On the Great Game - the Pamir Highway
Dear All
Just back from Tajikistan and Afghanistan meeting with Jim to drive the Pamir
Highway. The highway is poor, and this section of the Great Game Rally will
test our endurance from Dusanbe to Osh in Kyrgyzstan, but what we give up in
road condition it is more than made up as one of the most stunning, and
fascinating, drives I have done. To drive so close to the forbidding land of
Afghanistan, following the raging Panj River, so close you could hit a tennis
or golf ball across, is one of experiences of the rally. The mountains of
Afghanistan tower across the other side of the river and we will follow this
road for two days before crossing over into Afghanistan herself.
Even more impressive is the view across the river into Afghanistan seeing the
cliff hanging walkways that hug the rock face. Just tree trunks strapped
together and strapped to the rock face supporting a pathway running for
hundred's of miles along the Hindu Kush.
The Tajikistan side now has a road, the Afghanistan side there is no road, just
this mountain way of old, connecting villages along the valley. It is a biblical
sight to watch the local people, women in burqas, men in turbans, leading their
donkeys along the precarious mountain pathways. It is a formidable sight and I
have been researching the history of this continuous mountain walkway.
Incredible this is the same walkway, the only path left, that Marco Polo walked
1000 years ago. And before the war ends, and this mountain path becomes a 'must
do in a lifetime', I will return and walk this land with the people not the
tourists. Those coming bring your binoculars to see into Afghanistan.
The same with the bleak crossing into Afghanistan from Tajikistan into the
valley of the Wakham. It has an incredible austerity and a sense of driving to
the end of the world. The Wakham is between the two great mountain ranges of the
Pamirs and Hindu Kush, and they both tower above this very narrow valley with
the Panj River, once know as the Oxus, flowing fast between the two mountain
ranges.
Our visit to the Wakham will be short, but those coming will change their
perspective of Afghanistan, and as it did with me, and I hope as to return
within the next few years to make my way along the complete length of the
Wakham. The land where the Russians and the British came so close to war.
All the best Conrad
