UK Edition
'It is a test of faith' – dodging wolves and hypoxia on the world's wildest road trip
Another world awaits on a dramatic drive in Central Asia, through some of the wildest terrain on the planet
The M41 unfurls from Dushanbe as a civilised ribbon of asphalt. By the time it cuts into Kyrgyzstan 690 miles later, it has gone feral; throwing off its tarmac and cuddling up to Afghanistan, killing trucks then galloping away from their twisted metal carcasses. Where it soars into high-altitude desert, it drip-feeds images of fire-blackened skulls and sun-baked plains into your hypoxic dreams.
It has morphed from a mundane route into something fantastical, into Central Asia’s greatest road trip – the Pamir Highway.
A satisfying road trip isn’t just a car journey. It is a test of faith; it is trusting in serendipity as much as suspension. That’s getting harder to find in Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan is so risk-free that Saga goes there. Uzbekistan is enjoying a boost from a visa waiver last February.
Tajikistan, on the other hand, remains an old-fashioned, where-the-hell-is-that-stan. It lies on one of the world’s most poorly buried fault lines, a scar that slices across civilisations and occasionally itches with resentments. It is where the Iranian Middle East meets the Orient meets the Russian north.
Before it became one of the “stans”, shires of the former Soviet Union, it fell within the Persian empire then the 10th-century Samanid empire that stretched from the gulf to Pakistan and China.
In June, tour operator Explore runs its first 2020 trip along the Pamir Highway: 780 miles, 19 days, plus the bragging rights of cruising at 15,272ft along the world’s second-highest road (the Karakoram Highway through Ladakh pips it). It tracks the mother lode of all road trips, the Silk Road.
I joined the first recce trip last year. On paper it sounded like a journey spicy with exoticism and the potential for hazard. I heard the call of adventure. I just hoped it wouldn’t be a wrong number.
I started in Dushanbe. Painted in the grim-cheer pastels beloved by Soviet states and sanatoriums, the Tajikistan capital is a city in search of an identity. Elderly Tajiks feel communism’s loss like an amputated limb. They still ache for it. Since independence in 1991, the president, Emomali Rahmon, has been nation-building.
In a country ranked below Somalia in GDP, he has erected the world’s biggest tea house, the Navruz Palace. The size of five football pitches, it’s constructed from semi-precious stones, Siberian cedar and self-justification. Rahmon’s National Library is Central Asia’s largest, his 541ft flagpole was the world’s highest until the Saudis went 17ft better in 2014. His £190 million presidential palace makes Downing Street look like a garden shed.
Rahmon has also legislated on the maximum size of weddings (150 people) and the age at which men can grow beards (40). That smells of Soviet control-freakery until you learn the aim was to encourage financial prudence and secular Islam. Anyway, Tajiks could have been lumbered with worse. Last April, the Turkmenistan president released a rap about his horse. Tajiks themselves are incredibly friendly, incidentally. They touch their hearts when they greet you.
My guide, Shaboz, and I load up our four-wheel Toyota and hit the highway. In truth, the first 100 miles are a disappointment. The scenery is flat. A 10th-century Silk Road citadel undergoing reconstruction in Hulbuk is diverting, but it’s a long way to come to watch brickies while a local archaeologist interprets hummocks of earth.
Then, an hour from Khorob, we grind up a potholed dirt-road, grin our passage through a police checkpoint into autonomous Gorno-Badakhshan province, and I feel a sharp pain as my jaw hits the floor.
No purple prose, no photo prepares you for the Panj river valley. It rises in dirt-brown walls of rock. Snow-ribbed peaks plug the ends. It’s too muscular a landscape to be beautiful. It isn’t welcoming or generous. It’s sweary. It looks like it has a temper as savage as the river itself. Alongside it twists the Pamir Highway, skittering over scree and ducking under cliffs that occasionally lob car-sized boulders on to traffic.
I spend the first two days looking not up, but across the river to Afghanistan. On our side, troop patrols shoulder Kalashnikovs, and Chinese trucks plume dust. On the other, carpets dry on riverbanks below mud villages and turbaned blokes tap-tap donkeys through acid-green fields. It’s a divide between centuries as much as countries.
Shaboz can’t see it. The “stans” are artificial constructs, he says; a Russian ploy to divide and rule a once-united people. Around 12 million ethnic Tajiks now live in Afghanistan, a quarter more than in Tajikistan itself. “It is just a border. They’re the same people on both sides of the river.”
Just 250,000 people live in the Pamir province, even though it accounts for 45 per cent of Tajikistan’s area. They speak an ancient dialect of Farsi and many have the brilliant blue eyes of mountain skies (one yarn places them as descendants from Alexander the Great’s army).
