Random Rambles

We have a good week exploring Ulaanbaatar before flying home. Ulaanbaatar isn’t everyone’s idea of a beautiful city, but we find a lot to keep us busy.

(One of the first things we notice: there are a LOT of Koreans here. Korean restaurants, karaoke bars, and businesses are everywhere. They also make up the largest group of foreign visitors.)

Sükhbaatar Square is the undisputed centre of the city. A government building facing the square has a mammoth colonnade monument featuring – of course – Genghis Khan.

Speaking of the man, we hire a car and driver for an excursion out of town to the Chinggis Khaan Statue Complex. The star attraction is the 40-metre tall stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan on horseback.

You can climb up flights of stairs for a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside.

The Genghis-mania continues. Back in UB, we visit the new-ish Genghis Khan Museum. This explains everything you might want to know about the Mongol Empire and its founder.

At the top is a palatial yurt-like structure with a golden statue.

There’s an almost religious veneration for the man. Visitors are advised to remove their shoes before entering, pay their respects, and exit slowly without turning their back on him.

One day we visit the Narantuul market. Some so-called ‘influencers’ like to boast about daring to enter ‘the most dangerous market in Mongolia’. What a load of old codswallop. YouTubers will say anything for clicks. Narantuul is about as dangerous as Disneyland.

(Incidentally, the Chinggis Khaan Statue Complex has, for some unknown reason, a gigantic Mongolian boot on display.)

Narantuul is a good place to pick up a morin khuur, the two-stringed national instrument. These produce the main sound in the traditional music of Mongolia. Note the decorative horse-heads.

Of course, there’s lots of horse tackle for sale. You can watch people making it.

There are aisles and aisles of brightly-coloured traditional clothing, too, called deels. Men and women wear similar robe-like clothing.

Also lots of items of interest to practising shamans, such as animal parts and bird heads.

You can’t visit Mongolia without indulging in a Mongolian Hot Pot meal. We find a great place and go there twice.

Next day, we visit the Gandantegchinlen Monastery.

One of the few Buddhist monasteries that avoided complete destruction during the Communist purge of the 1930s.

Inside is a statue of Avalokiteśvara, 26 metres tall, we’re told. He’s a bodhisattva.

There are lots of prayer wheels around to spin, and the locals do just that.

According to Wikipedia: ‘As of 2004, Gandan is Mongolia’s largest active monastery, with 100 monks. ‘

And so we bid a fond adieu to Central Asia, after four months of travel. We’d like to give a big shout-out to the hundreds of people here who have treated us with kindness and a welcoming attitude. (Also, heartfelt thanks to our sure-footed automotive companions, Sergei, Vin, and Khan, for transporting us in safety in all conditions.)

Time to be headin’ home. Tomorrow, we depart from Ulaanbaatar to Tokyo, Tokyo to Vancouver, Vancouver to Ottawa.

Sight or Insight of the Day

Housing in the Soviet world seems to have been a problem that eventually got solved.

These are the same apartment blocks we’ve seen all over the ex-USSR territory, including the Caucasus countries we visited a few years ago. They’re known as ‘Khrushchevka‘ or ‘Brezhnevka‘, depending on under whose regime they were constructed.

North America is currently undergoing a catastrophic lack of affordable housing, and promises to build even a fraction of needed shelter seems to be so much political hot air. We have seen no homeless people in our four months in Central Asia. (Well, one or two people sleeping on grates here in UB.) Everyone has a roof over their head.

Even today, these countries are raising housing complexes of ten, fifteen, twenty flatblocks, all being built simultaneously. Maybe we should ask how they do it?

We continue driving ‘Khan’ – our third rented Toyota Land Cruiser of this trip – around the country. (Mongolia has had many noble Khans in its history.)

Next stop is the ruins of the Ongi Monastery.

This was an extensive monastery that came to its end when the communists destroyed all of the buildings and executed 200 monks, scattering the survivors to the four winds. So it goes.

We pitch our tent by the Ongi River near the posh ‘Secrets of Ongi’ yurt camp. For a nominal fee, we can use their facilities. Maria comes back in a state of bliss after getting a massage there.

