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 Osh in Kyrgyzstan. The route was begun by the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century but the current paved highway was largely the result of Soviet efforts in the 1930s. The region held strategic significance for the Soviets, bordering potentially hostile neighbours in Afghanistan and China. The Soviets poured resources into the Pamir region in an attempt to integrate Pamiris into the Soviet Union and to woo them away from their ethnically and linguistically similar neighbours in Afghanistan.

 

Gorno-Badakhshan, as the Pamir region of eastern Tajikistan is officially known, also holds a complicated place in contemporary Tajikistan. Unlike the other post-Soviet Stans, where the principal language (Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz) belongs to the Turkic language family, Tajiks and Pamiris speak languages that are closely related to Persian. The majority of Tajikistan’s population lives in the lowland west of the country and are Sunni Muslims who speak the Tajik language. Although far more sparsely populated, Gorno-Badakhshan is far more linguistically diverse. There are four main Pamiri languages, as well as numerous local variants. Pamiris are predominantly Ismaili, which is a branch of Shia Islam.

 

Of all the post-Soviet states, Tajikistan had the most fractious start. The civil war that ran from 1992 to 1997 claimed over 100,000 lives. It pitted the central government against a number of opposition groups, notably Pamiris. Early in the civil war, buses in Dushanbe were routinely searched and anyone with a Gorno-Badakhshan identity card was summarily executed.

 

In short, the Pamirs are geographically astonishing and culturally distinct. But before I tell you more about my time on the Pamir Highway, I should rewind to my first few days in Tajikistan.

 

Five days in Dushanbe

 

I ended my last blog post on a Sunday evening in Termez in Uzbekistan. I woke up super early on Monday morning to connect with a shared taxi that would take me to the border with Tajikistan. Another shared taxi on the far side of the border got me to Dushanbe by about midday. The driver for the second leg has a son in New York City and was excited to learn that I was from that part of the world, very roughly speaking. He showed me photos on his phone of his visit to New York the previous year, paid for by his son.

 

I then had five days to kill in Dushanbe. My friend Tamar was arriving very late the following Friday to start the Pamir Highway trip with me on Saturday. There are other worthwhile things to see and do in Tajikistan—notably hiking in the Fann Mountains in the country’s west—but infrastructure and driving distances are such that I’d need a day to get anywhere, a day (or ideally more) to do anything interesting, and a day to get back to Dushanbe. And smack dab in the middle of that week I needed to be online for a student’s MA thesis defense on Wednesday evening (can you believe that having a job can interfere with a two-month vacation?!).

 

Not a big deal. I needed time to read and think about the MA thesis, not to mention write up the Afghanistan adventure for this blog. And a slower pace amid all this travel would do me some good.

 

Dushanbe means “Monday.” A century ago it was a small town with a Monday market. But then it was anointed the capital of the nascent Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic and grew into a city under the name of Stalinabad (it reverted to Dushanbe in 1961). With a population over a million, it’s the first full-on city I’ve visited since Tbilisi.

 

Dushanbe is a weird place. It has that uncanny vibe that you sometimes find in corrupt or autocratic states of things not quite lining up. The centre of the city has numerous monumental government buildings in a neoclassical style set amidst broad tree-lined avenues and throughout the centre you see tall buildings and lots of construction. None of it is at a human scale—even the parks in the city centre feel too big—and you get the feeling of top-down planning with very little citizen involvement. At street level, there’s not a lot going on, and all these displays of magnificence feel out of place in one of the poorest countries in Asia. More than a quarter of the country’s GDP comes from remittances, mostly from Tajiks working in Russia.

 

The National Assembly building in Dushanbe

The very regimented Rudaki Park

The top-down planning emanates from Emomali Rahmon, who’s been running Tajikistan since 1992. In case you weren’t sure who was in charge, his picture is everywhere, often in massive banners several stories high. To an outsider, they look comical. Rahmon isn’t especially photogenic. He has the look of a mid-level functionary in a 1980s truckers’ union who’s been unexpectedly asked to pretend to be a statesman and hasn’t yet warmed to the role.

 

Emomali Rahmon, taller than lampposts

Nevertheless, he plays the role of dictator with Putinesque zeal. Ten years ago in Istanbul, a prominent Tajik dissident living in exile was poisoned in a restaurant and then shot in the head as he staggered out into the street. Elections in Tajikistan are a sham, and corruption and nepotism are rampant.

 

Dushanbe is hardly a tourist must-see but it has a few interesting sights, which I spread across the five days I was there. The National Museum of Antiquities collects local treasures as far back as the Stone Age. The two main highlights were a room-length reclining Buddha and an eighth or ninth century wooden tympanum from a Sogdian palace. The latter is black and charred but all sorts of delightful details are still visible, notably little figures in the negative space that are contorting themselves to hold the principal decorative features in place.

