Wow!
Wow! What a country! So far Tajikistan has been an order of magnitude tougher, rougher, harder, more strenuous, more demanding, more precipitous, more awe inspiring, more enchanting and, just occassionally, more scary than anywhere we have ever been before.
Since leaving Dumshanbe we have been doing ten hour days on really tough roads. The surfaces have varied between completely knackered, potholed tarmac, sand (awful), river bed boulders (knocks the hell out of the bikes), just buldozed landslide (not as bad as it sounds), melted tarmac (really awfull), and for about 10km, pristine just laid chinese tarmac. We followed a river valley for a about 150km (harder than sounds), then had a monster, two day climb over the 3,200m Khahumabot (Tajik for Knee Cracker) pass.
One of the amazing things is that as we are struggling up these roads you would hesitate to tackle in a land rover, we get passed by 20 and 30 year old Ladas and Ford Consul look alikes.
The descent from the pass was unbelievable. It was as if a couple of Tajik road engineers had taken some acid, looked at one of those wildly switch-backing alpine roads and said "We can do better than that!". Some how they found a way to get this road down a near vertical gorge. It took us four hours of hanging on our brakes to get to the bottom of it in one piece.
The descent through the gorge took us to Kailiakum, from where we have been following the Penj river, with Afghanistan just 100 yards away on the far bank.
It's been hard to get enough to eat. Shops are few and far between and don't have much stock apart from a few candles and a packet of stale biscuits. So, we are getting better at foraging vegetables from the locals. Also the havthe most devine yogurt and honey.
Scary moments so far have included, cycling with mine fields on either side of the road and getting woken by two dodgy looking armed soldiers in the middle of the night.
Since leaving Dumshanbe we have been doing ten hour days on really tough roads. The surfaces have varied between completely knackered, potholed tarmac, sand (awful), river bed boulders (knocks the hell out of the bikes), just buldozed landslide (not as bad as it sounds), melted tarmac (really awfull), and for about 10km, pristine just laid chinese tarmac. We followed a river valley for a about 150km (harder than sounds), then had a monster, two day climb over the 3,200m Khahumabot (Tajik for Knee Cracker) pass.
One of the amazing things is that as we are struggling up these roads you would hesitate to tackle in a land rover, we get passed by 20 and 30 year old Ladas and Ford Consul look alikes.
The descent from the pass was unbelievable. It was as if a couple of Tajik road engineers had taken some acid, looked at one of those wildly switch-backing alpine roads and said "We can do better than that!". Some how they found a way to get this road down a near vertical gorge. It took us four hours of hanging on our brakes to get to the bottom of it in one piece.
The descent through the gorge took us to Kailiakum, from where we have been following the Penj river, with Afghanistan just 100 yards away on the far bank.
It's been hard to get enough to eat. Shops are few and far between and don't have much stock apart from a few candles and a packet of stale biscuits. So, we are getting better at foraging vegetables from the locals. Also the havthe most devine yogurt and honey.
Scary moments so far have included, cycling with mine fields on either side of the road and getting woken by two dodgy looking armed soldiers in the middle of the night.
posted by Tim and Rowena at 6:07 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home