Apologies for the break – I was busy finishing a piece of writing and didn’t have any spare time to continue the Pamir roadtrip story.

Where were we? We were still on Day 2, having just arrived into Khorog, and were exploring the gardens at the Serena, while Dan napped off his stomach bug. We can cover the remainder of that day plus Day 3 (In Khorog) here.

By about 5 in evening Dan forced himself out of bed to show us a bit of the town, and we went to have a bite to eat and a pleasant time relaxing on the tapchans at the Chorbogh teahouse (operated by the group of Aga Khan organizations, just like the Serena – the AK development network seems to kind of run the Pamirs, or at least Khorog). The teahouse is situated just on the banks of the river Gunt, in a corner of the Khorog city park, with a raised platform hanging out over the river and the icy blue-green water rushing by below.

The town itself feels quaint and small, although it also has the bustling feel of a regional hub, and the center of town right next to the bazaar housed a constant crowd of travelers and touts and small-time sellers and minibuses and SUVs – the marketplace for anyone wanting to depart the Pamir region for west-central Tajikistan and not aiming to pay for one of the very limited airplane seats out of town (meaning almost any ordinary traveler).


Khorog is a border post, founded in the 1890s by the Russian military as the boundaries between British-controlled Afghanistan and Russian-controlled Central Asia were firmed up, so in a sense, although the town is picturesque, it isn’t surprising that it also has a hint of the rough and ready menace of a border station. And maybe because our visit coincided with a holiday weekend, including Tajikistan’s independence day, for which there was a large public celebration in the city park, there was also at times an ever so slightly trashy feel – drunks hanging around on the edges of the park, groups of men ranging around after the late afternoon breakup of the local football match, and literally lots of remaining litter lying around in the park after the main heaps of trash had been carted away on the actual holiday. So Khorog was a pleasant break during our travels but certainly not home to us, as tourists and visitors.

We had a peaceful stay at the Serena, got rested up, and refroze the ice packs from our cooler. Continued to meet up with random travelers you’d never imagine would bother to make their way to Tajikistan, although I suppose that for them that’s the point: the Pamirs in a real sense are the end of the world, following in Marco Polo's footsteps, that kind of thing. On our first evening we’d already met up with a group of San Diego based travelers in Kalai Khumb who were making their way from Osh in Kyrgyzstan (I was surprised, given the relatively recent violence there) to Dushanbe, by way of Khorog. They claimed they’d visited (or would soon have visited?) every country in the world. “There’s a group of us,” their ringleader noted, by way of explanation. Who knew? In Khorog we crossed paths at the Serena with a French family traveling in a 2-car caravan. They had driven overland all the way from Europe and aimed after an exploration of the Pamirs to end up in Tashkent, where their university-aged son had a reservation to fly out in a few weeks’ time.

We also spent a thoroughly enjoyable morning in the Khorog Botanical Garden, perched up on a hill above the Shakhdarya river, on the southeast edge of the narrow town. (Khorog is situated in a narrow gorge, where the Gunt runs westward and intersects with the northward flowing – at this stage – Oxus. It basically has room for one main east-west street on the north side of the Gunt and a few secondary ones parallel to it.) Not much more to report on here except a slow meander through the semi-wild gardens and admiring (and taking snapshots of) the flowers, groves, and the imposing and tacky new mansion the president of Tajikistan has built for himself at the edge of the grounds. (The Serena, where he used to stay, apparently is no longer good enough. But thinking about that made us realize, kind of ickily: ‘wait, if we splurged to stay in the deluxe suite at the Serena, probably we’re sleeping in the same bed where Rahmon has slept!?’)

The brief R&R was good for our peace of mind, and Dan began to feel better. After a phone consultation with our Dushanbe medical provider, he decided to get his hands on some metronidazole, on the suspicion that he’d gotten giardia. We had a moment’s doubt about whether we could find it in Khorog, but then we realized that the prevalence of stomach bugs in this part of the world meant that actually this was probably the easiest medicine to get your hands on in a local drugstore. And we were right. He started to improve after 1 or 2 doses of the meds.

On the negative side, Monday morning we got a phone call from Dushanbe, alerting us that, in addition to the recent 25-man jailbreak and reported suicide-bombing at government buildings in Khujand, there were now reports of a bomb (or a fight? in Tajikistan rumor is king) in a local Dushanbe nightclub on Saturday night. That was slightly unsettling news, although the rational mind would tell you that in the remote eastern Pamirs you’re about as safe from unrest and political violence as you can be in Tajikistan.

Another negative that was nagging at both Dan’s and my mind, as we prepared to set out on our eastern loop through some of the most remote and unprovisioned territory in the country, stemmed from the unfortunate fact that the X-Terra’s “Service Engine Soon” light had lit up just as we pulled into Khorog, and it hadn’t yet gone off. Although the message was ominously vague, after consulting the owner’s manual, we’d established with pretty good confidence that in fact it was primarily a warning about the emissions system. Bad gas from a brief refueling stop in Kulob, perhaps? We weren’t sure, but we convinced ourselves that it probably didn’t mean we were in danger of breaking down. We hoped.

