We saw some Bactrian camels. We saw an Afghan shepherd and exchanged waves. The valley widened into a deserty plain with nothing but a line of telegraph poles and a derelict Soviet-era watchtower. There’s a military post and checkpoint, and beyond, a campable stream. We were visited by a shepherd boy who gave us some milk and by some soldiers who thought we should give then our camera. The haze was beginning to clear but the disappearance of the haze was a prelude to cloud and rain. We were tempted to sit it out, and over breakfast sat in the tent reading other people’s accounts to find out what they had done when faced with rain in Tajikistan. Unfortunately it seemed all of them just kept riding.

The Great Pamir Highway

The road climbed fairly gently up a wide valley. There was a lake in the distance and there were mountains but it wasn’t really that spectacular, and looked like Wales in low cloud only a bit bigger. The pass was not as high as claimed, which is usual for these things, but it was certainly over 4000m. The descent was rough.

After some horrible sandy track we reached tarmac, the great Pamir Highway. It was about one lane wide and had no traffic. There were no houses, nothing, just a line of telegraph poles. Far away in the distance we saw a figure, a man walking, coming towards us. We have no idea where he had come from or where he was going. We crossed paths with him after a while, and that was it – we left him behind walking along the road and disappearing into the distance. He looked a little bit drunk.

The weather was still low cloud. We were on a wide plateau with ranges of mountains all around but the cloud hid anything interesting. After a whole lot of nothingness we reached something. Alichur. Which looked quite nice from a distance – well, any human settlement would, even one called Ali’s Curse. Close up, it’s a desolate and deserted place mostly consisting of telegraph poles, and widely spaced low, square, half derelict houses. But like the sun suddenly breaking though the clouds, the place is transformed : a young woman greets us and says her family have a homestay. She’s called Shahnoza. Her family’s house is very basic, but she makes us very welcome. And she knows where the Snickers shop is.

The Alichur plain isn’t a great place for camping. It is a wide and very windy plateau and there is not much in the way of water. There are yurts and there is a fish restaurant for Chinese lorry-drivers. To avoid camping you can try and flog the whole distance to Murghab in a long days’ ride, which we did; the ride isn’t actually too gruelling despite incorporating a 4000m pass. It’s a bit rich to claim this as a pass – it’s really just the high point in the plateau. Nevertheless we felt it worth celebrating with a Snickers.

The surrounding peaks drew closer; red and swirly rocks. A convoy of Chinese lorries. Then a gradual descent in a wide valley, and over a crest above the Murghab valley. The green is astonishing, and a wide silver river snakes across a green plain. A convoy of teeny Chinese minibuses, driven across the border in a sort of caravan, the drivers racing up the climb.

Murghab to Karakul

Murghab is essentially Kyrgyz rather than Tajik, the people are oriental looking, speak a Turkic language and keep to Bishkek time, an hour ahead of Dushanbe. The weather had made a number of abortive attempts to improve. It didn’t try very hard on our rest day but this didn’t interfere much with our planned activities which were Sitting and Eating. We did also go in search of information about the passability of the Bartang valley, which was not much of a success.

We left town on my birthday. There are only 2 roads, the right one and the wrong one and we somehow got on the wrong one, the one that goes to China. Then we found another wrong one, and this one goes to a derelict airfield. I have had better birthdays, but also much worse ones. This time nobody stole our bikes, and we had Ukrainian Swiss roll in a pannier.
We rode northeast through a plain flanked with mountain peaks, sort of following a river and gaining altitude imperceptibly. The weather slowly cleared, traffic had all but vanished, and for most of the day it was just us and the mountains and the marmots. We camped at over 4000m, with a fabulously clear sky, the night saturated with starlight.
We crossed the high Ak Baital pass the next day, and this time it was a real pass, over 4500m, and the day was brilliant and cloudless. We crossed though snow peaks then the mountains drew back, we descended a rough section to a wide river valley, crossed through a small ridge, and into a vast plateau with the huge lake Karakul ringed by snowy ranges, Tajikistan and the borders with Kyrgyzstan and with China.
The village on the lake shore was a windswept and sparse place, almost empty of people, rather surreal, rather di Chirico. The village shop was indistinguishable from the other one-storey houses except that the door was open. A dog waited silently outside. Inside seemed empty, except for the sound of a radio – Chinese lute music – drifting from a room inside, and a shadowy figure of an old woman sewing. We bought enough biscuits to last the ride back to Murghab, but they were gone by the evening.

