THE PLAN: An Update

THE PLAN: An Update
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
October 25th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

THE Plan has changed.
It is a theme of the Trek that our plan develops or mutates as constantly as the reasons for invading Iraq.
“Oh it is part of the War On Terror. No actually it is to find WMD. No sorry I meant it was to spread democracy in the Middle East. Shit, that’s not working- we did it to overthrow a tyrant.”
Well we should really head north. Oh no that won’t work, we’ll go east. Actually that cant happen. Ok we’ll ship the cars. Oh there are a few problems there. Fine, back to the original plan.
This has been happening for a month now.
Living in such shifting sands would probably make people of a more structured persuasion go slowly mental. But we Trekkers are used to it now.

In the last few days we have received new information:
First we learned it would take 40 days to ship our cars from Mongolia to Thailand. That seemed to rule out the northern route and leave us with little option but to ship from here. Then we found out shipping from here to Bangkok would also take 40 days, rather than the “two or three weeks” we were originally quoted.
Then we got an email from our Chinese travel agency saying they have managed to get our visa dates pushed back a fortnight.
The long and the short of it is that we are still heading north. But now we hope to return to the original plan and drive through China, rather than ship. We will probably be about a week late for our new visa date (which means about three weeks late for our original date), and then we will have a fortnight to blitz through China.
Today we sorted our Russian visas. Hopefully we leave tomorrow or Saturday.
But chances are the plan will have changed by then.

Ends
Mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs go to: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.Trabanttrek.org

Birthday Boy

Birthday Boy
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
October 19th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

TODAY was my birthday.
Twenty-five.
I woke up early, ate a healthy breakfast of fresh grapefruit and muesli, drank decaffeinated coffee without sugar, flossed, went for a jog, showered, removed hair from the plug hole, got a smart, respectable new look, put on clean, ironed clothes, applied for a mortgage, got a small business starter loan, and began the quest for a wife.
None of that is true, but I suppose some people think it should be. I imagine my grandfather would tell me that he had already founded and sold two newspapers by the time he was my age. My mother was raising her first child (me).
But times change, and my fellow trekkers, who are all older, seem to have just as few tangible links to responsible society as I do.
Once I have entered the cycle of job, home, family, bills etc it seems there will be little opportunity for gallivanting across the world until I retire from it all, in what forty years time? I don’t see the need to rush into the rat race, and I was strangely happy to celebrate my birthday in Bishkek, a city I hadn’t even heard of a few months ago.

We spent the afternoon doing a clear out of the cars- stripping them and cleaning them up, redistributing the weight more evenly and trying to get organised.
Tony put together a list of what is wrong with the cars:

Fez
Tyres bald
Rear control arm weld needs reinforcement
Front lights broken
Breaks very dodgy
Passenger door interior torn off
Speakers blown

Ziggy
Weld the bumper back into place
Fix the starter
Sticky throttle, replace cables
No mirrors
No turn signal
One headlight dim
Cracked cylinder head
Windshield wipers have been torn off
Look at brakes
Rear control arm weld needs reinforcement

Dante
Sticky throttle, replace cables
Starter wiring dodgy
Radio blown
New fuse box needed
There is no exhaust pipe
Strengthen rear control arm
Passenger door swings open randomly

I am told that ‘sticky throttle’ means the accelerator has a tendency to get stuck down: “Its fine on the highways,” Tony explained, “not so good in the cities.”

We drank beer and I was presented with a cake, which was rather touching. Then we went to a restaurant for dinner, before heading to Metro, the six trekkers plus a bunch of new friends from the hostel.
The bar is a tiny microcosm of the West, almost like the set of Cheers has been displaced to the heart of Asia. You can order a burger or a burrito with your Bud. Sports channels churn out American football and baseball. On one corner TV the Air Force Network plays constantly. I had no idea there was such a thing as AFN, and it is a truly wonderful sight- a mix of wholesome US shows and sports interspersed with military advertising and warnings.
In the pub I couldn’t help but overhear snippets of conversation. A burly looking American with a crew cut: “I can’t imagine anything worse than being sent to an Afghan prison. I’ve seen Afghan jails and they are frightening. Must be the worst place on earth…”
A nerdy looking NGO type: “…you know they’re looking for a new macro consultant at DPNG. They need someone to work in their democratisation department…”
A strange group of contractors, the military and charity workers, eating pizza in their little oasis.

From Metro to Golden Bull, via a tense standoff with some taxi drivers following an incident related to the etiquette of urinating in bushes.
It’s strange to be frisked by a man in military fatigues before you enter a club, but Westerners get in free at Golden Bull, for we are the money.
On Friday and Saturday night there are performances. A hooter sounds and evil looking henchman step in to clear the dance floor and keep the crowd orderly. Then the dancers step into the ring, normally a group of three or four boys or girls, all dressed up as gangsters, go-go girls or the like, performing well choreographed routines. Later in the evening some of the dancers get raunchier and expose a little flesh. It’s always impressive and breaks up the evening up nicely.
The women here love to dance and they pack the floor no matter what day of the week. There is always a ring of sour looking boyfriends standing around, staring menacingly at anyone who dances near their ladies.
The music in the club is generally rubbish, and my dancing is pathetic, truly terrible- I look a little like a deranged geography teacher having an epileptic fit at a trance party. So I get little joy from scaring people on the dance floor by shaking my thing to tunes I cant stand.
I tried it anyway.
It was rubbish.

As I was the birthday boy, I was called on stage by Mikayel, my favourite gay pop star. He pretended not to know me, despite numerous introductions over the past month, and spoke in Russian a lot while I was on stage. The gang cheered loudly for me as I was presented with a bottle of something that smelled and tasted of old, fizzy vinegar.
Pretty much my last memory was sharing it with OJ, but I must have enjoyed myself because I was the last one back, arriving at the yurt alone at around 6:30am.
Carlos returned an hour earlier and had to break into the toilets to free OJ, who had fallen asleep on the crapper. Apparently he’d been locked in there for two hours, and when Carlos finally woke him, the big Slav threw up everywhere.

Being away from the cars for so long has given me a chance to walk. It sounds strange, but I haven’t really walked anywhere in months. A few nights ago I did the stroll from the centre of town back to the hostel. It was about three in the morning, and Bishkek was quiet. I felt calm in the ghostly silence of a sleeping city and the simple stroll gave my mind the chance to relax and wander.
A police car pulled up by a drunk-looking prostitute, and a dog trotted past on its own night time adventure. I passed a few emptying clubs, men and women spilling out onto the street to be heckled by taxi drivers.
Man was born to walk. As the only mammal to spend its days on two feet, it is something that defines us, that makes us human. The great evolutionary leap from the trees and onto our hind legs, freeing up our hands and allowing us to use tools, to build, to stroll about the savannah with a spear.
It was a mild night and I paced out a steady rhythm that my heart and lungs soon fell into time with, sending me into a meditation.
I must walk more, I thought.
I’ll file that one with ‘learn to dance,’ and ‘take more exercise’.
I'm only 25. Plenty of time.

Ends
Mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs go to: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

The Reunion

The Reunion
Bishkek, Kyrgysztan
October 18th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

BANGKOK. It hovers in my mind like a giant, flashing out-card.
We ship the Trabbis from here in Bishkek, straight to the Thai capital. It takes two to three weeks. While the Trabbis are on route, we meander through China, taking in a few sights, then collect the cars and continue the short trip to Cambodia.
Nice and easy, and within a month we could be on a Cambodian beach, sitting on the bonnets of our cars, warmed by the thick orange sun, sipping Buckets of Joy and telling tales of far away places.
We’d be local celebrities, and could relax, knowing we had accomplished our mission, raised a few thousand dollars, and were the first people ever to get three old Trabants across half the world.
A blissful time, running through old stories with the boys and laughing at the days when we were stuck in bleak, miserable Bishkek. Maybe spend a fortnight on the beach? I’d be home for Christmas.
$6,300. That’s the price of the shipping, a little less than the money we will save by skipping China and that country’s exorbitant car visas.
Such a pleasant daydream.

The other option? The long northern route through Siberia, fraught with risk and danger.
We drive up the length of Kazakhstan, then veer east for a thousand miles into the Siberian wilderness, before dropping south into Mongolia and Ulaanbaatar, the world’s coldest capital city.
It was the route we always planned to take, but we are two months late. We had imagined Siberia in autumn. We will get Siberia in winter.
A time when the temperature dips to -20 ( average temperature in November in Novosibirsk -17). When snow covers the half-paved roads and icy winds slash across the land.
Then the solace of Mongolia? To quote the guide book’s advice: “We would not recommend driving in Mongolia. What appear on maps as roads are often little more than goat paths and the country has virtually no road signs.”
Perfect.
And the icing on the cake. From Ulaanbaatar we ship to Bangkok anyway. We just get there a month later, a month colder and a month poorer.

So it’s no contest right?
Right?

