Bumping to Kalai Khumb, Limping into Khorog

Well, I took a short break in real time to visit Norway, and let me tell you: visiting one of the most remote parts of the world (the Pamirs), followed by one of the most progressive parts of the world (you guess), followed by your return to the sort of semi-deprived point on the map that you now call home can give you situational and psychological whiplash. It is good to be home, but also sad to leave behind those little comforts (and friends), your fondness for which (and whom) was brought back to you in vivid color during your weekend away.

But back to our trip to the mountains, still occurring in narrative time:

Day 1 into Day 2 (Kalai-Khumb to Khorog. 240 km, ca. 9:00 am - ca. 4:00 pm, approx. 7 hours)

Midday into our first leg of the journey, we passed through Kulob and picnicked on the other side, still feeling excited for the road ahead.* At that point, another kind of bad road began: we left the slippery, fine sable-hued dust of the construction zones in the Khatlon hills and headed for the red dried mud, steeper inclines, slightly more hair-raising switchbacks, and, I can say in retrospect, medium-grade bumpy road that led between about Shurobod and Zigar. We also crossed successfully (that outcome was actually more in doubt than anyone expected setting out on our journey) the requisite iffy bridge that I think any journey in Tajikistan worth its salt must include.


Once we crossed into Darvoz proper at Zigar (recall the map), the road again included surprisingly well-paved patches. Here the Iranians, Turks, and Chinese are dividing up the road and improving it, although apparently on their own individual schedules and with their own idiosyncratic materials, methods, and plans.

We pulled into Kalai Khumb nearing dinner time and fairly quickly located our guesthouse. Since I was the passenger, it fell to me to go in and determine whether our attempt to make a reservation had really worked. It became clearer later on that it actually hadn’t, but we still got a room. The main problem when we first arrived was that my head, my neck, my shoulders – really, my whole body just felt like it had undergone some kind of human jackhammer experiment gone awry, and I was tired to boot. The synapses in my brain seemed literally to have been jostled and split, so I kind of had trouble expressing myself to the guy and explaining that we needed a room for 3 people but that it ought to be somewhere on his “reservation list.” Part of the problem was I really wasn't sure at first what language to speak, Russian or Tajik, so a bad mixture with words forgotten in each came stuttering out of my mouth. In any case, we quickly sorted it out and were shown to a double on the first floor of the small guesthouse building.

We had been unsure in any case whether we even wanted to stay in this place, since the advance report last year had steered Dan away due to bedbugs. (Dan and colleagues spent the night at the recommended Kalai Khumb alternative, only for Dan to wake up scratching his entire inflamed midsection due to – you guessed it – bedbugs. But because of that experience, we figured, we might as well try the original place.)

The guesthouse was actually very enjoyable in a Spartan kind of way, a pleasant surprise. OK, it didn’t quite merit the term “bed and breakfast,” which for Westerners is too loaded with charm and quaintness to do justice to hardly any lodging experience in Tajikistan, but the rooms were fine, the mattresses and bed linens clean, and the walls had no signs of bug squishage, which we’d been told was one way to detect a bedbug infestation. Dinner was a welcome and hearty portion of both pasta and rice with a saucy chicken and tomato kind of thing to pour over it. Large pot of green tea, a platter of dried nuts and raisins: the whole 9 yards (well, maybe 7, but in provincial Tajikistan that's a long way!). Our host even offered Dan a cold beer to start out, although it was the less savory Baltika #9 instead of a 7 or even a 3. But hardly a discomfort. We were quite happy to have a peaceful meal on the balcony overlooking the small, rough garden, and to watch the basin of the mountains rising out in front of us as they darkened into dusk.

Night unfortunately brought little sleep – Anya was hopped up, and it was hot and stuffy in the room. But we still anticipated that we’d get moving in the morning and everything would get back on track.

That was until the wee hours of morning, when at least for Dan himself that hope started to go south as he got extremely nauseous. I found out only as we rose and got ready for breakfast (which he was unable to eat) that his stomach was presenting some serious problems.

