The road to the Tajikistan border is almost totally empty. it follows now up a broad river valley with the mountains closing in around. The road becomes increasingly scrappy and pot holed.
I meet an abandoned dog and give it some of my food. I hope someone rescues it. It’s going to get cold out here tonight.
Here I am. Camped out, neither in Kyrgyzstan nor Tajikistan. High up between snow covered peaks in no mans land. Either border about seven kilometers away.
Just me my tent and my bike. I’ve possibly made some not very smart choices at various points in my life. But I’m here. And I’m enjoying where I currently am. There are lots of things that I don’t have, but for now I have this.
Tent up, sit, then into my sleeping bag liner, then a sleeping bag, then another sleeping bag.
Tomorrow, a new country.
G’night…
In the morning, frost rime covers the tent and the sheet over my bike, I half pull out the Thermarest out of the tent and do my morning sit, sitting upright still in my three sleeping layers, utter silence is threaded with the sound of running water at the crux of the valley, the occasional bird screech, halfway through, a loud rumbling sound in the snowy peaks. The beginning of the morning sun brings a minor avalanche somewhere.
Last minute thoughts on Kyrgyzstan.
My images of poverty tend toward clichéd kind. Of outstretched skinny brown arms in the crowded gutters of baking hot countries. For all my gut wrenched moaning about the food here, it’s clear that in lowland regions of Kyrgyzstan, the land is very fertile. Even so, every road side seller predominately sells watermelon maybe some tomatoes occasionally onions but not much else. Mostly it’s melons. Cafes often don’t have many of the meals offered on the menu.
Maybe lack of refrigeration storage is the problem. I dunno. It’s weird that the world is covered with mobile phones and internet cafés, but these are the same places where food still has not diversified.
Tajikistan is poorer still by all accounts. Long live instant noodles.
It’s five kms to the border and the gravelly unmade road takes me about five hours to get there. The air is so thin, the furthest I can go without needing to rest is about forty metres. So this is how I acclimatise.
I indulge myself with an imaginary bacon and fried egg sandwich that my old landlady Corinne has just imaginarily cooked for me. The bread is fresh, white with very chewy crusts. The bacon has been fried in butter and the egg yolk is rice and runny. It’s delicious.
Last night I imagined I was at my mate Pete’s house and he was making me a smoothie with banana, beetroot, apple, orange, celery and wheat grass all blended together.
It’s been proven that imagining eating food can set of bodily chemical reactions that encourage the body to behave as if you’ve really eaten what you have imagined. Very handy when your in the middle of nowhere.
Half way along I encounter another recently abandoned dog, this time an old female Labrador, gentle as anything.. I try to get her to follow me to the border. She comes most of the way and then decides that she would rather stay where she is. A rook overhead clucks.
The first thing I see at the border is another marmot like the one that almost ran into me first thing this morning. Looks like a beaver but has the fur colours of a white polecat, creamy white with brown tips. Must be going into winter fur.
The most insalubrious border control I have I ever crossed, the first person I see is passing a big fat joint to another guard. Some others are squatting round a pile of food and I get invited over for plov….
Goodbye to the border and hello Tajikistan. Immediately the landscape becomes the broadest mountainous moonscape ever. The road begins to drop immediately and the next ten kms is constant decline on constantly washboarding gravel. Eventually it turns into the first tarmac surface I’ve been on in nearly two days. It’s lovely. Meanwhile a dust storm is blowing across the plain ahead. There are virtually no signs of life except for a long barbed wire fence that stretches along the Chinese side of things. I haven’t come very far today, maybe twenty kms. I was warned that the# few days at high altitude would be very slow going and so it has been.
Off-road, the ground is an once thick layer of powdery dust that is impossible to get tent pegs into. I do my best not to get the dust on me so as not to get any dirtier than I already am.
I would love to get cleaned up, but there’s no water and it’s bitterly cold. One packet of heated noodles later and I’m soon in bed
14th Sept.
