Tajikistan and a teeny bit of Afghanistan
For a day and a half, I was nowhere: stranded in no-man’s-land between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. And in a blizzard.
I’d already gone through the Kyrgyz border controls and, with a single-entry visa, couldn’t return.
The Kyrgyz post had been located sensibly in the shelter of the valley at the foot of the Pamirs but the Tajik equivalent is on the actual border, 20km further on just over the 4200m pass crossing the mountain range that divides the two countries.
Unknown to me at the time, Kyrgyzstan had been running out of fuel, one of few negative ramifications of the short and sharp uprising which had overturned the government. What it meant was traffic between the southern Kyrgyz capital of Osh and Murgab in the eastern Pamirs trickled to a halt. And what that meant for me was I was stranded in no man’s land.
My arrival early in the morning had coincided with height of the fuel shortage. Several vehicles went north into Kyrgyzstan that day but not a single one went south into Tajikistan.
The soldiers and police at the Kyrgyz border were friendly enough and we whiled away the boredom with games of the central Asian version of backgammon. But they were equally adamant I couldn’t stay there overnight.
Fortunately for me, there was a Kyrgyz family living a short distance away in no-man’s-land took me in while I waited for a ride.
The enforced stay provided a wonderful view of life within a traditional family.
Not least of which is how much work the women do. Here, one of the daughters was milking a nak — a female yak, although I suspect it was actually a dzhou — during one of the regular snow storms.
A 4×4 Lada packed to the rafters passed southbound early the next morning and then an English couple, Charlie and Nina, arrived, having been told by the border guards — bribed by me with a pack of Chinese cigarettes — that I was stranded here.
Charlie was a banker in the City and was made redundant in the global financial crisis and they figured that with the job situation looking so dire for the forseeable future, it was time to buy a 4×4 and do a mammoth figure-eight loop from London via central Asia, the subcontinent, Singapore and China.
Besides the adventure, it was a wise call because some of their colleagues who stayed to search for work are still unemployed, more than a year later.
As they put it in their blog, NoJobWillTravel.co.uk: “Nestled in a rocky, snow covered valley at the base of the 4,282m Kizyl-Art Pass, the Kyrgyz border post feels like the remotest border point on earth. Certainly not a place we’re expecting to see foreigners.
“Having stamped us out of the country, though, the border officials tell us there’s an Australian” – I travel on my Australian passport – “hiker stuck in no-man’s land a kilometre on, waiting for a lift.
“We try to imagine what sort of tourist would knowingly find himself stranded within the 21km of no-man’s land between the two isolated borders…
“As we pull up to a solitary Kyrgyz farmhouse, an excited, bearded and bespectacled Westerner, in walking boots and a big jacket, springs from the house and walks towards us. No wonder John’s surprised to see us, he’s been here for a day and a half waiting for a lift of any description – the fuel shortage in southern Kyrgyzstan has decimated nearly all the border traffic.
” ‘You need a lift? Hop in!’ Soon John plus rucksack are loaded into the back of the car.”
And very grateful I was too, as only a day and a half in no-man’s-land can engender.
We drove on to the Tajik border, located in a series of former fuel tanks and shipping containers in as godforsaken a site as it would be possible to imagine. I had a mild altitude headache just from being there for the two hours or so of border formalities and couldn’t imagine being stationed there.
That pass proved to be mild. Another was at 4655m — a little lower than the summit of Mont Blanc or 900m higher than Aoraki Mount Cook — and all helped to make this highway the one with the highest average height.
The scenery had a stark beauty to it. Almost nothing grew here and after an hour or so along the crumbling highway, built for the Soviet military in the 1930s and 1940s and seemingly not maintained since, we arrived at the lakeside village of Karakol.
The lake, created by a meteorite, was frozen over and the town seemed to be too.
Just beyond in a site even more remote some poor soldier was stationed at a watchtower keeping eye on the border with China. This area had been the scene of the Great Game, a jostling match between imperial interests because this is where the Soviet, British and Chinese geographical spheres of influence intersected.
We changed money. Two US$100 notes produced this embarrassing wodge of Tajik notes.
After a night in the regional capital, Murgab, I went up to a hot springs while Charlie and Nina continued to Khorog.
I’d hoped to do some yurt to yurt hiking but a late and snowy spring left me about a fortnight too early because the nomads had not moved to their summer grazing in the high country.
But I got to sleep in a yurt, under a sky of swirling stars which I could see through the hole in the top of the yurt.
