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

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

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

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