Blogs from Tajikistan, Asia - page 14

This first video shows the treacherous road to Garm, Tajikistan from Dushanbe. It's literally 4 hours of freaking hell on a dusty, rocky, narrow, windy road. The scenery, however, is quite beautiful, but it's difficult to look at when you are in a taxi with a crazy driver who is weaving all over the road trying to avoid pot holes, cows, and sheep. I actually had callouses on my hand from holding onto the "oh shit" handle! One has to leave from Dushanbe at 6 a.m. to go to Garm and there is NO sleep on this road. It's eyes open all the way. The second video is of us being gridlocked by sheep coming down from the mountains. I was told that villages send roughly 1,000 sheep into the mountains in the spring and in ... read more

It was a nice afternoon stroll coming back from the world’s second highest Botanic Garden. I was heading to my accommodation in the busy little Pamiri town of Khorog. That was until I walked along the river and saw four Tajiki soldiers walking along the bridge. Khorog is the capital of Gorno-Badakhshan region (Pamirs) and borders Afghanistan. It lies in a valley surrounded by four peaks with a river flowing through the middle. It’s a picturesque setting in what is really an unhospitable part of the world. Tajikistan became independent in 1991 following the breakup of the Soviet Union. But from1992-1997 civil war broke out between this region and Dushanbe in a similar way to the Basmachi from 70 years earlier. Striving for independence as an Islamic state, it has gained an autonomous type existence. If ... read more

It does get the Semi-Nomadic juices flowing. Especially when seeing a dead carcass being dragged, trampled, thrown, tugged and eventually claimed as a prize for a brief moment - This is one the joys to nomadic life. Generally with games there are clear rules but this I don’t know? In a way I am still clueless as to what the point was to this game? Either way it got the crowd going. Buzkashi is one of the great sports to capture a culture. Rarely played nowadays it only occurs on special days. Being Navrus (Persian calendar New Years), Hissar, 45 minutes from the Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe is one of the best examples left in the world to capture this spectacle. Days earlier I asked around to make sure all the information is correct - 10am and ... read more

After spending a night in Murghab which is indeed a pretty wild and slightly off-putting kinda place nathaniel and I headed up to the Murghab Eco Tourism Authority to see if we could organise a car and driver for the trip north. We had a few days to spend in the Pamirs and so organised a trip. First the driver dropped us off on one side of a ridge and we walked along the Gumbezkul over the pass at 4731m. It was a great afternoon with lots of puffing and wondering if we were really going in the right direction. Its the thing I like about travelling in this part of the world as if all very free. Eventually we gained the pass and while Nathaniel walked around I scrambled over the top and climbed along ... read more

Well, I had heard so many bad things about the road down from Penjikent to Dushanbe, whether to go through the tunnel of doom or the pass of many nightmares! It seemed like the choice that Frodo and the rest of the nine walkers had to make, whether to cross the pass of Caradhras or whether to go through the mines of Moria.... (had to get a bit of LOTR somewhere into this blog)! Added to this the road is being mended in the daytime so you can only travel at night... So took a shared taxi down to Denau and then on to Termiz.... It sounds so easy when you put it like that, however negotiating the reality is often somewhat different and much messier! As it often is… Imagine people crowding around all talking ... read more