Several reasons why finding your way in Mongolia is such a challenge: it’s impossible for us to keep in mind the multisyllabic placenames of such entities as ‘Amarbayasgalant‘, or ‘Dalanzadgad‘, or’Övörkhangai‘.

Not to mention these places can be transliterated in several different ways in English (Mongolian uses Cyrillic characters). When you attempt to load a destination into Maps.Me, it as often as not doesn’t recognize it.

Speaking of placenames, we find this signpost in Kharkhorin/Kharakorum/Harharin. Ottawa lies almost 10,000KMs due East.

Let’s call it Karakorum. Genghis Khan proclaimed this as the new capital of his new empire. His successors built it into a grand walled city until eventually Kublai Khan moved the capital to what is now Beijing.

All very historic, but there’s virtually nothing left of the city. There is, however, an excellent museum with well-displayed artifacts.

We really enjoy Karakorum and spend several days there in a yurt. One night, it goes down to -6 Celsius.

You see these shrines everywhere in Mongolia, even in the least likely places. They’re called ‘ovoos‘, a holdover from traditional shamanistic practices that are still visible throughout Mongolia.

Shamanism, in case you don’t know, is an ancient, animistic belief system centered on nature reverence, ancestor worship, and healing. In the enlightened Western world, we have more up-to-date methods of healing.

Many small towns in Mongolia have an impermanent look, as if everyone’s ready to pull up stakes at the drop pf a hat.

Along the way, we spy a bunch of vultures chowing down on a sheep carcass mere metres away from the road. Fun fact: a group of vultures dining together on the ground is called a ‘wake’.

From Karakorum, we drive to Terkhiin Tsagan Lake.

The Khorgo volcano is located near the eastern end of the lake. Now dormant, around 8,000 years ago the Khorgo cinder cone erupted.

Lava flooded the valley below, forming a lava dam, which eventually created the lake.

We spend a leisurely afternoon hiking to the rim and back.

You can’t go far in Mongolia without encountering yaks. These pre-historic-looking beasts look like they just stepped out of a cave painting.

Sight or Insight of the Day

‘A Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings’ – Mongolian proverb

In common with other Central Asia countries, Mongols love horses. They are, in fact, central to their culture.

There are more horses in Mongolia than people.

Mongolia is full of horse-y imagery, including on the gates that mark the entrance of many towns.

Just before arriving back in Ulaanbaatar, we spend our last camping night in Hustai National Park. This park is home to herds of Przewalski’s horse, a wild horse species successfully restored to its native habitat.

Or ‘Chinggis Khaan’, as he is known here. We suspect this after arriving at Chinggis Khaan International Airport, checking into the Chinggis Khaan Hotel, via Chinggis Khaan Avenue – well, you get the picture. His likeness is on every denomination of banknote. There’s even a beer named after him.

Nobody knows what the gent actually looked like in real life, because he refused to have his portrait done. The is the famous Yuan Portrait, done long after his death.

From now on, we’ll refer to him as ‘Genghis Khan‘, since that’s the name he’s known by in the West.

We’re staying at the Chinggis Khaan Hotel, a better class of hotel than we usually opt for. It’s walkable distance to most sights we’re interested in, which is important because Mongolia has no Yandex/Uber equivalent, and as far as we can see doesn’t even seem to have taxis. Besides, traffic is bad most of the time in Ulaanbaatar.

We manage to put all the pieces together – renting a 4X4, renting some camping equipment, buying whatever else we need at the handy Emart superstore steps away from our hotel – and drive south. We turn off the road at a small village and go overland in search of a particular yurt camp. (They call them ‘gers‘ in Mongolia, but we’re used to the word ‘yurt’.)

This is what we’ve read about – multiple trails crisscrossing the countryside, no signs whatsoever. After 35 KMs, we get within a few KMs of our destination and give up. So we simply pull over and set up camp.

We spend a nice evening with only munching cows and a billion stars for company. Next day, we make our way down some pretty rocky trails.

