Tajikistan Pt.5

And here as an intro' for this posting is a nice landscape shot. And if you look really close, you'll see Bjorn packing his kit ready to start the days riding ... Somewhere down in one of the valley's lurks a mad Chinaman! Read on ...

Onwards to the Pamirs ... A Rocky Road

Rightly or wrongly we'd decided to snub our noses at the first part of the Pamir Highway, in favour of riding south and east on what appeared on my map to be fairly minor roads. Rather disturbingly when I looked closer and saw where it swung east and moved closer towards the River Panj that separated Tajikistan from Afghanistan, the solid line of a real road became a very thin line indeed. In common map-makers parlance this was a road only one step above a track. But what the hell I told myself, I'm a fully-fledged Enduro-Man now and can handle anything that Tajikistan throws at me ... well, maybe not anything, but I was still game for a challenge.

The stretch from Dushanbe to Kalaikhumb was a tough ride overall, and once more found myself getting twitchy as the road condition deteriorated. What I was tending to do, was to make a comparison between what I could see on my map and what I was looking at on the ground in front me. In doing so was trying to work out how bad that thin black line was going to be that paralleled the River Panj when we finally got to it. A few twists and turns across a patchwork of minor roads and we edged closer to the river and Afghanistan, so it wasn't long before I found out.

With Anzob fresh in my memory the first bit of proper unsealed stuff didn't do much to disturb my peace of mind. But it went on ... and while it was variable, for the most part we didn't come across anything too scary. It just kept coming hour after hour. And again at the end of the first day, in reviewing how far we'd come against how much further we had to go before we got back onto thePamir Highway, the lack of progress was quite discouraging. Once more we were not able to estimate the amount of time it would take with any degree of accuracy. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration, to say that distances in Europe that would take an hour, could take the best part a day here in Tajikistan.

With no accommodation around we were expecting a nights camping under the stars, and happily it looked like being a pretty good night too. But right near the end of that day's travel we'd taken a wrong turn on a section of road-building, to end up in a dead-end of a part-built tunnel. I'm sure that Bjorn will have something more to say about this, as he was on the receiving end of things. But my contribution to his anecdote is this: In trying to establish if the tunnel was accessible he approached the entrance, but instead of a simple wave or some kind of signal to give us a clue one way or the other, a Chinese-worker who was stood just inside the entrance suddenly became hysterical. You can rest well assured that even if we did speak any Mandarin, we'd have had no chance of deciphering this mad Chinaman's outburst. He was right over the top, barking ... no raging with a face like thunder. So out of proportion was his reaction, it was hard to take him too seriously, but it displeased Bjorn who took it all rather personally. Though a little later when we discussed it, he seemed to be mollified when I told him what I saw. And that the reaction was so OTT that this guy might've had a mental problem of some kind. He most certainly had anger-management issues and that was for sure!

We managed to extract ourselves from that building site, but not before a few wobbles on some wet and soft stuff that had my teeth gripped and temples throbbing. Not so long after finding our way back onto the road dusk signalled it was time to stop, so was well pleased to call a halt and settle down for the night. Part way up a windy hill we found a spot away from the road. There would be no beers this night, but we had enough provisions to rustle up some tucker and of course a nice cuppa çay.
This is Bjorn nestled into his sleeping bag, with the sun coming up in the background ...

It took the best part of another full days riding to get to Kalaikhumb, and back onto the Pamir Highway. The main stopover would be Khorag where we would be staying for at least a couple of days. It would be the limit's of civilisation 'as we know it' (Jim!). Once we reached that point things like food choice diminishes, fuel supply and quality is sparse and the advent of continued high altitude steals a lot of the summers heat away. We could even expect to be short of oxygen, with the average height of the Pamirs something over 2 Kms above sea-level.

But before I jump too far ahead of myself would like to make a brief mention of the 2nd nights stopover we had while still on this section. We'd pulled over into a ... and here am not quite sure what to call it. It couldn't be a Truck-Stop as few enough trucks plied that route for the owners to make a living from. It sure wasn't accommodation as such, as the few meagre buildings were barely adequate to house the extended family that lived there. But we did manage to scrounge both food and drink for a few bucks, as well as camping out under their trees. Before it got fully dark the owner took me on a tour of his piece of land, and showed me a number of fruit and nut trees. There were apricot and fig trees, pomegranate, pears and walnuts too. They had their own fresh run stream that flowed down from the adjacent cliffs where I'd guess nobody else lived, and so the water was clean and clear and could be used for everything. They had no tap or piped water-supply. There was no need, as the small over-flow near their kitchen was the combined washing, washing-up and drinking water collection point. The ground was little more than dried earth, brushed to get rid of fallen leaves and other detrious. Simple and to them I'd guess, quite homely.

Tucked well into my sleeping bag, I couldn't see any need to pitch my tent and so spent the night on a slab of rough concrete that served as one of their dining tables. It was a poor nights sleep too, as we weren't very far from a section that the road-builders were working on. A digger driver on night-shift was in the middle of shifting piles of dirt less than 30 metres away from where I was trying to sleep. At one point his lights shone straight onto me, so looked up to see something that looked for all the world like a dinosaur picking up a fallen tree-trunk. He eventually moved further down the track and with the noise diminishing finally fell into a fitful slumber.