Returning

Our route from there was several days reversing the way we had come. The original plan had been to return to Khorog via the Bartang valley. It’s reputed to be difficult terrain, even without the lack of any human settlement at all on the way which means you have to carry a week’s worth of food. We’d heard in Khorog that the road at the far end was blocked by a landslide; we had no way of telling whether that meant it was impassable with bikes or not, but we couldn’t risk it. So we rode back to Murghab and back along the plateau.
From Alichur the easy way back would have been to follow the highway back, but there’s a more interesting alternative in crossing a pass to the Shakdara valley, which lies between the Panj and the Gunt valleys. Not many cyclists have done it, though we wouldn’t have been the first.
So now we diverted from our outward route and followed the so-called highway, as empty as ever. A day’s ride took us over two 4k passes, not bad going, but some untarred, washboarded sections made it hard. To our left was a snowcapped cluster of summits, Kyzyldong. Kyzyl means red, and we could only imagine dong means "not", because it wasn’t red. We passed a deserted corral of sorts, an overturned Chinese lorry, a strange abandonded piece of machinery and a grand monumental sign announcing we were now in Shugnanski Rayon.
We also met Peter again, a Swiss cyclist, doing much the same tour but in the opposite direction. He said he’d tried to come via Shakdara but had been refused entry: he had 6 out of the 7 districts on his permit and Shakdara was the missing one. We didn’t have to check our passports; we had filled in the same form as Peter. Colin thought it better not to look, so that when told the inevitable at the checkpoint, our surprise might seem more convincing. But we knew anyway.
The descent from the pass wasn’t the treat we’d hoped for as, again, it was gravel; and soon after tarmac was regained we had to find the turn to Shakdara. There were a disturbing number of right turns, all about the same quality of surface and usage; but when you come to it, the correct one is pretty obvious and has a purposeful air. We camped here by a small river, Kyzyldong not far away, its snowfields lit by the moon and stars. They still didn’t look very red though.

Shakdara Valley

The appeal of the Shakdara valley isn’t just its relative inaccessibility, but above the high valley there’s a pair of mountains. They still have unreconstructed heroic Soviet names – Engels and Marx. Magnificent mountains they are too: Engels a dark and rocky dome, Karl Mark a glittering snowy pyramid.Even without them to decorate the place, the pass over to the valley was a classic ride. After a steep initial climb, you’re on a blissful rideable track high on a plateau at above 4000m, and four-thousand somehow seems just the right place to be, gloriously high. We passed a long oval lake; shepherds and their sheep far in the distance.We reckoned we had enough time for one last mad scheme. There is another pass out of the Shakdara valley, linking it with the route from the Panj valley. It’s called the Matz pass and we hadn’t seen any account of people cycling it. So once down to the valley we turned right, and up again. We had a river crossing, and towards the end of the ride, an unforgiving and unpromising ride (more truthfully, push) round the shoulder of the mountainside. Unpromising because we were high on a steep slope with the river in a ravine below when a nice grassy flat meadow would have been more to our taste. All the more delicious, then, when a grassy meadow did finally materialise. And fine spot it was, with soft ground, and marmots to entertain us.We rode on, as much as we could, slowly up the valley and then up a section of zigzags until we were high above the valley floor and on easy terrain. A very surprised shepherd. On through rocks and cairns, slowly gaining height to a wide pass. We declared victory, ate our last cake, and returned.

The final ride down the valley took a couple more days, but despite downhill it was not particularly easy as the surface was rough and we were tired and hungry. We had run out of nice things to eat. Actually we had run out of even acceptable things to eat.With 10km left before Khorog, we got to the checkpoint. We handed the guards our passports, smiling with cheerful and completely feigned innocence. We had started the trip knowing no Russian but over the three weeks we had managed to learn two words piva (beer) and normal (good). Neither which gave us any clue as to what u vas nyet propuskov na Roshtkalu. Vam prikazano zaplatit’ shtraf na 200 dollarov meant. Perhaps fortunately. After several minutes they gave up, handed back our passports and waved us on our way.In Khorog we packed the bikes and started eating.

Tracey Maund
(Cheltenham, Gloucestershire)