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