18/10/2019 1 Comment The Pamir highway, our Everest momentSome of our previous blog posts talk about the Pamir and the struggles we had along the way as well as the amazing things we saw. The Pamir plateau was a place of absolute silence, of salt-soaked earth, of red/ green/ yellow mountains and dust tornadoes. Wide open spaces, forlorn villages, and long stretches of empty road.
All in all, from Samarkand to Osh, we biked for 31 days, plus 8 rest days, and did 1816 kilometres. We climbed 9 passes, 5 of which were over 4000m. But there were countless more hills, meaning that in total we climbed 19,262 altimetres. We biked while it was snowing twice, had one puncture, one broken chain, one broken stove and a lost water filter. It was a pretty epic journey through the mountains, the pinnacle of our trip and a great way to end the Central Asian chapter of our cycling tour.
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If there's one lesson this trip has taught me, it's to persevere and you will make it. I've never been in such challenging situations, but in the absence of the ability to pack it all in, I kept going on and managed what I never would've thought was possible.
The month trip from Dushanbe to Osh through the Pamir plateau was tough. It started off gentle and easy but just before we started the first climb up to 4300m, I got really sick. It took me more than a week to totally shake off but we kept going in the meantime, aware that winter was fast approaching and that it would only get colder. Doing that first climb with no energy was hell. More often than not I would end up off my bike and pushing for no reason other than that I couldn't face biking anymore. Or I would end up having a lie down on the road to catch my breath. I lost count of the times I wanted to throw my bike down, curl up in a ball and have a meltdown. But I didn't. I realised that this wouldn't achieve anything and that no-one was coming to fix my problems. So I kept pedalling. And pushing. And panting. And swearing. But bit by bit I made that first pass, and then the 6 more passes on the high plateau. On the Pamir plateau we were also battling with headstrong winds and bitter cold. At times I felt almost overwhelmed by a sort of panic, that I couldn't get warm and that stopping biking wouldn't help so I just had to keep going. So I did, I just kept going, and I survived. It all sounds a bit melodramatic in retrospect but I still feel a bit shaky thinking back on these weeks. But I also carry those lessons with me. What seems impossible, isn't really. When you can't go on, you can. You just have to focus on a small step in front of you rather than the mountain ahead. Our bodies, and our minds, are infinitely stronger than we realise and with a little perseverance they can be pushed to achieve great things. 18/10/2019 0 Comments "Oh Crazy Tajikistan"As we entered Kyrgyzstan from the no-mans land stretching to Tajikistan, the border guard's first words to us were 'Oh crazy Tajikistan!'. It felt like a pat on the back for getting out of that crazy country and into gentle Kyrgyzstan.
It's true, it is a bit of a crazy country compared to Kyrgyzstan where life seems immeasurably easier in comparison, and so much richer. Tajikistan has suffered from poverty brought about by civil war at the end of the Soviet Union as well as economic difficulties due to its inhospitable geography. Over 93% of the country is mountainous. It also shares a long border with Afghanistan and continues to struggle with the illicit drug trade this brings, with the value of the drugs passing through the country equivalent to 30% of its GDP. But, and there's a big one, it is by far the most beautiful country we've been to. From the moment we crossed the border, the mountains towered above us in their glory. The sheer dramatism of the nature never ceased to amaze us - ragged cliffs, raging rivers, colourful mountains, snowy peaks, barren rock-strewn pastures, and amongst this all, tiny patches of green where people make their lives. The people continued to astound us with their hospitality as well. In Tajik culture, if you see a stranger outside your house you must invite them in for tea. We lost count of the number of people who invited us in for tea, fried potatoes, tried to convince us to stay, gave us fruit, vegetables, nuts. Tajikistan may not always be an easy country to travel, you have to have patience and nerves of steel for some of the roads, but it was without a doubt the most rewarding. 18/10/2019 0 Comments GHello, my name is..There were many potential dangers and annoyances that crossed our minds before we left, but children was not one of them. It turns out that they were often the biggest challenge.
These suicidal little kids would see us coming and come running, flinging themselves on the road, inching further and further out, just to get a high-five. They seemed to totally misjudge how quick we were sometimes going and ignored the fact that there might be other traffic on the road. This was exasperating and downright scary for us at times. Once we heard voices up the mountainside and looking around for the source, saw some little faces flinging themselves down the cliff-face to try and reach us in time. But we also had some great meetings, conversations and bike races with kids who were fascinated in our trip. One little boy was convinced that Acacia’s leather seat was too hard (it is pretty hard) and tried to give her the saddle cushion from his bike. They also loved to practise their english. At some point we remarked that they must all have the same textbook in Central Asia because they all yell 'hello!' with a thick guttural h, and 'what is your name?'. But they don't just say hello once, no, they continue to keep yelling hello long after you've replied. Occasionally there will be a variation, like in one village they would all say 'how are you?' or 'you country?'. The funniest one we heard happened on a couple of occasions when a kid said 'hello, my name is', which left us watching them and waiting to hear what their name was, but it never came. 18/10/2019 0 Comments Chinese borderOn the Pamir plateau we came up to this fence. It marks the beginning of the no-mans land leading up to the Chinese border. We always wanted to bike to China, so it's also the place where we celebrated our goal.
