Freelance Journalist

Pamir Highway Day 14, Before Garm Chasma to Khorog

My last day on the Pamir Highway is a sad one. It’s one of the last days of riding of the trip and probably one of my last cycle touring for a while; it rather feels like the end of the adventure despite being a couple of hundred kilometres from Dushanbe and a flight home. I wake up camped hidden at the bottom of a small wheat field, after resisting the attempts of numerous village people to force me to stay with them.  I’ve become slightly bored of the scenery of the Wakhan valley, the terrible road surface and testing food and will hitch a lift to Dushanbe. The Pamirs are beaten, broken and behind me.

Finally some fresh fruit and veg in Khorog bazaar.

As I get within sight of Khorog, the river Wakhan spreads itself out into the river Panj and Afghanistan bursts into life on the neighbouring side of the river as traditionally dressed men harvest their crops by hand and tend to their donkeys. Its colourful and alive with life. They wave and hoot across the raging river Wakhan and seem happier to see me than any of the local Tajiks. Their small villages are being connected by a road, being brutally cut into the mountain side by small men using flimsy looking hand drills. It looks like they may be drilling a while.  I take great pleasure in getting off and shouting ‘Salam!’ and receiving a bombardment of shouts and waves from the Afghan people. I am fascinated by everything to do with Afghanistan. Perhaps it wasn’t that the Tajik people failed to endear themselves to me in the same way as the Afghans, by waving and whooping, but that years of war in Afghanistan, years of reading, and years of research on my part have given them a slightly mystical magic in some part of my brain. With the town spreading out below me, the road kicks itself up the valley side a little way further, just to remind and humble me to the mountains power. It’s as if the Pamir is saying “I’m not nearly beaten”. It was the end of the road, the end of my adventures for another summer. Long live adventure. Long live the adventurers.

From Khorog I decided to ride another day and rode to Kailakhum where I struggled to find onward transport to Dushanbe. Cyclists should note that at this point in the road, most transport is already full and locals advised me to hitch back to Khorog in order to pick up a 4×4 to Dushanbe. Local offers for transport to Dushanbe were nearly $200. I ended up hitching with the slowest truck in the world to Dushanbe and have some of my most testing days of the trip in the company of two of the most incompetent truckers I have ever encountered, in their less than mighty Kamaz truck . Arriving in Dushanbe, feeling battered and vibrated (from the truck! I wish I had cycled!) felt very much like being back in Europe after the Pamirs and I passed a couple of days eating Turkish food and catching up with Maxime; a Frenchman who I had ridden with for a few days in the Pamir.

Reading back through my blog and diary I must say that I feel it reads very negatively, all I seem to comment on is the wind, the lack of food and fail to hark on too enthusiastically about the scenery. I did enjoy the Pamirs intensely. It was fantastic, incredible and humbling, but don’t expect to see that much different if you’ve spent time in Ladakh or Tibet.

I must say that it is very hard to while away days in the Pamir, in a way it is not hard in the Karakorum or the Himalaya and my mental disposition to push on only added to this. There is very little shelter, nowhere really worth stopping for a full day and little to eat. The wind in the afternoon (beyond 10/11am) is also so unpleasant as to make stopping off putting. So it doesn’t make too much sense to take things easy. The only way to perhaps break it up would be to take a 4×4 tour or short trek away from the highway out of a centre like Murghab, to some springs high in the hills or to see the Petroglyphs the region has to offer.  I didn’t see value in doing such a trip, with the highway itself so isolated anyway. I really kick myself for not spending more time in the Kyrgyz Tian-Shen mountains, trying to cross off road from the Torugart pass to Osh and instead trying to kill myself on the mindlessly boring, depressing Kazerman road.