After our second morning enjoying a hearty breakfast in the Serena dining room, overlooking the sunny garden and riverbank, we gassed up again at the much more trustworthy-looking main gas station in Khorog (hoping the possibly bad Kulob fuel might get diluted?), and set out southward on the road toward Ishkashim.

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.

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.

Summer Camping Trip

Photos from our goodbye camping trip with 2 families that will leave us soon -- one for a few months and the other permanently -- are here.

Our Journey Along the Silk Road (Take One)

I am obviously still working at glacial analog speeds when it comes to the digestion of and reflection upon travel experiences. I just can't seem to get the distance and peace of mind to consider my impressions of where I've just been with anywhere near the light speed expected from a blog.

I did upload about 2/3 of the photos we took -- and they do still say that a picture is worth a thousand words, don't they?

But I think by now -- a full two weeks since returning from Bukhara, and almost a week clear of hosting our first visitors in Dushanbe, which came on the heels of our journey -- I've got a handle on what this trip meant to me.

Our journey along the rough outlines of the Silk Route got off to quite a rocky start the Friday we set out. Given my experience with air travel to Moscow, and now our record on regional overland travel, as well as an indirect experience with flights from Urumqi (in western China), it is really starting to sink in just how difficult it is to get from point A to point B when one of them involves Tajikistan. So, I guess in a sense this trip was important just simply for being my first chance to get out of Dushanbe, see more, experience more, get more frustrated, and then just let go and enjoy the journey for whatever it throws in your way.

We made every effort to ensure that our plan to trace a big circle on our way out to Bukhara and back to Dushanbe -- out the northern route and over the mountains, and back the southern route through the plains of southern Uzbekistan and then into Tajikistan through Tursunzode -- wouldn't be blocked. Our main fixation was the scary Anzob Tunnel (which in fact was not very scary at all this time around -- no random sharp pieces of metal jutting out of puddles, in fact no standing pools of water, and a portion of the tunnel even luxuriously illuminated for easy navigation). We'd heard that not only was the tunnel a frightful passage but that it was closed from 9am into the evening while work was being completed on it. Dan's contacts assured us that it would be open, though, and that there might be only uncharacterized "delays" on the roadway north and west after passing through the tunnel. Unfortunately our drive proved that our main concern paled in comparison to the obstacles we hadn't even really considered, and it turned out we probably should have pressed for a bit more information on the nature of those "delays."

By about 11am, we had made it to a point some thirty kilometers after the tunnel's end, where freshly laid, smooth asphalt snaked down the mountain right into the midst of a cluster of about 20 vehicles stopped on either side of the highway. They were being held in place by a roadblock enforced by the Chinese construction workers who, as a rule, speak neither Tajik nor Russian nor English. We waited for over an hour while Dan gathered all the information he could -- the basics were that the crew working on this portion of the new road had stopped all passage (apparently as they have been doing every day, which called into serious question the helpful informants we'd consulted ahead of time), beginning at 7am and most likely continuing to hold traffic in place until 6 or 7pm with, of course, no alternate route provided.

At this point, let me make one thing clear: this isn't just "a route" north from Dushanbe; it is THE ONLY route north and the only auto route connecting the north and the south of this country! (The old route, which the tunnel and surrounding road now bypass, goes over a mountain pass whose roadway, we discovered later in the day, since we had oh-so-little to lose, is now poorly maintained and suffers from rockfalls and blockage by snow well into June.)

When noon rolled around and the speculative limited opening of the roadblock didn't materialize, Dan decided to storm the roadblock and bluster his way through on the basis of the red diplomatic plates, but even that didn't work. It turned out that the block wasn't just a formality; there really was no way to pass the big construction machine that was literally straddling the road atop a precipice -- there was just mountain to the right, air to the left.

But we did succeed in stoking the anger of another group of Chinese road workers, who got really furious at us. One of them started screaming at Dan in Chinese, trying to get us to back up. Dan took the bait and entered into a shouting match with him (neither side apparently understanding anything the other was saying) until, as Dan describes it "something in me snapped and I screamed viciously at him." Yep, that about sums it up. At that point, Anya started crying, my own grip on my armrest ratcheted up another notch, and luckily Dan fairly quickly saw we weren't doing anyone any good and backed down. (The incident of course provided narrative fodder for the remainder of the trip and well into the past week at home in Dushanbe, with frequent asides from Anya about how "the Chinese man made Daddy reawwy angry.")