We had been confronted with these stretches the day before and decided they were impassable. So we take an alternate route. On the alternate route, there is an equally challenging goatpath, but we spy a group of travelers make it down successfully. So do we. And now our confidence level is a little bit higher.

Next stop is the Tsagaan Suvarga, or White Stupa, which isn’t really a stupa at all, but a rock formation.

It’s windy and sandstorm-y, so we stay at an interesting resort, the Gobi Caravanserai.

It departs from the almost-universal idea that everything in Mongolia should be a yurt.

It’s a good place to get away from it all.

We drive to the Yolyn Am, a valley with a gorge that’s popular with hikers. We think the valley itself is scenic enough, as the hiking trail looks like it might be crowded, judging by the number of vehicles in the parking lot.

We spend the night camped near the top of a hill.

Keeping us amused are the saxaul sparrows – bold little creatures that hop around within centimeters of our feet.

We drive to Khongoryn Els, site of some of the highest dunes in the Gobi.

On our way to the Flaming Cliffs, we pass through the small village of Bulgan. Some kind of festival is going on at the edge of town, in which women dressed in traditional clothing and mounted on horses sing songs, some old, some modern.

This is how we spend our days – we drive for hours at a time through countryside without seeing a soul, then come across villages with gas stations, mini marts, maybe a hotel of some kind. Kind of like Australia.

The area around the Flaming Cliffs is famous for its numerous important dinosaur fossil finds. Especially the work of Roy Chapman Andrews, a possible model for Indiana Jones. He also held some crackpot theory that humans originated in Central Asia.

This makes us eager to visit the Dinosaur Museum when we get back to Ulaanbaatar.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We usually don’t do things that we consider risky. A lot of people are put off self-driving in Mongolia because – well, many reasons. No roads. Bad roads. No signs. Animals everywhere. Long distances of nothing but beautiful scenery. Possible breakdown. Needless to say, at the very least, you need a dependable vehicle. (These are not cheap.)

More than once, locals have marveled at us for having neither a driver nor a guide.

BUT – We have an ace-in-the-hole: a mobile Starlink receiver.

This is an additional US$10.00 daily extra that we have with our rental vehicle. It takes care of the problem of relying on internet navigation when you have no internet. It attaches to the hood (or elsewhere) with non-marring magnets that grip even in the roughest conditions, so we always have connectivity.

That doesn’t mean that we never get lost. For us, apps like Google Maps and Maps.Me behave, shall we say, imperfectly? We learn that navigating Mongolian roads is as much of an art as a science. We get better at it as we go.

Currently travelling through Mongolia in a rented 4X4, we don’t have much access to WiFi. Here’s a quick entry into our latest doings.

From Semey, we take another overnight train to Karaganda. Probably our final railway trip.

Karaganda is a coal-mining town. Even our guide’s father was employed in the mines. (We hire a guide to access places that are hard to get to on our own.) The Miner’s Glory monument takes pride of place in the city.

We visit a mining museum attached to a college that specializes in the mining sciences.

We also visit Vvedenskiy Cathedral, an Orthodox church in Karaganda. Maria needs more modest accoutrements to enter and is provided with a scarf and full-length skirt of heavy material.

The area is also infamous for its history as an enormous Gulag (one of many in the USSR) known as the Karlag. In the nearby town of Dolinka, we visit the Museum of Memory of Victims of Political Repression.

Really, to hear its own citizens speak of Canada these days as a ‘settler colony’ built on the crimes of genocidal maniacs is pretty comical when you consider the sky-high mountains of corpses – millions – left in the wake of history as unfolded in the non-Canadian rest of the world. Get a grip, people.

Finally, we fly back to Almaty for our flight to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia two days away. We take the cable car up to the Kök Töbe recreational area. It’s surprisingly modern.

So we spend our first days in UB (Ulaanbaatar) arranging the rental of a vehicle and camping equipment. We set out for a 16-day trip of wild camping and off-roading.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We wrap up our travels in Kazakhstan and head for Mongolia. It’s been a fun three months in the ‘stans.

