Fool's Gold

"Tajikistan is the greatest country in the world. It's the safest, the smartest, it has the biggest this and the best that ...."

If only our walking tour guide's words were true.

Mirjam had organised for a bunch of us to go on a 10.30am tour of Dushanbe with a local Tajik guy. He messaged her at 10 to change it to 12.30pm. It was hot, and the tour was, to be blunt, pretty meh. He didn't take us anywhere interesting. All we did is walk around and look at a few old Soviet buildings, and listen to him talk about himself, or how great Tajikistan was.

Our meeting spot

But after having come through the western region of Tajikistan before arriving in Dushanbe, I know how incredibly skewed the wealth and power structures in this country are. Outside of the rich and glitzy parts of Dushanbe, people are dirt poor. The President has been in power since the civil war in 1992, there's no political opposition whatsoever, and you'd better not say anything bad about the government, or you're in deep horse shit.

After our bland walking tour broke up, Austrian Tanya and Philip, Malaysian Jay, French Margot and I headed to the markets, to get some proper city action. The Mehrgohn markets occupy a few grand old market buildings, and were bustling and super interesting.

We looked around for awhile, and then went for food at a local restaurant. I ordered kurutob, a sort of soupy salad made from chunks of bread, raw onions, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, and drenched in a liquid yoghurty sauce and garnished with coriander. It's pretty nice, and seriously filling.

After lunch Jay and I decided to hang out and explore. We'd heard there was a little concert going on at the sports stadium, so we made our way over there. But nothing much was happening.

Jay is a really cool woman from Kota Kinabalu, a small city in Borneo, in the Malaysian state of Sabah. She was great to hang out with, I learnt loads about Borneo culture from her, we spent a couple of afternoons and evenings wandering around checking out places in Dushanbe.

The beautiful Navruz Palace

Teen tug of war.

Crossing the river

Dushanbe is swamped with construction sites. Some parts of the city are changing at a hugely rapid pace.

The leaning tower of Dushanbe, in the distance, otherwise known as the National Museum

Istiklol Tower

We went to the outrageously kitsch but very beautiful Istiklol, a huge new tower that opened a couple of years ago, and was built by the Chinese.

The architecture and art was pretty stunning. This arch is brand new as well.

Of course Pressy's carved in marble.

Once inside there were a couple of floors of beautifully exquisite contemporary art works of traditional objects, or artworks in completely traditional styles.

Beautiful local dress, for special occasions of course

A local staff member came to say hello and then somehow became our guide, he could speak pretty good English, and knew everything about everything. And he was sweet too.

Hand carved doors

Mosaic made from precious stones

Onyx and jade tables

The President

And a real man

I'm gonna wear this for my next jazz concert

His Imperial Majesty

One of the best things about the tower was that you can take a lift to the top, which we finally did right on sunset. The views were awesome.

As you can see, there's a glitzy part of the city, but much of it is old town and much poorer.

Rock, paper scissors. Jay and I with Abdullah, an Afghani guy we met there, who now lives in Sweden.

Colour blindness test. Please identify the following colours:

Answer: pinkle, lava red, grellow, tradie green, and purblue

We ate at a great Turkish place. There's a few around here.

It had cakes

Grand Dushanbe at night. It feels so weird to be around this part of town, when almost all of the country is dirt poor.

Brand new parliament building. Parliament in name but not function, of course.

Only moms look after kids here. Sad but pretty true.

Tajikistan National Museum

The next morning there was a bit of a sad exodus from our hostel, as most of the people I'd been hanging out with left.

From left to right: German Mirjam, Dutch Tanya, French Margot, English Mark, Belgian Yolan and Dutch Philip. Don't ask me why I'm telling you all their names, it's probably more for me than for you.

School's back today, after a long summer holiday.

School Uniforms of the World #54a. The boy wasn't real, he was a mannequin.

Some of the uniforms are outrageously inappropriate for the summer heat. The boys often wear full suits, sometimes with waistcoats, the girls often have to get around in long hot polyester plaited skirts and waistcoats and other hot clothes. So dumb.

Carpet shop

Cake shop

The museum, from across a lake.

This used to be the tallest flagpole in the world. Now it's the second biggest. The tallest is in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, and all the others are in dick-led, I mean, dictator-led, countries like Azerbaijan, North Korea, Turkmenistan etc.

The museum was actually pretty interesting. Jay is particularly interested in ancient and pre-history, old artefacts and fossils etc, which isn't surprising considering she's a geologist. So we checked out that part of the museum first.

Ancient bones from a Zoroastrian village

Cool Zoroastrian art. I wanna be him.

Ain't just a Buddhist thing

Adherents of Zoroastrianism would remove the meat and other juicy bits from dead bodies, and store the bones in these types of containers.