Since my other blogging weakness is showing terribly at this point (can't seem to make these posts short and snappy, can I?), and since, beyond our Beckett-like meandering through the mountains, nothing much else really happened over the course of this portion of the trip, I'll close out the tale of the folly of Day One of our journey here and tell about The Rest of It in the next post. But not without giving you a few more quantitative yardsticks of our experience (with apologies to Harper's):

Time spent in the car, from departure to dejected return home, in hours: 10

Of that, time spent stopped at the construction roadblock, in hours: 1.5

Quantity of angry Chinese road workers who yelled at us at any point during our sojourn: 5

Routes attempted to cross the mountains and reach Aini and points beyond: 3

Routes successfully navigated: 0

Combined sheep-and-goat herd traffic jams encountered: lost count at 7

Passengers taken in along the way: 1

Types of wild plant advised upon by hitchhiking safed: 2

Of those, types dangerous or poisonous to touch: 1

Cups of tea we got away with drinking in typical Tajik forced hospitality to thank us for the ride (per adult): 3

Minutes of cellphone reception while in the mountains from approximately 10am to 6pm: 0

Minutes of hailstorm and rain encountered on return leg to spend the night at home in Dushanbe: 15

Accidents/pairs of wet undies produced in our car over the 10-hour pointless journey: zero!!

Head For the Hills

I had a good writing day, and the weather outside was gorgeous, after a very, very rainy day yesterday. My treat to myself was to take a walk.

I headed east on Timur Malik and liked the look of the hills off in the distance, just over the crest:



And as it happens, that is exactly where I went.

I continued east past the students milling around at the Ag Institute, wide neckties and all. (Apparently another empty rule about form over substance in Tajikistan is that the men at institutions of higher education are required to wear ties. Some would say they ought to actually learn things and be encouraged to think critically before they're forced to do a Windsor knot each morning, but who am I to judge?)

Skirted south through the sorry little park in front of (our local) statue of Rudaki. Noticed a billboard that had a notice about what seemed to be repairs in the sorry little broken down park, and a photo mockup of better looking fountains in the park. Noticed the date was 21 April. Got interested. Then noticed it was 2007. Got a little disappointed.

Then I headed east again, on Karamova and decided, why not make my ascent close to home? I started my little climb just west of Tursunzoda. I passed the requisite group of kids who yelled stuff in English at me. Today it was "oh! let's go!" At least that's a little more creative than "hello!" Then I passed the requisite adolescent boys who greeted me in Russian. Then I got a young woman peeking out over a roof, who asked, strangely, whether I had a pen.

I continued a short way and the paved road ended, and a dirt path doglegged north and kept going upward. I rose up up up above the neighborhoods below me and got some beautiful views of the green foothills and the snowy mountains:


Then the Tajik woman who'd wanted the pen appeared again, and we had a friendly conversation in Russian. I continued on and two kids on bikes were hanging out enjoying the view. Had a short conversation in Tajik with the friendlier one, who, after of course asking me how old I was (another requisite question), said the Tajik equivalent of "dang, you're old!" (My main clue was 'pir.') Then I think he was trying to recommend some more good places to enjoy the view (I kept hearing 'tamosho'), but my Tajik was ebbing and I decided to leave while the time was right to have more walking time to myself. All in all, a very enjoyable afternoon treat!

The Day In Pictures

Yesterday: The view out the window at the Morningstar Cafe, during a rare workday lunch (and on a rare warm, sunny April day) with Dan.


Today: Anya and I take a break on the way to sadik to admire the "guest" in our yard, whose origins we haven't yet guessed. Must have something to do with either a lot of digging or a painful toss over our high compound walls.

Being Green

A friend who has also been away from Dushanbe for at least a few weeks returned this week and commented at how green the city is. I noticed it right away, too -- apparently it rained for practically the whole two weeks we were away.

This meant that, first of all, that there was no need for me to lie awake at night wondering what the swift change in weather in the two weeks before we left, from modestly chilly to downright hot, and possibly a continuing rise in temperature might mean for our little garden, left without anyone to water it while we were gone. We came back to a bushy garden full of all kinds of plants that I haven't even had a chance (because of the continuing rain) to parse out and edit. Among them are definitely a profusion of mint, what looks like maybe some carrot greens, definitely some light green lettuces, and a bunch of flourishing beet greens. And our rose bushes look very fine.

The rain also means that truly the hills surrounding Dushanbe really are a beautiful shade of green, which was especially striking to me, I think, because of where we'd been most recently.

We spent about a week in "La Ville Rouge," Marrakech, which really is quite ruddy red -- mainly I suppose it's the architecture and the old medina walls, but the overall sensation is definitely Red. Of course, I haven't yet uploaded all our photos, and anyway I didn't take anything so beautiful or illustrative of the red as this:


Then we hopped our plane from Casablanca to Istanbul, where everything is more grey-blue. Again, not my photo, but it easily could have been:


And now we're back and find ourselves in a curiously green environment. And, yet again, since I haven't yet gotten a snapshot of it, I will refer to Flickr for illustration. Even though this is outside Dushanbe, it gives a good sense of what those hills look like right now, and what I see every time I look out our upstairs window at the hills on the city's northwest edge:

Beautiful, Clear Sunday Morning

The view out our window, onto the snowy, cold mountains to the west of us, at about 9:30 this morning.

Apparently the reading at the Dushanbe airport is currently 25F. I swear the reading in our unheated bathroom has to be 40F, although surely that is not realistic.