Public transport hardly exists in Tajikistan, and travelling mostly meant taking shared taxis, waiting for a vehicle to be full of passengers before the driver would set off. In the Pamir region, these were often tiny Chinese-made minivans, into which seven passengers would be squashed, three in each of the backseat rows, and one upfront. They sometimes crammed in even more. They are not comfortable as they bump along the shoddy roads that lead up the mountain valleys. But sometimes a certain camaraderie develops among the passengers.
My first trip out from Khorog was to the Bartang Valley. I had hired a guide, but before we could leave we had to find a minivan that would take us the first part of the way. This involved hanging around the minibus station at the market, talking to drivers and trying to work out who would be going first in the direction we wanted to go. This was the main difficulty with travelling in Tajikistan. Drivers tried to persuade us to go with them, but if they did not have enough passengers it might be hours before they actually left. Travelling up the valleys in the Pamir region was a hit-and-miss affair, and I was often not sure whether I would reach my destination at all. Thank goodness for my guides on the trips I made. I am not at all sure how I would have negotiated with the minivan drivers without them. We found some other foreigners who wanted to go in the same direction as us, an Italian, two French and a German. That made six including us, so, rather than wait around, we decided to split the cost of the seventh, empty place among us. But by the time we set off, it was nearly lunchtime, so the driver decided to stop at a small eatery close to the bank of the Panj, just short of the turnoff for the Bartang Valley. It was an attractive spot, although we were plagued by midges. I ate some greasy samsas (samosas), washed down with green tea. When the bill came it was embarrassingly little.
But my fellow travellers began to have second thoughts about their destination. I wanted to go only a short distance up the Bartang, and then to set off hiking up the tributary Geisev Valley. They decided they wanted to go further up the Bartang, but our driver said that, for his little van, the road further up was too rough. They decided to try to find a four-wheel drive in Rushan, a small town just beyond the Bartang turnoff. Thankfully, our driver agreed to drop them there, and then continue up to Geisev with my guide and me. We left them haggling with the owner of a four-wheel drive. So we set off up the road to Geisev, along a fast moving river flanked by hills. We passed through the pretty little village of Yemts, and stopped by a beautiful lake to shelter from the afternoon heat.
When we reached the beginning of the Geisev Valley, I got a little bit of a surprise. I had been expecting a suspension bridge across the Bartang; the guidebook said there was a suspension bridge. Indeed, there had been a suspension bridge, but it had been washed away. Now there was just a little cable car. More precisely, there was a little metal box, painted in the colours of the Tajikistan flag, and open on one side, there being no door, which had to be manually winched across by furiously turning a handle on the inside of the box. My guide volunteered to turn the handle. We were joined by a solo Israeli traveller. So while she and I crouched opposite the open space above the raging torrent beneath us, the guide turned the handle for all he was worth, and steadily we made it across. How refreshing it can be to be in a country where there are no health and safety inspectors.
After a couple of hours hiking up the valley, the grey slate slopes gave way to a lusher, greener landscape. And suddenly there was a man, tanned by the sun, his hands rough and gnarled from hard work. Good evening, welcome, he said, beaming and speaking passable English. He was from the first of the three little hamlets that stretch out along the Geisev, just clusters of four or five houses, as well as out buildings for animals and storage. He would be our host for the next two nights. As we relaxed with copious cups of green tea, women worked at the outdoor hearth preparing our simple supper. They produced almost all their own food here. Not only did they bake their own bread in a stone oven, but they milled the flour themselves, from wheat they grew in their own small plots. In the morning, we ate eggs from their own chickens. This was something close to subsistence living, although their incomes were now supplemented by foreigners like me staying with them.
In this little hamlet, they were a family group, all relatives living in a cluster of houses, sharing the one hearth, living as a small, contained community. One traditional Pamiri house was for guests. My guide and I slept there that night, but our host told us that only a couple of days before there had been a wedding, and the place had been filled beyond capacity with more than 100 guests. It got chilly at night up there in the mountains, and I was grateful for the heavy eiderdown. But a couple of the children slept outside, on a kind of terrace at the entrance to their home. The house had a small solar panel on the roof, which powered an electric light. Drinking water came from a spring a few minutes walk away. As in all the mountain villages, the toilets were sheds with deep holes in the ground some distance from the houses.