. A somewhat lethargic day. Maybe it’s suddenly being on my own again, the fact that washing is now difficult (water in rivers is either ice cold or actually frozen). Cold winds drift around with no definite direction, sometimes as headwinds sometimes more helpfully.
My squitty guts seem mostly have settled. I fantasise regularly about baked potatoes with cheese and baked beans. Pizza. Instead I eat dry instant noodles straight from the packet. Good job that currently I rather like them. Very settling for the stomach.
There are no trees here. The only signs of there ever having been grasses are occasional swathes of brown dead stuff. Clumps of low lying plants spot the landscape, half of it dead, some of it green.
The ground is either concrete coloured sands or compacted gravels. Usually with an inch of powdery dust which makes setting up tent not only impossible to get pegs into the ground, but a very delicate job as regarding keeping said dust off of clothes and out of the tent.
Cycling up the road I meet some mountain bikers out on a day trip who very decently stack me up with chocolate bars and dried mulberries. Thank you Stephan from Germany!
The road at least is mostly good and solid, about the same quality as your average English farm track.
After the mountain bikers, the road drops for several kms down to Kusgol Lake. A salt lake with fish in it. The village seems apparently thriving, with a few home stays offered, a village well and lots of children out playing football and volleyball during the school morning break.
The nearest other habitation is150kms away. How on earth do they survive here?
I almost feel like giving up for the day. Maybe I’m still acclimatising. Maybe I’m just feeling unmotivated. I can’t tell the difference. There’s a rotten headwind pushing down the valley which definitely doesn’t help. In the spirit of fuckitness, I head on into it anyway. I have a theory that I will turn off into an adjacent valley in a few kms and maybe then I’ll get some protection from the wind, which fortunately turns out to be the case. Not only does the wind drop but I am also rewarded with a series of descents, which very strangely all seem to remain invisible until I’m right at tar head of them. It’s weird how so often it’s impossible to guess where the road is going to turn next,
after a minor battle with the wind to get the tent up, I eventually succeed but am obliged to crunch my way through an uncooked packet of noodles for tea. I quite like them like that but the added body heat would have been handy.
The following day I really can’t be arsed, motivation levels are well down. I meet an English man and his Italian girlfriend who are both walking and he explains to me that the altitude will do that to people. I am cycling more or less on the flat, and I have to stop every 50 to100 metres and try to catch my breach. Currently I’m at 3500 metres. In 8kms I start a claim to a pass that will take me to 4702 metres. I am not looking forward to it, though the upside is that after the pass the road is very good and is supposedly a free wheel all the 60 or so kms to Murghab.
Currently the road is washboarding corrugated gravel and is awful to ride on. Getting caught in the corrugations is pretty much like putting the brakes on with the added excitement of vibrating loosely-packed stuff off the top of my rear pannier..
Happily, I am reunited with the Belgians from Sary Tash and also the famous Australian family that every one had heard about…. Mark, Mel and a their three young girls, Sia, Ezra and Rain are travelling by two tandems, starting from Urumqi going via Kashgar. To here.
I join them in camping at the bottom of the pass even though it’s only two in the afternoon. It seems that we are all experiencing minor difficulties with the altitude.
Its a cold night, it was -8 in the Belgians tent. I wake up to find ice both inside and outside my own tent. No wonder I didn’t really sleep much. It was another raw noodle night too. Got to eat hot food at night. Crucial. Even if it is bloody windy and makes boiling water difficult.
We start our collective morning munch appreciating our mutual support. The9km climb to the top of the pass is more like a crawl and takes us about four hours. Mel is struggling to breathe, Pif, one of the Belgians has diarrhoea. Mark is a total superstar as are the kids, and I aim determined to pedal every inch of the way, which means stopping extremely frequently and moving at an absolute minimum pace.
At more or less midday we finally reach the top of the pass, all of us struggling hugely.