Head of a room-sized reclining Buddha

Little figures in the charred Sogdian tympanum

The Ethnographic Museum was a treasure-house of traditional clothing and jewellery. Central Asian textiles in general are gorgeous. I especially like the flowing robes and the knee-length women’s tunics whose collar merges into a long ornamental stripe. I also delighted in huge woolly socks and noticed old imperial Russian kopeks used as medallions on some of the elaborate jewellery.

 

Traditional clothes on display in the Ethnographic Museum

And, in case you had any doubts about Tajik national greatness, they’ve built the world’s largest teahouse by an artificial lake. It looks more like a five-star hotel or an autocrat’s palace (which, in some sense, I guess it is), fitting right in with the other monumental neoclassical buildings in the capital. It’s wedding photography central with lots of BMWs and Mercedes parked around the perimeter.

 

Navruz Palace, the world's largest teahouse

I had my best meal in Central Asia (which isn’t saying a lot) at an unassuming outdoor spot that serves qurutob. Qurutob is a hearty and filling stew with bits of bread soaked in a yogurt sauce and mixed together with tomato, onion, parsley, and hot pepper. A great way to fuel you through the afternoon!

 

The cast

 

I met Tamar twelve years ago when we taught in the same Humanities Core course as members of the University of Chicago’s Society of Fellows. We’ve lived parallel lives since: both of us at different times have also taught at Deep Springs College and Koç University. She now lives in Jerusalem, where she makes most of her money working for a foundation while also teaching courses at the Hebrew University. It’s been a turbulent few years for her, as you can imagine, watching her country slide rightward and then set about the wholesale destruction of Gaza. Tamar is one of a vanishing breed of left Zionists, who believes firmly in the necessity of a Jewish state but one that respects Palestinian sovereignty rather than smothers it.

 

She had some free time in late August and wondered if we could overlap in Central Asia. I suggested sharing a trip along the Pamir Highway. We looked into renting a vehicle and driving it ourselves but there were several obstacles to that plan. For one thing, renting a car in one country and then dropping it off in another would be costly and logistically tricky. For another, the Pamir Highway is a very rough road, unpaved in patches and heavily potholed, and with long distances without cellular access between settlements. I asked Tamar if she had any knowledge of auto mechanics because I don’t. She said not really, but that she had served in a tank unit during her two years of military service. I suggested we look into renting a tank to drive across the Pamir Highway but in the end we decided it would be safer to book a tour with a driver.

 

We told the tour company we’d be open to adding a third passenger to share the cost of the trip. This turned out to be Fusheng, a twenty-something (I’m guessing) Chinese guy who lives in Dubai, where he works for the Chinese state oil company. He’s from the inland west of China and grew up speaking Salar and Bonan at home, which are Turkic and Mongolic languages, respectively. He seems to have travelled everywhere, including Yemen, Peshawar in Pakistan, one visit to wartime Ukraine and two to wartime Syria. He talks about these trips as if they were ordinary holidays and insists they were perfectly safe. Far from presenting as a worldly tough guy, he’s clean-cut, fastidious, and effete.

 

We travelled in a convoy with another SUV from the same company. This one carried two couples: Dennis and Laura from Berlin and Alessandro and Katia from Milan. In an inversion of national stereotypes, the Germans were animated and liked to laugh while the Italians were more sober and serious.

 

Their driver was Kadyr, an attractive man who turned thirty while on the road with us. His neutral expression is one of stunned disbelief but it can change in an instant to a broad smile. Our driver was Japar, probably in his mid or late twenties, round-faced and jovial and, apart from some Tourette’s-like tics and twitches, basically a Kyrgyz bro. He likes to talk up the virtues of yak meat and fermented horse milk and takes a smoke break whenever the car is stopped for a few minutes. He has typical Central Asian facial features but blond hair and blue eyes. Both Japar and Kadyr are ethnically Kyrgyz—Japar says he has no Russian ancestry and that some Kyrgyz are fair—but Kadyr is from Alichur in a Kyrgyz-majority region of Tajikistan while Japar lives in Osh.

 

Japar’s English is maybe a little better than my Russian. We mostly spoke English in the car because Tamar and Fusheng know no Russian but Japar would sometimes try to explain things to me in Russian and I would sometimes understand. Japar owns the Lexus SUV that he drove, which he bought second-hand last year. He makes the trip between Osh and Dushanbe dozens of times a year, working from late spring into autumn, making the trip one way and then making the trip back with a different group a few days later. He then spends the winter on holiday. This winter the plan is to go to Dubai. In the past he’s been to Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Turkey among other places. He speaks decent Turkish but that’s a lot easier if your first language is Kyrgyz.

 

The team on a hill about Khorog. Clockwise from top left: me, Japar, Tamar, Laura, Dennis, Katia, Alessandro, Kadyr. Not in photo: Fusheng

Day 1: Dushanbe to Kalaikhum

 

Tamar arrived in Dushanbe in the middle of the night before our Saturday morning departure. I’d booked us a room with two twin beds and woke just enough to register that she’d arrived but not enough to be able to move my jaw muscles to say hello. I fell back asleep almost right away, saving the reunion for the morning.

