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There are plenty of people killing time in Dushanbe and it’s a nice place to do nothing, if only because there’s not much to do. But not wanting to spend the week until I flew in Dushanbe I decided to head northwest to Penjikent. My main (only) reason for heading to Penjikent was to do a daytrip to the Marguzor Lakes, a chain of seven lakes in the Fan Mountains. I hoped that there would be other guests at the homestay that I could share costs with and I had a few nights to lie in wait for them.

The owner of the homestay took good care of me, suggesting that I eat dinner with him and his family rather than go out alone at night. I’d been a little apprehensive about travelling alone but everything seemed to be going OK. Still, as his concern proved: just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not after you. I’d already come to the same conclusion and stocked up on dinner supplies. There are still plenty of places where being a lone woman is a hassle.

Unfortunately nobody else turned up so I had to pay for the whole car but it was a nice day trip. The lakes were formed by landslides from the steep sided valley. We drove up over the landslides and got to the seventh lake where we got out and walked around the shore. For my safety the homestay owner suggested the driver go with me but this time it wasn’t sleazy men he was concerned about, it was bears. Right. On our way back down to the car we walked for a while with a family who were bringing down wood from the mountains. Everywhere in the villages you can see people preparing for the winter, stockpiling feed for the animals and wood for heating. I’d heard that there were often power supply problems in winter and one of the reasons for this is the fact that much of the power comes from hydropower. A clean and renewable energy source until the lakes freeze.

Back in Penjikent I met a really cool girl from Khojand (further north in Tajikistan). She was fascinating to talk to because she perfectly embodied the clash between traditions and modernity. She’s 24, well educated, independent and unmarried. As she told me, in Tajikistan most women are married by her age and the gossip mongers are talking about her and speculating that she has some “problems”. One of the problems she mentioned they might be talking about is that she can’t have children though I’m not sure how someone who is saving themselves for marriage would know that. Most promiscuous Westerners probably have no idea until they actually try to conceive. Proposals have come her way but she’s reluctant because she doesn’t want to lose her freedom. I got the impression that in Tajikistan women are much more subject to the desires of their husbands; if her husband allowed it she could still work but if he was more traditional she’d be popping out babies every 9.5 months. Well not quite but there was much more a feeling that things change for women after marriage. At the same time she does want to get married, in the abstract sense of it. Her parents are very liberal but value family and have told her that having children is the natural thing for women to do in order to continue the family line. Apart from the fact that she’s almost beyond marriageable age is the fact that her younger sister is 20 and ready to get married. The older sister has to get married first otherwise the gossip mongers would go completely crazy.

In the share taxi on the way back to Dushanbe the woman next to me threw up constantly for 8 hours. Once again I was very happy to arrive though at least this trip didn’t take 55 hours like the last one. A few more lazy days in the capital before I flew to Riga, Latvia. First impressions were fantastic (see my last post) and I’ve decided that I’m going to spend most of the time until Brett gets off the boat hanging out here.

Unfortunately the sun that bathed everything in that warm beautiful light is now nowhere to be seen and my couchsurfing host keeps laughing at me when I say I’m waiting for it to come back. As it turns out I was very lucky to see it and autumn in Europe is grey. Who knew? The last few days have been the kind of weather that makes people jam their hands in their pockets, shorten their necks into their scarves and walk briskly to the next heated area. Anyway, my project for the 6 weeks is to learn how to build a website so grey days aren’t so bad, less temptation to run around taking photos.

Tags: Dushanbe, Fan Mountains, Latvia, Marguzor Lakes, Riga, Tajikistan

I’m in love. We’re moving to Latvia. I arrived in Riga this morning and am blown away by how awesome it is. This is a bit of an irregular update and totally out of order because I haven’t written about my last week in Tajikistan but I need to write about this. Even from the air it looked cool, very European type buildings surrounded by pine trees.

I arrived to a few drops of rain and rainbows arching over the city. There’s something about the time just after a rainstorm, when the sunlight has been washed clean and everything is so grateful for its warmth. Especially on those cool crisp days when you need a big jacket but don’t quite need to zip it up. After dropping my bag in a locker at the train station I wandered out of the building with the aim of getting lost and following whatever street looked good. The plan was to go to Old Town but I don’t think I made it. Instead I stumbled upon an absolutely fantabulously beautiful church, where rays of sunlight filtered through the dusty air to light up the oodles of gold on the icons. Outside they were doing some restoration work on the wooden walls and when a guy saw me admiring the original wood he pointed me around the corner to where the 1mm thick layers of paint and plaster had all been stripped away in preparation for new layers.

The central market was heavenly, full of fresh produce, spicy aromas and the cheeses and sausages that i just can’t get enough of. Even just the variety and quality of things was mind boggling after central Asia. And everyone speaks English. Even the ones that say they only speak “a little”. At a small bistro owned by a soccer obsessed guy I was fed fried pancakes filled with cheese that came with a side of sour cream. Absolutely delicious but wow i’m glad my cholesterol isn’t a problem. Maybe it will be by the time I leave Latvia? I’m definitely going back there for more of those pancakes so I’ll keep you posted.