Our host told us that the people who lived in the Geisev valley now were relative newcomers, their forebears having arrived only a century or so before. The people who had lived their previously had fled invaders from Afghanistan in the 19th century. The valley is fertile, but life must always have been hard. In the modern world, it is difficult to see how it could be sustainable. Children have to make the trek down to Yemts to go to school. The older ones have to board in Rushan. I met a teenage girl from one of the villages further up the valley. She spoke excellent English. She lived in Yemts, and was just visiting relatives. Our host told me that, like so many from Tajikistan, he had two brothers away working in Russia.
Tourism offers many opportunities. Our host was clearly counting on this. He had picked up English from talking with visitors to his valley, he told me. His main concern was to get a new bridge across the Bartang. The cable car was of limited use. If it were on the wrong side when someone wanted to use it, the alternative option was a little chair that could be used to pull yourself across the river. He often did that, he told us. Others would surely demur. It looked terrifying to me. And what if both were on the wrong side? There was no mobile phone signal in Geisev, so there was no chance of phoning someone to tell them. Only a few dozen people live in the Geisev Valley, so I could imagine building a new bridge would not be a priority for the local government.
The valley is gorgeous. A meandering turquoise stream, interspersed with placid lakes surrounded by damp greenery and wild flowers, amid the rising shingle slopes, topped by snow-clad peaks. The next day we walked slowly up the valley, pausing to eat the soup, bread, yogurt and jam offered in one of the other hamlets, and to watch as an elderly man broke up dried wood to fire the bread oven.
Another journey, this time up the Shokh Dara valley, began in the same way, trying to find a shared taxi that would take us the first part of the way. This time my guide was a 19-year old girl doing an internship with the information centre in Khorog. I was her first client, and this was her first tour. Again, I would have been lost without her as she negotiated with the various minivan drivers. One said he was going our way, but then disappeared. We waited uncertainly, not knowing whether he would come back. Eventually we gave up and joined a van that was going part of our way, as far as the village of Roshtkala. The driver promised us he would find us a vehicle to take us the remainder of the way. But when we reached Roshtkala, there seemed to be no one headed further up the valley. We waited. An elderly man told us his son was coming, and we could go with them. Still we waited.
And then a rickety old car, packed with people and luggage pulled up. The driver was full of spirit and dressed in what looked to me like pyjamas. He assured us there was room for us too. Somehow we squashed in, my guide squeezed on to the front passenger seat together with a young man. I felt sorry for her. She suffered horribly from car sicknesses as we lurched around the bendy river valley. She and one other passenger walked the first couple of hundred metres out of the village, in case the police stopped our massively overloaded vehicle. The driver, we soon realised, was very drunk. She could smell it on his breath. He was also exhausted. This was the last leg of a journey all the way from Dushanbe. How his car had made it so far, over rough mountain roads, was a mystery, it was such a rickety old wreck. It seemed to wheeze along, always on the brink of giving up. But the passengers were in high spirits, laughing and joking all the way. At one point, as the driver seemed about to fall asleep, one of the ladies insisted that we stop so that he could splash some water in his face. And then we had arrived. The car stopped in front of an old bus, now without wheels, that had been turned into a local shop. Perhaps this bus had once carried passengers up and down the valley, at a time when the country had functioned a lot better than it does now.
We set off hiking up the valley, stopping at houses along the way to ask for directions. Invariably we were invited in for tea, but we declined. We wanted to make it to our homestay before dark. One lady told her son, a boy of no more than seven or eight, to show us the way. Silently he led us, frequently stopping to enable us to catch up. Close to the top, we reached the simple Pamiri house where we would spend the night. My guide had been fasting for Ramadan, and, although she had drunk water that day, breaking her fast, she was drained of energy. The daughter of our host had been on a tourism course in Khorog, and she wanted to work as a guide. But her lack of English let her down.
The next morning we set off early back down to the village, in the hope of finding transport back to Khorog, or at least to Roshtkala. Our host, who also had a shop in the village, asked around to see if anyone would be making the journey. And then suddenly, bumping round the bend, came a minivan driven by the man we had given up on in Khorog the previous day. Gratefully, we climbed in. Not long before Khorog, he told us he was going to take a detour to visit the house of his sister. What to do? This was quite normal in the Pamir region, my guide told me. So we left the road and bumped along a dirt track to his sister's house. We were invited to drink tea and eat bread and thick cream while the driver visited his relatives. Then, after half an hour or so, he was back, and off we went again. I found myself wondering how it would be if in Europe a bus driver were to take a detour and invite his passengers in for tea?
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