 

We had a rendezvous with our drivers and the rest of the passengers at 9am at the Dushanbe Mall, where we were also able to buy a couple 10L water containers to save on plastic waste on the road, and where Tamar and Fusheng could get Tajik SIM cards. (I spent several hours spread across three days trying to get my Tajik eSIM to work before giving up and buying a SIM card for myself.)

 

Our first stop on the road was the Hulbuk Fortress, an eleventh century structure that was (all together now) destroyed by the Mongols. The fortress itself is an unremarkable archaeological site and the attached museum is fine but unspectacular. But it ended up being a memorable group bonding experience thanks to the museum curator.

 

Slight and thin with a traditional Tajik hat balanced precariously on top of his head, he led us through the museum speaking very authoritatively in very broken English. He would point to a stone ornamental coping on display and say, “Eleventh century—original.” He would then point at the very new moulding above us and say, “Ceiling—new.” Once he’d shown us one section of the museum, he said, “thank you very much,” and walked off. We weren’t sure if we should clap or thank him but then we realized he wanted us to follow.

 

At one point, he showed us a ninth century pitcher and cup. It wasn’t enough to explain that these objects were used by a mother to feed her infant. He insisted that we had to act it out. Each of us in pairs had to step up and play mother and infant and the mother had to feed the infant. When it was my turn, this delicate clay vessel was put in my hand and I marvelled at the thought that this was possibly the oldest artifact I’d ever held, barring a few ancient Roman and Ethiopian coins. But no time to examine it, I had to cry like a baby and mime drinking from it. On the way out, the curator gave each of the men flowers that we had to present to the ladies.

Tamar and I acting out the roles of mother and baby

After lunch in the nearby town of Kulob, we started to climb upward and eventually joined the Panj River, which marks the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. For much of the next few days, we followed the river with Afghanistan a literal stone’s throw away on the far bank (a hefty stone’s throw at most points, to be fair). We could see a rudimentary road and small villages on the Afghan side, patches of green and terraced fields where the river waters had been irrigated to feed the otherwise barren landscape. The lives of those villagers had to remain a mystery to us.

 

Afghan village on the far bank of the River Panj

During one break in the drive, I found myself captivated by the flowing river. Water is so ordinary and yet so extraordinary. I find moving water hypnotic, whether the turbulent flow of a river or the ocean swell, where the general pattern of motion is predictable and yet constantly changing. After staring at the river for a minute or two, I looked up. Because my eyes had been fixed for so long on something steadily moving, the solid land seemed to be moving as well, the near shore drifting toward me and the far shore drifting away. It made me wonder whether Heraclitus—the ancient Greek philosopher who said you can’t step into the same river twice—had spent a long time gazing at a river before he ventured his cryptic remark that “everything flows.”

 

The last stop of the day was at a dacha and hotel used by president Rahmon on his twice-yearly trips along the Pamir Highway. The site is a ridiculous confection befitting a petty autocrat. With no organizing rhyme or reason, the grounds are full of follies. A fake Medieval castle stands atop a hill with a cascading waterfall passing by a mini Greek temple, a large pomegranate, a long-necked lute, and a white piano.

 

A dictator's aesthetic

We arrived at the town of Kalaikhum at dusk. Here, and at most stops, we stayed in guesthouses where we slept in shared rooms and ate at communal tables. Facilities tended to be pretty basic: hot showers are a luxury on the Pamir Highway, not a given.

 

I ventured out after dinner to wander the streets. A crowd was gathering around a man in an uncertain state of inebriation outside a small shop, using an overturned bucket as a drum while he sang traditional songs.

 

Day 2: Kalaikhum to Jizeu

 

Setting out the next morning, we continued along the bank of the Panj, often on dirt roads carved out of a steep mountainside without any kind of protective barrier between us and a steep drop into the turbulent river below. It’s not an easy landscape to push a road through and the Tajik state isn’t exactly flush with infrastructure money. At one point we had a half-hour wait while a digger cleared out some rock that had fallen on the road the day before.

 

At the village of Rushan, we diverged from the Pamir Highway onto an even rougher road toward the Bartang valley. After about half an hour, Japar and Kadyr dropped us at a suspension bridge we had to cross to start the two-hour hike up to Jizeu Village.

 

Suspension bridge at the start of our trek up to Jizeu Village

The village is an assembly of huts near a small lake. The nearest road is the one we left behind two hours earlier to hike up a barren river valley with steep rocky shores. The hike gives a deeper appreciation for everything we found at Jizeu, from the rustic huts to the dining table to the dinner and breakfast we enjoyed there. Everything, barring some of the food, made its way up to the village on donkey back or sometimes on human back.

