The road there and back

Hey, I am back in Chicago, but I still have so much I want to write about Tajikistan. Since I was in Pamir for much of the trip and didn't have internet access, I want to keep writing about Tajikistan. So I will.

The road to Pamir was ridiculous. I stayed with my boss and his family the night before we drove to Pamir, because we woke up at 4am to try to avoid driving in heat as much as possible. To get to Pamir, you take a winding, mountain "road" along the Pyanj River, which is the border with Afghanistan. I have road in quotations because most of the road is unpaved gravel or a mudslide or one huge pothole. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Tajikistan stopped taking care of the roads, and except for main streets in cities, roads are non-existent or date from the Soviet era. Riding in the car sometimes felt like I was on a carnival ride because it was so bumpy. The distance between Dushanbe and Khorog, the main city in Pamir, is about 600 km. To put it another way, Tajikistan is about the size of Wisconsin. So it should only take about 5 hours to drive there if the roads were all good. Instead it took us 15 hours! Most people who travel to Pamir take a taxi, which usually comes in the form of a van made in China or the former Soviet Union. I'm not sure which one is worse. I bumped into some Belgians who had done the trip by taxi, and it had taken the taxi 27 hours to reach Pamir! The norm by taxi is about 20 hours. Luckily my boss has a new SUV, a car a never thought was that practical in the States, but is extremely so if one is traveling by car in Tajikistan.

One obstacle we had to cross was this rickety bridge. My boss found it exceedingly funny that I thought this bridge was so dangerous. It probably was on the safer side of things we drove over, but it was an old rusting metal bridge, and the surface we drove over was sheets of sheet metal. They weren't fastened in place or anything, they were just laying across the surface of the bridge so cars would not fall through. Woo, this gave me a heart attack! It was so loud and clanking, too!

The official name of the province of Pamir is Gor Badachshan, gor meaning mountain. I call it Pamir because the Pamirs are the name of the mountains in the area, and there are Pamiri people living in the entire area of the Pamirs, including China and Afghanistan. Gor Badachshan only refers to the area inside Tajikistan where Pamiri's live.

Aside from the nausea-inducing, dusty road, the drive was gorgeous. We drove with mountains all around us, with the Pyanj River churning away in the canyon.


I also got to stare at Afghanistan all day, which was interesting. It was strange to see houses on the Afghan border, because I don't know how the people who lived in them got to that area in the first place. Immediately behind the houses were the mountains. It doesn't seem like a very convenient place to live either, they didn't seem to have electricity or running water.


The drive to Pamir was the first time I really saw how much old Soviet metal was still laying around Tajikistan. Old Soviet gasoline tanks are all over the place in Tajikistan, and remnants of Soviet times dot the landscape. The most common remnant laying around are the gasoline tanks, but there are also the other type of tanks, the kind which roll around and shoot at people, now sitting quietly in the landscape. Many old Soviet cars, brand name "Lada," sit around rusting as well.



People put the old metal to good use. Many stores I saw in Pamir were stationed out of old Soviet bunkers, it's too bad I didn't get a chance to take any pictures of those. Many people use old car doors as doors to their gates. These people used the whole body of the car as part of fences around their homes.


Children also use the old junk as impromptu jungle gyms. These kids had a lot of fun playing around this old Lada in the yard of one of the women I interviewed. This was actually the yard of the last woman I interviewed. These neighborhood children were so cute, I especially like the little boy crouching under the car. However, he and the other boy were covered in red bumps, maybe chickenpox?


Anyway, this is all a complete sidetrack. I was talking about the road to Pamir. The road was very flooded in multiple places, and we actually had to ford the river to continue driving! Holy crap! I was so scared at those moments when we had to drive through the river. If the engine had flooded, we would have been stuck in the middle of Tajikistan, staring at Afghanistan, with no where to go. Whew! Here is a picture I took while the car was in the water.

This picture is of another place where we had to cross water on the way back from Pamir, but luckily this one was shallow. We got out to wash up and drink water, which comes from the mountains and is clean. I think I mentioned this in my previous post, but there is actually no running water in Pamir, so people get their water from diverting mountain streams to their homes.
As we drove along, there were many children along the road selling things. Whenever we rolled by a town, children would hear the crunch of wheels and run out of their homes or from under shady trees and start shaking whatever they were selling at us. Usually it was bottles of homemade drinks or bowls of apricots. This little boy had just caught a fish, and when we rolled by he held up his fish like a champion, with a champion grin to boot.

On the way there and back we passed children selling apricot seeds. These came on a red string, like beads, and were absolutely delicious. I had never had them before, but I know my sister Ursula had a tough time trying to isolate and bake them once. I don't know what the secret to preparing apricot seeds is, but there must be some secret because they had a ton. This little boy is holding up his strings of apricot seeds. We were only going to buy five strands, but he couldn't separate the strands so we just bought them all. They were only 1 somoni for each strand I think, which is 23 US cents. So sad.

Sorry for looking so gleeful in my picture with the apricot seeds. I was just confused at how they had prepared so many and then somehow gotten them all on a string when Ursula had said it was very tedious to take out all the seeds from the apricots, let alone bead them. I mean, how did they poke a hole through the seed? That's like poking a tiny hole through a peanut. Wtf.

One more thing. In Pamir and most of Tajikistan, getting gasoline is not the polished, mechanical service it is in the States. In Pamir we mostly pulled up next to parked oil trucks along the side of the road where a guy was standing with a hose running from the oil truck. My boss would tell him how much oil he wanted, then the guy would fill a bucket. They'd stick a big funnel into the gas tank of the car, and pour the gas from the bucket into the car! This was ridiculous and kind of funny. It also produced terrible fumes, which makes me worry for the workers' health.


I don't know why the woman is praying while these guys are filling the car with gas in the first picture. But weird things happen all the time in Tajikistan, praying while filling gas doesn't even come close to weird anymore. :)