Some final issues about Kazakhstan – first, do ‘Cossacks’ in Russia have anything in common with ‘Kazakhs’ in Kazakhstan? According to AI:

‘Cossacks and Kazakhs share an identical linguistic root word that originally meant a “free man,” “wanderer,” or “adventurer”. However, they are two completely distinct groups with different ethnicities, languages, and histories.’

‘Both words derive from the ancient Turkic word ‘kazak’. Historically, the Russian Empire used this term to describe wanderers or people who lived free from the control of any state or overlord. Eventually, the Russian convention split the term to differentiate the Kazakhs of the Central Asian steppes from the Slavic Cossacks serving in the Imperial Russian Army.‘

Second, what’s the deal with Borat and Kazakhstan? As someone who enjoys offbeat humour as much as the next person, I find the character of Borat hilarious. But really, it’s not very representative of Kazakhstan. The Borat persona is more like an exaggerated Balkan/East European satire, rather than Central Asian. Maybe Sacha Baron Cohen should have come up with an imaginary country to use as his cultural pincushion?

My goodness, how’s that for an unsettling title?

Our flight from Aktau to Semey goes via Almaty. Almaty airport is a bit of a noisy hellhole at the moment – lots of construction going on in the Domestic terminal.

What is now the city of Semey in Kazakhstan was known as Semipalatinsk when it was part of the Russian empire. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was exiled here for four years. His house is now a museum. We like visiting the houses of well-known writers.

When I was younger, I enjoyed reading the long drawn-out psychological tales that Russians were so good at writing. (Especially the Constance Garnett translations.) Less popular today because, I’ve been told, people have a hard time keeping track of the many triple-barreled names that pepper these novels by the score.

According to AI: ‘There are seven major literary and memorial museums in the world dedicated to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Six are located in Russia, and one is located in Kazakhstan.’

This one is pretty good. It’s a nifty old wooden house, common in this frontier town.

Even the mosques are made of wood.

An excursion to the Polygon region – we arrange a tour to the formerly secret city of Kurchatov. This is where the USSR developed and tested its nuclear weapons.

The site was selected in 1947 by the infamous Lavrentiy Beria, political head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. (This was in addition to his duties as head of the NKVD, incarcerator of millions and murderer of tens of thousands. A busy man.)

The town was named after Igor Kurchatov, the ‘father of the Russian atomic bomb’.

Gulag labour was employed to build the primitive test facilities. The Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk from 1949 until 1989. (The first hydrogen bomb was tested in 1953.)

The first Soviet bomb test, Operation First Lightning, was conducted in 1949, in an area that would become known as the Opytnoye Pole (experimental field).

The Opytnoye Pole test site is 45 KMs away, straight down this road.

This is a video showing some of the early nuclear tests at the Opytnoye Pole test site, from nearly the same vantage point.

You used to be able to visit more sights in the area, including the actual test sites. Since 2019, these have been closed again.

Fortunately, a Swedish engineer, Martin Trolle Mikkelsen, specializes in chronicling abandoned Cold War sites. He took hundreds of photos of the area before it was closed down, You can see them here – pretty fascinating stuff.

In Kuchatov, there is a museum of the Polygon housed inside the National Nuclear Center, but it’s also no longer open to the public. Too bad, because it has a lot of interesting exhibits, such as:

• An AP-2 control panel from 1955

• A map of the blast radius. To see the effects of the test, Ground Zero would be surrounded by buildings (including a replica Metro station), military and civilian equipment, and live animals (described on the map as a ‘Biological Reserve’.)

• A model of blast radius effects. It looks like a sort of diabolical board game.

The plaque on a memorial shows the layout of the different test sites. Maybe this is where the name ‘Polygon’ come from.

All of this had a predictably negative effect on the health of local people over time. Al Jazeera (!) made a documentary about this ongoing disaster. There’s a monument to the victims in Semey itself.

We also stop at the ruins of the (formerly secret, now abandoned) Chagan air base. This base was the home of long-range heavy bombers, ready to unleash their cargo of nukes on us bourgeois imperialists at a moment’s notice from the Kremlin.

