First Afghan snow UPDATED 2007 12 05

It's pretty difficult to compete with Ben-Bob's "weather geek" blog posts like this jewel about the recent Iowa ice storm (even though he does not apparently own a camera) because he's so good at describing stuff and because he's, *cough*, a weather geek.

But I'll try.

Yesterday we drove from Kabul to Mazar e Sharif which involved crossing the Salang pass (tunnelled by the Russians at 3,400m) after its second day of snow this winter.



This picture taken hundreds of metres below the summit shows a jolly Afghan householder relieving his roof of the burden of about 40cm of nice new snow.

I asked my readers (both of them) who could identify the roof construction material used on front edge of the roof?

The first suggestion was that the mystery construction material is toilet rolls - pointing out that toilet rolls are good insulators and surprisingly strong. Excellent suggestion but wrong.

Then I gave the hint that this mystery construction material is almost more common in Afghanistan than toilet rolls... at least that's how it seems...

And then the Weather Geek himself (also known as Ben-Bob) gets it right! (See his comment.) They're artillery shell casings. He probably recalls seeing them in Eritrea. They're a dime a dozen here too.