 

Hiking up the valley toward Jizeu

The location of our homestay

Gathering for the evening meal. From left to right: Dennis, Laura, Fusheng, Tamar, Katia, Alessandro

We enjoyed a simple dinner and went to bed. The upside to having the bladder of an ageing man is that I stumbled out of my hut in the middle of the night for a pee and got a spectacular view of the star-filled sky and the Milky Way.

 

Day 3: Jizeu to Khorog

 

Jizeu is at 2495m and I had my first unsettled sleep of the trip, possibly owing to the increased altitude. I got out of bed at six in the morning to enjoy a quiet view of the village and the small lake upstream before gathering with the others for breakfast.

 

The lake above Jizeu at dawn

A couple travellers who are more adventurous than I am had set up tents near our homestay. Rather than taking an organized tour along the Pamir Highway, they were taking their chances with hitchhiking. They were Jacob, a Tamil and a Quaker originally from Chennai but who now lives in Kenya where he works for a Catholic mission hospital; and a Japanese woman whose name I didn’t catch. She was shy and spoke little English while Jacob talked a mile a minute, which means I learned a lot about Jacob and nothing about her.

 

They’d met a day or two earlier while hitchhiking and they were interested in getting a ride with us as far as Rashun. It meant a bit of a squeeze, as there was only one free seat between the two vehicles, but it was only a half hour of driving so it would have been churlish to refuse.

 

Jacob was a fascinating character but by the end of that half hour everyone, including Japar, had had enough of him. The type of character who is indeed interesting but thinks he’s a lot more interesting than he is, and won’t stop talking. He also takes a cheerful pleasure in needling first-worlders like myself. He speaks good Russian and explained that Russia is a country one can do business with, unlike Canada. When I pointed out that tensions between Canada and India stemmed from the Indian government sponsoring the assassination of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil, Jacob responded that the real problem was that Trudeau wasn’t diplomatic in his handling of the issue. Some Quaker.

 

Once we rejoined the main highway at Rushan—basically exchanging a rough unpaved road for a slightly less rough and occasionally paved road—we continued along the Panj river to Khorog. Khorog is the main city of Gorno-Badakhshan. “City” is a relative term—with a population of 30,000, it’s about one five hundredth the size of Istanbul—but things did suddenly feel urban again after a few days on the road. We even found an Indian restaurant for lunch. It was a long way from the best Indian food I’ve ever eaten but a welcome break from Central Asian fare.

 

On its surface, Khorog looks like a pleasant if unremarkable town but it has a darker side. Khorog has been a conduit for drug traffickers, especially when fractured Afghanistan was a major exporter of opium poppies. It’s also, and not unrelatedly, been a hub of resistance against centralized rule from Dushanbe (one person’s drug trafficking warlord is another person’s resistance fighter). These issues exploded into violent clashes in 2012 that have continued to reverberate since. As part of an “anti-terror operation” in Khorog in 2022, one of the prominent Pamiri opposition figures (warlord or local hero depending on your perspective) was shot by government-sponsored snipers, as were two people who rushed to his aid.

 

More happily, Khorog is home to the world’s highest botanical garden. Altitude aside, it isn’t the most exciting botanical garden I’ve ever visited but it did have rows of apple trees in full fruit (apples originated in Central Asia) and no one seemed to mind the tourists plucking apples and eating them.

 

Apple trees in the Khorog botanical garden

Day 4: Khorog to Langar

 

We spent the night at a hotel called Pamir Palace. Among its palatial trappings were shared bathrooms where only some of the toilets had seats and a bedside lamp with a North American plug that didn’t work even when I plugged it into my power converter. Its attached restaurant gave Tamar a nasty bout of food poisoning. Strangely, the culprit was grilled vegetables, which I wouldn’t have fingered as a dangerous meal—and one I nearly chose myself. I had an ungrilled salad and I was fine.

 

In general, the Pamir Highway has a reputation for messing with travellers’ digestive systems. All five of the people I met in Uzbekistan who did it before me had suffered from digestive problems. Literally every time I went to the bathroom in the Pamir Palace, one of the other bathroom stalls was shut and I could hear the squitting sounds of diarrhea. Partly owing to luck and partly owing to the iron constitution I’ve inherited from my mother, I managed to escape unscathed. But poor Tamar was out of commission for a couple of days and was only starting to recover by the end of the trip.

 

From Khorog, we deviated from the official Pamir Highway to follow the Panj River south, keeping the Afghan border on our right, along a steep river canyon. After we stopped for lunch in Ishkashim, the river and the road turns eastward and we skirt the Wakhan Corridor. If you look at a map of Afghanistan, you’ll notice there’s a long skinny bit extending from its northeast and abutting China. This geographical oddity is an artifact of the Great Game, the nineteenth century contest between the British and Russian empires as they vied for influence in Central Asia. Britain and Russia, with characteristically little local consultation, assigned this narrow corridor to Afghanistan to serve as a buffer between Russia’s Central Asian possessions and British India.