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ON THURSDAY (October 18th) Team USA arrived in Bishkek.
Carlos, Zsofi and I waited at a junction to greet them. We caught sight of Dante first, with OJ at the wheel, trying to drive and change gears with one hand and operate a video camera with the other. Dante’s passenger door is still sealed shut to counter its tendency to swing open without warning, so I jumped in through the window and gave the big Slav a hug.
It was great to see the Yanks, and we went straight to dinner. But it was immediately obvious that there were differences of opinion over what to do next.
“If we ship to Bangkok from here then that is the end of Trabant Trek,” said Lovey, who wasn’t eating.
The End Of Trabant Trek.
I wonder how many times I have heard that phrase. How many more times will it be uttered? (“I think about 50,” Carlos later predicted.)
Lovey had a point. On a map the drive from Bangkok to Phnom Penh in Cambodia looks simple. A week’s drive? Maybe give it two weeks to get down to the coast. Just two more weeks of driving.
“We’re only half way,” Lovey followed up, “so we drove half way to Cambodia and then shipped the cars the rest? That defeats the point.”
It is true that we are just halfway along our strange, circuitous route. But, by a more direct measure, we are more than halfway to Cambodia.
“But we’re going to ship anyway. Even if we go north we’re shipping through China, so what’s the difference?”: OJ was not a big fan of going north, and he was right- we have no way of getting through China, we’ve missed our visa dates and it takes two months to get new visas issued. No one’s prepared to stay here for two months, so if we go north we have to ship the cars through China anyway.
Lovey: “Yes but if we ship from Mongolia then at least we have driven as far as we possibly can along the route. Then we ship because we have no choice.”

The discussion continued in this fashion as we headed back to our homestay, and a few more people revealed their positions.
Tony P said he would not be heading south no matter what. He was dead against the idea of shipping to Bangkok and declared that he would head north on his own, without the cars if necessary. The countries to our north were among his highlights, particularly Mongolia, and he was adamant that he would not be missing them.
I spoke to OJ, who had spent a lot of time with TP in Khorog. He said: “I tried to tell him that even if we head north, we’ll just be driving through the country. It’s not like he can do all the things he wants in Mongolia: ride horses, go falconing, sleep in yurts. We wont have time for that anyway.”
But Tony wouldn’t even contemplate going south.

OJ then revealed that he had to be home by the end of November. He had promised his girlfriend and was determined not to let her down. The end of November seemed a pretty ridiculous promise to me, but I didn’t want to say. Surely she would understand? But OJ was adamant. At the latest he had to be back by early December.
Would it be possible to head north, ship the cars, and drive from Bangkok to Cambodia in time to send OJ home?
We worked through the route and the timing, went over the calculations.
No one knew how long it would take to ship from Ulaanbaatar to Bangkok so we just guessed at two weeks.
That meant maybe arriving in Bangkok December 5th if we were optimistic, December 15th if we realistic.
“So I can’t go north,” OJ said.
OJ doesn’t want to go north. He has a month left of his trip and, understandably, would rather be on a beach in Cambodia than in the snow of Siberia

So if we go south we lose Tony. If we go north we lose OJ.

Then a phone call and another bombshell.
Zsofi’s father, who has lent her the money for her Trek, has heard about our situation and is withdrawing funding.
He thinks Siberia will be too cold (-40c he incorrectly told her) and dangerous, and shipping the cars is just ridiculous.
(Nor was he impressed with our Korean option).
He told her he would continue to pay for her to get to Cambodia, but only by public transport.
“For me this is the end of Trabant Trek,” she told us.
49 to go.

Lovey said that if we were to ship the cars south he would probably go north; maybe take one Trabbi with Tony. He wasn’t definitive, he wants to be diplomatic, but he is very much in the northern camp.

Carlos was more drawn to the southern option.
“Siberia is cold. I don’t really see the point. I told my friend about all this and he said: ‘Hey, if you ship from Bishkek, you are not failures. You will have driven to Kyrgyzstan in Trabants man. And raised ten thousand dollars. That’s amazing.’”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BANGKOK. It hovers in my mind like a giant flashing out card.
In a month we could be sipping pina coladas on the beach.
But it does seem too easy. Maybe it is a cop out. Surely we should drive as far as the cars, the governments, our tempers and our budgets will allow before we resort to shipping.
I think back to the last time we had to make a call like this. Tajikistan and the Pamir Highway. We gambled then and it cost us three weeks. This will probably be the same.
But if we could go north, I would be up for it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No final decision could be made until we heard back from shipping companies. We knew Ulanbaatar-Bangkok was possible, we just didn’t know how much it would cost or how long it would take.
But getting the Russian visas that we would need to head north takes a week. So we resolved to put down the money to begin the process. OJ agreed to begin the application with us so as to keep all his options open.
The next day we got a quote from a shipping company: Ulaanbaatar-Bangkok, $5,000. He would be able to tell us how long the journey takes in a few days, but we reckon for a few weeks.
We were going to head north.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Yurt Life

Yurt Life
Bishkek, Kyrgysztan
15th October, 2007
by Dan Murdoch

OUR move to new accommodation has provided a pleasing respite from the perils of over familiarity.
For the first time in months we are surrounded by new, English-speaking faces: Kiwis, Brits, French, Israelis, Hungarians, Spanish, Americans.
We’ve found the backpacker trail, alive with traveller’s tales: where to go, what to see, who to avoid. A wealth of facts, half-truths, misinformation, opinion and downright exaggeration is channelled through the men and women who follow these strangely narrow corridors, as defined by the guidebooks that unite us.
The vodka-soaked stories that accompany our evenings are probably as close to a recreation of the old Silk Road as we will get.
Israelis and French coming from China warn us of pickpockets on the Xinjiang bus. Kiwis heading south to Pakistan inform us that the Khunjerab pass will be closing in a few weeks, sealing the border for the winter. We come from the west with dark warning of Turkmen bureaucracy and the importance of avoiding the Baku-Turkmenbashi ferry.
It must have been this way throughout Marco Polo’s time, but instead of carrying grubby backpacks the men had laden camels. Instead of gossiping into the night at hostels and guesthouses, the traders would have rested up at caravanesi, posted at intervals a days walk apart along many of the routes.
I imagine the same spirit of banter and adventure, nurtured by the local beverage, with a few delicacies from home.
After an evening’s exuberance during the Rugby World Cup semi-final, when I made enemies of a room full of Frenchman, alienated my companions with terrifying football chants, fell in a concrete flood ditch, inexplicably broke a bathroom mirror and then left the only pub in Bishkek that shows English sport without paying the bill, I awoke with a hangover.
The Israelis made me a hot concoction of ginger, honey and lemon as a cure, a Kiwi offered me Berrocca and the Hawaiian insisted I could drink it off. With such meetings of minds does the world’s knowledge spread.
Or maybe it’s the internet.
Either way, the relief of new conversation has helped us through our third week in Bishkek.

I was initially sceptical about our new home. It is a Yurt: a circular tent, with curved wooden props and a skin made of hides. In the top is a round hole that acts as a skylight during the day and a chimney during the evening. The hole also acts to release any stored warmth and instead encourage a stiff chill that develops as the night progresses until the small hours feel like a recurrence of the Karoo Ice Age.
Perhaps I had a romanticised notion of Yurt life: nomads wandering the steppe, and pitching camp where the prey dies, cooking tough mutton over the fire inside a hide covered shelter. In the morning they would wrap up and stroll down to an icy stream to fill gauds with water, then relight the fire for a brew.
But our Yurt has been set-up in a back garden in one of Bishkek’s less desirable neighbourhoods. It is not a large garden, it’s very obvious we are in an enclosed space, and there is a dormitory next to us where the less adventurous (or wiser) are staying. The nights are punctuated by the steady chorus of hounds, who give up at about the same time that the cockerels kick off.
But now I have enough blankets and sleep in a thick Russian military jacket, so I can overcome the yurt’s chill, and instead enjoy our new friends and the joys of access to a well-stocked kitchen complete with kettle.

After three months of early starts on the Trek, I have fallen into a strange, dreamy pattern here in Bishkek. We are killing time, treading water, and for the first time since the long lazy summer of my first year at university I have nothing to do. I am dossing.
With nothing to get up for there is little to go to bed for, and I sleep badly in our thin shelter, then lie in late.
My day involves going into town to find a bite to eat and browse the web to keep up with news from home. Then I find somewhere else to eat.
“Hey, I've lost weight,” Carlos told me, plucking at the sagging waistline of his jeans.
“I think I found it,” I replied looking at my own taught paunch. Must do some exercise, I thought, for the millionth time in Bishkek.
In the evenings I might visit Metro, a very Western bar well stocked with ex-pats, where they occasionally show the football, and, thankfully, have kept me in touch with the rugby. Maybe afterwards we go to Golden Bull. But after three weeks I am bored of drinking.
I am not yet frustrated by this general torpor, but I have been affected. I have less energy, spontaneity is dying out, a numbness has taken hold.
Still we are in limbo: torn between heading north into Siberia, or shipping south to Bangkok. Everyday we call new shipping companies desperate for information, quotes, rates, time scales. But progress is painfully slow.
Team USA should be here soon, then finally we can compare notes and get on with some decision-making.

Ends
Mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Megan has left the building

Megan has left the building
Bishkek
13 October, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”
Dr Seuss

MEGAN is no longer with us. I know I may have confused a few people by including a picture of her in my last blog, but I have checked and she has definitely left.
She announced she would be departing some time ago, so it was no surprise, just a disappointment.
We are horribly into the red, and she didn’t even have the original budget, so we always knew she wasn’t going to make it to Cambodia. She had hoped to leave from China, then Mongolia, then maybe Russia or Kazakhstan. But, as our delays increased, her point of departure shifted gradually further West until it settled gently, but uncomfortably, like an unwanted aunt on a sitting room sofa.
Once she had booked her flight the date slowly drifted upon us in the malaise of Bishkek. She flew out early on the morning of October 9th, exactly three months after I first met her.

