The Diarrhoea Diaries

With a skyline of bright-blue tiled domes and towering minarets, Samarkand is a city that is instantly enchanting and remains one of my favourite stops - not only in Central Asia, but on my entire trip. Once the centre of the silk road, the crossroads between Europe, the Middle-East, India and Europe, the city boasts 2,750 years of history, making it one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world.

Conquered by Alexander the Great in the 3rd century BC, it was then controlled for centuries by the Arabs (who brought Islam to the area and made Samarkand one of the most important Islamic education centres in the world). The city was sacked by Genghis Khan and his Mongol army in 1220, became the centre of Emir Timur's massive empire in the late 1300s, and was put under Russian control in the 1800s.


Despite Samarkand and the holy city of Bukhara being predominantly Tajik, and traditionally holding stronger ties with centres in modern-day Tajikistan, Stalin's nonsensical lines of division of the Central Asian republics while under Soviet rule, meant that these cities were given to Uzbekistan after the fall of the Union. There was protest from the Tajik population both in Samarkand and Bukhara, as well as in neighbouring Tajikistan (who felt that the cities belonged to them, both culturally and historically), but the cities remained a part of the new Republic of Uzbekistan. Today the Tajiks are forced to watch as Uzbekistan's tourism industry flourishes, thanks mainly to the increasing number of visitors (particularly mainland Europeans) to these two cities, while their own already-troubled economy steadily declines.

Timur, the tyrannical Emir whose empire extended from Western China to Egypt in the 14th century, left his stamp on the city more than any other person. He chose Samarkand as his capital and set about building the most grand of monuments and edifices as a showcase of his power. For some thirty years, the Uzbek government has been restoring the huge mosques, mausoleums and medressas (Islamic schools), that had crumbled into disrepair, in order to draw more tourists - and it's working. Uzbekistan is easily the most 'touristy' of the Central Asian republics. That said, it is nothing compared to Europe, or even elsewhere in Aisa, and it's still possible to have an incredible ancient site largely to yourself.


There are two sides to Samarkand: The more modern Russian side, with a more European feel to it, and the ancient Islamic Old City, a UNESCO World Heritage site and over-stocked with incredible historic sites that any European city would be envious of!


The signature domes, covered in glistening blue tiles, adorn the tops of many structures in Samarkand. The massive Bibi-Khanym Mosque (named for Timur's beloved wife), the adjacent Bibi-Khanym Mausoleum and the spectacular Guri-Amir Mausoleum (where Timur himself, and several of his most loyal subjects, advisors and teachers are interred) are three of the most impressive.


The central bazaar, which lies in the shadow of Bibi-Khanym Mosque, is the beating heart of the city. Bustling with people, bursting with colour, it is one of the most vibrant markets I visited in all my travels. The locals are excessively friendly and were always receptive to being photographed. They would gather all their friends who worked around them and eagerly show them the result on the LCD screen amidst 'Oohs', 'Aahs' and embarrassed chuckles.
The products on sale were as varied as the people working there, ranging from sheep's heads, entrails and tongues, to creamy fudge and coconut ice, to the most delicious fresh fruit and vegetables you could ever imagine, In fact, I defy anyone to find a piece of fresh fruit that is as orgasm-inducing as the peaches found in Samarkand Bazaar!


Near the market, surrounded by a huge cemetery (where spooky, life-sized pictures of the dead stare down at you from each headstone), is one of Samarkand's most impressive sites, Shah-I-Zinda. This corridor of imposing mausoleums, intricately patterned in colourful mosaic, dates from the 9th century, and is eerily beautiful.


Uzbekistan's most famous structure takes centre stage in Samarkand. The Registan is a collection of three huge medressas, their facades and minarets towering above three sides of a public square. My view of the Registan was obscured by a stage, grandstand and lighting towers as the site was being prepared to host the 'Rhythms of the East' music festival, an event showcasing music from across the Asian continent which Samarkand plays host to every two years.


Islam Karimov has been the president of Uzbekistan since it became an independent republic in 1991, maintaining his status for nineteen years through a series of rigged elections and illegal extensions of his term. A Samarkand native, Karimov, after visiting his hometown a month before the music festival, deemed it to be unfit to host the event and ordered the city be regentrified in time for opening day. The result was an entire city under construction.... and in a frenzied panic!


Newly-cobbled boulevards were being created to connect tourist attractions. These pristine new avenues were being lined with brand new buildings where soul-less, expensive souvenir shops would be housed, each doomed to fail since as yet, the city simply doesn't attract enough tourists to sustain them. Monuments and buildings were scrubbed clean, repainted or re-tiled. Parks were being completely stripped and re-lawned, and gardens filled with bright new flowers. Streets were being repaved at lightning speed while iron fences, several kilometres long, were being given a new coat of paint.