This was a slightly touristy yurt rather than the genuine variety as used seasonally in the high country.
The radiators kind of give that away, channeling hot water from the hot springs to provide a yurt with central heating.
By the time I returned to Murgab, the fuel shortage had been resolved so I booked a seat in a share taxi to the western Pamiri capital, Khorog. When I saw my mode of transport was going to be the mid-1970s Soviet-era automotive awesomeness that is a UAZ 3741, I had an inkling this was going to be very authentic, very local and very uncomfortable.
That initial impression was confirmed when the door creaked open and I discovered there as many trussed-up live sheep on board as passengers.
My pack was hoisted into the back, coming to rest on the topmost of eight of the live sheep’s less fortunate brethren, which had been slaughtered and skinned then ready to transport to the market at Khorog.
When we reached the first police checkpoint, instead of gathering our passports the driver got his knife out and cut off a chunk of mutton and took that in instead. And it seemed to work because we were on the road again in a flash.
Khorog had a nice and prosperous feel to it, which was a stark contrast to how it had been when it backed the wrong side in the brutal six-year civil war that wracked Tajikistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This chaikarna — teahouse — beside the river had been built in the local park where 15 years earlier, the economy had become so bad that money was abandoned in favour of a system of barter and local people ripped up the park to grow food.
After a day, I headed down to the fortnightly market at Ishkashim, which was held across the river in Afghanistan but could be reached without the need of a visa.
The drive along the Panj river that forms the boundaries between Tajikistan and Afghanistan was awesome. At first there seemed to be a millennium of difference between the two sides, with the Tajik one having a road and electricity and the Afghan one having little more than a donkey track.
But as we drove along, the Tajik side deteriorated and we ran into NGO-funded road crews turning the Afghan track into one fit for vehicles.
The next morning, I wandered over to the Afghan Bazaar, flanked by a mix of Tajik and Afghan soldiers who were mostly tooled up ready for bad stuff to happen.
The market was a fascinating mix of two cultures, even if Rambo movies are entirely cross cultural.
This was where the Persian and Indo-European worlds mixed with the Turkic and Eurasian ones, genetically and linguistically.
A coterie of Tajik women ran a chai and plov stall in the market but refused to charge me.
At this point, I had in cash on me about 10 years worth of their annual fiscal income.
I ran into Charlie and Nina again and scored another lift from them, this time heading up the Wakhan corridor, a valley split between Tajikistan and Afghanistan which was a Great Game solution designed to ease the tensions between the three great imperial nations at the point where British, Russian and Chinese interests met.
The people in this region are mostly Ismaili, a tolerant third strand of Islam compared to Sunni and Shia.
The Aga Khan, the Ismaili spiritual leader, had played a big part in this region and supported a series of homestays like this one.
This was classic Pamiri architecture. The reception room has five pillars — representing both the five main prophets and the five tenets of the faith — and the roof had four layers to represent the elements of earth, water, fire and air.
Our host was the grandson of a noted sufi, or mystic, and took us on a tour of the rebuilt home of his famous ancestor, including playing traditional instruments.
There had been new snow overnight but we pushed on, a little worried about the 4300m pass we had to cross.
But a quirk of geography and climate meant that although there was substantial snow here at 3400m, it was entirely dry nearly 1000m higher.
The valleys on the Afghan side were often kept perfectly, as you’d expect from an entirely autonomous subsistence farming operation.
There were still mines here from when this was the front line of the Cold War between Western and Soviet interests.
Another NGO was clearing the mines on the Tajik side, although the opiate trafficking from Afghanistan through Tajikistan to Europe took advantage of what was a pretty porous border.
And there were relics of the Afghan wars.
On what we thought was going to be our last day on the Afghan border, Charlie got down on one knee and proposed to Nina.
After 11 months on the road, they actually not only tolerated but actively enjoyed each other’s company, so marriage ought to be a breeze.
We toasted the engagement with Baltica Nine (anyone who has been to central Asia will know what this means!) then we all went back to the room we all shared, it being five days since our last shower… Yep, romance is alive and well.
There are two roads between the Pamirs and Dushanbe, the capital. One is really terrible and the other is even worse.
The terrible one was closed by landslides so we had to take the even worse one, which was clearly not long for this world.
The Pamiri part of Tajikistan had sided with the rebels in the ultimately unsuccessful civil war so the central government has been treating them like second class citizens ever since.
And I flew to Iran, getting an excellent view of Mt Damavand, the 5600m volcano which is the Middle East’s highest peak.
I was supposed to climb it. Supposed to…