Carlos, Zsofi and I stayed up late to show her to a taxi. It was a sad farewell, deep into a cold Bishkek night, with a few damp eyes. We tried to film the occasion, but the tape ran out at the point of departure. We waved goodbye to the cab, Zsofi continuing a forlorn flapping until the car was well out of view.
The three of us walked back arm in arm, and I felt a keen sense of loss. We hadn’t really spoken much about her going, so despite the forewarning, it still seemed a shock to see her empty bed.
She had been with me since my first day of Trabant Trek, July 9th, when she and Carlos greeted me at Budapest airport. I don’t know what I had expected, but she wasn’t it. Maybe I had imagined more of a straight-laced, all-American do-gooder, which she certainly isn’t (I mean that in a good way).
Opinionated, forthright, hands on, emotional, tough. No shrinking violet, she could throw a tantrum at a border guard in the blink of an eye, and return to normal in a few breaths.

We spent much of the Trek sharing Fez, particularly since Marlena left six weeks ago. Trapped in a five-foot by six-foot plastic lunch box for three months you get to know someone. Not that I could tell you too much about her history, her family, her past- her parents are teachers with the military, she has lived on military bases in Turkey, Korea and Europe. She has a brother and a sister, both older. She was freeloading at her sister’s and did a mundane office job before hitting the Trek.
But once you’re Trekking these details seem pretty irrelevant. More importantly, I could tell you that she was always keen to fix a flat, get dirty filling up the car and insisted on carrying her own stuff. She hides food in restaurants to take out to stray dogs. The sight of a camel, yak or bison makes her laugh out loud. She sings to animals. She doesn’t like sleeping in tents, can drive long into the night, rises before most and lets you know if you need to wash. She isn’t squeamish and knows how to dress a wound. She is confrontational.
She has a song and dance for every occasion and annotates her stories with strange acts of physical theatre.
While driving Fez on some endless, sandy, road I remember hearing her cackle and looking up to see she had taken a picture of my reflection in the rear view mirror. The photograph showed me sitting in the back, topless, in just my pants, wearing sand-smudged glasses and a hat, unconsciously pulling a face as I poured over the words on my laptop.
She said it was her abiding image of me because she had seen it so often.
I hope she still has it.

My image of her isn’t a still one, and couldn’t be captured by a camera.
She is moving, dancing; performing a jig to conclude a short story or illustrate an episode. Thrusting her hips to a rhythm only she hears, pulling a pout and shifting her head to an imagined beat. Her feet twist, crabbing her sideways, knees bouncing off each other comically before she finishes with a flourish, hand on hip, arms and legs cocked, pulling a ridiculous mockery of a model’s stare.
It makes me laugh every time.
Megan Calvert dances her own dance, and made my Trek all the brighter while she did.
Miss you Megs.

Ends
Mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Religion, vodka and gays

Religion, vodka and gays
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
October 2007
By Dan Murdoch

THE DOMINANT religion in this part of the world is Islam, which in some countries is taken pretty seriously.
Just over the Kopet Dag Mountains to the south is the extreme Iranian model, a theocracy based on Sharia law. Beyond the Hindu Kush and The Pamirs is the recently toppled but even more extreme Afghan Taliban, and the screaming-for-the-extreme Pakistani version.
In some of the villages and towns of these countries, women, if they are allowed out at all, must be veiled, sometimes covered head to toe. Being alone in a room with a man who is not your husband or a member of your family is prohibited.
I met a Serbian in Bishkek who works for an NGO that deals with the logistics of elections. A few years ago he was tasked with organising voting for 300,000 Afghan refugees sheltering in Pakistan ahead the historic Afghan elections:
“We met the village chiefs in their huts and first of all had to explain democracy to them. We told them that everyone would get a vote, including the women.
“’Great, great, good idea yes, the women should vote, yes’ they said.
“So we asked if we should set up separate polling stations for the men and the women.
“’What?’ the elders asked, ‘so the women will have to leave the house? No, no, no. This is not possible. Can’t you come round to see them?’
“There’s tens of thousands of homes, it’s not really possible…
“’Then the woman cannot vote.’”
Under the Taliban singing and dancing were banned. Even the game of chess was outlawed. And of course on the list of no-can-dos is the consumption of alcohol. Even in the medinas of Morocco, the opposite end of the Islamic world, alcohol is not sold.
Perhaps the tall mountains have sheltered the lands of Central Asia from the extremism lapping at their borders. Maybe the Soviet approach to Islam, attempting to fuse it with communist ideology, helped water down the religion’s illiberal edges.
For although the majority of the people here claim to be Muslim, few of these practises are noticeable. And no rule is abandoned more whole-heartedly than abstinence.
Judging from the huge proliferation of vodka, bandied about like nuclear secrets at an Axis of Evil conference, the culprits for this hedonism are likely to be the Russians.
In newsagents and grocery stores across the region it is quite usual to knock back a shot of vodka when you are picking up your morning paper. On the counter you can find a stack of grubby shot glasses, next to an open bottle of the local brew, and a plate of some sort of chaser- sliced cucumber, salted tomato, diced apple or whatever is to hand.
These ‘shop shots’ are generally pretty huge, often 70 or 80 millilitres, cost just a few pence, and are indulged in at regular intervals by working men of all persuasions.

Religion really is no boundary. Recently I got chatting to a serious, staid-looking man with a long Muslim beard: “We Muslims do not think it right to cut your beard,” and a little Islamic cap on the back of his head: “For Allah”.
“My religion is very important to me,” he told me, offering the local blessing by rubbing his hands down his face as if he were washing before going to the mosque.
Then he walked into a shop for a shot of vodka.
“Isn’t it Ramadan?” I asked as I followed, I had met a man the other day who had turned down water because it was daylight.
“Huh? Bah,” he washed the thought away with the fiery potion.

The effect of regularly quaffing terribly strong booze is tangible. I'm English and even I have noticed the amount of pissed shopkeepers and bus drivers.
The finest example must be Boris Yeltsin, who, along with standing on a tank to prevent a coup, declaring the break up of the Soviet Union and disbanding the Communist Party, was probably the most famous parliamentary piss head since Churchill.
Old Yeltsin loved a tipple: on an official visit to Ireland in 1994, he was too drunk to get off the plane at the airport, so had to stand-up the assembled dignitaries, refuel, and fly home to Russia.
In 1992, a little under the influence, he famously played the spoons on the head of Askar Akayev, the then president of Kyrgyzstan, and a few years later he was snapped by the press appearing to grab the Queen’s arse when she was on an official visit to Moscow.
His predecessor, Gorbachev, thought booze was stopping people from working and tried to ban the stuff, only making himself enemies. He may have been correct, but prohibition has never worked well with any drug, alcohol or otherwise, and in Russia vodka is a lucrative business.
Poor Yeltsin had no such qualms and, legend that he was, ended up making a right tit of himself through his alcoholism, pictures regularly appearing on international television of him dancing on stage at official functions with a bright red nose.

One morning I went down from our apartment to the little store to buy some eggs for an omelette. It was shortly before ten am and two men in their thirties were in the shop for a quick nip before they headed off to work.
A quick nip was a giant glass of vodka, downed in one, followed by a chunk of salted tomato.
Of course, as an intrepid field agent, keen to discover all I can about foreign cultures, I joined the men for a drink. They laughed a lot, but I knocked back the burning paint stripped without grimacing, shook hands and left.
The result was a merry morning of high-spirited banter and easy laughter.
The men seemed to be on to something so I stuck to the drink for the day and ended up in a nightclub, Golden Bull, where I may have been propositioned by Kyrgyzstan’s number one teen pop star, the nationally renowned singer, model and TV personality, Mikayel.