It’s eerie to walk through these streets that once thronged with Russian servicemen and their families..

It reminds us of walking around Varosha in Cyprus.

Apparently, the near-total demolition isn’t an effort to protect state secrets – it’s due to armies of looters taking everything they can sell to ward off the economic collapse after the Soviet pullout from Kazakhstan.

The garrison town was about 10 KMs distant from the actual air base and runways. There were two runways, both 4 KMs in length, now being slowly reclaimed by nature.

Imagine these runways bristling with Tupolev Tu-95 bombers.

The hotel we book in Semey is an old Soviet pile. It has hundreds of rooms.

Ours is a spacious suite, with TWO bathrooms and a nice view of the park across the street.

Sight or Insight of the Day

Funny story – the day after our Polygon tour, we are in our hotel in Semey. Late in the morning, an air-raid siren begins to wail. (Maria doesn’t hear, she has her earbuds on.) For a brief moment, given our visitations of the previous day, the thought passes through my mind: ‘This is it – the Trump-ocalypse has begun. Donald nuked Tehran, missile silo hatches are clanging open around the world. We’re all gonna die.’ It was nothing, of course. I still don’t know why the siren went off at that time in the morning.

All these resources poured into the creation and production of nuclear weapons. There exists an illusion about the end purpose of these devices. It’s not a matter of ‘gaining a strategic advantage over an opponent’ or ‘ensuring battlefield superiority’ or ‘neutralizing the enemy’s command & control capability’. Basically the result of this technology is the potential extermination of all life on Earth. Every man, woman, and child. Every puppy and every kitten. All the fish in the sea and the birds of the air. (OK, cockroaches would probably survive.)

I read an interesting book last year, Nuclear War: A Scenario. (Warning: Not good reading for the anxiety-afflicted.) It sets out step by step how within a couple of hours in any 24-hour cycle, a chain reaction of missile exchanges could result in an unstoppable Armageddon. Thankfully, half the world would be asleep through it all.

And all this satanic power is in the hands of a few dozen men – not a single woman – most of whom are ruthless aging dictators, and at least one doddering vindictive idiot on the cusp of extreme dementia. What a strange species we are.

A quick update: from Turkistan, we continue our train journey 1560 KMs to the city of Aktau on the Caspian Sea.

The Kazakhstan stations we’ve seen have been traditional, as opposed to the sleekly modern ones in Uzbekistan.

Unusually for Kazakhstan Railways, our train is half an hour late. But hey, we’re going to spend 36 hours on board, so what’s a mere half-hour?

Finally, our train pulls into the station.

It’s 1560 KMs of almost unrelieved flatness. After spending many weeks in the high mountains, this takes some getting used to.

For a day and two nights, we read, chat, sleep, or watch the countryside roll by. It’s very relaxing – for us, that is. Some people would find it boring.

We see isolated small towns and groups of camels. (The one-humped kind.)

Aktau is as far as you can go before getting wet in the Caspian Sea. It has beaches, but they aren’t really inviting. At least around Aktau, there’s lots of industry.

Even Maria barely dips her toes in. This doesn’t stop the locals from gathering on a Saturday afternoon.

We see the Aktau coat of arms on all kinds of city furniture, like these park benches. We recognize the salute to the oil & gas industry, the local uranium mining industry, and the shipping industry. Not sure what the bottom right corner represents – looks like a garden gnome with his hat pulled low.

Speaking of city furniture, another mounted fighter jet looms over this particular park.

It’s a MiG-21. Apparently the USSR produced over 10,000 of these.

These fish probably come fresh from the Caspian. We see them at the Sary Bazaar.

…which has all kinds of stuff. Like these musical instruments. The dombra is the ‘national instrument of Kazakhstan’.

(I still haven’t found a camel bell, by the way.)

Some things we notice in Aktau – English here is practically non-existent – which results in a lot of amusing lively dumbshow and fumbling for Google Translate on the phone.