The men wear the regulation sweatpants and T-shirts. The women, though, are magnificent, as bright as tropical birds in emerald, ruby and turquoise headscarves and shalwar kameez.
Many are Ismailis, an aristocratic Muslim caste scattered by Genghis Khan in the 13th century. They distrust Dushanbe and look instead to their spiritual leader, the Aga Khan. Yet before Ismailism – before Islam even – Pamiris were Zoroastrians. They worshipped fire, fed their dead to vultures and, wrote Pliny the Elder, discovered magic.
Beyond Pamiri capital Khorog, we track the Panj through villages, oases of poplars and willows among bone-dry mountains, where patient families with small bundles wait for a lift. Roadside shrines appear, on each sits the bleached skull of a Marco Polo sheep, huge beasts of the high mountains with 5ft horns.
We enter one shrine outside Ishkoshim. Its altar is stacked with sheep skulls and blackened by ceremonial fires. When the wind creaks in the rafters you can hear the old gods whisper.
That night, in a homestay in Hisor village, owner Davlatkhan sits us down in a room skimmed by rugs to induce migraines, and dishes up greasy rice and bread. “When we provide hospitality, we please God and become closer to God,” he says. But which god, I wonder?
Although Pamiris say the columns of their traditional houses represent prophets of Islam, they originally personified angels of the old religion. Above us is a skylight framed by four concentric squares – embodiments of the Zoroastrianism elements: air, earth, fire and water.
In the Wakhan Valley the next day, that strikes me as entirely rational. In the 1890s this was the 220-mile buffer zone between Imperial Russia and Britain. Now you could wade across the Panj to Afghanistan before you knew you’d got wet.
Across the river, a man rides side-saddle on a donkey at the head of a camel-train; six shaggy black Bactrians loaded with poplar trunks. Behind them glitter peaks of the Hindu Kush. It’s like a Victorian Academy painting of Marco Polo’s Asia, a scene as ancient as the Silk Road itself.
I watch the procession head east towards China, a swaying dot in a vast desert. Of course, people here were Zoroastrian. In so elemental a landscape, who wouldn’t be?
Our route heads north-east, grinding uphill past shepherds cradling lambs, past mangled cars like memento mori, to cross the Khargush Pass at 14,251ft. Beyond is the Bam-i-Bunya, “the roof of the world”.
The Pamir plateau is a desert of horizon-shoving scale. Its air is so clear that gauging distance would be tricky even if your head wasn’t fuzzed by oxygen-starvation. You’re fried by day and frozen at night. Marco Polo took 12 days to cross it and grumbled the whole way. There were no birds, he wrote. His campfire threw no heat. Fair call – temperatures can drop below -75F.
No one can live up here, you think, then you slip between peaks to see yaks grazing beside a kingfisher-blue lake and earth-brick houses hunkered down against the weather. Bulunkul village has electricity, a well, a shop selling rice and biscuits, and a makeshift air, as if the occupants, former nomads, might jack it all in at any moment.
We don’t feel the cold, teacher Bakhten insists. We’re cross-legged on a platform in her living room, lunching on noodle soup and yak yogurt. Local kids attend school whatever the temperature: “Minus 30 degrees [C], minus 50, no problem. Anyway, the yaks like the cold.”
She sees me eyeing a wolf pelt on one wall, a snarling 5ft brute. “We caught him in a trap. Wolves are a problem in winter.”
The highway tracks north-east towards sharp-planed mountains where snow leopards prowl. At Murghab, a cold-bitten town with a bazaar made from shipping containers, it swings north over Ak Baital Pass (15,272ft).
What’s on the highest road of the former Soviet Union? A Kyrgyz woman in an embroidered tunic walking to God-knows-where and broken Russian telegraph poles stretching to infinity across a land that’s impossible to tame. When we stop for a photo, it’s so silent I hear my heartbeat.
Seventy miles further, we reach the border. A soldier stamps my passport in a hut. “Tajikistan is finished,” he says. My journey or his country, I wonder. Either way, he’s wrong. I’m following the highway through Kyrgyzstan to Osh. It appears domesticated after the Pamir Mountains, its smooth tarmac as exotic as Switzerland.
As for Tajikistan, well, for latter-day Marco Polos, its story has just begun.
How to do it
James Stewart was a guest of Explore (01252 883719, explore.co.uk). Its 19-day Along the Pamir Highway trip costs from £4,602, including flights, B&B in guesthouses, homestays and yurts, and most meals.
Inspiration for your inbox
Sign up to Telegraph Travel's new weekly newsletter for the latest features, advice, competitions, exclusive deals and comment.