He was the club’s head of house, working the stage and occasionally showing off some rather impressive dance moves to the delight of the screaming ladies.
On our first meeting he appeared very vain. He showed Carlos and I a succession of videos on his mobile phone, offering a running commentary of each: “Oh and this is the one where I do a spin. And this is the one where the girls are screaming. And this is me singing. And this is me on stage…”
It went on and on: “And this is me, and this is me, and this is me…”
I asked if we might take a picture: “Oh yes, but not here, come with me.”
He escorted us to the lobby where there was a giant poster of him, looking sultry, emblazoned with the name ‘Mikayel’.
“We take it here, it is better.”
We took a few and then he insisted on looking through them.
“Oh no, not that one, that one is terrible. No delete it. No not that one. No delete it.”
“Um, ok,” I hesitated, but he watched intently to see that I did as I was told.
“Oh no and not that one. Delete it.”
“Ok.”
“And no delete. Delete….ah, there that one, good. Look at my smile. This one is the best. You may keep this one.”
“Oh, well thank you.”
It turns out that young Mikayel, who is 22, owns a stake in Golden Bull, and took me into his own private VIP suite within the club for a one-on-one interview.
But his opening question caught me a little off guard:
“So what is your orientation?”
As far as I could tell we were facing north.
“No, no. Oh…” he flicked a limp hand at me, “tut, it doesn’t matter.”
Ummm….do you mean sexual orientation?
“Yes,” he crossed one leg tightly over the other and lent an elbow on his knee.
“Well I'm straight,” and as an afterthought, in case I had not properly bridged the language barrier, I added, “I like girls…I’m not gay.’
“Ok, ok.” Bishkek’s biggest celebrity paused and eyed me: “It is just that you held my hand for so long when we met.”
“Oh, sorry. I am quite friendly….”
“What does that mean?” his eyebrow lifted.
“No, not like that. I mean I'm tactile…I’m just a friendly person.”
I was back-pedalling pathetically. There was a pause and I watched him measure me:
“But you have had gay experiences?”
“Excuse me? Umm well….” I tried to regain the initiative: “Are you gay?”
“Oh no,” I saw him try to drop the camp inflections of his accent, “It took me a long time to persuade the media that I am not gay.”
A young boy came in, bowed in deference and carefully presented two vodka shots from a tray. My host did not acknowledge him, the lad was clearly just a serf, but Mikayel lifted his glass and looked me in the eye.
“Come, we drink. To friendship,” then quickly added: “We only drink half,” he gestured at the midway point of the shot, raised the glass then took a quick sip.
I did the same.
“Are you religious?” I asked.
“Oh yes, I am a Muslim. Islam is very important to me.”
We finished the rest of the vodka.
After my homosexual denial he seemed to lose a little interest in our interview. He kept being called out to the bar to fulfil minor obligations, while I stayed in the VIP area steadily drinking the free vodka.

We met again in the club a few days later, and he practically blanked me.

Ends
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For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Meeting the Military

Meeting the military
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
October 3rd, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

BISHKEK has a large ex-pat community, mainly due to the Air Force Base at the airport. Used by Americans as a hub to supply Iraq, and by the UN as a base for operations in Afghanistan.
I’d imagined there’d be loads of GIs around the city, but there wasn’t a crew cut in site.
“US troops aren’t allowed off the base anymore,” an American contractor explained to me in a local bar, “they used to be allowed off but it didn’t work out. You have to remember, these guys aren’t like you and me, they’re not travellers. If someone bumps your elbow in the street you say hello. If these guys get jostled in the streets then they fight. They don’t understand being abroad. So they’re restricted to base after there was a bit of trouble.
“Bishkek is a transport hub. The troops on base could be anyone. They might be coming from operations in Afghanistan or Iraq, they could be straight from home, or they could be reservists.”
It must be strange coming from guarding a base in Iraq, where every local is a potential threat, to coming here.
“Damn straight. There was a big problem a few months ago when some guards at the base shot a local dead for carrying a screwdriver. That didn’t go down well with the Kyrgyz government.”
I asked how many troops there were at the base. He stepped back and raised his eyebrows.
“What?” I asked, “Do you know?”
“Oh I know alright, but that’s not the sort of question you’re supposed to ask,” he looked around then leaned in closer conspiratorially, “lets just say there’s more than 500, but not as many as 1,500.”

Later that evening the same line of questioning got Carlos and I into trouble.
During a visit to the local club, Golden Bull, Carlos was surprised to bump into a load of Spanish military. Naturally two of his first questions were: “What are you doing here?” and “How many of you are there?”
He got talking while I was having a brief nap in the lavatory. They were part of the UN mission in Afghanistan.
Carlos found me and took me to meet them, but I was too tired to overcome the language barrier and instead napped on a sofa.
He woke me at about four or five am, as the club was closing, he was still happy, laughing and joking with the Spanish. But in the space of the 100m walk from my resting place to the door it all changed.
I'm not sure what was said, but they became very angry and aggressive. There was a lot of shouting. They demanded passport numbers, identification cards, papers.
“Your friend is not English,” Carlos translated what they were saying, “Your friend is not English and you have nothing to do with any NGO.”
They were accusing us of being spies, based on Carlos’ early questions and something I must have said in an inebriated state during our walk to the door.
“What did you say Dan?” he asked me, shaking slightly, “did you say anything to them about ETA of Al’ Qaeda?”
It was impossible to say.
I admitted I might have blurted anything out. It was quite upsetting, particularly for Carlos who had previously been enjoying some camaraderie with his compatriots.
We stayed inside hoping they would leave, but they laid in wait, and we ended up having to sneak away.

A few days later we bumped into the Spanish military again. Carlos asked what had happened that night, but they would only respond: “We cannot tell you. We cannot tell you.”
But they did say that they thought I was a German.

I ordered a fry up at a place called Fat Boys along the strip. The ingredients were correct- bacon, sausage, eggs, beans, toast- but somehow it was wrong, cooked a little different, strange brands, it wasn’t right.
Surrounded by English and American accents- I could have been nursing a hang over at home. It was hard not to overhear the American next to me: “I came here in ’94. It was completely different then.”
He spoke in that slow ponderous way of some American southerners: “Everything stopped at eight pm, all the transport, all the traffic. There were almost no lights in the city at night. It was dangerous to walk around just because you couldn’t see anything.
“Things have changed a heck of a lot. That’s right.”


The walk from the café, near the President’s palace, to our accommodation on the other side of town was a slow descent into degradation. I passed a whole family of beggars- eldest son in a wheelchair, youngest son squealing on a chunk of cardboard, mother squatting open palmed and sad eyed, clutching a grimy baby. Further on an old man sat with his scarf-swaddled wife in front of a lonely pile of grapes and stared at a pocket watch as if time had stood still. They had cleverly set up stall outside the supermarket, stealing custom from the big chain. But few people stopped at their forlorn stand. The couple’s main competitors in the fast grape market were some fat, angry-looking Russian women.
The fall of the Russians. What status did these bleach blonde babushkas enjoy before the Soviet rug was pulled from under them? Now they sit with the Kyrgyz and compete to sell bruised fruit.

We were told our accommodation was student digs, but I saw few students there. The residents seemed to be the down on their luck, fallen-on-hard-times types: old men with crumpled fedoras and unironed shirts, a girl in her thirties with a perpetual scowl and a middle aged woman who refused to meet my eyes and ignored my daily greeting.
The courtyard was a menacing mix of old industrial waste, concrete slabs, metal pipes, bald tyres, and playful children.
One night the beggars who live under a curve in a pair of thick-set pipes set light to a few tyres and sat around the toxic smoke swigging vodka and shivering in their rags.
The next morning I kicked a football about with a few kids and a man in his early thirties approached and tried to head butt me. I wasn’t sure what he was shouting, and hoped he was being playful, but a kid behind him drew his finger across his throat and gestured that I should scarper.
Walking home late that evening, alone in the dark, a youngish man approached me. He was carrying a beer, and seemed a little the worse for wear, but didn’t come across as threatening.
“Why you walk alone? You have no friends?”
I thought he was mocking me: “No I have friends, they’re back at the apartment.”
“You not walk alone. This very dangerous. Many bad, bad men.”
I pulled my bag closer to me, felt the outline of my laptop jutting through the canvas, the lump of my camera protruding from my pocket, the mobile phone snuggled next to it, and my wallet, misleadingly fat with single dollar bills.
“This bad city. Bishkek dangerous. At night never alone.
“I work in Almaty. Big money there. I manage shop. $700 for one month. Here $300. Big money, oh yes, Kazakhstan beautiful. Money, money, money. Not dangerous like Bishkek. Here no money, many bad man.”
He took great pains to walk me near to my street then, for a reason I could not fathom offered me a small amount of cash, which I refused, and then he waved me off.
When I arrived outside our block two young men shouted at me in Russian, making me catch my breath. I was relieved to turn and see them clutching their heart in the local greeting.
I remembered the parting advice of one of the Richter ladies who had found the place for us: “Don’t leave your documents in your room, It is not safe.”
How reassuring, thanks for looking after us.
The following day I told a friendly waiter in a nearby restaurant that I was staying near Osh Bazaar: “You must be careful,” he replied, “Bishkek is a dangerous and criminal place. There is a lot of bad people here, especially at the bazaar. You must be careful.”
At night the babushkas close a thick iron grill across the entrance to our corridor. I'm not sure if it makes me feel safe or not.

The following day I was relieved to be told by Richter that we had outstayed our welcome in their free accommodation. They explained that there was a conference taking place for nurses from all over Kyrgyzstan and our rooms had been booked up. We had been there two weeks, it seemed fair enough.
The Richter girls showed us to a pleasant family run hostel already full of tourists, where there were showering facilities and a breakfast option, all for $6 a night.
I was pleased to get away from the seedy Osh Bazaar, but four days later I returned to pick up some contact lenses that I had forgotten, and our rooms, the ones booked up by the nurses, stood glaringly empty.

Ends
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The Center for the Protection of Children, Bishkek

The Centre for the Protection of Children
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
October 16th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

AMONG the busy stalls and back alleys of Bishkek’s bazaars, one organisation is offering a way out for young children forced to abandon their education and work to survive.
The Centre for the Protection of Children (CPC) has spent the last nine years working with children living on Bishkek’s streets, or working instead of going to school.
The burgeoning charity, which has 35 staff on the pay-roll, is based in Astrahanskay Street, where it has classrooms, workshops, offices, a medical centre and dormitories that house 20 children who were previously living rough.
It also has premises in Osh Bazaar and Dordoy Bazaar, which have a regular programme of workshops, a daily meal and first aid facilities along with access to counselling and advice for both children and parents.

