"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.

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........

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