So we started out on the road to Khorog with a bit of trepidation. A few sickness stops into the ride that feeling really had not abated, although this leg of the journey was at least not terribly long. I drove a portion of the way, when Dan felt so terrible he didn’t want to drive anymore (he insisted it was at least a distraction from the stomach pain until it got very acute). But as we neared the last few kilometers before the hotel, on the outskirts of Khorog, with Dan back in the driver’s seat, we heard a wail from the backseat and turned to see projectile vomiting inside the car from passenger #2! Trepidation took a turn toward dread with that one.

It was actually just motion sickness with Anya, instead of anything she ate, but we really only determined that later on. And even that fact didn’t exactly lessen our feeling of foreboding, since for Dan car sickness is actually a pretty serious and consistent problem. The notion that the kid might be barfing all the way through days two through eight of our journey didn’t lighten our mood.

We stopped for a short clean up along the side of the road, with the requisite wide-eyed Tajik kid staring at us the entire time, and headed the final half hour or so to the 4-star Serena Inn. (Dan very wisely planned our itinerary with variation, between splurging on the very comfortable Serena and staying at places more lacking in the mod cons before and after.)

Once checked in, we had a quick but serious bath for everyone, sick and healthy. Dan headed for bed, and Anya had a quick snack (very enthusiastically eating the very same thing she’d upchucked all over the car – homemade granola – lending more evidence that she was not seriously ill, thankfully). Then Anya and I went out to explore the Serena’s very extensive and quite beautiful terraced riverside garden, while Dan slept through his fever.


Next report: our fearless leader rallies from the sickbed to show us the fine city of Khorog on our first evening in town.

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* Side note on the security happenings that forced us to travel the southern route: a very good overview of what is happening in Tajikistan following the jailbreak and other events, and their larger significance, can be found at Stratfor.

Day 1: Dushanbe to Kalai Khumb

368 km, actual road time: 9:30am-ca. 6:00pm; approx. 8.5 hours.

Started out later than intended (of course), and had to get some additional provisions before we left town (needed to gas up and buy the inevitable bag full of lepyoshka/Tajik flatbread, which isn’t worth getting very far ahead of time because it quickly goes stale). Also reluctantly swung around the house again for a quick grab when we realized we hadn’t packed any booze.

The theme for days 1.5 of the journey was frankly how bad the road was. The quality of the road and our relationship to it was a theme on which we had chance to meditate throughout. But on the early legs of the journey, spent basically getting to remote Badakhshan (where I guess I assumed the roads would be worst), Dan and I were both surprised at how inferior the road was, especially the lead up to Kulob and the stretch from Kulob to where the road nears the Panj River. Our main complaint as we rose and fell through the high hills (or low mountains, depending on your perspective) that progressively grow as you go south from Dushanbe concerned the long dusty stretches where apparently some kind of road work was ongoing, although not exactly always actively in process. (To be fair, it was still Ramadan at that point, and I do think there was more activity actually happening on this stretch when we drove home the day following Eid.)

If you want to see this on a map, I'm plotting out points on the way here on Google Maps.

Also, if the Cyrillic is not a deterrent, here is a map below (click on it to get a larger view), which, now that I look at it, might have given me a more realistic expectation of the roads had I looked at it before we went -- notice the very absent road line, for instance, between Khirmanjoi and Zigar. And the yellow portion between Nurak and Danghara. It actually is a very accurate representation of the roughly 3 types of road conditions we met (terrible, bad, and acceptable/good). Brings that aspect of our trip belatedly into very sharp focus for me!


Here are a couple of shots of the scene out the window (this gives you no sense of the feel of the ride, however -- on the way home I actually started taking short video clips to at least record for my own memory just how much we were being shaken, though mainly in the middle portion in Darvoz, not here in Khatlon province). You can see more on Flickr.



Next stop: Kalai Khumb for a night's rest.

8 Days To the “Roof of the World”

I’m afraid my impressions of the trip we took over the recent short week (Labor Day for those who get US holidays, and 2 days off for Tajikistan’s Independence Day and Eid) are already fading, and I’m desperate to write them down and save them. At the same time I’m having that familiar feeling of anticipatory disappointment at the way that words and even the photos you’ve taken can only poorly convey an experience, even for your own memory.