From these bases the CPC team run outreach programmes that meet working children in the bazaars and try to encourage them to return to school.
CPC co-founder and executive Mira Itikeeva admits it is a difficult task: “It is a very hard job. Sometimes these children are living in terrible conditions in unfinished buildings like the ones near Fujika Park. They want to go to school, but they are often working to survive, just to buy bread, so it is hard for them.”
Despite the size of the task CPC boasts sending 112 children back into education last year, and another 118 this academic year.
“It is important to work with the schools. They are sometimes not ready to take these children back because they have gaps in their education and the teachers can have a bad attitude,” Mrs Itikeeva added.
But the charity is worried that this process has been made more difficult by the recent price rises for bread and vegetables: “Because of this more families need money and there may be more children being sent out to work,” said Mrs Itikeeva.
CPC helps around 170 children on a daily basis, but as many as 350 children, and their families, over the course of a year.
Training offered by the charity includes leadership and communication skills, advice on children’s rights and sexual health, along with informal classes in maths, reading and writing to help children return to school.
The charity’s sewing workshop in Astrahanskay Street has proved a particular success. Some of the girls who attend have been able to return to education and still make more money using their newfound skills than they ever did working in the bazaar. According to Mrs Itikeeva this also helps the children’s parents to understand the value of education


For the children living with CPC, long-term solutions are reunification with parents or family, or adoption. However, Mrs Itikeeva says international adoption is a problem because there is no monitoring system, leaving the children open to exploitation. CPC does run a programme allowing individuals to sponsor a child’s education. For 350s ($10) a month donors can help their chosen child to pay for school supplies and uniforms. The charity is planning to start providing reports of the child’s progress to their sponsors twice a year to try and boost take up of the scheme.

The CPC operation is funded by donations, some from the Netherlands, but the vast majority from the Danish charity Operation Day’s Work.
Despite her organisation’s majority foreign funding, Mrs Itikeeva thinks the Kyrgyz authorities are slowly coming round to the issue: “At the end of the 90s the government was saying that there were no street children in Bishkek, now they recognise there is a problem. But still there are no specific laws about child labour.”
She hopes the work of CPC will continue to provide support for children who have nowhere else to turn.

Ends

Crossroads: An Update

Crossroad: An Update
Bishkek, Dushanbe
October 9, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

"The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
Winston Churchill

WE ARE scattered. The team is spread across two countries and three cities in and around Central Asia’s craggy, imposing` mountain ranges.

Lovey has spent the last ten days in Dushanbe trying to sort out visas for our American contingent. The Tajik capital is currently hosting an international conference and every hotel in the city is booked, forcing J Lov to prostitute himself to find a place to stay. The poor chap has spent most of his days queuing and arguing at embassies, walking the same streets between the internet café, consulate and his accommodation.

OJ and TP, the other surviving members of Team USA, are in Khorog, high in the Pamir Mountains. Both of them are under house arrest, closely guarded by the Tajik KGB. It is illegal for foreigners to be out without their passports, which Lovey has in Dushanbe, and the pair were repeatedly arrested during their first few days without documents.
You would think a six-foot-three goliath of a Yank and a moustachioed Mexican with a Mohawk would be able to escape attention in a small Tajik mountain village. Maybe the brightly coloured German cars blew their cover?
Whatever happened, I’ll find out soon, but I know they have been subjected to constant police harassment and are now bound to their homestay, where, thankfully, the owners have taken pity and begun to feed them for free each night.
I'm not sure what curious cabin fever their enforced proximity has created, but during a recent Gmail chat both complained to me, quite separately, that the other smelled.
Team Europe, Carlos, Zsofi and I, are in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, staying in what may have been the inspiration for Prisoner Cell Block H, but without the lesbians. Actually we are probably Prisoner Cell Block Q or R, nothing as luxurious as H, where I hear they have their own shower.

Our continuing mission: to get to Cambodia, has taken some violent twists in the last few weeks. Crippled by a series of breakdowns on the Tajik-Afghan border, we were forced to stall the Trek to confront a number of burgeoning visa crises.
Between us we need new visas for the next four countries along our route: Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia. This being former-Soviet territory, any brush with authority puts you at the delightful whimsy of former-Soviet bureaucracy, and the visas have been a handful, setting us back a week, and they are still not finished.
But the delay has thrown up an even greater hurdle- looming large in the distance is China, an undoubted highlight of the trip, a booming country and culture we are all desperate to taste. But also a system of paperwork and officialdom that makes Turkmenistan look like a Parisian hippy community of liberal utopians.
To get a visa for our expedition in China takes has taken three months and is costing us $8,000 for the documents for three cars and six people. Our points of entry and exit are fixed, as are the dates, and the Chinese insist we pay to have a guide with us for the whole month. Hence the ridiculous costs involved.
The problem is we are almost undoubtedly going to miss our fixed entry date. But what we find infuriating is that we are actually on China’s western frontier right now- both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have open borders with the country. But the Chinese are refusing to let us change our point of entry. This means we have to circumnavigate the whole of north west China, a trip of thousands of kilometres up the length of Kazakhstan, across miles of Siberian wilderness, and down through Mongolia, a country that has more horses than cars.
Of course this was our original route, but, judging on previous form, it will probably take three weeks to a month. We have two weeks before we have to enter China, according to the terms of our visa.
Not gonna happen.
So we apply for a new visa? It takes at least two months to do and will mean another $2,000 deposit. No one can afford to sit in freezing Mongolia, where it was -14c yesterday, for two months.
So we have to seriously contemplate an alternative to China. We still haven’t paid $6,000 for our Chinese visas, so we have $6,000 to play with to find a way of avoiding the country.
“Blue sky thinking people, lets think outside the box here.”
Or something like that.
So far our ‘best idea’, and I use that term loosely, is to ship the cars through or around the country.
We’ve had to get our atlases out, but one option is to drive to Vladivostok, Russia’s icy eastern port, and get a ferry from there to the northern part of South Korea. We then drive down the Korean peninsular to the southern port of Pusan where we would get a cargo ship to take us around China- possibly to Singapore. From there we could drive north through Malaysia and Thailand, and east into Cambodia.
Crazy.
The other option is to drive to Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, and try to get the cars onto a freight train to take them through China, possibly to Bangkok, Thailand or Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We would either go along with the freight or sort out individual visas (a much easier process) and travel behind. Then collect the cars and continue to Cambodia.
Mental.
Both options mean taking on the challenging drive to the north east of Asia almost a month later than originally planned. The weather is closing in- it is freezing here already- and it will mean tackling snow and ice, which we hadn’t anticipated. This area is also the most isolated part of the trip, a terrible place to break down, and if we go through Mongolia there will be few roads.
The shipping option could also involve a couple of weeks at sea.
A third option is to try and get the cars onto a train to Ulaanbaatar from here in Bishkek. If it is possible there is a slim hope we can still make our Chinese visa and would miss the terrible drive around the borders of China.

So there we go. We are in contact with freight and shipping companies (if anyone knows of any in the region, please get in touch) and await their replies to see if any of these ‘plans’ are even feasible.
Hopefully Lovey will fly back to Khorog tomorrow and Team USA can begin the trip over the Pamir Mountains. It’s maybe a week’s drive till they get here to Bishkek, then we need another four or five days to sort out final visas and make our decision.

Our route and our trek could soon be changing dramatically. Personally, I'm excited. I love change, and I love the idea that we can tackle the Chinese challenge by doing something completely ridiculous like taking to the sea with the Trabbis.
I'm up for the shipping option.
I wonder what Korea is like in November?

Ends
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Notes on showering etiquette in Central Asia

Notes on showering etiquette in Central Asia
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
October 8th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

THE SHOWERING situation here is quite an adventure. The facilities are very much communal, shared between three large apartment blocks. Inside what I shall politely call the gentleman’s washroom, but may be better termed a small, filthy cesspit, there are three showers, which in my experience are shared between six people.
The routine is this: you jump in the shower for a quick rinse, wait for the naked men surrounding you to start staring, then step out and begin to lather yourself. You will have to wait near a shower for at least five minutes, dripping and soapy like some fluffy yeti, for a gap to appear beneath the crowded nozzles. When you see a space it is imperative to jump in quickly and wash off the spuds, before the other nudies get annoyed.
You may then retreat to the relative safety of the dressing area, pleasantly decorated with live moss, where people perpetually leave the door open to the wider world, leaving you horribly at risk of a terrible exposure.
Of course I always seem to arrive in the washroom when there is a deep queue for each shower. So I have to hover, in full naked glory, waiting for my go and wondering where to look. I normally stare at my miniature aeroplane bottle of shampoo, which is about the size of a teabag and written entirely in Russian, a language so foreign it uses a different alphabet, and is utterly, utterly indecipherable to me.
I'm sure this ruse is wearing off, but I have yet to work out the correct posture to adopt when standing in a room full of naked Kyrgyz.
But I tell you this: I have seen more cock in the last ten days than the preceding ten years.
And the Asian penis has been hugely underestimated.

Ends
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Impressions of Osh and Bishkek

Impressions of Osh and Bishkek
Kyrgyzstan
September 29th – October 3rd, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

OSH is famous for its bazaar, though I wasn’t that impressed. My favourite stall
sold a single roller blade, four wind-dial telephones, a selection of second hand electricity sockets, various ratchets, one faucet, two plates, a cashiers tray, a wing mirror, one large cooking pot and assorted nuts, bolts and screws.
The man’s entire business.