At the top a Russian and an Estonian are taking photos of us which I find rather annoying as they don’t even bother to say well done or anything to us first. Afterwards we do have some conversation with them. Whilst there we meet another English couple from Exeter coming the other way as well as the walking English guy with his Italian girlfriend again. Funny how you can be in the remotest place ever and still meet loads of people.
Mel is feeling sick, mark has a puncture and a cold wind has kicked up. Actually the weather has been incredibly kind to us today with pretty much no wind.
Punctures mended and multifarious “we did it!” Photos taken, we roll on down the other side in search of a spot to have lunch in.
Up until this point, the Pamirs had just seemed like a range of mountains pretty much the same as any other. Maybe my lethargy had something to do with my lack of general enthusiasm.
Now before us awaits the most amazing looking descent with multi-coloured mountains spiraling stunning reds whites greens and grey in all sorts forms from wildly varied shapes. Very wow.
We have lunch at a local woman house drinking lots of tea and eating lots of home made bread and butter. Her home is very basic, it’s only piece of furniture being a cradle for her baby. Central is her woodbine on which she cooks our tea. Most of the walls are hung with lovely colourful rugs. I wonder how on earth she manages to survive once hate tourists have all gone home.
Outshine we meet a pair of Argentinians sitting in brand new deck-chairs on a never ending world tour. We seem to be meeting every one today. Halfway up the pass we had met two cars full of Japanese who all wanted to take our pictures of course. That’s Japanese for you. I expect they take pictures of each other eating their breakfast. They can’t stop themselves.
Back on the bikes, it’s goodbye to gravel and lumpy stuff and hello nice smooth tarmac. And it’s all very gently rolling downhill. And the scenery is stunning in a very other worldly kind of way. This is fabulous, and we all earned it.
The rest of the day is easy peasy, except that I lose a bolt somewhere that was holding my mudguard steady and mark gets a puncture twice. Eventually we arrive at Murghab our first proper town in Tajikistan. We have been so long in the mountains that seeing metal fences and other paraphernalia of the modern world is something of a surprise.
We all stay at the imaginatively named Pamir Hotel for three nights, encountering a variety of mostly European and Russian tourists there. Most of us are cyclists, some are touring in big four by fours covered in stickers . One or two motorcyclists, including a pair of big BMWs….. Clearly doing a Ewan and Charlie.
Being ill seems to be the man topic of conversation…. Pretty everyone takes a turn at having a dose of the galloping trots. I’ve had my dose already, so I hope I’ve had my fair share and am not obliged to have another dose at any point.
At the town bazaar, a series of occupied converted sea containers, provisions are obtained for the next bout of mountainous emptiness. My re stocking consists of a bang of onions, a slightly past it cabbage and 38 packets of instant noodles. Not bad for someone who recently vowed never to eat them again.
Everything cleaned, hot meals had, the best showers I have had in months, films watched and fluffy duvets enjoyed, the only thing left to do before leaving is to obtain the mysterious customs form and to register with the police. This is a classically tangled bit of bureaucracy involving trapping from the police station to the bazaar to obtain photocopies, then to the bank to have some form or other laboriously filled in by hand four times… No photocopier in this bank. That’s twenty forms for the Aussie family. It takes an age. Then we all traipse back to the police station to have our forms processed. Except trees nobody there to process anything for about three hours. Oh what fun we are having today….
Eventually a very nice lady policeman comes and sorts everything out. By the time she gets to doing my form it’s getting dark and I have to give her a torch cos the bulb in her office is so dim.
Next day, we more or less go our own separate ways, passing each other a couple of times. I’m feeling the need to break free.
I pass some bloke ridding a tall bike. Beats hitting a golf ball across Mongolia I suppose.
The Pamirs are pretty much finished now, passing from crazy coloured mountains to a broad flat bottomed valley pasture after which the area is named.
A passing Dutch couple inform me that the Wakhan Valley road consists of130km of sand “road” and that they heard that someone had to push their bike for three days through it.
