A handful of tourists still go to Bamiyan and its mountains, which host an annual Afghan ski challenge.
That same year, he returned to launch the Afghan Ski Challenge, a ski mountaineering race open to locals and anyone able to get to the start.
The number of foreign participants in the Afghan Ski Challenge has dropped significantly this year, with the recent bankruptcy of the only airline that served the region.
The available games -- not my forte, mind you -- included Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, A Ski Challenge, a Trivia Tournament, Solitaire, Blackjack, even, bless its heart, Pong.
The Afghan Ski Challenge package, from 22 February to 2 March 2015, costs £1,700 including internal flights, accommodation and guiding but not international flights or visas.
Four years on he now boasts the title of Afghanistan's number one skier and reigning champion of the annual Afghan Ski Challenge, the only competition of its kind in the country.
For the hundreds of spectators who walk for hours to watch the annual Afghan Ski Challenge in the remote Hindu Kush mountain range, the wrecks are the best part.
On donated skis, he climbed up a quarter-mile slope and skied down an ungroomed mountain well before the handful of experienced Europeans and Americans who traveled here specifically for the Afghan Ski Challenge, held on Friday by the Aga Khan Foundation and two Swiss journalists.
The ski school he founded to drum up local experience for the race, Bamyan Ski Club, has brought last year's Afghan Ski Challenge winner, Alishah Farhang, a sheep herder, and Sajjad Husaini, an electrician, to the Swiss alpine resort town of St Moritz for two months of professional training.
To the Editor: I find it interesting that just after the Escapes section featured an article about the numerous ski destinations in New York State, Travel published "The Family Ski Challenge" (Jan . 13, on an affordable family ski vacation at Copper Mountain in Colorado (above).