The wind if you are heading from Osh towards Dushanbe is constantly in your face. If you decide to cycle from Osh to Dushanbe, bear in mind the only period of tailwind you are likely to get is from Sary Tash to Lake Karakul. Pack plenty of chap sticks, because you’re lips are going to be toast pretty soon. Bring some Tabasco for your Chinese noodles as well. You will get mixed reports from cyclists about which way the wind blows; but the most sensible direction is from Dushanbe towards the East. I lost over a stone in my short Central Asian trip and I’m someone who enjoys eating lamb fat intensely; don’t bother if you’re a vegetarian (seriously).

I’m now of the belief that the ultimate cycling adventure for those with a short amount of time is the trip from Dushanbe, along the Pamir highway across Xinjiang in China towards Kashgar (a detour I failed to make for visa problems), turning south to the fantastic Karakorum highway, winding to Gilgit, down to Islamabad, the peaceful Tourist Campsite, litres of Mango juice, samosas, pakoras and an easy colourful journey to Lahore and beyond to the expanse of the sub-continent. It must be the most beautiful, varied, fascinating, captivating and magical small area of the earth.

Pamir Highway Day 9

The split in the Pamir highway towards the Wakhan valley signalled a tough decision for my aching legs and adventuring heart. My choices were to take a well paved road, leading to a major regional town, with all the associated benefits of showers, cooked food and a restaurant serving the regions NGO community called ‘Delhi Darbar’ or a massive detour on what looked from the windswept junction to be a road made of only sand, straight up and over a valley which had a gale force wind blowing down it.

The Wakhan Valley is a mysterious region of Tajikistan; its people are ethnically Tajik, but the valley is shared with Afghanistan.  It’s one of the most westerly valleys in which Buddhism reached and the valley which Hinduism never could. The Hindu Kush or ‘the killer of Hindus’ borders  the valley floor and it has become the chosen route for cyclists wishing to test their metal on poor roads, and see greenery again in the otherwise sparse and arid Pamir valley.

I had pondered my decision for nearly two days having left Mughrab. The wind was playing a massive role in my psyche; I had imagined the Pamir to be a place of peacefulness and tranquillity. For nearly a year all I had wanted to do, in my prison like cell at the University of Manchester was experience once more the great sound of silence, while the idiots I had been billeted with wanted to experience nothing less. Yet, I had seldom experienced silence in the Pamirs due to the unrelenting gale which ripped past my ears for most of the day.

The junction though is too tantalizing. To my right a Lada passes me along the tarred road leading off along the plateau, or too my left a sandy path leading high and away into the mountains, past salt lakes and leading to a valley steeped in mystery and isolation. I pedalled off towards the Wakhan valley with the knowledge that I’d made the right decision as the rear tire snaked its self in the deep dust. I always find narrow valleys more comforting than wide ones, and I’m happy to be away from the plateau which made me feel so small and insignificant.

Pamir Highway Day 7

I wake up in Mughrab eager to take on the bizarre (or should that read bazaar?) and bag the best goods and the pick of any vegetables for my depleted supplies. I decide it’s a good idea to wake myself up at the crack of dawn, in order to descend on the Chinese shipping containers which have been arranged into a market for the crowds. It’s seems peculiar that this far from the sea, where even scrap cardboard seems to be a treasured resource, that people have made the effort to arrange old shipping containers into shops. They look horribly cold in winter, are horribly hot in the winter and are unattractive, dusty and noisy.

Early morning at the bazaar.

The bazaar is strangely empty though. In most parts of Asia the people wake up at the crack of sunlight, but it’s too cold in the white washed mud-brick town to wake up and the bizarre bazaar kicks off at around ten o clock. The town in the early morning orange glow is strangely captivating; maybe I’m starting to understand why people live in this part of the world.

The bazaars shops all seem to sell the same things. There are about twenty shops selling exactly the same goods. Eventually I manage to find a few onions, a top up of my tomato puree and some chocolates on one of the retailer’s gourmet shelves. It’s hardly a treasure trove, but will keep me going. What’s incredible is that nearly everything in the market comes from Osh in Kyrgyzstan, a horrific journey over some tough roads, when Chinese trucks roll thtough the town all day and the city of Khorog lies less than a day away over tarred roads! Krygyz people living here and want to buy Krygyz goods!