Cobblers lined the rusting bridge repairing tatty shoes over a dirty river.
From the thick crowd an old man held my hand tight: “Manchester United?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Aha,” he celebrated this victory of communication long and hard before expanding: “Anglia Ruski tree nil”
“Yes, we beat the Russians.”
“Aha,” another victory cry, he still wouldn’t release my hand, “Chelsea?”
“No, Chelsea are boring, Chelsea eta scoochnaya.”
“Aha,” he loved that one and squeezed my hand tightly. The conversation was typical of my travels. Pretty much everywhere I have been in the world, except the United States, people speak the international language of football.
“Beckham, America?”
Even here, in this strange outpost of civilisation, Beckham’s move the states is big news.

Many of the city’s buildings still bear communist murals depicting strong boned, clean shaven men in factory overalls and bright eyed independent women in jeans in front of ploughed field and assembly lines. At least Sovietism was a victory for women’s rights.
A fantastic variety of hats top the streets. Little skull caps, clinging to the back of the head, sharp cut fedoras in pale blue with embroidered ribbons, the sweeping Pamir hat looking impossibly balanced and ready to topple.

We visited Salaman mountain- where all your dreams come true. According to legend Mohammed came through here and camped for the night. At the spot where he slept the ground rose up to form a mountain in the exact shape of his reclined body.
The mountain is etched with lover’s graffiti, messages entirely suitable of a geological miracle, such as “Samir loves Ruia”.
If you take a dried thistle from the mountain’s soil you can cleanse your home of evil spirits, and by tying a strip of ribbon to a tree your dreams will come true in a week. You slide down a few metres of smoothed rock seven times to cure back problems and place your hand in a hole three times to have a wish granted. Pilgrims crawl into a tiny crevice to pray to Allah, and joggers exercise on the undulating path. The foot of the hill is a sprawling cemetery of people wishing to forever lie where the Prophet once rested.
From the top Osh stretches out across the wide river valley, a beautiful respite from the mountains. It looked greener than from the ground, a neat grid of tree lined roads, few buildings breaking the two-storey skyline.


In Kyrgyzstan one of our main sponsors, the pharmaceutical giant Richter, has a base. So here they have been helping us out with visas, transport and accommodation.
The country is divided into north and south by a range of snowy mountains. The north is the more Russified, and has always held the reigns of power from the capital, Bishkek. The south is more conservative and more Muslim, and, in 2003 revolted, beginning in the cities of Osh and Jahalabad.
I asked one of our Richter contacts how things had changed since then.
“In 2003,” she told me, “People wanted a change- the president had put all the power in his family and people were not happy. After that many people left Kyrgyzstan. It was a difficult time. But now things are safe. People are calm and friendly, they have smiles.
”On October 21 we vote on a new constitution and that should help make the country more democratic.”
But when I arrived in Bishkek and asked the same question, I got a different answer: “Things are worse since 2003,” the Richter lady told me. She said she was Russian, but was born in Kyrgyzstan, to Kyrgyz parents, and had lived and worked here all her life. “There is less money. The country is going nowhere. There is no money here. Not like Kazakhstan or Russia. Kyrgyz people do not make anything. They just buy and sell things in the bazaar.
“The culture of our people is not great. They do not wash their hands before they eat, they eat from the same plate. I cannot understand it.”
We were driving through the city and she paused to point: “That is our White House,” she explained, gesturing at a crumbling concrete edifice surrounded by limp fountains.
What about the new constitution?
“Bah,” she scoffed, “three weeks until the vote and still we have not been allowed to see the document. Why do you think that is? No, there will be no more rights for us. The leaders don’t care about democracy.”
Is there corruption?
“Oh yes, of course. Everywhere. People have so little money. If they are in a position with power then they use it to make money for themselves. I think corruption is in the blood of our people.”
Strong words, but I didn’t take them to heart. A wannabe Russian living in the city.

We had been looking forward to the accommodation Richter had promised to provide in Bishkek, but when we started pulling into a down-trodden ill-paved courtyard my heart sank.
We got out of the car, and a thick breeze scooped up rafts of dust, sand and litter and swung them into shawled faces of poor old ladies. This is not what I was hoping for. Our apartment had the demoralising ambiance of a prison block, even the cockroaches looked embarrassed to be seen there. Then the cherry: no showers. The simplest of pleasures, but we were desperate for a hot shower, it had been days. But we would have to go to a public washroom across the street.

Ends
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The Pamir Highway

The Pamir Highway
Khorog, Tajikistan to Osh, Kyrgystan
September 27th and 28th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

RETRACING the steps we had taken the day before by Trabbi, I was immediately struck by how different it is riding in a normal car.
For the first time in two and a half months people weren’t staring at us.
Hey, it’s us.
But nothing.
No waving, no screaming, no kids running alongside our cars, no old men tapping on the chassis and raising querying brows. The police don’t even stop us now. We’re just like any other backpackers- except there really aren’t any other backpackers around here.
Our star has truly fallen.
Hey, we used to be famous.
Whatever, get to the back of the line.
It’s strange.
On the other hand it’s nice to be a casual tourist for a week. I can revel in the anonymity. I don’t have to get up at seven. There’s no worrying about the cars, the group, the plan, the money, the breakdowns, the… … …
We are in two teams- Team USA and Team Europe. A strange circle, when I first met Lovey and TP, back in 2001, we designated them Team USA.


The Pamir Highway between Khorog and Morghab reminded me of the Turkmen desert. But it is freezing cold and two miles high.
Millions of years ago it would have been a desert at a reasonable level- another chunk of rolling Central Asian plains. But the steady shove of the Indian subcontinent has raised it an inch a year until now this bleak plain sits 3,000m high, incongruous in the mountains.
It has the same bleached boulders and sun starched sands as any desert- all the colours washed out. It is bone chillingly cold in the shade and at night, when a wind picks up it grates the flesh and painfully rattles the nerves.
But still, the sun is powerful enough to burn.
The land has its own bleak beauty. Other than the cold the only sign that we were in the mountains were the distant snowy peaks and glaciers- 6,000m tall but resting easy on the eye line.
We stopped at thermal springs and dipped in boiling hot, greenish water that smelled of eggs. The flow had been funnelled into a small hotel complex with a café and a tv. I imagine the other trekkers would be delighted to find this little oasis in the desert, and maybe spend some time there. But we had just half an hour as our share taxi was keen to plough on. There were seven of us in the five-seater, with two crammed into the boot. Luckily we had sent our bags ahead.
Our car crossed crumbling bridges with old tank parts for decoration, twisted steel reinforcement, protruding from the cracked concrete.
The drive wasn’t difficult, we’d been told this leg was pretty flat, and it was true, there was little that I imagined would trouble the Trabbis. Though I expect those words to come back to haunt me.

We stayed at the Murghab Hotel. There was only enough electricity to power two light bulbs at night. It’s freezing. Washing my hands felt like thrusting them into a furnace. No wonder Marco Polo complained when he crossed the mountains.
We sat on mats on the floor with an old man and his old son. The father was white haired and Chinese looking, his eyes seemed almost closed, and he rocked back and forth when he laughed like an old bear. His son was deferential, filling up his father’s cup at every opportunity, and pausing to allow him to speak. The old man dipped hard Chinese bread into his tea. We shared two cups between us- one person would drain their ration then hand it back to the younger old man, who would pour the dregs into a dish, then refill the cup and pass it to the next person.
It felt primitive and natural to share the simplest of commodities, hot water and a few tealeaves. Then they offered peaches and a strange fruit that looked and tasted like a cross between an apple and a pear.
There is little choice but to bed early in the mountains and on my way to the freezing outdoor squat I heard the Hound Chorus kicking up as the town’s muts began their nightly battle for territory, invading in packs and defending rival incursions.

The town is a jagged mix of one-storey buildings, connected by dirt tracks with one wide paved road running through it. Deceptively large, there are 400 pupils at the school. The following morning I walked in with one who had the same thoughts you’d expect of any 15-year-old. He hated learning the periodic table for chemistry, and didn’t know why he was studying Arabic, English, Russian, Chinese and Tajik.
We hired a 4x4 to take us to Osh in Kyrgyzstan, a twelve-hour drive. The scenery was far more spectacular then the previous day, a geologist’s wet dream.
Out of endless desert springs a huge icy lake of deep aquamarine formed by a meteor in another time. Peaty bogs turn to hard brown tundra and frozen streams irrigate the bleak permafrost. Thick yellow grass meets jet black sands and hardy shrubs cling to orange earth.
A haze of sand floated like a heat haze on the horizon. Rising from the opaque, the hills escalate in tiered in colours. Ochre sands and a kaleidoscope of stones flanked the arrow straight path.
Man has made little impression on this landscape. Just three signs of human existence: the long road, lined by electricity poles and flanked by the fiercely barbed Chinese border.
We hugged that border for hours, with it menacing lines of razors. I was surprised to find a lone gate in the fence, near to nothing, with no path leading up to it, but invitingly open.

