Doing the Mongol

Week Three

A dip in the pool the next day and then headed off eastwards. Apart from passing the first of 2 road traffic accidents we encountered on the rally there were a few sights worth seeing in Turkmenistan that we didn’t get a chance to seek out. The Door to Hell for one. But our 5 day visas had one day left from running out. Still we stopped off at Mary where we found a wedding party in full swing. Five best man speeches, all the food and toxic drink we could consume and we bailed out to the other side of the town and got our heads down.

The next day saw us arrive in Turkmenabat just short of the Uzbek border seeking a bank with a Western Union for the Americans to get some badly needed cash. While in the town – which did have quite a few Soviet style tenement blocks – you couldn’t help notice quite a number of folk were definitely of Russian origin. Tall slender blondes would go about their daily cleaning/selling in amongst the more down to earth shall we say wives of Asian extraction. Wars and empires leave their legacy everywhere I guess, but here in a small town on the edge of one of the most inward looking states in the world the contrast seemed just that extra bit stark.

Anyway we sorted things before closing and headed on to the Turkmen border station just before the Amu Darya river. A bit of haggling later and we were over the river (in which the hapless customs man revealed a pile of Travellers Cheques with several thousand pounds denominated on them obviously used by a previous rally team to trick him, and he was asking us how could he cash them!). The time was approaching 6.

Time.

It never really occurred to us how late in the day it was. Just that this was the last day of our visas and that meant technically we had til midnight to get over the border. But this wasn’t the land of 24 hour open borders. When we finally rolled up at the Turkmen post it was 18:25 and the gate was shut. There were still two young privates loafing about the gate and a frantic bit of waving and ‘big problem’ later had a more senior guy down to the still locked gate. We showed him the dates on the visa. ‘Big problem’ he repeated with a wry smile. He then took the long walk back up to the control point. Minutes passed. And then with a whistle and a wave the young soldiers were ordered to open the gates for us. We had got out of Turkmenistan by the skin of our teeth.

One relatively smooth exit process later and we were in No Man’s Land once more, this time for the night as the Uzbek authorities didn’t open til the morning either. That’s when we met two Turkish truckers who insisted on sharing their vodka and an impromptu fry up. The guy was pretty well travelled and spoke good English. What’s more, when the drink ran out he showed us a way into Uzbekistan temporarily via a loose fence in order to avail of round the clock shower and bar facilities. Magic

By now, we were in authentic Silk Route territory and the surroundings seemed to take on a distinctly more ancient appearance accordingly. Having said that the quality of the roads were much better in Uzbekiland and we powered through to Samarkand. However at the market the richly woven textiles in dreamy Eastern designs we had expected did not materialise and instead we had everything you get at a market back home. So mobile phone covers, detergent and bric a brac furniture. Apart from one covered area that sold spices and sweets there seemed to be little of the artistry of old. Globalisation for you I guess. We were later told that for carpetry and the like Bukhara market (no not the Mog one) was the the place to go. Bummer. We piled on ahead.

And by ahead I mean due south, missing the turn off east for Dushanbe. So full steam ahead through the night to Afghanistan. Stopped half way to the border town of Termiz to get the head down for the night only to be moved on by some ‘concerned’ locals who communicated by stoning us. Another 20 miles down the road and we made sure we were well out of the reach of any settlement and slept once more. For the record I’d like to point out I was the only one who sleep outside of the car that night. Team scaredy cats! While we did hear a few noises during the night I was fucked so with a healthy does of ignorance went heads to zeds and hoped for the best.

Morning and scran up time. We still didn’t know where we really were so Bob got onto his woman back at base camp to decipher a few signs and yeah turns out we’re a couple hundred clicks away from Ghanners. Maybe just maybe we could have been tempted to handrail the Afghan border the whole way round but at one of the military/police stations (which were becoming more numerous as we headed south) not really understanding the lingo one of the cops gave us enough that we recognised ‘Boysun’ as being a turn off not too far down.

More pressing was the need for petrol. And as we had run out of local pistachios and dollars, our decision to take euros was looking pretty stupid (looking at the state of the eurozone now that was surely a prescient economic warning if ever there was one. Any FX traders looking to improve their game I’d recommend the Silk Route for a month or so). After station upon station with no will to take the feringhee’s coinage we hit upon a seemingly well to do restaurant/fuel combo with a pleasant young English speaker more than willing to give us a decent exchange rate too. That guy saved our rally because that part of the world is seriously bleak.

