That was the week that was

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You need a special permit to explore Pam Ayres, because this is a highly sensitive area. It's well worth it though, to see giant peaks and dramatic vistas into the valleys. If you go deep into the valleys and hunt in amongst the bushes you find all sorts of hidden wonders that will bring you great pleasure.

I am, of course, talking about the Pamirs of Tajikistan, where I've been for most of the last week.

Let's start in Osh where, mindful of the problems of shared taxis (and even more mindful of the lack of them travelling into the Pamirs), I teamed up with a Korean called You Lee and rented a 4WD and driver. Expecting some sort of shoddy jeep driven by a lunatic, imagine our surprise to get a comfortable minivan with air conditioning and *gasp* a careful, safe driver.

The road started off reasonably well by Kyrgyz standards, with tarmac for at least the first 2km. Then we hit roadworks, where they were digging up the surface, presumably to replace it. This went on for a while, before I eventually realised that they weren't repairing it any more, it had turned seamlessly into a gravel track.

We stopped for tea for the first time, and I was far-sighted enough to order food (we didn't get another chance until evening). So it was that I tucked into a delicious bowl of shorpa, a soup made by boiling a large lump of dead cow until it turns into wood and then serving it in a bowl of hot dishwater with lumps of fat floating in it. If you're really lucky, all they'll give you to eat it with is a blunt spoon.

Back on the road we crossed the first pass, a stunning road that wound its way dramatically up the mountain. This was the first of many, each revealing a dramatic view of even higher snow-capped mountains as we went along, many of them with great names like Peak Lenin or Peak Karl Marx or Peak Kommunism. These have all been renamed but, as I've discovered in many parts of central Asia, the new names haven't all caught on.

Eventually we arrived at a dusty border crossing where lots of friendly Tajik soldiers were wandering round or hiding in giant steel cylindrical sheds to keep out of the cold, since we were now above the snow line. Things went smoothly enough, our details were noted down in a book (so high tech) in which I could see that only 14 foreigners had used this crossing in the previous month. Good to see, we're really off the beaten track now.

So this was the last place I expected to find a shouty American tourist running round yelling at officials. "THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN IN AMERICA!!!!" he screamed, before getting back into his jeep and slamming the door. This strategy was clearly going to persuade them not to fine him for failing to register while in the country. Mmmm.

Registration, incidentally, was one of the things I had to do in the next town, Murgab. What you have to do is present yourself at the office of OVIR, the Ministry for Making Life Difficult for Tourists, and pay them some money to get a little certificate. It's quite simple really.

So we diligently turned up at OVIR and, after waiting for a while for them to come back from lunch late, handed our passports over to an officious woman in uniform, who told us we had to go and pay USD15 and 23 Tajik somani at a bank round the corner.

At the bank, we had to wait for a while for the cashier to come back from lunch late, at which point the first woman we'd asked threw two forms at us and stuck her head back into a ledger. The forms, of course, turned out to be in Tajik only, so we asked for help and, without looking up, the woman waved her hand at the door. Outside the door we found 15 different examples of the form filled in for various different purposes, none of which was registration of foreigners. Some helpful locals tried to assist but were equally flummoxed.

Eventually we managed to make our payments and went back to OVIR with the receipts, only to find they'd lost the member of staff who could register foreigners. He wasn't likely to return until the next day. Central Asian red tape strikes again!

So we left town for the night and went up to some hot springs for a yurtstay and a good soak. This time we had a battered 21-year-old UAZ jeep to take us up the fucked road to a stunning location with three yurts, 2 greenhouses and an insanely friendly little old man who was the perfect host. These weren't normal yurts - this time I wasn't destined to struggle to keep warm fully clothed under three duvets, because there was underfloor heating, supplied from the hot springs. Cunning. Hot. Mmmm.

Back in Murgab we went back to OVIR to find that the guy still hadn't turned up. The driver/guide wanted to leave anyway, suggesting we register later, but thinking how stressed the American had been we insisted on sticking to the rules and waiting. He wasn't long, and the guide did the registration for us, which had the advantage that we didn't have to deal with officious police but the minor disadvantage that he registered me as a Korean citizen, so now I get confused looks from every official who examines my registration certificate.

Then we were off, starting a bone-shaking few days with the relative luxury of the Pamir Highway, which even had tarmac. In places. It was so badly surfaced and maintained that I concluded that Lambeth Council must have taken over the upkeep. But that was the last significant stretch of tarmac for quite some time, so I shouldn't complain.

After a night in another homestay (more on these later) we headed off over the Khargush Pass into the Wakhan Valley. The views had been spectacular,but cresting this pass and looking straight across into Afghanistan was breathtaking, and dropping down into the valley didn't diminish the effect. This is now the best picnic spot I've ever had, eating tinned fish, bread and biscuits and drinking yet more tea with 7000+m mountains as a backdrop and Afghan camels visible wandering around across the river.

