly minimalist decor - there aren't any chairs - and yammers at length about the places he can take me to.

His rates seem reasonable, working out at about five dollars a day, though I imagine there would be a fair bit of time spent in shops owned by his relatives. He's a cheerful old soul, a sort of cross between Doc from the Seven Dwarfs and Uncle Bulgaria from the Wombles, and chatters away in his excellent, if stilted, English about his two wives and seven children. He asks me why I won't come with him to Darra, the Smugglers' Bazaar and his home village in the shadows of the Khyber Pass ("My brother makes guns! Bang bang! Very good price!") and I explain that I'm waiting for a visa so I can go to Afghanistan. "You're crazy," he says. For a moment, I feel a gratifying glow at the idea that craggy, wise, seen-it-all Poppa knows a young, devil-may-care, bullet-chewing swashbuckler when he sees one, and then he finishes his sentence. "What you want a visa for? I get you into Afghanistan, no problem. Very good price."