Jay called this guy Captain America. He's actually Cyrus the Great, a famous Persian king who took over in around 550BC, and founded the Achaemenid Empire. His empire became the largest in the world at the time, and at its peak, under a later ruler Darius the Great, the empire stretched all the way from the Balkans and Southeast Europe to the Indus Valley and northwestern India. Cyrus, of course, made it all the way over to here in Tajikistan too (obviously).

Ram heads

Ancient Oscar

Brass shekels

Russkiye Roubles

Medieval scenes

The ole chopsticks-up-the-nose trick is as old as the hills

Petroglyph

Very Chinese looking goddess

Ancient Koran

Really stuffed moose

This is the crystal for me! It should be labelled as lazurite, but hey, I prefer their label.

Crystal mosaic art

I guess this was first found in Tajikistan?

Same to you.

Trippy alpine re-creation

Various mountain dwellers. There's lots of these critters in Tajikistan, particularly in the Tajik National Park, which covers 18% of the total land area of the country. We're gonna go there.

Around 94% of the country is mountainous, which favours more lasting habitat, as development is more difficult.

Beautiful Buddhist art. The Buddhists got here as well, of course, just as they did everywhere else along the Silk Road.

Stunning carpets and jewellery

The President pretending he's normal

Pic from the Soviet era. Dushanbe used to be called Stalinabad.

We all know Stalin-is-a-bad. He was one of the worst.

Late lunch with Jay in the museum cafeteria. It's super cheap, not like the overpriced cafés in most Western museums and galleries.

The interior of the museum

Cute flowers

Wandering The Streets

Old Dushanbe is so interesting, way more quirky than all the new glitzy gold stuff. All that fool's gold.

One day I went wandering with Tomas, a lovely Portuguese guy who's driven his 4WD all the way from Lisbon to here.

We went off looking for a guitar to buy for him. Unfortunately all the cheaper ones were really crap, and the good ones were more expensive than in Europe, so our quest remained purchase-less. But we had a really great day together anyway.

Local book stalls

Old residential area

I watched this huge truck shed iteself of all its melons over a period of a few days.

Cream cheese ladies

Science academy

The beautiful Kohki Navruz, or Navruz Palace, which Tajikistan tourist literature (and our walking guide) say is the largest tea house in the world. But it's not even a tea house, what they're saying is complete shite. There might be one in there somewhere, but I couldn't find it.

It's a magnificent building filled with restaurants, wedding venues, a cinema, a ballroom, and even a ten pin bowling alley.

But no tea house.

Cinema advertising is bad everywhere

I stopped here for a delicious lunch.

Lots of people take their wedding pics here.

The huge Presidential Palace, a no-go zone. Our Tajik guide said that's where President Rahmon "does his work." (Meaning, of course, how he plots to keep any critics or potential political opponents in prison, and how he can make himself, his family and his friends more obscenely rich than they already are).

President Rahomon's son Ruston is widely seen as his successor. He's a former footballer, and played as a striker and captain for the Dushanbe club Istiklol, which he founded. The team won the Tajik league for many years in succession, and it's widely believed that that was mainly due to favourable refereeing decisions. (If the President's son's team loses then the ref is obviously in deep donkey shit. It's not worth it).

Ironically, Ruston has been appointed to head the Tajik National Anti-Corruption Commission, which could otherwise be described as The Fox Guarding The Henhouse.

In January 2017 Ruston was appointed mayor of Dushanbe, and, since then, development companies under his family's control have seized private properties from poorer citizens and constructed huge development projects on their land, with no compensation paid whatsoever.

And there's basically nothing they can do about it.

Such is life in Central Asian dictatorships.

What to do, to escape from all this male nastiness and negativity?

Canadian Kelly, a beautiful woman I had dinner with a couple of times. She lives way way up in British Colombia, north of Vancouver, on a dead end road not far from Alaska. It was great hanging out with her, we're pretty close politically, environmentally, and otherally. I'd love to visit her one day, her small town looks stunning.

Furniture shop for rich Tajiks. Looks like the interior of an 18th Century French noble's house.

To The Pamir!

I hung around in Dushanbe, sussing out the best way to travel the Pamir Highway, one of the most beautiful but most remote mountain roads in the world.

I've dreamed of travelling this road for a long time now, having seen pictures and read about its intense beauty and stunning off road spots.

And then my dreams came true.

A couple of days ago I met Lisa and Beni, a beautiful couple from Vienna. We met once, had an amazing conversation, and after all feeling pretty connected super quickly they asked me if I wanted to join them on their 2 week journey into the Pamirs.

Does the Pope shit in the woods?!!!

They're the most amazing people to be with. They've driven here in their 4WD van, all the way from Austria, through Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and are now heading to Kyrgyzstan. Then they plan to drive through a small chunk of China and then into Pakistan/India, before heading back to Europe via Nepal, China and Mongolia.