You may wonder how this work was being carried out? Where did they find enough workers to get the job done in just one month? Well, after asking around, I discovered that most everyone in the city had to lend a hand - no exceptions! It wasn't uncommon to see a group of ten men and women, dressed in shirts and ties or flowery dresses, slapping paint on a fence with little idea as to what they were actually doing. I was told that at one point, in preparation for the president's follow-up inspection, an entire hospital's staff (including doctors and nurses) were ordered to leave their posts in order to scrub the sidewalks clean in front of the building!


I stayed at Bahodir Guesthouse behind the Registan. Bahodir is easily one of the best places in Central Asia for the weary backpacker to chill for a few days, with a beautiful courtyard, massive free breakfasts and $2 dinners (which most guests take part in), as well as the most humble and obliging family on staff, catering to your every need. It was a fun place to hang out, with an eclectic mix of travellers constantly flowing through the doors, eager to exchange stories and indulge in one or two shots of cheap vodka.

One of the most confusing (yet at times exciting) things about traveling in Uzbekistan is dealing with the local currency. It's wise to bring with you all the money you will think you will spend in Uzbekistan (in US dollars) when you enter the country, exchanging it as and when needed (ATMs are extremely rare and extremely unreliable when you do find one!). The Uzbek som is most commonly traded on the black market. What this means is that if I were to trade US dollars at a bank, I would have received 1,320 som for each dollar, but trading on the black market meant that I would receive 1,850 som for each dollar - about 20% more bang for your buck! Now here's the real kicker: The largest banknote available in Uzbekistan is a 1000 som note - roughly US 60c! Changing one crisp $50 note gives you a wad of bills, a couple of centimetres thick! This makes the actual money exchange a heart-racing affair!

Moneychangers are usually found lurking in the shadows at the back of market areas with a large plastic bag. Once you've found one, the next step is to negotiate an exchange rate (you must bargain for everything in Uzbekistan, even entry fees to historic sites are negotiable!), make the exchange and then quickly count the wad of ninety-or-so notes to make sure you're not getting screwed. This is not an easy task when your hands are shaking, you're feeling distinctly like you're in the middle of a major drug-deal - not simply exchanging $50! - and you're eyes are constantly surveying the market on the look-out for police (who are always crooked and will always want a cut of the money to conveniently ignore the illegal activity they have witnessed!).


A Finnish friend, J.P, from the Bahodir accompanied me to the market one day and each of us exchanged US$100, yielding a stack of bills that would've made Uncle scrooge drool. It's an essential souvenir to have your photo taken rolling around in your underwear amongst 100,000 Uzbek som! We decided to go one better by cleaning out the smelly bathtub in the stench-ridden bathroom, combining our 370,000 som and getting photos of ourselves literally bathing in money!

Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital city, is probably the most pleasant of the Central Asian capitals. It has a relaxed feel with a European 'cafe-culture' atmosphere. Its broad avenues are lined with large shady trees, fountains take centre-stage in large well-manicured parks and many of the ornate buildings in its centre could easily have been transplanted from St. Petersburg.

I took a few days' 'rest' in Dushanbe. Until now, I'd felt like I'd seen Tajikistan from the window of a jeep, and so I relished the opportunity to do nothing for a few days. The only problem was that there is really no decent accommodation in the city, so I stayed at three different hotels in the hope that each would be better than its predecessor. None was.

Inge and Elke left a day before me and headed north to the Fan Mountains. I moved to my third hotel, the Hotel Dushanbe, and was pleasantly surprised that here (unlike the previous two hotels), I didn't have to fight with a belligerent receptionist, whose vocabulary didn't extend past the word 'Nyet!', in order to get a room!



I did end up with a much bigger fight on my hands later when, after having enquired as to the price of the hotel's laundry service, and stating clearly in Russian that I would have it done later that day (when I would have sweaty gym gear to add to my laundry bag), I returned to find that someone had gone into my room, taken my laundry bag from my pack and washed my clothes! They then tried to charge me the equivalent of $7 for the service. The argument that followed was a joke! The women couldn't seem to understand why I was angry, as if it were standard practice for them to go through a guest's belongings then remove them from their room without their permission! Begrudgingly, the laundry service was offered without charge, though clearly the point of the altercation was still lost on them! Things just don't work the same in Asia!


I took a shared jeep north to the town of Penjikent, near the Uzbek border. It was to be my last long-haul journey in Tajikistan and the scenery, as usual, was spectacular.

Up to this point I'd not really taken to the Tajik people as I had to the Kyrgyz. This changed as I headed north. Nadis, a lovely thirty-something Tajik lady, decided to befriend me and over the course of our nine-hour journey, I became the centre of my fellow passengers' attention! None of the other six people in the jeep spoke English, so I was left only with my basic Russian and my Rough Guide phrasebook to get by with. Usually, once it got to the point that the phrasebook came out, people would realise that my Russian wasn't quite as good as they'd originally thought and would dispense with the interrogation. Not Nadis! Whenever I couldn't understand a question, and a translation couldn't be found in my phrasebook, she would attempt to ask the question in several different ways, none of which I would understand. A man sitting in the front would periodically call his French-speaking friend, pass his phone to me and have his friend translate the question from Russian into French so that I would understand and the conversation could move forward!