 

The Wakhan Corridor is extremely remote, which has its upsides. It’s only nominally under Taliban control and life apparently goes on there as it has for generations. It’s also apparently possible to arrange guided tours of this region. Don’t think the thought hasn’t occurred to me.

 

On the Tajik side of the border, you get frequent reminders that you’re in a troubled part of the world. We frequently passed soldiers on patrol, always in groups of three and spaced out enough that a single mortar could kill only one, as well as small fortifications (apparently the technical term is a sangar) that soldiers can shelter behind and return fire.

 

A roadside sangar facing Afghanistan

At least the soldiers get a pretty view

Nor are military fortifications a recent arrival in the region. The Kushan Empire, known for its Greco-Buddhist art, established a series of imposing fortresses two thousand years ago or more to protect trade along the Silk Road. We visited two on the road from Khorog to Langar.

 

Qah Qaha, dating from the third century BCE is mostly just a few ruined walls but the trails leading between them make for some fun clambering and the highest ones afford great views over the Panj and to the Afghan Wakhan across the river. Even more spectacular is Yamchun Fortress, which is also ancient but had a twelfth century makeover. When we visited, it was under heavy (re)construction to make it more accessible. This made the fortress itself a little less exciting to visit, since it meant dodging between construction crews and heavy machinery, but the unfinished construction made for some adventurous sightseeing. A cantilevered ledge extended out from the fortress edge over a precipitous drop and—something that would never be possible in countries with halfway reasonable safety regulations—you could walk right up to the edge and admire the views.

 

View over the Panj to the Afghan Wakhan from Qah Qaha

Crazy view from crazy ledge at Yamchun Fortress

Driving onward toward the village of Langar, we passed through villages with neat hand-built fencing, orderly fields, and stacked bales of hay. Our touring SUVs seemed to be the main entertainment for village children and we got enthusiastic waves as we drove through. I had the acute feeling of getting mere fleeting glimpses of an entire way of life. These scenes took on a magical quality as late afternoon turned to early evening and golden light kissed the valley.

 

Day 5: Hike to Engels Meadow

 

I stepped out of the guesthouse in Langar to my first genuinely chilly morning. We were at 2900m now. I had a slight headache but the altitude wasn’t affecting me too badly.

 

Today was a break from driving, which was welcome for us but even more welcome for Japar and Kadyr. Navigating these rough and pitted roads requires intense concentration and I could tell how fatigued Japar was by the time we arrived in Langar the previous evening.

 

Instead, the plan was to hike up to the meadows lying under Engels Peak. The peak itself has an altitude of 6510m while nearby Karl Marx Peak reaches 6723m—poor Friedrich, always playing second fiddle. The meadows are no slouch in the altitude department either. Just shy of 4000m, they’re as high as the summit of Mount Robson, the tallest mountain in British Columbia.

 

Tamar, an avid hiker, had to stay in Langar and feel miserable as her body worked to expel the poisons of the Pamir Palace restaurant. The remaining six of us started the steep ascent through an austere landscape of rock and scree. We were all short of breath and after about an hour we left Katia and Alessandro behind because Katia was feeling unwell. Fusheng struggled onward but was miserable throughout the ascent. Apparently visiting wartime Syria is easy but climbing a mountain is hard.

 

Climbing the slope above Langar

After a couple hours, we joined a shepherd’s path and the hike flattened out. The path was an impressive structure. Well above 3000m, some hardy souls had carved it out of a steep hillside—nearly vertical at points—reinforcing the path against erosion with a layer of piled stone and vegetation. On the uphill side of the path, they had dug a canal that channelled water from the river that ran down the valley below us.

 

Shepherd's path on the way up to Engels Meadow

Once we reached the point where the canal diverged from the river, the path became more uneven and we started to ascend again. We passed through a series of meadows with grass chewed down to putting green levels. By early September, herders descend from their high mountain pastures, so I guess the getting had been got while the getting was good.

Very thoroughly grazed meadow between mountain slopes

Nearly five hours after we set out from Langar, we arrived at the final meadow where we could see the rounded summit of Engels Peak in the distance. Across the river, a roughly built stone hut served as a simple home for the local herders. We were some distance from them—and from their barking dogs—but we waved to each other across the distance. Like with the neat Pamiri villages we’d passed through the previous day, I wondered at the kinds of lives these people led.

 

In Engels Meadow with Engels Peak in the distance behind me

Cattle grazed in the meadow, as did a few donkeys. When we settled into our lunchtime snacks, a couple of them trotted over, very interested in any forage that might be heartier than grassy stubble. The two were a jenny and a foal, maybe mother and child. I gave each of them one of a two-pack of granola bars. The foal was affectionate and very much welcomed pets and cuddles. The jenny was more aloof and I could see why she might not naturally see humans as her friends. She had saddle sores on her back, including one that was festering and crawling with flies. The foal showed no marks of ever having worn a saddle, so remained innocent of the knowledge of humanity’s uses for donkeys.