Camping at the junction that takes me either directly to Khorog or the long way round via the Wakhan Valley, I very nearly decide not to go down the sandy road. My bike is very new and the thought of all that sand might very well wreck the bike.
After a nights sleep I decide to just go for it anyway. After all, I’ve meet at least a dozen cyclists who have ridden the route and I’ve heard no complaints about the sand so far.
The next day I encounter the Belgians again and we cycle together for a few days.
As soon as I take the turn for the road that heads down to the Wakhan Valley, which is effectively the Afghanistan border, the road begins to deteriorate rapidly. It’s as if those in charge would prefer it if nobody actually came down here. For the next foreseeable number of days the road varies from sand to nothing but a ribbon of small boulders and every conceivable combination you can think of in between. The trick with sand is to keep in the second from bottom gear and turn as little as possible. And don’t stop. And don’t go any faster than about four miles an hour. Do that, and you’ll be fine. Unless the sand is more than two inches deep. In which case you’re screwed.
The gravel/rocks are alright as along as you don’t let yourself go too quick on the downhill bits. We had one stretch after an exhausting pass that lasted for about twenty miles that consisted mostly of small rocks. Apart from twice nearly wiping out, it’s a small miracle that my wheels were still round and true at the end of it.
At the bottom, a military checkpoint which involved a lot of pannier searching. The Belgians objected to the intrusion, but I was fine with it. What would you expect in an area that is next door to the country that is/was the largest producer of heroin in the world? If what these guys do stops heroin getting smuggled out then I am happy for them to search my bags.
Some way on we reach the oddly named hamlet of Ratm.
For the last two weeks we have been travelling through a 95 percent dead region. No trees at all, except for a few astonishing willow blushes in Murghab. Almost no live grass. Virtually no animals or birds. One beetle. One hundred and fifty cyclists but they don’t count.
Its been a world of rock and wind. Sparse. Many waterless riverbeds full of nothing but boulders.
Reaching Ratm then is astonishing. Here is an oasis of green. Many willow, poplar, and a tree which I think is called whinberry. Lots of old mans beard creeping through upper branches.
It really brings home to me how integral trees are to life. Without these trees, this village couldn’t exist. And the trees are here only because of there being a mountain stream and the cunning use of irrigation.
The trees afford firewood and animal fodder. Firewood burns better than dried dung, doesn’t clog your lungs so much, and means that the ground has the chance to become more fertile. There are fields here with what looks like wheat being grown. Field edges are lined with trees as vital windbreaks.
The sight of this green civilisation and agriculture after two weeks of bare rock is astonishing. It’s like arriving from another planet.
The next few villages of Langar, Zong and the rest are equally amazing. The roads are lined mostly white old willow pollards that look to be about fifty years old. Clearly these trees were planted at the same time during the Soviet era.
Each village is filled with a network of irrigation channels, and every where there are willow and poplars.
The trees are a safeguard against the ferocious wind that drives down the valley. The effects of it are clear. Outside the villages, as soon as the trees end, sparse rocky desert and sand dunes begin. Today I spent all day battling against a non-stop headwind outside the villages, chugging along at a steady 4mph all day.
Climbing up out of the village of Ptup, its vast new forest petered out and I was left to find myself in a mighty sandstorm. It was plain to see, that if once the desert was reclaimed by tree roots and wind slowing tree tops, the horrible sandstorms will end.
Trees are cool. Sandstorms are shit.
I struggled to find anywhere to put my tent that was protected from the wind. As it is, my tent is still very slowly gathering sand inside. I hope I don’t wake up buried in my own tent.
Monday 27th September
tent emptied of a handful of sand and packed away. On the road, and almost immediately the road turns solid. Tarmac, mostly. I’d been told that it was to be gravel rocks and dust all the way to Khorog, some 150kms still to go. From here though is where it really begins. After yesterdays creeping along, pushing through the headwind, this is a major bonus. The villages continue to be picturesque and peaceful.
