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Published: November 10th 2017
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Geo: 36.7081, 71.5729
The southern route nicely takes you down the warmer south
then nicely drops you into the valley that separates Tajik from Afghanistan.
Right from the onset the road is bad, the recent rains having caused some chaos
and further damaged an already damaged road.
So the first night we try to get close to the river and camp
only to be sprung by some Tajik military doods so were not so keen for us to do
so… eventually found a camp site under some trees and reasonably well off the
road. Cooked dinner and was about to make a coffee when Lisa exclaimed Darren
there is something running at your foot… well even before I looked I jumped and
almost brained my self on the canopy…. Looked around and in the torch light saw
the biggest ugliest nastiest spider I have ever seen…. Good grief I exclaim and
run to get away and the dam thing ran after me…. Regaining some composure, one
must appear brave in front of our new German friends, I recognised it as a
camel spider… yep and it had big fang's dam big and the thing could run and
also jump… it ran towards me again so I moved towards Thomas and Sarah and it
followed… dam man it
Afghani Camels
We spoke with the nomad who invited us over for tea. Hmmm seems the locals do cross the river, showed us the spot for crossing, the river is icy so we declined his hospitality. That and some serious border issues. was intimidating… after quite a while of running about I
got a container and very carefully placed it over the spider the put a rock on top
of the container to make sure it did not run off.. next morning we lifted the
container and snapped off some shots.
The next 4 days were spend driving right next to the river
and where we could almost throw a stone over to Afghanistan, through little
villages and we slow climbed in altitude to 3000mtrs. Iskashim is the town
that normally has a Saturday Market on an island in the middle if the river so
technically in no mans land… we were keen to cross and have a look however as
we were to discover in May of this year some Taliban sniper took some pot shots
into the Market and it had been cancelled ever since.. bugger
We had purchased a special permit for a remote track through
a national park called Zoc Lake. However once we cleared the final military check
point and approached the gate we were informed that we would not be allowed to
enter the park… hum apparently the Taliban were a little active in the area and
tourist gallivanting around was probably the head line news the Tajik Military
were wanting.
At this
High altitude lake
The colours are just crazy point Lisa was suffering a little altitude related
issues, we had climbed from 2500mtrs in the morning to 3900mtrs. We all had
headaches and I was feeling a little dizzy, so give our progress into the park
was blocked we had no choice but to ascend the pass up to a head spinning
4327mtrs. We ended up camping the night at 3912mtrs a little ways over the pass
and it was not that good a feeling.
With the altitude comes cooler weather, and it was now dam
cold with a nasty wind that came from all directions… thus no escaping it. Lisa
came better after some Panadol, Sarah and Thomas seemed okay with only headaches
and was feeling great… yep really… however during the night I awoke from a
dream where I was being forced to descend from Mt Everest because of the
Altitude, I sat up and then opened the tent window and was sick… dam man..
awoke the next morning with a keen desire to drop some height.
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Nic
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Loe the spider story - can just imagine the scenario so clearly! xx