I spend the rest of the day trying to post a letter (failed), trying to make a phone call (failed), trying to use the internet (failed) and getting something other than soup or plov to eat (failed); it is definitely a successful day! I end up spending the remainder of the evening having a nice time with the local fire brigade who are the only ones in town who have electricity and who are happy to charge my batteries in exchange for the promise of a few snaps in the post.

The Firemen who have electricity.

Pamir Highway Day 5

I wake up not in my tent, but in a small mud outbuilding beside Lake Karakul.  The occupants are out already.  They are gathering grass for the winter to feed their animals around the deep blue, crystal clear lagoon. They cut away at patchy inch high grass with large scythes and seem to be making little or no progress in collecting it. It is the only vegetation for miles, and hardly noticeable on the desert floor. This is a tough existence and to my untrained eye looks like a waste of time. Despite a brilliant blue sky and the lack of a single cloud, the temperature hovers around four degrees.

My kind hosts.

Russian bike, Kyrgyz Men, Tajikistan photographed by an Englishman.

I set off in the shadow of Mt Muztagh Ata, one of the several 7 000m-plus peaks that make up the Pamir range surrounding the lake. My diary for day five lacks any articulation and the constant headwind is to blame. When Marco Polo visited Lake Karakul in the 13^th century he also complained bitterly about the wind, and nearly eight hundred years later, I find myself in the same situation. The painful truth is that I’m likely to be at the mercy of the horrible headwind until the end of the highway at Khorog. I am sometimes limited to 8kmh on the flat plateau by the sheer power of the wind. The road also returned to corrugations for a longish stretch which didn’t help my moral. It depresses me that for another thousand kilometres or so, i might have nothing but the wind roaring past my ears for company.

I pass a number of abandoned collective farms sitting in isolated parts of the plateau; farming was never going to work well in this part of the world, they sit desolate and part occupied. Most of the buildings seem to have been filled with cow pats for burning through the winter, while the occupants have reverted to their felt yurts. The other amazing legacy of the USSR is the power lines and pylons which haul themselves over the mountains and over the passes. You can go a whole day without seeing another sole, but are kept company by the never ending wooden sticks poking out of the ground at regular intervals.  At the height of Soviet Power, not only were there working collective farms in this part of the world, but working electricity and telephones; it all seems a long way away, as the cables sit slack and damaged on the desert floor.

I spend the afternoon climbing the Ak Baital Pass to the highest point of the journey; a 4600m summit. I sit at the top of the climb, in a small cut out in the rock and eat the last of my snickers bars. I wonder if I’ll ever be back at this height by bicycle. I feel quite head achy with the altitude, but I really feel I am crossing a line in the journey and so force myself to sit and enjoy the altitude for a few more minutes. From this point onwards it is more down than up; I’m on top of the world and in punching distance of Mughrab.

Top of the Pass

The only thing I have hastily scrawled in my diary on day 5 was ‘Hard day’. I fall asleep tired and dusty, elated and alive.

Pamir Highway Day 3

It was the day I had been dreading and I woke up with a thick layer of ice on the tent and a desire to stay inside my slightly mildew smelling sleeping bag until midday. I crawled out of my tent, smashed the ice on the nearest stream to fill my water bottles and mustered all my strength and energy. I boarded my steed and started the days task of climbing to an altitude of 3500m. The Taldyk pass has been conquered by no one; it’s ferocious weather and steep slopes have beaten many, and the Sovietski road’s condition suggests that it has finally surrendered to the mountains, only for a new contender to take their turn; the Chinese, who are now attempting to cut a new road through the remaining mess. Stories about the ferocious wind, plumes of dust and army’s of Kamaz trucks storming up the narrow channel , have haunted me since Osh, when cyclists arriving at the hostel looked as if they had been marooned on a desert island; coughing sand from their lungs, shaking powder from their hair and stuffing their hungry bellies with kilos of shashlyk. This was the stretch that they said hurt them!

This lone yurt sits alongside the new Chinese road; it might be one of it's last summers.

