Nearly in Afghanistan

It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we decided to see how close we could get to Afghanistan and to see the famous Khyber pass.
Sitting on a bike without stopping, it can be difficult to judge the mood of the locals. All that you can go by are the children lining the streets. On the way to Peshwara, which is around 60km from the border with Afghanistan, it seemed to be changing from that in the North. Some of the children appeared to be picking up stones to throw at us! None of them actually did, but it is generally a clear sign of the thoughts that have been passed on from the parents. This made me a little pensive as to whether our visit to the North-West was a sensible thing to do, but many people that we had spoken to in the welcoming North had suggested that there would be no problem - and there were no problems. Everyone that we stopped and chatted to was very polite and welcoming, generally asking the usual questions of where we were from, where we were going, if we were on motorcycles (even though we were sitting on them at the time(!) and, of course, what we thought of the cricket. Our record audience was around 100 people when we were buying a pair of sunglasses, and, as usual, involved some police to clear the crowd! Often, we just get people standing next to us, staring. The solution to this is to just stare back, and seems to clear them after a couple of minutes. I can't see how seeing 3 bikers filling there motorcycles with fuel can be even vaguely interesting!
A couple of hours of riding later, we were in Peshwara, sitting in Afghan Carpets, drinking tea with the Colonel (as introduced by Stan, the tour guide that we had met in Kashgar and Charimabad). The Colonel was to arrange our visit to the border with Afghanistan, complete with a private armed guard! All was sorted out within half an hour and the next day, we were to leave for the 2 hour drive to the border.
Peshwara is a fairly big town, with a small centre, full of a whole range of shops, but especially motoring shops, so we took the opportunity to have a couple of things made for our bikes. In particular, we went in search of a painter to make a design on our bikes like those on the colourful trucks that we had seen everywhere on the roads along the KKH. An interesting couple of hours later, we were unable to get the painting done, but much wiser in terms of having seen trucks being built and 'decked' out.
Our visit to the Afghan border took us though the Khyber Pass. We were accompanied by an armed guard, but apart from the rather precarious driver of our car, all seemed to be pretty safe. Most of the area around the border is not controlled by the police but by some kind of an independent army called the Khyber Rifles. We got to within a kilometre of the border and this time found ourselves drinking chilled Coca Cola on the top of a hill overlooking the border itself. There was a surprising amount of traffic at the border, to the extent that I'd say that of the 17 borders that I have crossed to date, this was the busiest! Good job that we weren't crossing it!