It's little wonder I couldn't understand! The conversation changed quickly between unrelated subjects, from Nadis trying to marry me off to her sister, to whether I believed that the plot from 'Titanic' was based on a true story! Central Asians have a rather unhealthy obsession with this movie! I was told I looked like Leonardo DiCaprio twice(!!!) and was often made to endure Celine Dion's vomit-inducing theme song on public buses!

When I arrived in Penjikent I headed to the west of town to a well-known backpacker guesthouse, owned by Niyozkul Nematov. Somehow, Niyozkul's guesthouse received good reviews in the Lonely Planet guidebook, however my experience (and, I later discovered, many other people's) was far from positive.

Contrary to the LP review, I was told that the $10 per bed didn't include dinner, so I ate a shashlyk dinner (skewered flame-grilled meat) at a local restaurant. When I returned, I was invited to join Niyozkul, his manager and other guests at a table in the courtyard for a meal in celebration of one of the guest's birthdays - None other than my Italian friend, Marcello!

Niyozkul and the manager questioned why I'd gone to eat elsewhere - 'Um... You told me dinner wasn't included!?' - and then proceeded to tell me that they could provide transport to the Fan Mountains where I intended to hike the next day. Logically, I then enquired as to how much it would cost (a perfectly reasonable question given that I am a backpacker and have a budget to stick to), but Niyozkul avoided answering the question. When I asked a second time he shot me a menacing glare and angrily told me that business had no place at the dinner table and that if I wanted to discuss business I could do it elsewhere. Hmmm.... maybe you shouldn't have brought up the service that you offer in exchange for money while at the dinner table! That would constitute 'business' in my estimation!

I politely excused myself from the table and spent the rest of the evening in my room. Then, in the middle of the night, the next serious episode of food-poisoning began. All night and the whole of the next day I made frequent visits to the toilet (which was, thankfully, a western-style flush toilet!), barely being able to stand the searing, impossibly-bright sun that bore down on me every time I made the run between bedroom and toilet. I ached in every muscle of my body and lay in a feverish sweat in my bed, drifting in and out of a shallow sleep.

The manager tried to make sure I was OK a few times. He asked what I had eaten and then scolded me over my choice in eateries! He'd apparently had a similar issue after eating there a few years before. 'From now on, all guests must eat here!', he stated. Other guests were concerned that I was dying. The manager suggested calling in a doctor, and even Niyozkul eventually showed concern, offering me tea and bread!

Luckily, the next day, after a long night of sleep, I felt like a new man. I'd lost a full day, so had to cut my plans short for the Fan Mountains. Instead of a two-day hike, I would have to settle for one-and-a-half.

I needed a tent, and asked Niyozkul about the rentals that he had.

'Do you have a one-man tent to rent?'
'Yes'
'How much does it cost to rent?'
[With an annoyed expression] 'For you, it's free! Why are you always so concerned about how much things cost?!'

You would think that someone who runs a guesthouse catering to foreign backpackers would be used to cost-related questions! Or maybe the average Central Asia traveler is independently wealthy and has no concern for how much money they spend on a daily basis. Under normal circumstances I would've insisted on paying something (Heck, I'd even given the laundry lady at the Hotel Dushanbe some money despite our altercation!), but by now, I couldn't stand this guy, so I gladly took his tent for two nights - gratis!


I took a public bus to Artush, a short distance, but a three-hour drive from Penjikent. A Hungarian couple and I were amongst twenty-three people crammed into the bus, which would be better described as a minivan. One of the Hungarians spoke Russian and so we were able to communicate with our fellow sardines throughout the journey. Somehow, the people in the north of Tajikistan seemed a lot happier and more open than the locals I'd met in other parts of the country. They just seemed more welcoming, more genuine and interested in me, not the money in my wallet.

This was certainly true as I began my hike south from the village of Artush into the Fan Mountains. The first part of the hike followed a dirt road through fields of wheat and grazing animals. Whenever I passed a local farmer or child, I was not greeted with the usual 'Hello!' in English, which while usually said as a genuine greeting to a stranger, can often carry with it an air of contempt or sarcasm. Instead, these locals would put hand to heart and say 'Zdravstvutye' (Russian for 'Hello' or 'How are you?') with a bow of the head. I could be over-analysing it - maybe they said 'Zdravstvutye' because the majority of trekkers in the area are Russian and they assumed me to be also!

I had to move quickly to reach the Kulikalon Bowl before dark. After leaving the dirt road, I climbed up a steep path of loose dirt, finally entering the massive amphitheatre as the sun was setting. The bowl is encircled by lofty, flat-topped peaks. Glaciers drip off their summits like icing from a cake, feeding the painter's palette of bright turquoise and deep green lakes that are scattered across the floor of the bowl.


