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 hundreds 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 known 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