The surface was in places only sand and the heavy bike sank, forcing me to run alongside pushing the sinking bike to avoid being squashed by the determined Kamaz drivers. It’s interesting that it’s the Chinese trucks which slowed down and offered courteous waves to allow the lone cyclist to weave his way unimpeded up the pass, whereas the Kyrgyz drivers hooted and accelerated to insure a good gassing from their diesel fumes.

Monument to the lost lives at the top of the Taldyk Pass

From my travels in China I had always thought of the Chinese as cold and uncompassionate, yet the mainly Uighur drivers seem to have a great respect for the European hauling his weight over the mountains.

It takes me two hours to reach the crux of the twisty climb and as I approach the monument to the lives lost building the pass, a mighty wind bellows over the summit hitting me and rattling every bolt on my bike and bone on my body. The mighty Pamir is upon me and I am surrounded by snow capped peaks. I barely dare take out my camera to take a victorious photo, and fight a losing battle to move forward off the pass. The temperature has suddenly plummeted and I am cycling in all my clothes and trousers for the first time on the trip (and it would turn out the first of many days for the next weeks).

On the way down I see the wall of the mountain covered in small ant like figures painfully drilling away into the hillside with small hand drills; if anyone can conquer this region, it’s sadly the Chinese and brute force and sheer bloody mindedness are their weapons of choice. At the bottom of the rock face are poor looking Kyrgyz shepherds camped up in traditional caravans that look like they were once train carriages on a Moscow bound route alongside cheap and grubby looking yurts. These are poor people even by nomadic standards. Their way of life has survived hundreds of years, in these parts largely surviving even the long arm of Stalin’s collectivisation; their only protection was their extreme isolation and as the Chinese tar a two lane highway alongside their settlements and over their grazing, you have to wonder for how much longer. My silly nostalgic view takes a hit as I pass a group of Kyrgyz children who have gathered to throw stones at me by the side of the road, they all have snotty noses, are painfully thin, have chapped skin from the constant wind and bloody red eyes from the constant cooking smoke in their Yurts; maybe the Chinese will be their saviours.

The Pamir Highway at Sary Tash; the last petrol station for a very long way.

Sary Tash is the last village in Kyrgyzstan and where the road splits from the Pamir Highway to the road to Kashgar and China. The roads split at a modern looking petrol station which dwarfs over the white washed village which could just as well have been lifted straight out of Tibet or Ladakh. I look out at the road to Chinese Simhana and wish I had fixed my visa problems in Bishkek; I have a Chinese visa but cannot continue my journey there to the Silk Road town of Kashgar. I take lunch in a small cafe, which is probably the last small cafe for a few hundred kilometres, poke around the village to search out any fresh vegetables and set out across the plateau which I have reached only two bruised looking onions and a snickers bar heavier, completely alone but for the howling wind. The sporadic truck traffic which has lent me company from Osh is going towards China, and only an old soviet radar station, its gold dome shining in the sun and a dilapidated Krygyz army base, complete with a comic selection of ex-Soviet hardware, collapsed walls and what look like US-aid tents in place of the crumbling barracks offer any clue to any human inhabitation. Small birds are attempt vigorously to fly off a single line of the tale tale wooden pylons which litter the former CIS heading towards the border station, but are blown back by fearsome gusts blowing from the west. I stick up my hood and push forward head down, struggling to enjoy the view which I have so yearned for in the last year towards Tajikistan.

I finally reach deserted border station to check my way out of Krygyzstan. I’m left standing in the biting cold by the border guards who won’t let me enter their building, and who leave me for newaly forty minutes. I pass though without fanfare into the large stretch of no-man’s land which separates the two republics and snow begins to fall. Slowly snow begins to settle on the ground around me, and dwarfed my snowy giants around me, I pitch up in the shadow of a huge glacier and fall asleep to the sounds of the wind and the blizzard battering my tent. I hope and pray the snow doesn’t settle. For the first time in a long time I fear the wrath of Mother Nature; I am scared.