I found a spot to make camp next to one such lake, then sat at its shore watching the last red rays of sunlight disappear from the red rocky peaks to the east, all reflected in perfect detail in the still waters of the lake. It was far more beautiful than I'd imagined it would be up there. The calmness of the wind and intense silence added a feeling of extreme isolation and solitude, and the immense sky above was filled with the brightest stars you can imagine. Awesome.


The morning proved to be equally as spectacular with the sun catsing a golden hue across the bowl. I explored the area close to my camp, taking dozens of photos along the way. I encountered a group of local women on a lakeshore who'd come from their basic camp across the water to check the catch in the fishing nets they'd cast the day before. They invited me to come with them, and I watched as they pulled in three small fish from the net (not a great catch!), their bright red robes reflecting beautifully in the mirror-like water at their feet.

I broke camp and headed toward the Alauddin Pass. The day became hot, and when the trail climbed out of the bowl, the altitude kicked in as well. The pass sits at 3,900m, a height that I would laugh at by the end of my trip, but by this time I still wasn't used to high altitudes, so each step with a heavy pack became increasingly difficult.


On the final approach to the pass, the trail's gradient increased and after taking in the view of the lake-littered bowl below, I decided to ditch the pack beside a large boulder and continue with just my camera. I can't have been more than five minutes from the pass (where I would be rewarded with one of the best views in the park, over the Alauddin Lakes), I stopped to catch my breath and thought I saw two people hanging around where I'd left my pack. Realising that my wallet and my passport were in my pack, I made the decision to forego the view from the pass and bolted back down to where my pack was. Not the same boulder! The two people I'd seen were just trekkers, and had been nowhere near my pack. I couldn't bring myself to climb to the top again, so I never saw the view from the pass!


I descended all the way back to Artush. Along the road approaching the town, a family exited a farm with two donkeys laden with wheat. Sasha had been a passenger on the bus from Penjikent the previous day and recognised me when I walked by. He grabbed my pack and gave it to one of his nephews to put on the back of the donkey he was riding, so that I wouldn't have any load for the remainder of the walk.

I'd missed the last bus back to Penjikent, so intended to find a spot to pitch my tent and then take the 6am bus the next morning. Sasha and his sister-in-law insisted that I stay at their family's home that night. I accepted the offer, and it soon became one of the more bizarre nights on my travels!

Hassan, a young 17-year-old who was with the family when I met them at the farm, invited us all to his house for dinner where his entire extended family lay in wait to meet the mysterious foreign visitor. Several generations of his family and Sasha's family (which often seemed to overlap) were in attendance. Not one spoke English. Hassan had a book of basic English phrases that he'd learned in school, but appeared to have no idea what any of them meant.

We were sat in the living room, which in Central Asia rarely has furniture. We sat on a luxurious carpet with colourful carpets and tapestries on the walls. The dinner began with a large tray laid out on the floor, with sweets, biscuits and chocolates which I was encouraged to eat several times. I figured that this insistence to eat meant that this was dinner, so I ate. A lot. That was when the lamb came out! The most delicious, succulent lamb I'd had on the entire journey, and I could barely eat any! I'd just finished explaining that I was too full to eat more when the soup came out! Full of noodles, potatoes and peppers as with the usual Central Asian soups, this one had one thing that all others I'd eaten before had lacked: Spices! It was easily the best soup I'd eaten in Central Asia, but I couldn't eat more than a few spoonfuls. I felt like I was offending these incredibly generous people, but I just couldn't stomach any more!


After dinner came photo time! It began with one or two requests for photos to be taken, but before long I felt like a wedding photographer, only there was no bride or groom! Every possible family combination was covered: Sasha's two nephews; the two boys and their mother; the two boys, their mother and her parents etc, etc, etc!

Hassan forced not one, but two ice creams into my hands as I left. I somehow found a place in my belly for them on the walk back to the house through pitch-black laneways. Back at the house Sasha's sister-in-law dressed up her two boys in their best traditional suits and had me take photo after photo of the two of them as well as her and Sasha, to the point that I just had to say, 'Enough! It's time for bed!'.
Mattresses and blankets were laid out and we slept communally, as is the case in most houses in this region.


Sasha accompanied me back to Penjikent (where he, his wife and children live) the next morning. There was a swarm of locals fighting to get on the bus that morning. Somehow, Sasha and I pushed through the crowd and secured seats inside. Others weren't so lucky. Many were forced to stand, which is virtually impossible in a minivan, especially when there are several other people competing for the same space. In all, there were twenty-eight people crammed into the vehicle!

I met Sasha's wife, children and parents back in Penjikent and was aggressively forced to eat stale bread and jam by his father. I played photographer again, before forcing my way out and heading off to burn the fifty-or-so photos to disc for them. Having not spoken a word of English in two days, yet being the focus of Sasha's extended family's attentions, I was now just exhausted and starting to become frustrated by the whole experience. When I returned to give Sasha the DVD, I had to bluntly refuse more food, but was given a round of bread, so hard and stale that it could have been used as a frisbee, to take with me.