Tonight I meet up with my couchsurfing host and we’ll probably head to a gathering of other couchsurfers. Hopefully at some stage I’ll get some sleep, the taxi this morning came at 3:30am. Eurgh.

Tags: Latvia, Riga

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Two nights of luxurious accommodation in Dushanbe were enough for us (besides, it was sending our daily accommodation budget through the roof!) so we headed north. Our constantly changing plan eventually ended up with us hiring a taxi to take us to Iskander Kul, a lake in the Fan Mountains, then on to Istaravshan the next day. Given the minibus from hell experience getting to Dushanbe I feel it’s only right to tell you about how fantastic this drive was. The 4WD was comfy, the bumps were doable and we had no flat tyres or engine problems. We felt nice and smug about our choice of transport up until the time we saw a very similar vehicle stopped because the wheel had snapped off the axle. Another new sight to add to the mental bank of weird stuff that never happens in Australia. Well OK maybe it does but certainly not on the average Sydney street, Tajik roads chew up cars and spit them out like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

Up at Iskander Kul we stayed in an old Soviet holiday camp which had a vibe similar to the sanatorium in Kyrgyzstan. Well past its glory days. The shower block was missing parts of the roof and the whole place had that run down look to it which I’m actually quite a fan of. Maybe I can travel the former Soviet bloc countries and hunt down these forgotten and forlorn Soviet relics before they completely turn to dust? The lake itself was pretty, a gorgeous turquoise colour, and we wandered around the shore as the sun sank in the sky.

The next morning we went for a short walk to a nearby waterfall on the river flowing out of the lake. I think I enjoyed the walk more than the waterfall itself (impressive as it was) because our self appointed guide fed us with berries picked from the trees en route. The oval shaped blue ones were super sour but you got used to it. The bulbous red ones were sweet and my favourite until I threw a whole handful in my mouth. When you do that they make the back of your throat feel like you’ve just eaten hot chilli or something, a really strange sensation. Round red ones with pits almost as big were good too but relatively rare. We weren’t the only ones feasting on berries, the guide pointed out a sizeable pile of bear poo and we spotted many more just like it. I selectively ignored the fact that this meant there was a sizeable population of bears in the area.  

Later that day we drove to Istaravshan, a town in the skinny part of Tajikistan as it squeezes up between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. In the guidebook it sounded nice and historic but there was a weird vibe to it. If you’ve ever wandered the streets in a dodgy border town then you know what I mean, it was as if everyone was sizing us up. The stares were nothing like anything we’ve had in Central Asia so far and any thought I had of coming back alone once Brett went to work quickly disappeared. The old town was as disappointing as the welcome, though we did have a nice time wandering around, gathering children like the Pied Piper of Hamelin and having tea at the house of an English teacher. Some of the historic buildings were nice but overall we weren’t sad to leave.

On the way back we were stopped for 3 hours behind a Chinese road crew who figured that the middle of the day was a perfect time to stop all traffic in both directions on the only road north to south in this part of the country. As the crew stopped for lunch (road still closed) I talked to one of the workers. He told me he hated it here, the people don’t do what they’re told and they cheat him because he’s a foreigner. Sounds like my impression of China. Oh no, he protested, Chinese people wouldn’t do that. The people here are terrible. As I looked up at a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds he told me that the weather in Tajikistan is awful, and the food worse. He’d been here for two years and was headed home in a few months. As for how long it might be until we could pass through? “hard to say” “who knows”. He was the one in charge of making sure the traffic didn’t go onto the freshly laid asphalt and he achieved this by throwing hissy fits, screaming at people in Chinese and banging on cars that crept slowly forward, frustrated by the wait. Apparently we were lucky to only wait three hours; sometimes they stop traffic for seven or eight hours at a time.

Back in bustling Dushanbe (read with ironic sarcasm) we had a lazy day before Brett took his early morning flight back to work. At least this time it was a relatively short trip up to Norway. I’m still in Dushanbe and will hang out in Tajikistan for about a week. So far I have a ticket as far as Riga and Brett and I will meet up again in Cairo. Plans are flexible; especially because we have no idea how long the work stint will be this time. Istanbul, Cyprus, Stockholm and Helsinki are all possibilities for me before I meet up with Brett again.

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After much charades and Pictionary action at the local taxi stand we managed to organise a car from Osh, Kyrgyzstan, to Murgab, Tajikistan. There wasn’t much in Murgab itself but the homestay we found was fantastic and we did a nice day hike up in the Pamir Mountains over Gumbezkul Pass. Overall the mountains seemed to be pretty rocky and barren which makes it hard to believe there are snow leopards lurking in the area. We did see a group of four ibex which was pretty cool, though they ran off before I could get overly close. Obviously seeing animals in the wild is cool but in a way I’m always disappointed that I can’t get as close as I can in a zoo. Another indicator that I’m a city girl I guess? Water in the hotsprings nearby was hot enough to boil a person and the hospitality of our guide’s family nearly made us miss dinner at our homestay completely. Most of the population in the Pamir mountains are ethnically Kyrgyz though apparently the “city” of Murgab is majority Tajik. In language and religion the Pamiri Tajiks are different from the lowland Tajiks who live in other parts of the country. Not that we were there long enough to see these differences, they’re just things we’ve read about or been told.

