Tajikistan 26/08/26

Hello! It’s been a while. I’ve been gratuitously off grid. Tajikistan was my tour of the Pamir mountains, I booked it so I could flex a WhatsApp status that said ‘last active 2 weeks ago’ and to finish War and Peace. Notes below were made at higher altitude so expect evidence of lower than usual brain function.

I’ve found it hard to write about 15 days in Tajikistan. It was physically pretty tough, and I was out of my comfort zone, but I loved every minute of it. It was like abrasion, rough treatment that smooths down edges, but it’s hard to bring into words what was essentially looking at mountains, living in a tent and shitting behind every rock I walked past.

It was a 3 day drive to even get to the Pamir mountains. The views of towering mountains are incredible, the road conditions are hilariously bad, the drivers utterly insane, the roadside facilities hideous. I liked our drivers, despite their suicidal tendencies and impulses to make phone calls when we were on the hairiest cliffside bends. We drove along  the Panj river, and on the other side could see Afghanistan. It looked serene, with tiny villages surrounded by cypress trees.

Here’s a summary of 9 days hiking at high altitude: 9 days is a long time to camp and wash in rivers, the daytime heat and lack of shade was oppressive, the temperature at night freezing, the torrential diarrhoea taxing. The altitude wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The stars are night gripped me. Seeing shepherds in stone huts living in a way that likely hasn’t changed in thousands of years was disconcerting. I saw yaks, which were cool, and thousands of goats. It got dark and cold at about 7pm, so we’d go to our tents and I’d usually be asleep by 9pm. It was strange and peaceful and a million miles from the things I was familiar with, and there was a simplicity in everything that was amazing, despite the grime and sweat.

One important thing was THE mountain. There were lots of mountains in the Pamir mountains range, but I knew there was one that I needed to see. I didn’t know where it was, what it was called or what it looked like, but when I was sick of London, sick of work, sick of everything, I knew I had to drop it all and go and find a big mountain somewhere. It was around day 4 or 5 of hiking, my diarrhoea was peaking, and we set up camp on the side of a huge lake. Behind it was a great snowcapped mountain and in the afternoon I sat by the lake and looked at it. Perhaps I was looking for a profound moment but it was comfortingly mundane. I had done it. Life was now and carried on. I had done it. And I was brought straight back to earth by having to run to the toilet tent and bury another pair of pants.

We finished two weeks later exhausted, close in a weird way that four very different people who’ve spent 9 days shitting in the same hole will be. The tour company put us up in a fancy hotel where I could wash my clothes, shower and sleep in a double bed. I went for dinner with Nick, the younger Australian guy, and Evelyn, a swiss retiree who I’d become best friends with. It was a slightly strange anticlimactic goodbye.

TRAVELLING TO SAMARKAND

I was due to travel from Dushanbe the next day, to drive to Samarkand. I checked myself into a hostel, last minute, so was sent into a basement with 4 fetid russian blokes. The hostel was cool, a meeting place for people doing the mongol rally or motorbiking the Pamirs, and the courtyard was full of bikes and cars.

I’d been sitting in the courtyard for barely 20 minutes when two guys I recognised from Kyrgyzstan; one Belgian guy I met in Bishkek and one giant Fin called Jusso I’d met in Karakol. They had clearly coalesced as They’re currently the heaviest smokers and drinkers roaming central Asia. “I travel with you to Samarkand tomorrow” Jusso informed me after a few minutes. He was only drinking one bottle of the 18% wine with his beers because the two bottles he had drunk the day before had affected him rather a lot, he told me. Other travellers at the table told us it was an arduous and long journey, which we prepared for by drinking until 3am with Germans, Belgians, Israelis. I told Jusso to be ready to leave at 9:30 and went to bed. I woke up promptly at 8am, showered and packed, went to buy breakfast and coffee, and change currency, so had ample time to wait for Jusso to wake up at 10:45.