I get checked out as a potential lunch by four enormous eagles who fly so low I can hear their wings whistling in the total stillness of the sparse place I meet them in.
A highlight, in one village I say salaam to an old man sitting on a bike who looks exactly like my dad who died a few years ago.
In Eshkashem I am cajoled by cheeky kids, and I have a hill to climb to escape them. And I’m getting tired. And, it seems, I am back in the land of the wreckless driver as twice I have cars coming straight at me at high speed on my side of the road and then dodging out of the way at the very last second.
I’m tired. I was awake watching Schindler’s List till two in the morning last night.
Eshkashem seems to be a town. It has a set of traffic lights, which I find mildly shocking.
Another bonus though is finding a magazin which is able to sell me pots of cold fruit yoghurt. I have been starting to miss protein in my diet and it never occurred to me that I might find it in delicious yoghurt. The yoghurt is the super pasteurised kind that never goes off. It’s fantastic.
In the morning it’s hot. Seeing as how the laws of physics declares that hot air rises whilst cold air sinks, I completely final to understand why the lower I descend geographically, the sweatier I get. Ice cold mountain streams have been a big dissuader to me washing particularly thoroughly. Now it’s hot hot hot and I am supremely sticky. Proper wash and back to wearing shorts I think.
After a two week mountain top blip of cooler weather, I now return to the endless summer heat I have been enjoying virtually non stop since my trip started in Mumbai at the end of January.
In100kms is the city of Khorog. It has a real Indian restaurant with a good reputation. This is possibly the most exciting thing ever.
27th Sept.
Wow. What a day! Not only is the road almost totally smooth to ride on, but the few slight inclines pay me back with long beautiful flowing descents that wind round immense craggy mountain buttresses that line the Panj river that I’ve been following all this time.
Photographing afghan villages, waving to afghan kids and watching their village lives ticking along from only a couple of hundred metres away is fun and also a little surreal. Here it is, the land of ill repute, home of the big bad beast of fundamental Islam, of Soviet invasion, of war and terror. From where I stand, it looks strangely the same as Tajik village life; kids herding cows and goats, men harvesting wheat, women and girls tending other crops. Same both sides of the water. Life goes on.
I would have entertained the thought of crossing the river to say hello, but there is a significant presence of Tajik border guards along the route today. Not only are they preventing me from breaking the law, but they are also preventing me from probably getting myself severely drowned in the fast flowing waters.
I meet four polish cyclists and have lunch with them. They are going the other way from me. I feel sorry for them. The way I came is definitely easier. Nearly all downhill for one thing. And even that was tough.
I also meet the Brazilians in their truck again. It was lovely to see them again, but I was distracted by their passenger, an Englishman called Jeremy. We delighted in each others Englishness, dreamed together about fish and chips and bacon and eggs…
Tomorrow I have 15kms to go to reach Khorog. Then I will book into the Pamir lodge, get clean and then go out and eat Indian food for lunch. And then come back and do it again in the evening.
The Pamir lodge is full of cyclists talking about diahorea. Twenty cyclists talking about their personal bumrot endlessly for three days is not interesting. All the guys seem to have black beards, square glasses, baseball caps, legs like stick insects. I think somebody is cloning them somewhere.
Happily, it is very lovely to bump into Lenka and Alex the very British Czech couple who helped me plan my route in Osh. Being non cyclists, we have fun not talking about gravel, washboard, headwinds and bumrot.
There really are other things in life, many of them rather silly.
After three days of chatting and Indian lunches at the Delhi Durbar Hotel, I up sticks and head out north. I get as far as Rushon where whilst camped out and away from endless chatter, it dawns on me that I am to make solid continuous cycling progress into Georgia (where visas cease to be an issue) and going to need to go to Dushanbe sooner rather than later to hopefully change my date of entry into Uzbekistan and having done that try to a get month visa for Kazakhstan. I get fifteen days for free, but it’s not long enough to cycle through the little western corner and get the random sailing to Baku in Azerbaijan.