That afternoon, I shared a taxi with an Italian couple to the Uzbekistan border, preparing to leave the mountains behind for the next couple of weeks in favour of dry deserts and ancient silk-road cities.

You'd think that when you organise a vehicle and driver for four days on a per-kilometre rate, that you'd at least get a vehicle with a working odometer. Not the case in Tajikistan, unfortunately! The only thing more ridiculous than the situation itself is the solution offered by the incompetent, yet unjustifiably arrogant woman at the PECTA tourism office in Khorog, 'It's OK, you just need to look at roadsigns and ask locals so that you can accurately gauge the distance'!!!

Being normally so even-tempered, it may come as somewhat of a surprise to many of you that I lost it at this point!

After a fruitless search for a replacement vehicle, an argument with Little Ms. Arrogant, and much deliberation with my three carmates, the driver of the odometer-less vehicle, Shob, finally agreed that he would take us on our loop of the Wakhan and Shokh Dara valleys based on our rough estimate of 520km.

Our jeep was an ex-army Russian jeep which had served as a medical vehicle during the Afghan war more than twenty-five years ago. We rolled out of Khorog at close to midday. After all the faffing around with trying to sort out a vehicle, we'd wasted so much time that we didn't make it to the trans-border market in Ishkashim before it closed. It's possible to leave your passport with the Tajik border guards and cross to the market which sits on an island in the river between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Technically, it's Afghan soil, but really it's no-man's land between the two countries' border controls. Whatever the case, you can come away from the market and brag that you went to Afghanistan, watching looks of admiration appear on people's faces and feeling smug when you hear their 'Oohs' and 'Aahs'!



The road leaves Khorog and follows the Pyanj River south to its junction with the Wakhan River. Both rivers form the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, so I can now say that I have seen a great deal of Afghanistan without ever actually setting foot on its soil. Craggy, barren mountains rise on either side of the river creating an almost impenetrable landscape. Villages surrounded by rice paddies and terraced fields of wheat provide an occasional splash of green in an otherwise brown landscape. Paths connecting these villages run through numerous caves cut into the sheer-sided cliffs above the river, leading us to speculate as to whether Osama may be hiding inside one.



After a brief stop to buy samosas from some friendly local women in Ishkashim, we bore east and followed the Wakhan valley. With the mountains becoming loftier and increasingly capped with snow, it was now possible to see parts of Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan (The spine of the Hindu Kush range, rwhich rises up on the Afghan side of the river, forms the Afghan-Pakistani border and so the peaks are shared by the two countries).



The Wakhan has a feeling of utter remoteness, like it has been long forgotten and left behind in time. It's a beautiful place, with a verdant valley floor blanketed with farmland and tiny traditional villages tucked in their midst where life seems to continue in much the same way as it has for centuries. The villages are connected by a single dirt road that sees little traffic and is lined with ancient fortresses that stood guard over the valley as far back as 2000years. Marco Polo, the original 'backpacker', traveled the length of the valley back in 1271!



We spent our first night in a homestay in the tiny, bizarrely-named hamlet of Ptup. This is really your only option for accommodation in the Pamir or Wakhan, and if communal sleeping and disgusting outdoor pit-toilets aren't your thing, then maybe this isn't the destination for you! Many of these homestays are asking as much as US$15 for board and meals. This may not sound like a lot to you, but in a country where the minimum wage is $4 a month, and considering that your meals are generally a carb-overload of bread, rice, fried potatoes and (unfried!) onions, this figure is somewhat over-inflated for this part of the world. One cheeky woman even tried to charge us $6 for a lunch of plov (fried rice with a couple of pieces of mutton on top), something which costs around a dollar at any market foodstall in Tajikistan! We haggled and in most places came to the mutually agreeable price of around $5 per person.

The traditional Pamiri home is built around one large, brightly-painted and decorated room with four pillars surrounding a skylight at its centre. These four pillars represent the five pillars of Islam (one of the pillars is shared between two), as well as the five holy prophets (Mohamed, Ali, Fatima, Hassan and Hussein). The raised area surrounding this central feature is used to eat meals which are laid out on a tablecloth and eaten communally. At night, thick mattresses and layers of warm blankets are thrown down in the same space and everyone sleeps there together.

The patriarch of our host-family that night told us of the difficulties of life in the Wakhan. Despite being a desert area, the Wakhan gets extremely cold. In winter there is no electricity in the region and the river itself freezes solid for three months. I tried to imagine getting through a Montreal winter without electricity - not a nice prospect!



Our second day began with a diversion off the main 'highway' and up the side of the mountains to one of the region's many hotsprings, which, despite its spectacular location, was indoor with no view. We decided to skip it in favour of exploring neighbouring Yamchun Fort, the most well-preserved in the area. Dating from the 3rd century BC, the fort occupies a rocky mountain lookout. Its exterior wall is still more-or-less intact, with many turrets still standing, and the views up and down the valley are absolutely beautiful. It's hard to imagine that these forts were ever even necessary since the area is hard enough to get to today, let alone two millenia ago!