 

My two donkey companions on the meadow

On the descent, a herder passed us with two donkeys, one fully loaded and an unburdened foal. A bit further on, we passed him having a rest with a couple friends while the donkeys carried on down the path ahead. This proved to be an obstacle, as the pair of donkeys would hurry on ahead whenever we got close. Not only were we separating the donkeys from their herder but we kept disrupting their attempts to chew at the pathside shrubbery. Eventually we hopped across the canal and hurried along above the path to get ahead of the donkeys before returning to the path.

 

Herder descending with donkeys

Before leaving the canal path, I stopped to marvel at a peak on the far side of the valley. Diagonal striations in the sedimentary rock bore evidence of (I’m guessing?) hundreds of millions of years of sediment that would have been deposited horizontally. What titanic force lifted up the entire landscape and threw these once horizontal sediments askew?

 

Diagonal striations in the sedimentary rock

On the way down, we caught up with Alessandro and Katia, who’d managed to struggle on as far as the end of the canal path. We got back down to the village by about five o’clock, nine hours after we’d set out.

 

Descending back toward Langar

Day 6: Langar to Alichur

 

Setting out from Langar, we started our ascent to the high Pamir plateau. The road was barren and dusty. That morning, the limited cell signal in Langar had been enough for two different friends to send me photos from travels in Sri Lanka and Ireland. Tamar loves austere landscapes but I grew up in a rainforest. I enjoy visiting arid terrain from time to time but I never miss the desert when I’m surrounded by green and I do feel a yearning for green when I’m in the desert.

 

The day started off with two of the diciest stretches of the route. The first was a river crossing without a bridge. We simply had to jounce across uneven stone as the shallow water rushed beneath the chassis. The second was a bridge that was under repair. A section of the bridge had collapsed a couple days earlier and there was a real question whether we’d be able to cross it or would instead have to backtrack to Khorog. We managed to sneak across the narrow remainder of the bridge while a crew of workers carried and stacked stone to fill in the section that had collapsed.

 

Fixing the bridge

Throughout the drive we passed through military checkpoints once or twice a day where we had to present our passports and GBAO (Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast) permits. I was intrigued to see some soldiers still have hats bearing a red star with a hammer and sickle.

 

Soldiers were less common on the Afghan side of the border—mostly it was men on foot herding livestock or rickety little motorbikes racing between villages—but at one point we passed a patrol of Taliban. Tamar, starting to feel better, waved out the window to them and they waved back. She was tickled at the thought that some Taliban soldiers had just waved at an Israeli.

 

The main undertaking of the day was a hike up to Panorama Ridge. We stopped near a salt lake 4500m above sea level and started a slow ascent toward the ridge above. The air was thin and the going was slow but the real challenge came when we reached the exposed part of the ridge. The wind there was so fierce that my nostrils ached from its blast. And to think this is summertime in the Pamirs.

 

The viewpoint itself was at 4800m, making this the highest altitude I’ve ever reached apart from the day a quarter century ago when I crossed the Thorung La Pass (5416m) in Nepal’s Annapurna region. A small stone shelter mercifully allowed us to get some cover from the wind. In the distance we could see the white peaks of the Hindu Kush.

 

The team at 4800m. From left to right: Alessandro, Katia, Fusheng, Tamar, me, Dennis, Laura

On the way down, with more energy to spare to enjoy the landscape around us, we noticed dozens of marmots hopping about the mountainside, dashing from one hole to another. One was as big as a mid-sized dog. I have no idea how they find enough food to grow so big in such a barren landscape.

 

The road turned north and away from the Afghan border and soon we rejoined the Pamir Highway proper, which meant exchanging gravel roads for deeply pitted paved roads. The high desert landscape didn’t feel exactly welcoming to living things.

 

Not exactly bursting with life

Finally we arrived in Alichur, windy and forlorn at 3900m. This is where Kadyr was born and raised and from here on we passed through settlements with sizeable Kyrgyz populations. The Kyrgyz are traditionally nomadic pastoralists so this is their kind of landscape. I can’t say it’s mine. Alichur itself is a depressing collection of low-slung and humble dwellings. One doesn’t get the sense that the people living here have much in the way of energy or resources to devote to adding some flair to their homes.

 

Alichur: not the architecture capital of the world

In the midst of this squalor, our hotel stood out as the best one we stayed in. A two-storey structure with a comfortable common space, it even had an attached sauna. It also had the weirdest sign I think I’ve ever seen in a hotel. (You can click to enlarge any of these images, by the way.)

 

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Day 7: Alichur to Karakul

 

I had a bad case of altitude sickness when I hiked the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal back in 2001. Apparently it’s a bit random who suffers from altitude sickness and how badly—it’s unrelated to things like fitness level. And evidently a bit random across a lifetime: I’m happy to report that the worst I suffered on this trip was the occasional bout of sleeplessness. That included my night in Alichur, which came with the upside that I was up in time to watch the sunrise.