This was a trip we, especially Dan, had been planning for months, a weeklong road trip to the remote Pamir mountains and plateau, Tajikistan’s “Autonomous Region of Mountainous Badakhshan” (abbreviated in Russian as GBAO). He went last year at about the same time for work, so he had a better idea of what we were in for, in all senses of the phrase, while my notion of the trip was more vague.

I knew our itinerary as we planned it – from pictures and the telling I had some ideas of what it meant, but largely it was just place names:

Saturday, Day 1. Dushanbe to Kalai-Khumb (368 km, approx. 8 hours)
Sunday, Day 2. Kalai-Khumb to Khorog (240 km, approx. 5½ hours)
Monday, Day 3. In Khorog.
Tuesday, Day 4. Wakhan: Khorog to Langar (215 km, approx 6 hours)
Wednesday, Day 5. Langar to Lake Yashilkul (~120 km, approx. 4 hours)
Thursday, Day 6. Lake Yashilkul to Khorog (~195 km, approx. 3.5 hours)
Friday, Day 7. Khorog to Kalai-Khumb (240 km, approx. 5½ hours)
Saturday, Day 8. Kalai-Khumb to Dushanbe (368 km, approx. 8 hours)

On the first leg we would take one of two possible routes to get from Dushanbe to the eastern region of Tajikistan: either the northern route, through the lower mountains and valleys due east of Dushanbe, traveling part of the route we took in March to see buzkashi in Gharm, via the Rasht valley, but shifting south and going through Tavildara; or the southern route through the agricultural expanses of Khatlon, the southern towns of Danghara and Kulob, rounding upward toward Badakhshan. For our sake and Anya’s, we’d break up the trip that most travelers make in a Herculean single drive of anywhere from 14 to 24 hours and more, depending on road conditions. From the middle ground of Darvoz (literally, “gateway,” in Persian) we’d climb to the chief city of GBAO, Khorog, and after a day’s rest and sightseeing there, we’d follow the looping Panj River (more familiar generally as the Oxus or Amu Darya) ending up moving east through the Wakhan Valley, a remote finger of lowland shared warily by Tajikistan and Afghanistan, with the Hindu Kush peeking out from the south. Then we’d skirt northward to the lower sections of the Murghab plateau, and, meeting the main Pamir Highway, we’d return westward, back to Khorog, and from there retrace our tracks homeward via Darvoz.

The earlier debate about the “two possible routes” quickly ended after the recent Dushanbe jailbreak. The prisoners supposedly had fled to Rasht, traditionally a base for the political opposition in all its incarnations, and security recommendations from the American Embassy pointed us firmly southward. It’s hard to explain, but the escape didn’t worry us very directly on personal safety grounds. It was mainly a confusing event – ultimately followed by several others this week, but as an isolated event it called into some slight question general political security here rather than promising hardened criminals around every bend. We didn’t feel any need to call off our trip, but we did follow the guidelines and avoid what was possibly the hottest spot in what was a slightly warmed over general security situation.

I’ll try to set down my impressions of the progressive stages of the trip here over the next few days. As the vagaries of planning would have it, this Friday we’re already setting off again on a long weekend trip from Dushanbe to Oslo that defies credibility. So my fears about preserving the impressions of the journey to the Pamirs are quite real.

For me it was an adventure, a getaway, an exposure to some of the most dramatic and inspiring landscapes I have ever seen. It was a weird inside-out, through-the-looking-glass kind of experience, a trip both outward and inward: staying within Tajikistan, yet going to the edge of its borders, to a region that is extremely different and otherworldly in many respects. Going further inside and in a way digging a level deeper into the isolation and remoteness of our existence here, and yet traveling out into vast expanses, getting away from our physical and psychological lives at home in Dushanbe, away from the everyday. Depression makes you burrow in, in ways that you don’t even recognize, and it’s a gift to be able to escape, even if the return is difficult and the changes you’re able to envision during that reprieve and pledge to yourself that you’ll make threaten to slip through your fingers like the light dust blowing all along the road. You hope that, like that dust in another way, they’ll settle in quietly and barely noticed through every crack and crevice, and all but become a part of you.