The Roof of the World (Pamir Highway)
A month ago, I visited the Aralkum desert in what used to be the Aral Sea, the result of a massive Soviet engineering project gone horribly awry. Over the past nine days, I’ve explored a more successful Soviet engineering project: the Pamir Highway. The Pamirs are one of the mountain ranges (the most notable being the Himalaya) that were thrust upward when the Indian subcontinent collided with Asia about 60 million years ago. Not quite Himalayan in scale but taller than anything outside this part of Asia, its highest peaks surpass 7000m. They also shelter an expansive, dry, upland plateau. The etymology is uncertain but one candidate is that the name derives from the Persian bam-i-dunya , which means “roof of the world.” The Pamir Highway is the second highest international highway in the world, after the nearby Karakoram, which runs between Pakistan and China. This one runs east from Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, traversing the Pamiri east of Tajikistan before looping north to...