 

Sunrise over Alichur

After breakfast, we set out across the barren plateau fringed with mountains. Chinese truckers rumbled down the highway in the opposite direction. These included Shacman trucks and BYD electric cars (both Chinese brands) without license plates. They were being delivered to Dushanbe, where they’d be sold and acquire Tajik plates.

 

Our first stop at the day was basically a postcard saying “Greetings from Central Asia”: three yurts and a herd of yaks on the open plateau.

 

You know you're in Central Asia when...

The family of Kyrgyz pastoralists who lived here made a side business of welcoming tourists and letting them ride a yak for the equivalent of about $5 USD. I was captivated by the herd of yaks themselves, sitting around or grazing with the spectacular backdrop behind them. I was less keen on being complicit in animal abuse but I felt I really ought to comply, since it would be shitty tourist behaviour to roll up, take some photos of these people’s exotic lives, and then leave without compensating them in any way.

 

The yak was led by a young boy who tugged it by a rope attached to a septum ring while the father occasionally whacked it with a stick to make it hurry along. I’d had enough after about a minute and told the boy to turn around.

 

Yaks in repose

Me, complicit in animal abuse

We stopped for lunch in Murghab, another squalid town on the high Pamir plateau. A sharp contrast to the confected opulence of Dushanbe, you get a stronger sense out here of the relative poverty of Tajikistan. We ate in a sketchy restaurant behind which was the most disgusting outhouse I’ve ever seen, which is quite an achievement when you consider some of the places I’ve been (I’m sorely tempted to describe it but I don’t think anyone will thank me if I do). We had an hour to kill after lunch—mostly, I think, because Japar and Kadyr wanted to catch up with some friends here—and wandered about a bazaar that consists of shops in converted shipping containers.

 

The Murghab bazaar

We drove north through a landscape that I imagine Mars to be like if Mars sprouted a little vegetation. I asked Japar about the economy in places like Alichur and Murghab. He explained that a lot of people work in tourism in the summer while also managing herds of yaks. They buy the yaks cheap in the spring, fatten them up, and sell them at a markup in the autumn. Many will then spend the winter in Dushanbe or Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. It’s a hard life, he said. Living at these altitudes causes many health problems.

 

About an hour north of Murghab, we crossed the Ak-Baital Pass, which, at 4655m, is the highest point on the Pamir Highway.

 

Stopped at the Ak-Baital Pass

From there, it was gently downhill until we arrived at Karakul Lake. That expression is redundant since kul is Kyrgyz for “lake” (not coincidentally similar to the Turkish göl). Lake Titicaca, between Bolivia and Peru, holds the claim of being the highest navigable lake in the world. But Karakul is big enough that it certainly seems navigable and, at 3960m, it’s more than a hundred metres higher than Titicaca.

 

Karakul is salty and doesn’t support fish but its surrounding wetlands are apparently rich in bird life. In case you’re wondering too, I looked it up: the main factor determining whether a lake has salt or fresh water is whether it has any outflow. If not, minerals flowing into the river stay there, forming salt deposits in the lakebed and making the water salty. By extension, the world’s oceans are salty because they have no outflow either.

 

No fish but unreal vistas. On a grassy shore caked white with salt, I looked out across blue water to the mountains ringing the north and west sides of the lake. It felt like I was on the coast of Scotland or something but the lake is at the same latitude as southern Italy. Tamar and I wandered back to the lake to watch the sunset before heading back to our hotel (also with a working sauna!) for dinner.

 

Early evening at the shore of Karakul

Day 8: Karakul to Tulparkul

 

About an hour north of Karakul we reached the Tajik–Kyrgyz border. The crossing was slow on the Tajik side and made slower by the fact that Japar refused to pay a bribe to the customs officer. He retaliated by insisting on searching all our bags thoroughly. Which is weird, considering that just made more work for him, but he seemed to enjoy it, whistling as he picked through our things.

 

Japar was visibly gladdened to be returning to Kyrgyzstan. His gladness was partly the pleasure of returning home but also due to the conveniences of a relatively more prosperous country. The border crossing on the Kyrgyz side was smooth and better organized and the roads were noticeably better, which makes a big difference to someone driving for hours each day.

 

While the languages of Tajikistan are related to Persian, Kyrgyz is a Turkic language. No one’s entirely sure where the Turkic people originate, but it’s somewhere around here (most likely a bit further north, around the intersection of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia). Traditionally they were nomadic pastoralists but they got caught up in the expanding empires of Islam, at first raiding urban centres, then getting enlisted in slave armies, and eventually running the show. As Islam spread east, the Turks spread west, and by the fifteenth century, Ottoman Turks had assumed the title of caliph, claiming political–religious leadership of the Islamic umma from their seat in Constantinople. But it all started with yurts and livestock in the Central Asian grasslands.

