First Road Trip of August 09

Somehow we don't seem to have taken nearly any pictures nor gone on any drives over the course of July. I'm not sure how that happened, since summer is the time in Dushanbe when people tend to escape the heat of the city for the cool of the river valleys outside of town. I guess we can chalk it up to an extremely full social calendar here in the city, from the weekend of July 4th all the way down to last weekend, as the US ambassador to Tajikistan prepared for the end of her posting here.

This weekend we took our first drive out to the east of Dushanbe (or at least Anya and I did -- Dan had been a few times, to visit the dam at Nurek and to see Gharm, in Rasht Valley). We went in neither of those directions, though, instead going up the smallest road that spokes off from the little hub that is Vahdat (aka Kofarnihon), a town due east of Dushanbe (that is being somewhat kind, I hope you realize): we took the northern spur into Romit Valley (that's Romit like "raw meat," although if you're following along at home with Google Maps, apparently it's "Ramit").


It was very pretty and very different from the Varzob river valley that runs directly north of Dushanbe and through which we have driven already too many times to count. (Road construction work on various tunnels and road surfaces makes that trip a little tiresome.) It was also quite different from the valley that runs north of Shahrinav, out west of Dushanbe, although it's possible our experience of that terrain was unique because it was springtime and a very wet one at that.


Romit in summer had brown hills, but a wide rushing river the color of jade or celadon. The further up we went (and according to the GPS we turned around to head home right here, at 38.90 x 69.28), the wetter the landscape got -- actually kind of surprising given how dry it is for the most part where we live.

In the valley that runs due north of Romit village, the roadway was lined at almost every turn with carefully constructed rock walls and fences woven out of spindly branches, evidently delimiting orchards and garden plots and grazing land. Some of the road wound under full tree cover where the ground was wet and the walls were covered with moss. (Moss!)


The unpaved roadway up the valley was surprisingly smooth, given our experience elsewhere in Tajikistan so far. Someone had clearly been through with a grader or something since the end of the spring, when all the rainfall we saw here would have covered the route in rockfall and mud. But there were still sizeable stretches of our trip where we were bump-bump-bumping along, which you realize only near the end of your journey is actually quite exhausting. I think maybe if there was a clear destination we were headed to, I'd endure that jostling a little better. (I think of the poor souls on that 22 hour car ride I have heard about between Dushanbe and Khorog, and I wonder if actually I'd be pulling my hair out even with the anticipation of seeing the Pamirs.)

But our usual road trip M.O. is just to head out merely for the sake of exploring, and more often than not Dan's interest in what lies beyond that next rocky outcropping is greater than mine, although he -- by mutual agreement -- invariably holds the steering wheel. Maybe the next time we hit some terrain cooler than Dushanbe, I'll push for less driving time and more footpath exploring (or picnicking), to break up the journey a bit more.