Originally our plan was to cycle through China to SouthEast Asia. We have abandoned that plan. First of all we because we don't have a visa for China (as a journalist Jasper would not be allowed into Xinjiang anyway). But we're also put off by the stories we've heard from cyclists coming the other way. They had to show their passport several times a day, they were followed by the police for hundreds of kilometres, questioned for 27 hours by 5 chain-smoking cops, passed from one police station to the next, refused places to stay in hotels. The western province of Xinjiang, where millions of people are locked up in what China euphemistically calls ‘re-education camps’, is an open-air prison and extreme version of a big brother-style police state. Our new plan? Cycle to Almaty and fly from there to Bangkok at the end of October where we will start the more relaxed cycling chapter of our trip. 18/10/2019 0 Comments "Put your pride aside and push"We live in Brussels, so we were convinced that we knew a thing or two about bad roads. That was until we cycled through Tajikistan. Here is an overview of the surprising variety of sorts of bad road we've encountered on the Pamir Highway.
- Asphalt: the asphalt roads were built in Soviet times. There's parts of it left, but it hasn't been maintained and there are big potholes. So you have to keep an eye on the road at all times and never enjoy the surroundings too much. - Gravel: in a lot of places the road is broken up and all that is left is gravel. It's surprisingly easy to ride on until the layer of gravel gets too deep. When this happens you suddenly get stuck, so a certain level of attention is required at all times. - Rocks: in some places the gravel comes with a variety of small or even big rocks. Needless to say these are to be avoided. If you hit one, you risk an ugly fall or worse, you risk breaking your bike. You have to have your eye on each rock on your path. - Sand: You would not expect it but in the high mountains of the Pamir there's a lot of sand. This is not a problem as long as it's a thin layer. When the sand gets deeper you start skidding and you risk falling. Once you’ve lost your speed, it's hard to start again. So sand can result in having to push your bike. This is to avoid at all costs, so sand requires a high level of attention. - Washboards: This is the real enemy. The problem is that you don't see washboards coming until suddenly you're on one, which means your bike and you yourself are heavily shaken like you're riding a bull It's a mystery how they got there. We suspect it might be from the machine in the picture above. - Snow: This is surprisingly pleasant to bike on, most of all when it covers the enemy, washboards. Still it comes with it's own challenges. In the low temperatures of the mornings snow becomes icy and extremely slippery, in the high temperatures of the afternoon snow melts and together with the dust it forms mud. Both ice and mud block your brakes. Be on high alert all the time! The surprising thing about the Pamir Highway is not that it comes with this variety of "bad roads", but that these variations occur in rapid succession or often in combination with each other. Large sections of the Pamir have washboard in the middle of the road, gravel with big rocks next to it and deep sand on the sides. At times this simply makes biking impossible. A French guy who we met said it best: "you just have to put your pride aside and push". We've laid out on our blog before how a day in our life as desert cyclists looked like. This is a typical day in the Pamir mountains:
4am: Wake up and realise we're cold again. This happens every hour or so, because the nights get gradually colder. Outside our tent it's -10 degrees. 6am: We wake up, because it's getting light. The sun is still behind the mountains, so it's too cold to get up. We stay in our sleeping bags, covered by an extra one, and dressed in several layers of clothes. 6.45am: The sun will start peeping over the mountains soon, so we manage to get up. We have a first hot drink from the thermos. While one of us is boiling more water and making breakfast, the other one starts packing up all our camping gear. The key is to keep moving to shake off the cold. 8am: Start biking. The first kilometres are hard. You know immediately you made a bad decision the previous day, when you said: "let's leave that steep part of the climb for tomorrow". 9.30am: Time for second breakfast. we're pretty exhausted already. A look on our route planner shows us we've done only 7km. We've set ourselves an ambitious goal again. We now know already that we probably won't make it. 11.30am: We're getting near to 4000m. We still have 15km to climb and we're starting to feel the altitude, in the sense that on the steep parts we have to stop every couple of hundreds of metres to catch our breath. 1pm: Lunch break. In the Pamir there's hardly any fruits or veggies, so we enjoy our very dry bread. Sitting and looking around us makes us realise again why we're here. We're surrounded by the high peaks of the Hindu Kush. The view makes up for all the suffering. 2.15pm: We're climbing the last 10km. We can't see the pass yet. After every corner we're hoping to see it, but there's just more endless switchbacks. By now not even the stunning views make up for the suffering. 3.45pm. We can see the pass! We're at 4300m altitude and we're exhausted, so now we have to stop every 100m to catch our breath again, but at least we know now the climb doesn't go on forever as we had started to fear. 4.10pm: We're at the pass. The view is incredible! This was totally worth this whole day of suffering (that's at least what you think in a brief moment of euphoria, possible caused by the altitude) 5pm: It's getting dark. We've descended a couple of kilometres and we find a valley full of big boulders. They should give us some shelter if the wind picks up. 6.30pm: It's dark. One of us has cooked, the other one has set up our tent and rolled out our beds. It's too cold to sit outside, so we're in bed. Too early to sleep, we say, but a half an hour later we are asleep. 9pm: Wake up for the first time. It's getting colder. Time to put an extra layer on. 18/10/2019 0 Comments Wakhan CorridorIn Khorog we chose to take a little detour from the Pamir Highway and follow the Wakhan Valley. That way we got to keep following the Afghani border for another 350 kilometres, and best of all, we could follow the Afghani Wakhan corridor, albeit from across the river.