Sounds pretty interesting huh.

And so suddenly, before you could say, "where the hell's the Pamir Highway?", we were on it.

River Paradise

It's hard to describe the incredible beauty of this place.

I'm sitting by a fast flowing turquoise river, steep hills are towering both in front of, and behind me. The air is clear and fresh, and it's cool, but not cold.

It's my second night here on the old Pamir Highway. We've taken some wild back roads to get here. We're camped on a river near a small town called Qolaikhum, which is right across the border from Afghanistan. The roads have been rough and precarious so far, pretty much dirt all the way, and they sometimes hug vertical cliffs that appear to lose rocks and boulders regularly. There's evidence of major landslides all over the place. Scary.

Lisa and Beni are the best people to be around.

We've had some cracker adventures and conversations already, and I feel incredibly grateful to have this chance to spend time with them.

It's totally cruisey travelling with them. We've been talking a lot, we've all got loads of travel stories, and somehow when you're in this type of situation you all find yourself describing so many different parts of your lives to each other, and getting to know each other in a pretty deep way quite quickly.

I love it.

Sitting in the back of their van I feel like I'm riding on a magic carpet, through some of the most spectacular mountain scenery you could ever wish to see.

And, I have to say, travelling on the consistently worst road I've ever been on.

Yep, this definitely wins my world record for long bad roads.

We left yesterday, in their 4WD Sprinter van. Even though I'd absent-mindedly left my sleeping bag and tent back in Tashkent because I wanted to travel light, Lisa and Beni have a spare tent, sleeping mat, and extra blankets and pillows, and I also found an old light sleeping bag and a couple of blankets and a light long sleeved jumper at the hostel.

The universe delivers, as always.

We stopped for a shop at a great food selling area as we left the city, and bought loads of great food.

She reminded me of Michael Jackson

It took awhile to get out of town, the traffic was pretty heavy, but eventually we hit the main road out of the city, and not long after took the northern route heading east, a much slower and less travelled road, which is actually the old Pamir Highway.

But it's the furthest thing from a highway I've ever seen.

The Pamir Highway is the second highest altitude international highway in the world, traversing the Pamir Mountains. It once formed one of the major routes of the Silk Road. It's a 1200km long windy road that passes through Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and at one point climbs way up to the 4655m Ak-Baital Pass.

That's where we're headed.

The official Pamir Highway is marked in red. We travelled together from the circled Dushanbe, in the west, to Sary Tash in Kyrgyzstan in the east, but we took the green routes as well. I carried on afterwards to the northeastern end of the highway, at the Uzbek border with Kyrgyzstan.

Our plan was to take some of the back roads along the way, which is what we've been doing for the past two days. So this road is way rougher, way more spectacular, and has way less traffic than the newer route east.

There's a lot of sheep and goat traffic though.

Collecting water

Last night we found a beautiful spot to park by a river, which, I guess, is something we'll be doing a lot of this trip. Beni is swinging chechil, a delicious stringy smoked cheese that's perfect with beer, and seems to last forever out of the fridge. It's my favourite savoury snack right now.

Pillow and blanket delivery

The view from my tent this morning

There was a precarious flying fox stretching across the steep valley. No thanks.

Shots from the road. Pretty spectacular.

This whole area has a heavy military presence. We needed special permits to come here, as much of the route falls within the GBAO, the Gorno-Badakshan Autonomous Oblast, which borders Kyrgyzstan. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan aren't on good terms right now.

In fact the borders between the two countries are closed to local citizens. Only foreigners can pass through, if they have permits. There were loads of checkpoints on the way through, but the military guys were pretty friendly, and never searched the van or hassled us in any way.

We passed through Farking. It was quite messy.

The beautiful but precarious road

Beni with a friendly donkey

So Much More To Come

We've just begun our amazing Pamir journey.

Lisa and Beni have two weeks to get to the Chinese border, because they need to be there on a specific date to meet their Chinese guide. If you want to drive your own vehicle through China, which they do, a government-sanctioned guide is a compulsory requirement.

So we've got nearly two whole weeks to get to Sary Tash, a small town which lies just over the Kyrgyzstan border. From there Lisa and Beni will turn right to go to the Chinese border, and I'll head further northwest to Osh, in Kyrgyzstan, and then return to my lonely bike in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

The distances we need to cover aren't huge, but the road is so bad and there's so much to see that two weeks here will definitely be filled to the brim.

The next part of our journey will take us right to the northern border of Afghanistan, which we then plan to follow for hundreds of kilometres, through the Wakhan Valley.

And if we're lucky, we'll get to meet some Afghanis from the border region.

This trip is such a trip❤️

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