At a checkpoint we learned how hard hitch-hiking is here - there was a queue of people waiting, and we only had one seat which we gave to an 18-year-old called Maksoud who was heading home to take his final school exam two days later. We were only going part way, but that was still useful. In the end he stalked us as we were his best chance of getting any further. There was a regular minibus service beyond our first stop (Langar village) but it wasn't due to leave for another five days. So Maksoud came with us in our next car too.

At Langar the kids from the homestay showed us the way up the mountain to a collection of petroglyphs, ancient drawings on the rocks of ibex, mountain sheep, men on horseback, cars and inscriptions of things like "Imomyor loves Nasab". Many of the newer inscriptions went straight across clearly ancient pictures, and a lot of the older petroglyphs had been very clumsily reworked since, so it was quite sad really.

Switching cars in Langar we carried on, this time with a surly Tajik at the wheel of an even more battered UAZ which turned out to be shit at going up hills. We boiled over a few times, had to stop to clean out the carburettor, and had to hand crank to start even when things were working OK.

So we rattled our way through the valley, climbing up to dramatic forts perched high above the river, soaking off some of the dust in hot springs and drinking enormous quantities of tea. We tried to blag our way into Afghanistan but the soldiers guarding the bridge were having none of it - we might have succeeded if we'd had cigarettes to bribe them with though,and they were friendly about the refusal.

Friendliness was more or less universal. Apart from our surly driver, everyone was smiling and greeting us, and they seemed to love having their photos taken - people would stop and ask you to take photos of them completely out of the blue. The message was universally welcoming. It only got tiring once, when a policeman who reminded me of Manuel from Fawlty Towers flagged the car down to get a lift up to the hot springs where he was due to work that afternoon. It was the following morning by the time he stopped talking, by which time my pidgin Russian was struggling.

The homestays were a great, if basic, experience, again with friendly people of both Kyrgyz and Tajik ethnicity. In all of them we slept on pads on the same raised platforms on which food and tea were served, and under duvets filled with concrete (or maybe it was lots of felt- either way it was heavy).

I've read that in 1918 when Tashkent was suffering extreme food shortages it was not unknown for bakers to mix sawdust with the flour. Well, tradition is being kept alive and well in the Wakhan valley, as I figured out the second time I found woodchips stuck between my teeth. It wasn't all bad though - many meals were actually quite tasty and healthy, although the catering also included such delights as deep-fried fish tails (actually quite tasty) and homemade yoghurt that was so dodgy I started taking my anti-malarial antibiotics again to stave off stomach problems.

Stomach problems were definitely not what I wanted given the toilet facilities. In most cases these consisted of sheds with holes in the floor located far enough away that you couldn't smell them, which meant long walks with torches in the night. In the least appealing case the toilet meant climbing a steep hillside and squatting in a load of thorn bushes.

There was even a bright side to the night-time excursions to the toilet (which were always necessary due to the daily consumption of at least 20 cups of tea), in that the complete lack of light pollution revealed the full night sky, with clear views of the milky way that I've only ever seen before in Nevada.

The week was finished with style, with an absolutely amazing flight to Dushanbe from Khorog, the only airport I've ever been to that had a pit toilet. I completed the set of major Soviet airline companies by boarding an Antonov An-28.

Tajik Air is renowned for poor service. Well, in this case the service was simply confusing. Firstly, buying the ticket involved giving our passports to a grumpy bloke who vanished into a room and didn't tell us what to do next. After a while we worked out we had to go round the back of the building and talk to the same guy through a tiny hole in the wall, whereupon he gave us tickets. Check-in we found by following a group of people who were holding similar tickets, where we waited in amongst piles of rubble until Grumpy Bloke appeared and opened the door. Boarding was by stampede.

On board I took a good window seat (not hard, as 13 of the 17 seats were window seats), fastened my entirely pointless seatbelt that was fixed with wire so it couldn't be adjusted to a girth less than Ted Heath's and waited for the safety announcements to begin. Eventually the pilot boarded, pulled up the steps, closed the door and vanished into the cockpit, locking the door behind him. Then we were off. When I thought about it, the lack of announcements made sense. There were no emergency exits to point out. No tray tables to put in the upright position. No toilet to have a smoke detector to warn you against disabling. No in-flight systems to be disturbed by mobile phones.

We took off and climbed slowly up the valley, never getting above the highest peaks but flying between them, with the ice-bound mountainsides only metres away. Every corner revealed dramatic views, and the settlements in the valleys were clearly visible, with white-water rivers flushing through them and little specks of cars crawling along the gravel roads and high passes beneath us.

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