Also, there are a lot of Georgians here. (From Tblisi, not Atlanta.) Not sure why, besides the poor state of the Georgian economy since they decided to go back to being Russia’s sidekick.

One nice feature of Aktau is the Skal’naya Tropa, a scenic boardwalk by the sea.

Like many cities here, Aktau boasts some badass murals from the Soviet times. One housing estate has a matching set of three.

(This text isn’t actually on the murals – I just grabbed it at random from a search of trite Soviet-era slogans.)

Sight or Insight of the Day

Completely by accident, we check into the same hotel in Aktau as Norwegian writer Erika Fatland did in her book Sovietistan.

This was the first book we looked at when thinking about this trip. We’re happy to report that even though the book came out in 2018, many things in the area have changed for the better since that time.

We fly from Dushanbe to Almaty, the former capital and main city of Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan is supposed to be the most prosperous of the ‘stans’: it’s resource-rich. (Tajikistan, where we have just come from, is the least prosperous.) Almaty is certainly a modern, thriving place.

At first glance, KZ also looks like the most secular of the ‘stans’ we have visited so far. The vast majority of people are ‘normal-looking’, which admittedly to us means ‘non-religious’.

Especially in cosmopolitan Almaty. The name ‘Almaty’ comes from the Kazakh word for apple (alma), and it literally translates to ‘rich in apples’ or ‘father of apples’. AI adds this:

‘The Birthplace of Apples: Scientific research and DNA sequencing have proven that the region around Almaty is the ancestral homeland of the modern apple (Malus sieversii).‘

Of course, that’s according to AI, so it might be total slop.

One of our first stops is the impressive Almaty Museum of Arts. It’s brand new (opened in 2025).

Among its collection is a signature gigantic iron sculpture by Richard Serra. (There’s also one in Pearson Airport.)

We also visit the Central State Museum of Kazakhstan.

Like the other ‘stan’ dwellers, Kazakhs are crazy about horses. This goes back to their history of nomadism and early horse-taming, stretching back millennia. One exhibit displays a replica of the Berel burial, where a chieftain was found buried with his wife and favourite horses.

Another thing about Kazakhstan: they have the funkiest currency, the tenge. It takes 470 tenges to make a US dollar.

Almaty has an enviable amount of green space and parks. It’s very civilized.

Kazakhstan is an enormous country, the world’s ninth largest. Fortunately, it has a really good rail network and good flight connections with national discount airlines, so the long distances are not a problem.

Like we did in Uzbekistan, we travel by public transport, mostly by rail. But now we increase our comfort level exponentially by purchasing all four places in a four-place sleeping compartment, an affordable extravagance.

KZ is famous for its almost unlimited flat steppes, but our window is still full of mountain views duringour first day on the train.

Our first destination is Turkistan. It sounds like a country but is, in fact, a city.

Turkistan’s claim to fame is the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, a Sufi poet of the 12th century.

It’s a site of pilgrimage. Especially for women, it seems.

The mausoleum is part of a complex that includes an underground mosque and the archeological remains of the old town within a stretch of restored city walls.

Sight or Insight of the Day

KZ doesn’t have the many historic towns that Uzbekistan has, so they’re keen on developing Turkistan as a destination that attracts visitors beyond the pious pilgrim sort. There is now a ‘new town’, built in the style of a Silk Road city, complete with an IMAX theatre in the shape of a golden Roc’s egg.

It seems strangely devoid of visitors. Maybe it’s too earl in the season to expect throngs of tourists?

A few interesting facts about Tajikistan:

• The other ‘stans’ speak Turkic languages, but Tajik is essentially the same as Persian/Farsi/Iranian
• Politically, Tajikistan has much more of a Stalin-esque cult of personality, with images of the leader everywhere
• Many Tajik women wear ‘modest’ clothing, but with lots of colour and bright patterns, covered with sparkly stuff (at least in Dushanbe)
• 47.9 percent of Tajikistan’s GDP comes from remittances by Tajiks working in Russia (where they are treated – big surprise! – very poorly)
• It’s illegal to have a dirty car in Dushanbe

Our journey continues. Some parts pass through quaint, leafy villages every ten KMs or so.