Next morning I stash my bike at a guesthouse and take a mashrutka up to Dushanbe which takes a brain buggering 14 hours through 500 miles the first three quarters is winding dust and rocks.
Arriving at 2am I head for the Green House hostel, the cyclists choice… more bumrot banter to come no doubt. I get there, of course it’s shut. I bed down on a pile of dustbin bags with about a quarter of an inch of dust on them. Half hour later a chap comes by, tells me he is the manager and gives me somewhere proper to sleep inside.
Despite an thronging crowd of about 170 people outside the Uzbekistan embassy and thanks to a policy of foreigners getting preferential treatment, the nice man at the desk issues me a new updated visa which now means I won’t need to be jumping on any trains in order to get to borders on time. It would be nice to say I cycled the whole way after all.
Next I go to the Kazakhstan embassy. By contrast, the place is totally empty. I make my application, which includes made up travel insurance information.
After three days of hanging out, very good pizza, surprisingly little bumrot analysis and using the very nice WiFi at the cafe at the very nice Sheraton Hotel, I go collect my Kazak visa.
I am a little anxious about collecting it. I hope I can make the two kilometre walk to the embassy without needing to shit myself.
Yes. My own personal bumrot has returned.
I collect my visa. Success! My bottom has not exploded. So far so good!
I drink coke in the park and wait by the toilets just in case. Nothing happens.
The next morning, still in a state of bumrot, I get an early mashrutka back down to Rushon.
Over the next three days, bottom exploding merrily along the way, I start my return to Dushanbe again. The lack of food leaves me feeling euphoric about being in the mountains and feeling very simple minded about things in a nice way. Another day I am feeling tired, grumpy and really don’t want to talk to any one.
Familiar with the route I am taking now, I know that I don’t need to push too hard, which is as well under the circumstances.
I find when I am actually cycling the body processes what I consume to use the energy. When I stop moving, it just spits it all out. Conclusion: Keep cycling, but don’t flog myself in the process.
Its October 10th and as hot as the hottest English summers day. Fresh apples and pomegranate for breakfast.
October 29th.
Its been over two weeks since I last wrote any thing and clearly I am now somewhere else entirely. Just west of Boysun in Uzbekistan to be exact.
I had been a little anxious about coming to Uzbekistan, as I often am about many new countries that I visit, though I think this is now a dying habit. Everywhere invariably turns out to be easy peasy. My particular worry about Uzbekistan was 1 getting the third degree in being searched upon entry (it took half an hour. No big deal) and 2 being totally bamboozled by having to carry enormous wads of near worthless notes. I changed forty US dollars for a wodge of notes an inch thick. 10 5000 notes and 98 1000 notes. The 1000 notes are worth 16 pence currently, though will probably be less next week. 1000 som will buy a disc of fresh bread, 2500 a bottle of fizzy mineral water or a bag of persimmons or apples and 6000 buys a small tin of condensed milk (for making Indian style chai) or a double sized snickers bar. There you go; how straight forward is that? Trick is to change small amounts at a time…. I had heard tales of cyclists having panniers stuffed with vast quantities of notes and people carrying big sacks of money about. Why do I listen to other cyclists? They either have to talk about the state of their guts or make up exaggerated cobblers about how hard it all is. Not all of them. Only some of them. I exaggerated. I can’t help it; I’m a cyclist….
Back down in the Wakhan Valley, with my minorly exploding bottom (cyclist; sorry)
From Rushon to Qal’al Kum was bumpy dust roads all the way. The valley was gorgeous though. From Qal’al Kum I have the option of either turning right and taking a 280 km road that is so crap that a Scottish cycling chap I’d met a few times on the road said that he’d got halfway and then chucked himself and his bike on the first truck that came past, cos the road was the worst he’d ever encountered. Or so he said. He was probably exaggerating and just wanted to get to Dushanbe super quick so he could shag his girlfriend who was waiting for him there.