We stopped at a mountain village for tea and were served by a strikingly good looking family- high cheekboned with broad honest faces, the epitome of mountain health. The husband was Chinese looking with his flat cap and practical clothes.
We ate deer with hard bread and a sour yoghurt made of yaks milk. To much amusement Zsofi dropped her purse into the toilet pit, and the husband had to fish it out with a pole.

With our driver acting as guide, the spectacularly located border was no problem. But it is surely one of the world’s longest crossings- more than 20km of no man’s land between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The landscape here is instantly different. Shimmering emerald cliffs moated by chocolate clay. Mounded of saffron hills bearded with cumin.
We followed miles of rounded pebbles marking a former riverbed, sparkling out like broken glass.
The road changed too, deteriorating suddenly into an unpaved rockface, the surface becoming a treacherous mix of slick clay and jagged stone.
I can imagine the little Trabbis being stuck here- where few but eagles roam, stuck in the strange space between countries. Their only respite is that it is mostly downhill from there.
At Kyrgyz customs Zsofi noticed the guards were tearing paged from the register to use as toilet paper.
The final Kyrgyz border post was closed by the time we reached it, but we paid the guard $10 to let us through. I breathed a sigh of relief to leave Tajikistan behind me, we’d been stuck there too long, and continued to Osh.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit danmurdoch.blogspot.com or trabanttrek.org

Breaking Up

The Break Up
Khorog, Pamir Mountains, Tajikistan,
September 25th and 26th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
Kahlil Gibran

WE STOCKED up on supplies in Khorog, sent our bags ahead in a van to lighten our load, and headed off in caravan- one Mercedes short of a full trek. Today we tackle the Pamirs- the range of mountains that have loomed large in our consciousness for so long. Would our cars be able to make the journey? Do we really have the time to tackle the mountains? What if we break down up there? How will the carburettors cope with the reduced oxygen in the air?
The unknowns added to the excitement as we drove through a warm sunny lunchtime, filling up on petrol and beginning on the low foothills leading to the first pass, a warm-up on the well-paved nursery slopes.

Thirty kilometres in there was a bang from under Fez, the car listed to the right and the sound of tyre on chassis filled the cabin.
Thirty kilometres.
The distance hangs on our horizon like an angry dust storm- the near unbreakable limit of a day’s travel by Trabbi in Tajikistan.
Megan and I jumped out and watched a puddle of oil form under the car. The rear right wheel was jutting strangely into the wheel arch. The rear control arm looked broken again and this time under the minimum of duress, but we couldn’t tell where the oil was coming from.
We prowled the Trabbi and waited for the others to realise we were missing and turn back. When the formation had assembled we got the car up on a jack and removed the wheel- the reinforced metal bar that held the disc in place was sheered in half, a recurrence of the injury we had welded a few days before.
“The guy did an ok job,” TP said of the welder, “but it’s a bad break. We might need a new piece.”
And the oil?
“A bolt has popped out of the engine mount, it keeps all the transmission fluid in place. You’re lucky that the wheel broke or you would have destroyed the engine driving it without any oil.”
So the oil was no big deal- in little time TP had found a replacement bolt, and we could refill it easily. But the control arm was a real problem.
“We can go back into town and get it welded properly, maybe try and get it reinforced,” TP said, “But this is probably going to keep happening.”
We had ditched the replacement part back on the Turkmen border three weeks ago. “It is almost impossible to break one of these,” TP had confidently asserted at the time, “they have been reinforced.”
“Maybe we should go back to Turkmenistan and get the piece?” Carlos suggested with a smile, to widespread derision.
We discussed getting a new part. There were a few people in Hungary who would ship it to us- but where to? Bishkek? That meant getting over the mountains. Dushanbe? That meant going back on ourselves. And how long would it take?
Either way our visas had just four days to run and we had learned in Turkmenistan that the former Soviet republics of Central Asia are pretty pernickety about visas. Lovey reaffirmed our suspicions: “The Swiss people I spoke to in Dushanbe had overstayed their visas when they were in Murghab and they had to go all the way back to Dushanbe to sort it out. It was going to take them two weeks to do.”
Back to Dushanbe for a two week wait was a nightmare scenario that would jeopardise our China visa’s fixed entry date and possibly the whole trip.

“So maybe we should dump Fez and carry on,” OJ suggested.
Adding to his line of argument was the dodgy bearing on Fez’s front right wheel. It had never been properly fixed since the wheel fell off on the Anzob Pass, and despite multiple attempts TP had been unable to find a new bearing to fit. He freely admitted that we were driving Fez until the wheel fell off again, but he couldn’t give us a decent approximation of when that would happen.
From our previous experiences I would say it was destined to happen as far from civilisation as physically possible, when we’re low on food and petrol, at night, in subzero temperatures, with no cash left in a country that thinks Mastercard is a cotton derivative and we’ve found a rare stretch of road that you can actually hit 80kmph on.
The problem with dumping Fez is that, without the Mercedes, we would be down to two cars. Dante can take two people, Ziggy three, but there were seven of us. Megan had already announced her intention to leave. She was out of cash. But we would still be one slot short.
OJ: “So someone either goes home or follows by public transport.”
So we draw straws to see who drops out? To me that was a horrifying scenario. It was unrealistic to think anyone could follow the trek by public transport- the trek operates in its own little time zone it would be nigh on impossible to keep track of.
“Unless anyone here is seriously considering dropping out anyway, I don’t think we should consider that an option,” I ventured. I would rather ride in the boot of Ziggy for the next two months than have to fly home. I would prefer to spend a month in the mountains working on Fez than face the short straw.

But even if we got the car welded that night and set off the second it was done, making it to the border before our visas expired would be a massive gamble. Judging from our previous progress a two-day trip could take us a week.
So someone was going to have to fly back to Dushanbe and try to extend visas. There was no point the remaining six people all sitting it out in Khorog, so we decided that three trekkers and Megan should go ahead to Kyrgyzstan, this would help reduce the weight in the Trabbis, increasing the chances of them making it over the mountains, and also reduce the number of people with visa issues.
Two people would stay and work on the Trabbis and one person would fly to Dushanbe. Various combinations were experimented with, but eventually we decided the Europeans (Carles, Zsofi and I) would go ahead with Megan. TP had to stay with the cars, and he chose OJ to stick with him, and Lovey would fly to Dushanbe to extend the visas and try to get a new passport for himself, as he had run out of pages.

We were dividing.
Team Europe and Team USA.
There is a strange symmetry to it. We are almost exactly two months into what is supposed to be a four-month trip. We are almost geographically half way, about 12,000km into a 24,000km journey. We’ve shed the support vehicle that we felt was holding us back, and after Megan’s departure it will be just the elite six who plan to go the whole way to Cambodia.
And after two months of Trekking, and for most of us two and a half months away from home, we’d enjoy a break from the road. Even if it was an enforced lay-off, Team Europe would be spending a week in the Russified Kyrgyz city of Bishkek, Team USA would have a week in the stunning mountain town of Khorog.

We bought lots of beer and went back to our hostel to discuss the divide and work through a number of potential scenarios for the next few weeks. It was entirely possible that we wouldn’t meet up again for a fortnight, even three weeks.
We got drunk and, knowing we were dividing, laughed easily and let the pressure of the past few months ebb away. I felt happy, and sucked away on the grainy, green tobacco powder a trucker had given me near Anzob. You put a pinch of it under you tongue for five minutes, then spit the dregs out. It tastes bitter, nasty and causes the under tongue to throb. It made me feel light headed, grin inanely, grind my teeth and concentrate on not being sick. Then I dressed up as an explorer using a lamp stand and outdoor rug, complete with walking stick and compass and collapsed in bed.


Driving Ziggy into town the following day to find a bus to Murghab, I was struck by a feeling of loss. There was a chance that I would never drive a Trabant again. This could be the end of Trabant Trek for Team Europe.
The cars may not make it over the mountains. They may break irreparably, or have to turn and head back through the north of the country- both options had been raised the previous night.
Most of us agreed that even if the Trabbis faltered, we would continue to Cambodia, but it wouldn’t be the same.

As I climbed into our hired 4x4 with Carlos, Megan and Zsofi, I felt excited to be away from the rigours of trekking, to be heading off without the limitations of Trabant travel.
But it felt like the end of a story, or the closing of a book, and I just hoped that Trabant Trek would reopen for Part 2.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or trabanttrek.org
Trabant

Goodbye Gunther

Come in number four. Your time is up.
Mountains, Tajikistan
18th-23rd September
by Dan Murdoch

“So where did you go this summer?”
“Oh I spent a week on the Tajik-Afghan border actually. Lovely part of the world.”

IF WE were going to make it across the Pamirs in six days, we needed everything to run smoothly. So within a few hours of leaving Dushanbe, Dante broke- the clutch plate smashed to pieces.