Other parts, you can drive for hours without encountering a soul.

We visit the Yamchun Fortress.

Remember we mentioned ‘cyclists with a masochistic streak a mile wide’? Imagine cycling up vertiginous, stony mountain tracks like this.

(We drive through such lonely territory all day. When we arrive at Murghab, the car goes completely dead. Luckily, it was just the cables vibrating off of the battery due to all the, um, turbulence – an easy fix.)

We cross paths with a Bactrian camel.

At first we think it must be a wild camel, the locale being so very remote. But apparently, genuine wild Bactrian camels are virtually extinct. If you see a camel – even in the remotest of places – it belongs to somebody.

In the distance, we also see some nomads. Like, REAL nomads – not the ‘come into my tent and I’ll serve you tea for 10$’ kind of nomad.

They are shifting their herd of yaks.

(Incidentally, ‘Yak’ is also a popular brand of beer here.)

We mention in passing that travel in this region is subject to having a GBAO special pass, which we obtained in Dushanbe. The Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) covers nearly 45% of Tajikistan’s territory.

We have to go through eight checkpoints and present a copy of our passports and GBAO permits.

So why is travel so controlled in nearly half the country? No doubt it has something to do with the Tajikistan Civil War (in the 90s). The opponents to the then-ruling clique were mostly from the GBAO. So the locals here are kept on a tight leash.

Toss in the proximity to Afghanistan and you’d expect a seething cauldron of unrest and instability. But being here, all seems calm and serene. People are friendly and helpful. The grandness of nature makes the affairs of mere humans seem petty and forgettable.

The furthest point on the Pamir Highway (for us) is the town of Murghab. Some people continue on into Kyrgyzstan and end their trip in Osh. Been there, done that.

Murghab has the forlorn, shabby look of an Arctic outpost. It’s at an elevation of nearly 4,000 m. above sea level.

(Regarding elevation: we both take medication to avert altitude sickness. It seems to have hallucinatory side-effects. Driving through boulder-strewn landscapes, we both keep seeing people, things, and animals in the shapes of the rocks in our peripheral vision. Very entertaining.)

About the stickers on the windows of our hotel: it’s a thing for travelling groups of motorcyclists (mostly) to leave their mark by plastering them onto every available surface.

Time to make the return trip to the fleshpots of Dushanbe, this time via the Koitezek Pass. (On the journey here, we took the Wahkan Valley route.)

The first 100 KMs or so south of Murghab are a practically undriveable minefield of cavernous potholes. Probably the second (or third?) worst potholes we’ve ever experienced.

On the way north, we notice intriguing side roads. Maybe they’re private? Or for military use?

It turns out they were probably used by the people responsible for constructing the road. But nobody uses them now. So they have NO POTHOLES. (They cross deep ditches, so big trucks can’t use them.) We gratefully take them wherever we find them and shave at least an hour off of our travel time.

OK, just a few more scenic shots of the Pamir Highway.

Just before arriving back in Dushanbe, we pass the Nurek Reservoir.

So in town, we prepare for our flight to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Хайр, Тоҷикистон!

Sight or Insight of the Day

We mentioned that Tajikistan has the most serious personality-cult leadership style we have seen so far on this trip. Its leader, Emomali Rahmon, is so beloved by his people, they keep voting him into office.

Just kidding. Now that we’re out of the country, it can be safely said: he’s an asshole. According to Wikipedia:

‘Rahmon heads an authoritarian government in Tajikistan. Political opponents are repressed, violations of human rights and freedoms are severe, elections are not free and fair, and corruption and nepotism are rampant.’

To be honest, sounds like the Trump administration. But he’s an asshole that the American electorate, in its infinite wisdom, freely elected.

People here, like the other two countries we’ve visited, are so kind. How the Tajiks end up with such a brute as a president is a mystery. (Like Chile during the Pinochet regime.)