We eventually found Boysun, then onto to a strip search at the border – signs of the drug trade were now commonplace – and soon found ourselves meeting up with Team America who after some repair work to the Toyota had found the correct road out of Samarkand and made it into Dushanbe at the same time as us.

We were on the M41 – the road that becomes the Pamir Highway and doesn’t end until the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek in the extreme north.

Dushanbe wasn’t the most peaceful city – there had been a bombing the week before we arrived and on our first night around we seen a mutt get shot as a black car stopped at lights in the town – directly opposite what seemed a company or so strength of police. The police looked on but did nothing. After checking the rates for Dushanbe’s finest 5 star accommodation it was obvious this was no Ashgabat rates and we had to ‘make do’ with a fairly innocuous soviet era hotel block.

And the next day, we had reached the limits of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province – the region that had fought a civil war with the Tajik government in the 90s over representation at government level. We signed in at the military post – showed our special passes for the area and sped past a Swiss de-mining convoy who were tackling the areas of the GBAO still strewn with Soviet era ordnance.

The road almost immediately began to deteriorate. By now alternating between a dusty yet well trodden track and a gravelly WRC style circuit that made your heart hit your stomach each time you entered it. Another few military posts ahead and but no real sign of altitude just yet, other than the vertical cliffs all around us. The road began to battle with perpendicular meltwater streams for supremacy.

We lost our exhaust pretty soon into that.

We gave a lift to a soldier back to his home from one of the outposts – close to Tavildara – and it also doubled as a cafe (which every home on the Highway seemed to do). And the protocol is for large wooden beds to sit on the porches of dwellings where the food and tea would be consumed. Afterwards he directed us to the first of these incredibly cheap Pamir motels that line the route. Bed & breakfast amounted to about 6 quid for our team. I picked up the first of a few souvenirs – 12.5mm Soviet empty cases. There were probably thousands of them lying around.

The conditions began to take their tole on the Suzuki and we punctured too. Got to the next valley to search for a tyre. We continued down it until we reached the town of Kalaikhum – resting on the confluence of a blue meltwater tributary and the Panj river itself, the natural borderline between two historic Central Asian nations.

This was our first sighting of Afghanistan. Once food was on board and a spare tyre sorted we followed the river upstream. Ghanners and the Panj on our right, Tajikistan on our left. The Pamirs all around. In this globalised world there were few real times when we felt like we were at the meeting of civilisations. Possibly crossing the Bosphorus, entering Mongolia and definitely that long winding road with the Afghan hills only metres away. This was still an arterial route and a lot of people made their living from this road – the contrast between the comfortable standard of living on the Tajik side and the seemingly abandoned clay dwellings across the river couldn’t have been much more indicative of the state of play in this remote part of Central Asia today.

In saying all that, a surreal but very British moment occurred somewhere along the way when we met an English team travelling in the opposite direction, on a different rally. One of those sliding doors moments.

The enormity of the landscape was stunning.

We stopped for the night at a place called Rushan and appeared to gatecrash a wedding party. No matter, bedrooms doubling as coatrooms were immediately released and while the grub wasn’t great – being treated to leftover party sugarbombs for dinner and breakfast – we couldn’t argue with the price.

Khorog was to all intents and purposes a market town. Though the presence of brand new black 4x4s in the town told it’s own story. This is a town central to the heroine smuggling network emanating from Afghanistan. A remainder of which was the beaming swish local who sprang out of his Mitsubishi and promptly offered us a grand for the Suzuki. We looked at eachother open mouthed.

“No problem, drugs!”

We thanked him but explained the nature of our journey. He smiled and drove off.

Khorug was also the last point at which we would see the war-torn landlocked nation making the headlines back home. And the last point to attempt a crossing of the Panj.

Well, I had been harping on about crossing it for the past two days.

We tried once further downstream using an island hoping technique that sapped our enthusiasm more than anything. So the logic went try further upstream, less tributaries means less flow right? Didn’t seem to make much difference. But we went down to the river to investigate anyway.