Or I could turn left onto a route which is 380kms… a whole 90kms longer. It also has lovely lovely smooth no-messing-about tarmac, which once I’m on it, the considerably less effort uphills and the no effort whatsoever speedily gliding downhills makes it an obvious no-brainer of a choice. Many of the downhills I had previously encountered were so unpredictable and bike -clatteringly bumpy, even going downhill took considerable concentration and sometimes pedalling. No one should ever have to pedal downhill.
Having previously passed through the gloriously named Zong right down in the south I now find myself passing through Zing and Zang. I imagine the villages forming themselves the ZZZVAJBWC- the Zing Zong Zang Village Association Just Because We Can. And not any sign of a children’s TV puppet on speed anywhere. Thank goodness.
A memorable camping spot. A field specked with enormous boulders that seem like sleeping elephants, hunkered down in amongst a number of trees that hang like hawthorns. It’s a full moon. The place feels special, like magic happens here. It reminds me of north wales.
The place is spoiled because it is full of abandoned plastic detritus. Not wanting to camp in a despoiled rubbish tip, I collect all the plastic and burn it. Why don’t I recycle it? I hear you complain. Because the nearest plastic recycling facility is probably several thousand miles anyway.
Further up the Wakhan Valley (it effectively is the Afghan-Tajik border and crenulates its gushing way for at least a thousand kms) the rock walls seem to close in even tighter, and the ever wonderful tarmac road is a work of Chinese genius. I suspect the chinks are copying the Roman tactic of laying nice roads down first so that empire building can progress nice and smoothly when an opportune moment comes. This particular route is part of the Silk Road network, enabling many trucks to pass (generally) east-west. Eventually they’ll clear the way down to Khorog, where it would join onto an existing modernised stretch that cuts across to Murghab and then directly into China just north of the Tibetan plateau.
Anyway.
At a police check point I am happily getting my passport checked by a nice friendly guard when his superior, a sour faced red haired pale chap, clearly of Russian descent, takes a dislike to my increasing fundamental Islamist looking beardage and mimes the necessity that I shave it off immediately. Fortunately, I am neither a policeman nor a soldier and thus he has no authority over me. I can’t take him seriously and I am mock-horrified about the prospect of suddenly getting my chin denuded. The guard checking my passport is trying not to laugh. The Russian superior is going red faced and even sourer looking. How can I explain to him that really I am just a London hipster but I left my fixie and my artisan bread and beer at home. No doubt my lack of hipster-identifying accoutrements is what is causing all the confusion. Oh what fun..
I eventually leave the Wakhan Valley by way of a steeply rising set of hairpins covered in road construction workers and their attendant vehicles, very many dumper trucks and lorries and continuously billowing clouds of nasty vision-blanking orange dust rising almost continuously. At least that was my experience of it when I’d passed through here twice in the mashrutka coming up to Dushanbe and then back down again. I had worried about this bit. I had thought about cycling up at four in the morning when there might be less traffic. As it transpires, I get to the bottom of the hill at about four in the afternoon one day, and weirdly there is virtually no traffic. I’m feeling surprisingly spritely after having already put in a days legwork, so I crack on and head on up, as far as I can be bothered. Split the ride up in two. It’s fifteen kms going up so this seems the most sensible thing to do. I camp out halfway up on a rare flat spot that isn’t a two inch pool of dust. Instead, I have picked a spot full of desiccated fossilised turds. Upon tentative examination, it’s clear that any malodorous intent had wafted away long long ago. I kick them away . No-one likes to camp in poo, harmless or otherwise.
The rest of the climb the next morning is inevitably busier and met with varying degrees of interest from the road workers varying from hand waving and shouts of ‘Hoy!’ Which I think, as I have experienced this over and over in Tajikistan, is a latent goat herder-ism. Every man in Tajikistan is a goat herder. Even if he isn’t. It must be in the blood.