Morning comes and the dinosaur's gone back to bed for the day. A quick splash in the stream as a wash, and immediately followed with the by now familiar bike packing routine and we were ready for day no.2. Surprisingly after having hours of stolen sleep, I'd woken up fairly refreshed.

Setting off armed with loads of enthusiasm and energy was determined to make some good progress this day. But we didn't get too far before I came to a grinding halt as another bit of Tajik road-building had me cussing soundly. In fact I had a fairly serious sense of humour loss on a patch of piled up gravel that served as drive-thro' for a section under construction. This forced-stop was bad enough that the bike's back wheel became dug-in right up to the axle. The only way to get moving again was to unload all the luggage and to carry it past the slope of dirt and gravel that was supposed to become a real road at some unspecified time in the future.

"Civil Engineering? Huh! It seemed very uncivil to me!!!"

While humping my luggage up the loose gravel slope cussing and swearing I also watched a convoy of small Chinese mini-buses picking their way carefully through. In going down the rise with gravity on their side, they fared better than me. These mini-van's appeared to be loaded with toilet paper ... They looked at me, and I at them. We both gave each other odd looks in passing and were probably both wondering the same thing about who we each were and where we were headed. I reasoned that there was only one place to go with toilet paper. And that was Dushanbe. They were still a good full-day's drive away with their cargo. But later when I managed to extract myself and get going again, spent some time with the conundrum of whether it was profitable to go to so much time effort and trouble to bring bog-paper all this way and across such atrocious roads. I speculated that these vehicles themselves must form part of the cargo, and were to be sold on at their destination. My best guess was that it would only be the drivers who would be coming back this way again, but instead of driving would be passengers with pockets stuffed full of money ...

We pressed on with grim determination, and sometimes had to fight with the roads. Sometimes though it was simply a case of plodding onwards till it got better. It didn't, it got worse ... Or more enigmatic at least. As the 2^nd day progressed we were to pass a convoy of Chinese trucks on some very narrow sections of 'road' (and have highlighted this word because if you'd have seen it ... ). The road wound it's way around a narrow section of gorge and hugged the side of the cliff. In some places there could have been no more than a metre between these trucks and a 30 metre drop into the seething waters of the Panj river. And don't think that the sides of the cliff was cleanly carved out neither, as there were jagged rocks left in-situ that encroached into the road. Little problem for us on bikes, but these trucks would have struggled. I suppose that in essence this is the modern day silk-route. Where traders would use any means and any route to get their goods to anyone who was willing to buy them. The enigma here, is that it's been said that China doesn't take much in the way of imports. So would these trucks be going back empty? A poor one-sided rocky road of a business if they were ...

To finish off this chapter would like to mention some of the stop-offs, we had to stand and stare across the river at Afghanistan. A country of ill-fame as one of the most dangerous spots on earth. In contrast to it's fearsome rep', we were looking at some very pretty villages. Across from where we were viewing them, they were often neatly laid out and we would sometimes be looking at fields crawling their way towards steep and precipitous parts of the gorge in search of springs and streams to irrigate for their crops. I couldn't help but notice, that even while in often poor and occasionally what could be described as dangerous state with loose rocks above and a raging river below, at least we had a road as such on our side. For all of the hours we rode alongside the Panj River I didn't see one single vehicle on the Afghan' side. I wasn't going to neither, as there was no road for them to get there on ... All that could be seen was a solitary donkey-track tracing it's way along the opposite bank, and even then in one place it clawed its way up the side of an enormous cliff face. Maybe it was the perspective I was viewing it from, but I couldn't imagine walking up that track. There was nothing that was going to stop you if you slipped and fell, until you were pitched into the fearsome torrent of the Panj, or otherwise dashed onto the building sized boulders hundreds of metres below. It looked like one of the loneliest pathways you could imagine.

Look closely ... those tiny blotches are people in Afghanistan carving a new track along the side of the river

While I was pulled over waiting for Bjorn to catch, up took the time to get a few shots of the local scenery as well as perusing the landscape in general. From that I was confronted by a sight that is now burned eternally into my memory banks.

Over on the Afghan side of the river there was a thin track that trailed its way from the left all the way along to a spot on the bank opposite where I was stood. It appeared to originate from small village a Kilometre or so distant. There was another track going off to the right, but these tracks were not connected. Both tracks truncated at a shear cliff face with a boulder the size of house at river level separating the two tracks. There was no evidence of any way up and over, so guessed the only other way for people who lived on either side of these tracks to communicate, would be to travel many kilometres in either direction before they could get up out of the gorge to find easier routes. Donkey-pace or on foot it mattered little, as the travel time had to be measured in days ... But I was looking at a group of people on the left at their dead-end, who were literally carving their way into and across that sheer cliff to enable them to connect to the other track. There were two other individuals on the right hand track too. But they didn't seem to be doing anything constructive that I could detect. They looked to be too far away from each other to communicate by shouting, so to this day don't know what they were actually doing on that side. If they were simply waiting I'd guesstimate it'd be another month or two before they could shake hands with the track builders. Or who know's? This is Afghanistan I was looking at ... so maybe they were waiting to shoot 'em!

As we watched a piece of rock bigger than a man went tumbling silently into the River Panj. They were a few steps closer to meeting their neighbours!

N.B. To qualify the above further, no boat was ever seen on that river. And besides which the river Panj moved at a high rate of knots, that seemed to spell a one-way trip for any un-powered vessel that ventured onto the fast moving water.