We parked up by the road and slept. TP, OJ and Carlos dealt with it the next day – it took until 4pm, then we set off again, already two thirds of a day behind.
I led in Fez, asking the bemused locals for directions. A bearded man on a horse with a long stick guided us some of the way, our progress so slow that he kept overtaking. In one hamlet I pulled up beside a hunched old man wearing long robes. He had been staring at us intensely.
“Khorog?” I asked.
“Khorog?” he spat back, then his craggy face broke into a mad toothless cackle: “Khorog? Khahahahkahahakahaha,” and he waved us down a dirt track.
The roads were in a shocking condition, and 20km into the drive Ziggy started having battery problems. We made ragged progress and ended up towing him to the nearby town of Cigar. Tony and OJ spent a long time looking at the car, but we decided we needed a new battery, and it was getting too dark to tow the thing on the rough, cliff hugging roads. So again we bedded down to sleep on the trail, having covered just 30km all day.
I spent the whole night fighting running battles with a gang if guerrilla street ants. I met their scouts within minutes of rolling out my mat, outside next to Fez. I flicked them away, but they returned with reinforcement, and I only woke when my position was overrun. There was little choice but to retreat, but the crafty buggers had trapped me between the mined Pyanj riverbanks and the lorry track road. Out thunk by a colony of Tajik mountain ants.
I squeezed myself between the front of Fez and the back of Ziggy- but was absurdly paranoid that someone would wake up in the morning, pull away and crush me. Wearing a blindfold and earplugs it was feasible that I wouldn’t hear them, and I jumped throughout the night thinking the Trabbis were moving.
After a turbulent few hours I was forced up with the rest of the trekkers, and found I’d been a banquet. The ants had feasted on all exposed skin- hands, wrists, neck and face- they’d even found their way to the exposed flesh between my jumper and my trousers, leaving a line of inflamed welts across my stomach that itched like buggery for a week.

Our route took us along the Pyanj River, the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and as we made our stop-start progress the Afghanis gazed at us over the water. Just a hundred meters of milky blue rapids divided us, but it could be a hundred years. On the Afghan bank, laden donkeys plod along rough paths cut into the mountainside, the trail propped up in places by piles of uncut shingle. Many of the men wear traditional robes, and have cloth wrapped around their heads. They support their weight with crooked shanks and return to homes made from piles of boulders loosely wattled together.
On our side we drove along a paved road, passing 4x4s, people carriers and Russian Kamaz lorries. Many of the kids have football shirts, mostly Real Madrid, and go to school in whitewashed buildings with corrugated roofs courtesy of the Agha Khan Foundation.
The water here flows fast, coming quickly down from the high peaks, and the boulder strewn riverbed forms impressive and noisy rapids, swarming with battling eddies and counter currents.
During a quest for engine oil I asked a local if it is possible to swim across, he held an imaginary rifle up to his shoulder and let off a few phantom rounds into my chest.
It would be great to touch Afghanistan. I'm not sure why, but we all had a strong urge to go to the place. I settled for throwing rocks onto the Afghan side of the stream and sharing cheers and waves with the Afghan’s I could attract.

Cigar had a surreal stretch of perfect paving running through it- a stark contrast to the rough, winding tracks we had been following through the mountains, and for a while we hoped the road might stay like that for a few hundred kilometres.
But within a few Ks of leaving we were back on the potholed paths, ripe for breakdowns.
We found a new battery for Ziggy, breakfasted, filled up on petrol and got back into the cars with a sense of hope that we could really push on for Khorog. It was going to be a great day.
But ten kilometres later the clutch went on the Mercedes. We tried to soldier on by pumping it, but no good- the plate was wrecked. We got a tow back into town and spent another day and night with a mechanic getting it fixed. It cost us $40, but we ate well, and were in good spirits when we headed off early the next morning. We joked that our new target wasn’t Khorog, but to get more than 30 km in one sitting- something we’d yet to achieve in the three days we’d been trying for the Pamirs.
But half an hour later, and just 20km in, the oil pan went on the Mercedes. We took it well and spent four hours patching the thing up on the side of the road.
We set off again shortly after 4pm, four days into what should have been a 20-hour drive, wondering if we would ever make it out of the mountains.


A white 4x4 from the UN passed us as we were push-starting Ziggy. They were in the area as part of the World Food Programme, and were checking that local schools were handing out the amount of food that they claimed.
Their car’s exhaust had been redirected through a chimney that towered high above the engine- an ominous warning of how high the rivers can get.
I asked one of the UN guys for some guidance with our route. All good was the verdict, the roads were passable.
What about the proximity to Afghanistan?
“It’s safe. There used to be fighters coming over until ‘97, but after that none.”
In 1997 Tajikistan’s civil war ended. The rebels, who lost, had been supported by the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. The Afghan’s had flooded across the porous national divide to provide men and arms. Now they do the same to provide drugs- heroine and opium. Tajikistan is one of the world’s biggest confiscators of narcotics, 19kg of heroin was seized while we were there.
“There are still mines though. Don’t go off the roads between here and here,” he gestured at a large section of the map. There was a lot laid during the war.”
As we wound our way through the valleys we saw the detritus of conflict- the odd burned out armoured personnel carrier, tank tracks, abandoned military installations. Every few miles we would pass another pair of soldiers- ridiculously young lads, fresh faced without hints of stubble, carrying machine guns and patrolling the border.

We managed just ten painful kilometres before the Great Red Gherkin’s clutch went again, and a new hole appeared in the oil pan.
It was too much. TP started hitting the car with a stick. He had hated the thing ever since we got it, but had resolutely nursed it across half of Eurasia. But those last few days had been its final chance. Tajikistan proved the better of it. We had to dump it.
In retrospect old Gunther probably wasn’t the best car to attempt the Pamir Highway in- as Lovey said: “This thing was built for German families to drive along the Autobahn.”
Not ideal for attempting some of the highest, most rugged roads on the planet.
But still, we felt let down. We’d tried so hard to get the Red Baron across- it had cost us so many days and so much money. But we couldn’t keep going.
We decided to strip it of anything of use and leave it by the road.
It was a strange situation. Parked precariously at a passing point in a road that looked chiselled into a huge cliff face. The river gushed noisily 40 feet below us, and every hour another Kamaz would squeeze past us.
Night fell quickly- making the job of unloading and repacking all the cars that little bit more exciting.
To take the spare Trabbi parts we needed from Gunther we had to dump anything we could. Overloaded Trabbis were more likely to break down and less likely to make it over the mountains.
We had a mass clearout then stripped Gunther of anything useful- battery, alternator, fuses, seat belts for towing, petrol, rear view mirror- we salvaged all we could.
After hours of organising, repacking, discarding and debating, we were ready. We said our goodbyes to Gunther, held a mock wake, closed the doors and left the keys in the ignition. It would be of use to someone round here.
We pulled the cars into formation, revved up and set off- Dante, Fez then Ziggy.
But Ziggy didn’t move. He started, stalled, then died.
The new battery was kaput. We weren’t going anywhere.
Half of us went to sleep, half of us worked on installing a new alternator.

We woke early, did final checks, and set off minus one Mercedes. It was strange looking behind and not seeing the lumbering beast following us. I’d love to know where it is now. Whenever we went to get it repaired someone would offer to buy it off us for a pittance- so I'm sure it is being put to use.

Morning’s in the mountains are always cold, but as the sun stretched out and the shadows retreated I began removing jumpers and settling into the view from the back of Fez.
Megan was driving, we were leading and the ride was terrible. We hit some almighty bumps- two in particular that flung the car in the air, probably the worst bumps we’d hit. At one point I heard a loud, twanging snap from beneath me. I assumed it was the springs in the seat going and didn’t mention it.
We kept getting ahead of the convoy, and Megan would throw a mini hissy fit. She’d stop the car, looking angrily behind her and snarling: “Where the fuck are they? Why can’t they keep up today? Why are they driving like grandmas?”
Her lack of composure when things aren’t going right is probably the thing that winds me up the most.
I suggested she was driving a little fast and we should try to keep together.
“I'm not even driving that fast,” she snapped.

During one particularly vicious bump our exhaust became detached and for a few hundred metres we used it as a impromptu plough.
Ten minutes later we realised the exhaust had been shaken loose by the jolting and when TP had a look he saw that Fez’s left side had slumped. After a record-breaking 100km stint, the rear left control arm had snapped. I was pissed off with Megan. I felt she’d been driving recklessly because she was in a mood and, maybe unfairly, decided she’d broken Fez.
We found a welder, but it was a huge break, and it is clear it will keep reappearing over the next two months- the sort of niggling injury that really slows you down. I was angry.
I wondered into a nearby field to try and draw out my frustration. OJ found me and we sat beneath the shade of a pear tree. A woman from the farm came over and offered us some freshly washed tomatoes. A few minutes later her toddling son came out with a tray of walnuts, and then a loaf of sliced bread. TP turned up and we sat and ate, using greasy, oily hands- unwashed in five days. The woman’s husband came home and demanded we step inside for tea. She put on a wonderful spread of dried berry’s, almonds, biscuits and toffees, with more bread, tomatoes, walnuts and tea.
They wanted nothing, they didn’t even join us to eat- just saw dirty, unkempt, foreigners and did what they could to ease our burden and show their hospitality.
The gesture filled me with warmth and again I wondered at the kindness we’ve been graced with for so long now.


The weld was done quickly and we made it to Khorog. It had taken five days to get 400km. A demoralising nightmare and without a doubt the hardest leg of the trip so far, we had to ditch a car and a load of equipment to make it. And we hadn’t even reached the Pamir Highway. How would we handle that, especially with even less parts and even more weight, in the unforgiving, isolated Pamir Mountains, where the passes reach three miles high and the temperature drops well below freezing.
We booked into a guesthouse and ate mountain food. Tomorrow we would stock up on supplies and head for the hills.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
You can read more of Dan’s blogs at: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org