Shob had now decided that the journey was going to be more than 520km, and reneged on his original commitment to our agreement, saying he wanted to reassess the distance when we returned to Khorog! Always the same story in Central Asia!



Our second day was our longest in terms of driving time. After the fort, we made a stop at an ancient buddhist stupa, perched on a slope above the village of Vrang. We were directed by some local children - the 'keepers of the stupa' - on the correct procedure to follow there. A young girl handed each of us seven small white rocks which we carried along a path (being sure not to stray from it for fear of suffering their wrath!) to the top of the stupa where we said some sort of prayer and threw the rocks on the top-most layer of the stupa. It was all very bizarre considering that the area is, and has been for centuries, muslim!



After our lunch stop at Langar, the last town in the valley, the road climbed up above the river which now ran through a massive gorge. There were a few more random forts en-route, but the road eventually became more desolate, with no life to be seen, save for a few shrubs and the occasional wild camel drinking in the river on the Afghan side. After a flat tyre and an overheated engine, we eventually made it to a superbly remote military checkpost, where I had a heart-stopping moment looking for my passport (with permit for the GBAO region) which I feared I'd left in Ptup! Much to the amusement of my travel companions, driver and soldiers, I found it after 2 panicked minutes of searching!



We headed north across a 4000-or-so-metre pass, the jeep barely making it to the top, and descended to rejoin the Pamir Highway for a brief moment before turning off to overnight in Bulunkul.

Bulunkul truly feels like the end of the world. It's little more than a small scattering of block-like houses on a desolate plain, hemmed-in by barren mountains. We found accommodation with a local family since a documentary crew had taken all the beds in the town's one guesthouse.



We'd come to Bulunkul to hike to a large lake, Yashil Kul, nearby, but these plans were quashed in the morning when a man with a gun, claiming to be a ranger for the Tajik National Park, came into our room and demanded that we pay 100 somoni each (about US$23) because we were in the National Park. Feeling rather intimidated, but also feeling safety in numbers, the four of us refused to pay and asked for the man's ID. Claiming he'd left his ID in his 'hotel', the man again took his gun out to show us as 'ID' before telling us we would all have to pay 1000 somoni fines and then leaving!

We went to the documentary team to see if they'd had the same experience. Apparently, according to the Australian bitch (sorry, can't think of another word to describe her) who was heading the team, they hadn't had a visit from the ranger, but she assumed that all their permits had been arranged, since their guide was the former Head of Forestry for the country.

As it turned out, the man with the gun was the ranger, and when he re-emerged, a heated discussion between the former Head of Forestry and the ranger ensued. The ranger insisted that just by being in Bulunkul, we were in the Tajik National Park, while Mr Forestry insisted that we were not yet inside the national park boundary. Whatever the case, there is no signage anywhere around the national park stating that a fee must be paid (about half of the Pamir Highway runs through the national park, and we'd not been stopped at a single checkpost or ticket booth, because they don't exist!).

The ranger offered us to just pay for two people, with the other two being free, making us wonder, if we'd paid the full amount asked, where would all this money have gone?

While the discussion went on, the Aussie cow (Ooh! There is another word to describe her!) piped up, saying 'You should go to the lake. It's beautiful! When will you ever be here again? What's $25 to you anyway? I mean, how much do you earn in a year?'

I'm sorry...... What was that last comment?!

Inge, Elke and myself were momentarily speechless before rage set in. Marcello went into a fit of stuttering and gesticulation.

Clearly this woman existed in a bubble, being driven around with her guide and filmcrew and never getting a sense of what things cost or are worth in the local economy. Moreover, we'd already paid US$100 for a Tajik visa, plus another $50 for a special permit to enter the GBAO region. We certainly weren't going to pay another $25 just to see one lake - especially when the 'ranger' had just threatened us with a gun! I'm not sure where this woman takes her holidays, but I'd be fairly surprised if she's ever paid $25 to see a lake in Australia, Europe, North America - anywhere for that matter - let alone one in Tajikistan!

We chose not to give in to the ranger's bully tactics and left Bulunkul shortly after, without visiting the lake and without paying a single somoni. Incidentally, several other travellers later reported to us that they had gone to Yashil Kul, had never been asked to pay a fee, and that the lake was pretty ordinary anyway!

We drove a small section of the Pamir Highway again, before crossing the Gunt River and climbing on a rocky dirt track with steep switchbacks (where a frustrated Shob was forced to stop and work on a very unhappy jeep) to a beautiful, high-altitude plain.



We spent a good hour-and-a-half debating on which of two dirt tracks to take when we came to a junction. Shob wanted to go left, I insisted that it was straight ahead. Showing him the map and trying to explain in broken Russian did little more than confuse him, so we walked straight ahead until we reached a lake that made it evident that this was in fact the right way.