Driving from Murgab to Khorog wasn’t as spectacular as we expected, though towards the end as we followed a winding glacial river through a scenic valley we did wish we had the flexibility to stop. Khorog immediately impressed us, there were so many people on the streets and the fact that it has a campus of the University of Central Asia seems to give it a youthful, energetic vibe. Apart from the odd car on fire or terrible Indian restaurant.

From Khorog we headed into the Geisev Valley to do some hiking. The Aga Khan Foundation and MSDSP have helped set up homestays in the 3 villages by providing toilets, showers, mattresses, cooking gas and tea sets. Altogether in the valley there are 100 people in 15 houses, mostly in the first village which is 2.5 hours from the nearest road. The nearest road is still a long way from anything you could call a decent sized town, and even Khorog (1.5 hours away) isn’t that big. Ironically the isolation which could make life difficult at times is the thing that makes it such a nice place to hike for people like us. A man who spoke some English told us that many of the men went to Russia to work, and the CIA fact book says that nearly half of Tajikistan’s labour force works overseas. At the moment jobs are scarcer because of the financial crisis. It’s hard to believe that a place as remote as this feels the pinch when the global economy falters.

Back in Khorog we tried, with no luck, to organise a flight to Dushanbe as we’ve heard it’s a scenic/scary route through the mountain valleys. Instead we opted for a share taxi to the capital, though our choice of car ended up being a bad, bad mistake. Before we even left town we were going to petrol station attendants houses to wake them up and buy spare tyres. Not that it did us much good, within 5 hours we’d stopped twice to fix flats. At lunch time we had another flat and ate lunch looking across the river to Afghanistan. At 3pm we stopped to put more water in the radiator as it had a leak and tried to put a new fan belt in as the engine was steaming. Then the back right tyre exploded. The driver disappeared to buy fan belts and inner tubes and 3.5 hours later we were on the road again. Around 11 pm we stopped in a town and there was much discussion (none of which we understood of course) and we ended up sleeping in a gostinitsa where the floor in the squat toilet was caving in. 17 hours into what was meant to be a 10 hour trip we were half way, there was still 284km to Dushanbe.

In the morning our travel companions had disappeared. But we found them again near our still broken down car where we waited a few hours until the car was “fixed”. Half an hour later we had another flat and sat there for about 4 hours. Incredibly the driver was not carrying a pump and so we had to wait for someone to come past and lend us one. That and he had to keep begging inner tubes from people as we were going through them faster than he and the lackey could fix them. Unfortunately there wasn’t much traffic, possibly because it was the end of Ramadan, a celebration we’d hoped to experience in a big city. Around this time the engine started having real problems and we had to push start the car regularly. As it was getting dark we had another flat and a fellow passenger told us that we still had 200km to go. Fixed again we headed off and got another flat tyre a few hours later. With not much traffic going past it was looking like a night in the car, a perfect end to a perfect 6 month wedding anniversary. Suddenly the four other travellers bailed on us, hopped into a passing truck and left us with the driver, lackey and the broken car.

By 9am the next morning we were ready to go again and about 20 minutes later we had another flat. I think by this stage even the driver had had enough as he just kept driving, determined to at least get to the town in the distance before he let something so trifling as driving on rims stop him. The tyre was absolutely shredded and by the time we stopped there was a second flat. We had been travelling for 50 hours at this stage and by hour 50.5 we gave up on the minibus and hopped in a passing 4WD. By hour 55 we checked in to a super expensive hotel where we enjoyed luxuries like running water, a toilet that flushed and a hot water shower. All these have been relatively scarce in the past few weeks. We also took a break from local food and had some Mexican, sometimes the expat cocoon you find in capital cities can be oh so welcoming.

We spent today relaxing, wandering the streets of Dushanbe and trying to organise ourselves for Brett’s final week before he heads back to work on the 29th. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have felt a bit rushed, we could definitely have used a month in each but it was a good taster and if nothing else it was great to finally get to a small part of Central Asia. At the moment it looks like I’ll hang out in Tajikistan while Brett’s at work though apparently visa extensions are hard to get as the president’s daughter is out of town. She heads up the ministry in charge of these things and we’re told things don’t happen when she’s away. Nobody can tell us when she might be back. When Brett gets off the boat in early November we’ll meet up again in Cairo for some time in Egypt then north through the Middle East until he gets pulled back to work.

Tags: Dushanbe, Geisev Valley, Gumbezkul, Khorog, Murgab, Tajikistan