After arriving in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s modern-ish capital, we find a vehicle for rent to travel the Pamir Highway. That seems to be what people do when visiting this part of the world (that is, people usually hire someone else to do the driving, but we value our independence), including cyclists that we can only surmise must have a streak of masochism a mile wide.

We come across a tank-like 2004 Toyota Land Cruiser. He’s a tough guy, and a Diesel, so we name him Vin.

If you want to know more about the Pamir Highway, there are plenty of documentaries on YouTube. It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted.

Gradually, the quality of the surface degrades.

From time to time, we come across some stretches that are narrow tracks. Occasionally a giant truck appears around a bend, so someone has to move.

If you’re lucky, you’ll be close to a wide spot to pull into. Otherwise, you may have to reverse a bit down the guardrail-less mountain.

Another regular hazard are rockslides spilling down over the road, making the passage even narrower.

It’s the spectacular scenery that makes the minor hardship worthwhile.

On the other side of the Panj River is Afghanistan.

It’s always interesting to see what the neighbours are up to.

Across the river, a group of men are involved in some unidentified activity. Maybe a market for motorcycles?

We eventually cover two thousand KMs on this trip. The freedom to stop where we want is a bonus. Besides, we see 4X4s that we suspect are foreign tourists driven by locals who drive like madmen – not something we’d be comfortable doing.

Sight or Insight of the Day

After a few days of travel in Vin, we and our belongings are covered in dust. I wonder if Gurkha, the manufacturer of my travel bag, would be interested in using it in some promotional material?

It may look like it’s been through the wars, but it’s still in great shape.

Almost everywhere we go, we’re beside soaring mountains and rushing alpine streams. The scenery is breathtaking. Unfortunately, this doesn’t show up in photos, but all this magnificence is stored in the old silicon chip <taps skull>.

On the outskirts of the village of Kojomkul, we see a strange temple-like object. It’s a memorial to a legendary strongman, born in the nearby village of Suusamyr.

So we have dozens of mountain photos. We’ll just select a few.

We mentioned before that Kyrgyzstan is ‘all about the mountains’. It’s also all about felt. (As in, the material made from wool.) So many things here are manufactured using felt; carpets, clothing, footwear, yurt material, headgear, bags and other containers, blankets, and more.

(We remember there was a German artist, Joseph Beuys, who made a career largely out of his felt creations.)

We go through one pass which is completely covered in a blanket of show (except for the road). It’s like driving a highway at the top of the Himalayas.

We spend a few days in the snicker-inducing town of Arslanbob, popular with hikers. Many of the buildings in town look like mangers from the middle ages.

The road winds along the Naryn River, a bright teal colour in this section. (yes, the same river we saw in Naryn town in previous entries.)

At one point, we pass through a series of four tunnels. These are kind of scary – the lighting is bad, and for a few brief seconds, we can’t see anything in the dark.

Apparently, in Tajikistan there’s a tunnel known as the ‘Tunnel of Death‘. You can be assured we aren’t going anywhere near that one.

Most of the places we have been staying at include breakfast. Usually with an assortment of chocolate bars and other sweet things. Like this surprisingly familiar item, a KatKit bar.

Our last stop before returning to Bishkek is the Belek Dream Hotel, one of the nicest places we’ve stayed so far. Gourmet food, lovely location on a mountain stream.

We go for a hike in search of petroglyphs. The groundskeeper has three dogs. They probably don’t get that much human attention, this being Kyrgyzstan, so when we shower them with kind words and a vigorous patting , they follow us for the duration of our hike with, well, dog-like devotion.

A couple of things we can mention about Kyrgyzstan: a lot of the men sport distinctive bell-like headgear, the Ak-kalpak.

Also, they like horses. They like to eat them, too.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We are back in Bishkek after our 16-day road trip, soon to depart for Tajikistan. We’re supposed to bring the vehicle back clean – Maria dragoons a young man at a self-serve carwash to do our car inside and out. (‘We can’t read the instructions’ we plead.)

It’s a treat getting back to our familiar neighbourhood. When traveling, it always nice returning to a place you’ve been before – like getting home.