One thing that has become apparent while travelling in Asia, is that neither mathematics nor map reading are high priorities in the educational curriculums in these countries. A calculator is always used to work out the change from 100 when an item costs 50, and asking someone to show you where you are on a map of their town is like giving them a Rubiks Cube and saying, 'Solve this'!



Our 3km unplanned walk was actually one of the highlights of the entire four days. There was not a breath of wind or a single sound up there, only the crunching of stones underfoot. The surrounding mountains were starkly beautiful and the intensely-blue sky above seemed close enough to touch!



From the plain we descended again, entering the Shokh Dara Valley which lies between the Wakhan and Gunt Valleys. Shob hadn't planned very well, and we had to coast downhill as much as possible with the engine off since we were almost out of petrol!

We passed two craggy 6,500m peaks, named after the two fathers of communism, Peaks Engels and Karl Marx. Before being renamed after independence, the highest peak in the country (and in the former Soviet Union), was called Peak Communism!



We stayed that night in a homestay in the tiny village of Javshanguz, where many of the houses are built against the side of massive boulders that lie strewn across the valley floor, almost appearing to be growing out of them. Unfortunately, our meal of fried macaroni (and raw onions!) was to be our last taste of delicious Pamiri cuisine.

The next day we descended through the spectacular gorge carved out by the Shokh Dara River back to Khorog. Shob must have grown to like us, because he decided that he was happy with our original agreement on price after all. We had done some recalculating and discovered that our original estimate had been a little short, so we bumped it up somewhat just to be fair.



After a rest day in Khorog, lazing around in the park and eating at a great Indian restaurant (Finally, food with flavour and spice! How have all these spices escaped Central Asia??), we headed to the nation's capital, Dushanbe.

Marcello took an earlier shared jeep while the girls and I took one together. We were crammed into the jeep with three other passengers for the journey which took about twenty hours! Over the course of this time, we grew to despise each of the three with equal intensity.

The man in the front seat refused to rotate positions so that everyone got some time in the incredibly uncomfortable back seat because he had two trays of apricots in the front with him. He wouldn't even give it up when the woman sitting next to me started being sick - well, trying to be sick. We soon realised that her attempts at vomiting came straight after one of our rotations, when she was either in the back seat or in the middle of the middle row of seats. She ended up having the seat behind the driver - the only seat in back with a working window and the one with the most legroom - She was about 5-feet tall! The 6'5", gold-toothed, 20-year-old arm-wrestler with whom I seemed to always be sharing the impossibly-cramped back seat, insisted on trying to have a conversation with me, even when it had become apparent just how limited my Russian was. After about hour number five of this, I wanted to punch him! In addition to this, the dimwit had traveled to Khorog without his passport (you must have this as ID at all times in all Central Asian countries), meaning that at each of the frequent police checkpoints, a lengthy wait ensued. Each time, a bribe had to be paid, and our driver became more and more irate while the young man just smiled his stupid gold-toothed grin.



The road itself, like every road I traveled on in Tajikistan, was absolutely spectacular! We followed the Pyanj for several hours before saying goodbye to the views of Afghanistan and climbing up and over a massive pass. En route we passed by several burnt-out tanks, remnants of the '90s civil war, left discarded to rust away on the roadside.

After dark, the jeep began experiencing battery problems and we were forced to stop every ten minutes or so. The driver was now tired and having trouble staying awake, which was quite important on the winding, clifftop road, so Inge stayed awake behind him, giving him a wake-up jab whenever he began to doze off. We finally arrived in Dushanbe at 3am. I've never been so glad to get out of a vehicle in my entire life.

If you mention 'The Roof of the World' to anyone, chances are they will instantly think you are talking about either the Tibetan or Bolivian plateau. There is, however, a third 'roof of the world'. Higher than Bolivia and more accessible than Tibet, the Pamir Highway runs from Osh, Kyrgyzstan, to Khorog, Tajikistan, crossing a desolate high-altitude plateau (over 3000m above sea-level) and littered with huge peaks that soar to over 7000m.

In the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh, Daniyar, the owner of Osh Guesthouse (where most every Central Asia backpacker makes a pit-stop) sends jeeploads of backpackers on their way south to Tajikistan as soon as there are four people who want to go. Due to high travel costs in the area, these four people will inevitably become travel companions for the next week or more. It's pot luck who you end up with, so you cross your fingers and hope that you get teamed up with a decent crew.


Our motley crew consisted of two young Belgian school teachers, Inge and Elke, and a 48-year-old Italian school teacher, Marcello. The two Belgians turned out to be a lot of fun, while Marcello, well, what can I say about Marcello? Displaying almost Rainman-like nervous ticks and autistic tendencies, Marcello was a constant source of amusement. The ultimate Italian, he talked more with his hands than his mouth, and stuttered nervously when he spoke in English or Russian (which, unfortunately for us, was the best of our group!). His random outbursts (usually because he couldn't get any meat to eat at homestays) were often hilarious. His profuse sweating and resistance to deodorising or changing his t-shirt more often than once a week, were not so hilarious!

