Mountaineers, avert your eyes.
I’m not especially outdoorsy so I had always imagined mountain passes to be a low point between two mountains.
Instead, the day before yesterday, some 8 hours into an extremely cramped ride with six other passengers in a Toyota Landcruiser, I found myself being negotiated along a muddy single lane road above the snowline at around 3,000 metres. Sometimes we drove through what felt like a corridor of snow as it stood 8 foot high one either side. Other times one or other side would be a vertiginous drop into the valley hundreds of metres below. Every now and then we would pass an empty bulldozer that had long done its work for the day having cleared a segment of the pass.
It was already getting late. We did not descend below the snow line again until nearly 8pm. With visibility falling I was glad we were not attempting this any later in the day.
So why did I end up taking this route by road through the Khaburabot Pass at all? Good question.
The previous morning I turned up at 8am at Dushanbe airport’s domestic terminal with Jovidon, a member of the wonderful family that hosted me in Dushanbe (a heartfelt shout out to Manon, Mavjigul, Ejod, Ehson, Bibijon and Soima). I was expecting a scrum. What I did not expect was the sense that the game was already over.
Bad weather frequently stops the Khorog flight from departing, especially in Spring when weather is so variable. Once it is announced that the flight will take off hopeful passengers race to get their names onto lists being maintained by a couple of entrepreneurial travel agents standing around who appear to have a duopoly of time in front of the small ticketing window. They stand there running through their list, occasionally calling out a name of a lucky winner who then leans over with their 400 somoni (USD 100) fare.
It took me an hour to realise that the first flight to Khorog had already departed, and that the second one was now full and would leave soon. Normally there are just two flights a day in 16-seater turboprops that skim across the tops of the mountains. But the main road route through the Khaburabot Pass had been closed for over a week because of a bridge being knocked out by a flooding river, so the flights were in high demand.
For this reason there was a rumour of a third so I hung around a while longer. Not only did the third flight not go, but the second flight was turned back from Khurog just ten minutes before the end of its 45 minute flight because of a thunderstorm.
It sunk in that I was not going to be able to move on that day. Such a dark feeling hit me. NOTHING PERSONAL takes me away from my family for two and a half months. Even though that time is pretty much set in stone, it helps at least to feel like I am on the move, heading home.
So yesterday I set off for the airport again with new resolve, this time at 6:30am, with a better idea of how the system works, and with the youthful assistance of Ehson, my host’s youngest son. He was primed to cut through any crowd that might ensue, get my name on any and every list going and my passport into the hands of the agents.
We never got our chance. Nothing happened at all until after 8am. Ominously I did not see either of the two travel agents loitering around. They clearly have contacts on the ground with better knowledge of the local weather conditions than the rest of us. The flight was cancelled. I hung around for a while at discussed possibilities with a couple of English-speaking would-be fellow voyagers.
One of them had heard that the land route had been open for a day now, but you normally take that route early in the morning in order to get to Khorog before midnight. But it might still be possible to find a car willing to drive into the night. I made up my mind. A genial fixer-type from the airport throng accompanied me and my posse and an elderly lady to the station where such long distance journeys depart. He helped us find a good car and driver and waved us on our way. Price: about USD 45.
My fellow passengers were a soldier, Rahmon, returning to his post on the Afghan border at Ishkashim just south of Khorog, a couple of elderly Tajik women and two grizzled Tajik men, and Faridah, a young woman working for the Aga Kahn Foundation who helpfully spoke fluent English. Faridah was one of the unfortunate passengers on the second Khorog flight the previous day that had been turned back. She was trying to get to a wedding on time.
The three women took the middle row of seats, and Rahmon had the front seat. This meant that I and the old Tajik men were folded up like so much canned food into the bucket seats in the back. I’m 6’2”. The road was rough. The Pamir Highway I am convinced is so named to reflect its altitude rather than its quality. At times it feels like a procession of dirt, mud, snow and endless potholes in search of a road, rather than a road itself.
Sleep was impossible. By the end my knees were bruised from rubbing against the top edge of the seat in front of me. As I crawled creakily out of the Landcruiser at every opportunistic stop I felt like a man twice my age.
We stopped for lunch and dinner, a couple of flocks of sheep, numerous donkeys, goats and dogs, and for several police checkpoints that were mainly concerned to see the driver’s documentation. The checkpoint marking the entry into the Badakshan region wanted to contrive a problem with my paperwork but Rahmon followed me into their office and began berating the officer, even taking out his mobile phone to video the officer in action and record his name and serial number from his uniform. I left unfleeced. Thanks Rahmon.
As we headed south in the darkness along bank of the Panj river on the last leg of the journey Faridah pointed out the lights in houses across on the other bank perhaps 100 metres away. “That’s where I work! We put in generators there to provide lighting.” That was my first glimpse of Afghanistan.
We had two flat tyres – one just before dinner and the last just on the outskirts of Khorog at around 3.30am. We stood around for an hour in the light rain and cold mountain night air and finally rolled into the centre of town. Our journey from Dushanbe had taken 17 hours. A guest house was roused to take me in and I pulled the bed covers over me at 5am on the dot.
The room number on my key enigmatically reads “Khorog 101”. Quite a lesson.
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