Eventually at Shur Obod, a bit of plateau and then a richly deserved long downhill. The first half is a bumpy no fun nightmare and the bottom half is 25kms of wind-in-my-beard ecstasy.
The ride to Dushanbe is easy and quick. In Kulob I find a shop selling Heinz Tomato Ketchup. Oh Wow! A tin of peas, some hideously expensive bottled mushrooms and ladles of the red stuff and I am sitting outside the shop having a partial English breakfast experience. I am a happy bunny.
After Kulob I manage to smack my front wheel into an unseen pothole so hard that I knew a flat tyre was on its way. Sure enough ten minutes later…
Mending my flat, an elderly gentleman, in amongst the usual almost non-stop barrage of ‘hoy!’s and hellos and at-kuda?!’s (where are you from?!), stops and suggests I stay at his home for supper and a night indoors. We can barely communicate, but it’s a very pleasant night. Supper is delicious and his tiny two room home I am envious of. He has no furniture; most people in this part of the world sit or semi-recline on cushions. It’s a very civilised way to be. After some time of doing things this way, the thought of being in a space full of clunky cluttersome chairs seems ugly and awkward. I have never been a fan of furniture, and coming to Asia to find my weird-in-England way of thinking is utterly normal here. A revelation.
We lay and watch TV, channel hopping as we go. At one point we watch ten minutes of Ant and Dec on that Simon Cowell pop singer thing. The X-files or whatever it’s called. My host is 68 and monitors the small electrical sub-station that his tiny home is connected to. He periodically goes out and opens the mysterious metal boxes to read meters, sometimes giving one or two of them a hearty slap to unstick a stuck needle on a gauge. Nothing explodes, not even my bottom. Well that’s nice then.
Just before Dushanbe I find lots and lots of wrapped sweets next to the road. Well that’s breakfast sorted then….
In exciting exciting Dushanbe, the city named after a day of the week (Monday), I do practically nothing at the slightly posh Green House Hostel. once again I cross paths with Val and Pif, Emilie and Roma (all of whom were still busy being ill) and the Famous Australian Family. It was nice (and surprising) to see them again.
Whilst in town it occurs to me to check out to see whether Dushanbe is a worthwhile place to get an Azerbaijan visa and whether it’s a better option than getting an e-visa. I might as well seeing as though I’m only here because I’ve got nine days before I can cross into Uzbekistan. Better to wait here than at a nowhere of a border crossing.
The consul at the embassy introduces himself to me fairly bluntly, being quick to point out that he is 27, that Dushanbe is an incredibly boring city and that he has been stuck here for six years. He then goes on to tell me that he studied for a PHD in New York and now rarely gets the chance to use his English.
We sit and talk for an hour, not so much about visas, but more about the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the peace process in Northern Ireland, the price of houses in various places and some of the finer points of British and American colloquialisms and grammar construction.
And then he gives me a nice flexible date fifteen day visa for 20 dollars which is a third of the price of the e-visa, more useful and much less hassle to obtain. He also advises me to become an English teacher because of my patience and clear talking.
I celebrate my day with a vegetarian 14 inch thin crust pizza and double fries.
Between net-nerdery at the hostel I do meet some lovely new people, one of them grant, a smiley South African, Florien from Germany with a wonderfully kooky sense of humour and his even smilier friend whose name escapes me (he’s probably called Ralf), and a guy from Barcelona who quite without prompting, also tells me I should become an English teacher. Hmm. Seems somehow omen-ous that two people within the space of a couple of days should tell me to go forth and teach English. Hmm.
Leaving Dushanbe, I pass through very agricultural country. It’s weird to think that this is the same country I entered 43 days ago, the utterly barren Martian landscape of the Pamirs.
Worth a mention is Turdybobo. Tajikistan is not a very funny place, not having any of the broken English signage of either China, Japan or India. What is does have is some rather strange place names. Turdybobo has got be one of the best I’ve ever encountered. Over the border to the north in Uzbekistan is the fabulously named Jizzax…
Richard Terry 