 

We had lunch in the town of Sary-Tash, where we were joined by Hillel, who had just arrived on a red-eye flight from Tel Aviv via Dubai. Hillel is a friend of Tamar’s and the two of them are going on a trek in the Alay Mountains of southern Kyrgyzstan this week. Instead of going all the way to Osh only to return a couple days later, Tamar arranged for the two of them to stay at our end-of-day destination of Tulparkul. Hillel is a historian in his sixties who’s a prominent voice on the Israeli left. He’s also an exceptionally lovely human being, with a kindly demeanour and a gentle wisdom.

 

From Sary-Tash, we drove out to Tulparkul (or Tulparkul Lake if you want to be redundant), which challenged the yurt camp from the previous day for the title of most quintessentially Central Asian vista. On the far shore of the lake, we could see rows of yurts and pastoralists on horseback herding cattle. Behind them loomed the white jagged peaks of the Alay Mountains.

 

Tulparkul with yurts and livestock on the far shore

The change in scenery on this side of the border is striking. While the Tajik Pamir are dusty and dry and more plateau than mountain, the Kyrgyz landscape is more dramatic. Grasslands replace desert and the mountains are very mountain-like.

 

And with grasslands comes wetter weather. At Tulparkul I saw my first cloudy skies and by late afternoon they sent down a mixture of rain and hail. This was the first rain I’d seen since my trek in the Georgian Caucasus more than a month earlier.

 

Day 9: Tulparkul to Osh

 

We spent the night in a yurt camp a short distance south of Tulparkul. Charming in principle, it wasn’t super comfortable in fact. The hardworking woman who runs the yurt camp added more coal to the stove heater every hour from afternoon into evening, to the point that the yurt got uncomfortably warm. But it cooled overnight so that I woke from the cold and had to put on more layers before trying to fall back asleep on the hard bed.

 

I stepped out of the yurt half an hour before breakfast to clamber up a hill and take in the spectacular scenery we’d be heading into that morning.

 

Morning view upstream from the yurt camp

The plan for the day was to spend the morning hiking up to Travellers’ Pass on the approach to Lenin Peak and then drive to Osh where the Pamir Highway terminates. At 7134m, Lenin Peak is one of the tallest mountains in the Pamirs. It’s now officially called Ibn Sina Peak, a name I prefer for obvious reasons (Ibn Sina aka Avicenna was one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages), but it’s still known colloquially by its Soviet-era name.

 

We set out in the morning with fairly clear skies, although Lenin Peak itself was obscured by cloud. No matter, the landscape was unspeakably beautiful. We ascended gently following a stream with the sounds of chirping marmots and gushing water around us. Yaks grazed across a valley and the world was beautiful.

 

You can barely make out the summit of Peak Lenin in the distance behind the clouds

Yaks on the hillside

A series of plaques affixed to a rock wall commemorated mountaineers who had died trying to climb Lenin Peak. I love mountains but I’ve never been especially tempted by mountaineering. Pretty much every serious mountaineer I’ve ever met knows someone who has died in the mountains.

 

As if to remind us of the perils of the mountains, the weather started to close in as we ascended. By the time we reached the final steep ascent to Travellers’ Pass, we were contending with a mixture of hail and snow driven by fierce winds. The pass itself was increasingly obscured by cloud and we decided it would be best to turn around.

 

It’s disappointing not to reach a goal but I think, taken in the right spirit, it can be psychologically healthy. Don’t get too attached to the goal and try to enjoy the journey instead. Besides which, the hike to Travellers’ Pass is scheduled for the first day of the four-day trek I plan to take with Nis later this week. “Tulparkul Lake” isn’t the only redundancy on this trip.

 

Mountain weather is changeable, and as we headed down, the weather cleared, then got nasty, then cleared again, then got nasty again. With each change, our own assessment of the decision to turn around alternated between regret and relief.

 

We were back at the yurt camp by two o’clock and on the road to Osh soon thereafter. We left Tamar and Hillel at the yurt camp and I said my final fond farewell to an excellent travel companion.

 

Tulparkul sits at about 3500m and Osh is at 900m, so there was some altitude to lose on the five-hour drive. The steepest bit came in a series of switchbacks snaking down a mountain road clogged with trucks, most of them with Chinese plates. A landslide caused by the rain had blocked off some of the road, meaning trucks had to take turns passing through a one-way patch of highway. Japar, whose strong suit isn’t patience, undertook all sorts of risky manoeuvres to get us around the trucks and down the hill quickly, at one point misjudging how fast he could get around a truck and bouncing hard off a bump on the side of the road.

 

The winding descent clogged with trucks

After that hair-raising experience, the road continued downhill more gently and I could see the temperature reading on the car’s dash rise slowly upward. From the snowy morning, the temperature rose to 24° by early evening.

 

We had some final farewells with the other vehicle at a stop an hour before we reached Osh. It was dark by the time Japar got to my hotel. I said goodbye to Fusheng, thanked (and tipped) Japar profusely, and had my first warm shower and soft bed in many days.