A look at the map of Afghanistan will show you that the Wakhan corridor is this strange extension of the country that preventsTajikistan from bordering on Pakistan and Kashmir. When cycling there you get the feeling that this region is cut off from the world and so of no importance to anybody except the locals. This is far from true. The corridor was created by London and St-Petersburg as a neutral buffer zone between British India and Tsarist Russia, and played a crucial role in history by preventing a major war between the two superpowers of the 19the century. Among cyclists the Wakhan valley is notorious for it's bad roads. Still many choose this way because there's no traffic and, more importantly, because it's just stunning. We were there in late summer. People were busy harvesting the last crops and everywhere we went people gave us fruit and veggies, which made the valley look like a bay of plenty. A simple look around at the surroundings tells you that this idyllic life was just temporary. The Wakhan Valley leads up to the so called Pamir knot, an area where the high mountain ranges of the Himalayas, Tian Shan, Karakoram, Kunlun, and Hindu Kush ranges meet. In other words, a ride through the valley guarantees stunning views, but you probably don't want to live there in winter. 18/10/2019 0 Comments AfghanistanWe followed the Afghan border for more than 500km, from Kalaikum to the end of the Wakhan Valley. It was surreal to be just across the river from a country where both of our countries have gone to war.
A few times we saw something that confirmed our stereotypes of Afghanistan, a view that is largely formed by the news. We saw one woman in a niqab, on the road parallel to ours we saw a pickup truck with a machine gun on the back, and our first night camping on the riverbank we were woken up early in the morning by Tajik soldiers pointing to the other side saying "Taliban" and holding up their weapons as if to shoot. Needless to say, we got going pretty quickly. Locals assured us later that there was no Taliban in the region and that there never had been. The soldiers were actually being very friendly and were just asking us to camp on the other side of the road and not next to the river. Later on we did camp next to the river again, but much better hidden. We got to know Afghanistan just a little bit, because - and we have tested this - it was just a stones throw away. To us it's a country with very charming villages full of friendly people and kids playing on the beach. One man even tried to throw us some nuts, but Tajikistan for him was clearly more than a nuts throw away. 13/10/2019 0 Comments The wrong familyWe had only just crossed the Tajik border when we met Zara. She was Uzbek, on the way to Tajikistan to visit family. What had just happened to her was Acacia’s worst nightmare - she had dropped her phone in the long-drop toilet and was watching a young guy trying to fish it out from the muck metres below with a long pole.
We got chatting and she insisted that we come and stay with them, on a small detour from the main road. Unfortunately we arrived much later than expected and realised we had not made a good plan at all to find them. After a few minutes of milling about, surrounded by a bunch of well-meaning but overbearing locals, we cycled out of the village and started to set up camp on the edge of a field. Within minutes, someone popped up to fetch his cow and take it home. He insisted that we come and stay with him, to the point that we couldn’t refuse despite wanting to. So, we followed him back into the village. And what a good decision it was. Muchammadier and his family welcomed us into their home and overwhelmed us with their hospitality. Besides Muchammadier, who luckily for us spoke good German, his wife and her sisters lived on the property, as well as his sons and their wives and a whole gaggle of little grandchildren. We absolutely fell in love with this little girl who was fascinated by us. We spent a lovely day with this family, eating delicious plov, talking, misunderstanding each other, hiking into the hills, drinking chai and eating fresh walnuts, before regrettably taking our leave despite the many offers to stay. We were waved off by the whole family, and cycled off thinking what a wonderful first day this had been in Tajikistan, albeit with the wrong family. |
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