The four of us were driven south on the road to Sary Tash (which I saw for the third time), before heading straight into the Pamir mountains (the world's fourth-highest range) and the Tajik border.

The border was little more than a grouping of shipping containers and large metal capsules which were used as offices and sleeping quarters for the baby-faced, barely-done-with-puberty border guards and their superior officers. Our driver gave out loaves of bread and a wash basin, presumably knowing that this would aid in a smooth crossing of the border. Tajikistan, due to its unmanageably long border with Afghanistan, is one of the biggest drug-trafficking nations on Earth. Feeling the harsh, cold climate of the region, seeing the basic conditions in which these boy-soldiers live, and knowing what a pittance they are paid for their efforts, it suddenly made a lot of sense to me why so many of these soldiers are also involved in cross-border opium smuggling operations.

We'd left the verdant pastures of Kyrgyzstan behind, and now the landscape was a painters palette of earthy reds, browns and oranges. There was little sign of life, save for the occasional truck rumbling past us towards the Kyrgyz border. No trees exist and there is little grass or arable land. In the few green oases that exist, there is a random cluster of yurts and the occasional grazing yak. Despite being Tajikistan, the eastern Pamir is predominantly Kyrgyz - another stroke of brilliance on Stalin's part when he scribbled impratical borders across the region in order to keep the republics divided and therefore easier to rule.

After crossing the first high pass on the highway, some 4200m above sea-level, we descended to the beautiful lakeside village of Karakul. The town sits at around 3900m and is a cluster of square building-block houses, telegraph poles and eerily silent dirt laneways.

We stayed in a traditional Pamir homestay, with an old couple who'd lived in this inhospitable place their entire lives. We wandered down to the shore of the huge, deep-blue lake, encircled by jagged snowy peaks and desolate hills which glowed red as the sun set on the other side of the lake. The wind off the lake was intense and cold, creating a swell on the lake that made it feel more like being beside an ocean. Watching waves crash at your feet at 3900m is a strange experience.


In the morning, we set off towards the largest town in the eastern Pamir, Murghab, crossing the highest pass on the highway - some 4,655m above sea-level!


Centred around a dusty bazaar selling little other than past-use-by-date chips and chocolate bars, Murghab is the home of Maria Guesthouse where we parted ways with our driver and spent the night. For about $6.50 we got a bed in the large, mattress-filled dorm, and three meals. Maria seems to understand what backpackers want in terms of price, but perhaps hasn't quite worked out the food thing - It was liver noodle soup for dinner.....
And so, about six hours later, began the first nasty bout of food-poisoning of my trip. I was forced to run to the outhouse and stayed there, slumped against the interior wall for the two-minute stretches between bowel movements! The toilet itself was a sight to behold! Rather than the usual wooden footholds on either side of a large hole, this was instead two opposing metal dishes, much like a large, metallic venus flytrap. I had visions of it snapping closed on me in mid-squat, closing viciously around my privates and refusing to let go! Oh, to have a western toilet when you're sick in Asia....

I'd not been in the toilet long when Elke joined me, liver soup coming out the top rather than the bottom for her! We bonded that night as only two people who have taken turns shitting and vomiting into a large iron insect trap can.

Maria scolded us in the morning, saying that we shouldn't have sat in the sun the previous day writing in our journals! It was no wonder we got sick!


Feeling much better in the morning, the four of us, and a German/English fellow Mark (who spoke fluent Russian and seemed more content being around locals than foreigners, often pretending he was actually Russian!), we found a surly marshrutka driver to take us to Khorog at the western end of the Pamir Highway.


Khorog, after the dusty villages of the eastern Pamir, was a nice surprise! Set on either side of the rushing Gunt, the town is an oasis of green tucked into the dry brown mountains. The park at its centre (where kids and adults take turns diving into the free pool) is actually garbage free, nicely landscaped and well kept (a rarity in Asia).

We stayed at the Pamir Lodge, sitting high above the town, in the gorgeous garden of a mosque overseen by a Pakistani and former mathematics professor at the University of Birmingham. He uses the money he makes from travellers to fund the mosque and was also a key player in bringing food aid to the Gorno Badahkshan Autonomous Oblast (the Pamirs) during the civil war in the 1990s during which supply to the region was cut off and thousands of people starved or froze to death. A brutal time for the whole country, but even moreso for GBAO natives - If you produced a GBAO I.D card to authorities when asked in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, you were shot dead on the spot.

This was one of the key stops on the Mongol Rally. A huge charity rally 'raced' each year from several start-points in Europe to Ulan-Bataar, Mongolia. Bizarrely, no matter how remote of a location you think you've found in Central Asia, you can bet that you share it with several brightly-painted, euro-flag-waving 4WDs, VW Beetles or motorcycles!


Marcello, the girls and I paused just long enough in Khorog to arrange a jeep and driver to take us on the next part of our journey: A loop along the Afghan frontier via the Wakhan corridor and the Shokh Dara Valley.