Will we, wont we in Dushanbe

Will we, wont we in Dushanbe
Dushanbe, Tajikistan
17th September, 2007
by Dan Murdoch

HERE in Dushanbe, chewing gum is money. Through some quirk of deflation, there are few low denomination coins in circulation. So you receive Wrigley’s Orbit in lieu of change at most shops- in the supermarket the cashier had a tray full of it. I was disappointed to learn the currency can only be exchanged one way- they refused to let me use a packet of faded Juicy Fruit to pay for a beer.

To 19th Century Russians, this mountainous region of Khanates and tribes was a piece in the Great Game- another step towards India. In the 1930s the Soviets kindly created a full republic here, inventing Tajikistan, but for the next 60 years propped the new nation up and used it as a staging post for their war in Afghanistan.
This rugged land was the Central Asian country worst affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union: high unemployment and infant mortality, a reliance on imported food, no real exports.

Within a few years civil war raged- Islamist rebels against the pro-government forces from the northern city of Khojend, Tajikistan’s richest city and long the power base of the ruling elite.
It ended in 1997, with compromise and the promise of political representation for the rebels. Since then the UN and the Agha Khan Foundation have supported the isolated mountain towns, which are slowly becoming more self sufficient.

Dushanbe, the capital, is the most Westernised city we have visited since Baku.
Bowling, discotheques and, strangely, an Ecuadorian restaurant.
A fountain filled square opposite the opera house serves as the centrepiece of the city. During the warm evenings it fills up with locals sitting out to relax with a beer. A strange looking mix of Persian and Russian, I saw two fearsome old babushkas wrapped in layers of scarves and throws knocking back Russian lager together, while nearby a dark, thin-featured man with a beard drank dark tea and smoked incessantly.
One afternoon a ‘Dancing Bear’ was in the square. I'm not into animal rights, but it was a pretty disturbing sight. The bear wasn’t dancing so much as rocking in the way you expect of mental patients in straight jackets- side to side its nuzzled snout swang, while it beat its paws in a twisted rhythm. It’s owner, a tall bony man wrapped in traditional robes, would prod the bear with a stick to manoeuvre it. I tried to take a surreptitious photo, but the owner was wily. He saw and started shouting for money as I turned and pretended not to hear.
Later that day I again crossed the square, and, on its owners command, the huge bear reared up on its hind legs and ran at me. I was sure the old man was getting his own back. I discovered that being charged by a seven foot mountain bear is one of life’s scarier experiences, but I did the best I could: let out a high pitch scream and ran.
We based ourselves near a Southern Fried Chicken and began preparing for the Pamir Highway.

“No. It is not possible for you to get across so quickly. I think five days in a good car. In yours….” The tour guide tailed off. “Last month we had a group of Italians stuck in the mountains for a week when they broke down. They had to get a part shipped from Europe. But they had all the right equipment, satellite phone… Do you have a satellite phone?”
We had two battered Nokias, one with a faulty battery.
“No.”
The guide shrugged as if the argument was won. We were sitting in his two-room office, the walls pinned with maps of the mountains. He looked European, spoke with an almost German accent and claimed to know the Pamirs as well as anyone.
We asked about our alternative route- a quick, straight path through the centre of the country, which seemed the most direct way into Kyrgyzstan.
He laughed: “No, no, you don’t go over there, that’s rebel territory- the area is full of the rebels who lost the war. You would be safe, but they would take dollars off you all the time. They will dress up in police uniforms and demand money. Anyway the border is closed to foreigners.”
He frowned and flattened out some papers on his desk.
“I don’t think you have planned your stay in Tajikistan very well.”
Carlos and I looked at each other. We hadn’t really planned it at all.
“If you do not do the Pamirs then you must go north, there is a route out of the country. It will take three days. You will have to go back over the Anzob Pass. But the borders between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are disputed. The Uzbeks have claimed strips of land, some of them only a few kilometres across. But you still need a visa to pass these areas. So maybe you need a new Uzbek visa- or maybe you can drive around the Uzbek land, I don’t know.
“I can offer no guarantees about this route. But with your schedule, the Pamirs are not possible.”

We headed back with the options heavy on our minds. Heading north would take three days, but would mean missing one of the highlights of the trip, and tackling Anzob again- not something we fancied.
But taking on the Pamirs would probably take six days if all went well. Far longer if we had issues.
Because of our visas we had 13 days to get to Russia. We needed to get out of Tajikistan, cross Kyrgyzstan, which has the worst roads in the region, then bomb through the flat Kazak steppe. Maybe 2,500 miles of mostly bad roads, many through the mountains, in 13 days. In a normal car, no problem- but it took us two months to get 10,000km by Trabant.
Overstaying our Kazak visa would certainly have financial consequences- but it would also give us even less time to cross Russia- an already challenging 1,000km of unknown, rarely used Siberian roads, in a week.

Carlos and I reluctantly agreed that we couldn’t attempt the Pamirs- with our schedule it was just about possible to cross them, but everything would have to run like clockwork. And to date things had hardly run like clockwork. Maybe more like a maladjusted sundial.

We put the decision making process to the rest of the group, who were disappointed but understood our argument.
“The question is,” summised OJ, “Do we want to do the Pamir Highway, or do we want to get to Cambodia? I want to get to Cambodia.”
And we all agreed.

Later that evening the weariness I had been carrying in my bones for the past few days turned into a fever, so I threw on all the clothes in my backpack and wrapped myself up in bed to sweat it out.

I was woken by Lovejoy.
He was excitable.
“We can do the Pamirs. I’ve been speaking with these Swiss people, they’ve just come off the mountains- they said it was easy. It’s only two days to Khorog, and then two more to the border. It’ll take four days.”
I felt terrible, delirious, sweaty, aching, shivering.
“What car were they driving?”
“They were in a big 4x4.”
“Right.”
“But they said the roads were fine.”
I was exhausted and in no mood to argue.
“Dude,” if offered in resignation, “I really want to do the Pamirs. If it’s possible then I'm up for it,” I said not realising the consequences of the words.
I had cast my vote.
The next day I lay in bed feeling bad while the rest of the group sorted out passes for the Highway and worked on the cars.
We were ready to go by seven. But Lovey still needed to work on some footage with Brady, who was flying home that night. So, in typical Trabant Trek fashion, we didn’t even leave till midnight. We had eleven days to get to Russia.

Ends
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The Anzob Pass

The Anzob Pass
Fan Moutains, Tajikistan
September 15, 2007
By Dan Murdoch
10,000km travelled


OUR caravan was going ridiculously slowly as we crawled the Mercedes delicately along the rugged trail. We were following a winding river valley, cut deep into the mountain side and flanked with shingly cliffs. Everywhere the rock face was coming away, and hundreds of Chinese labourers used diggers to clear the path and dynamite the more threatening boulders. On a few occasions we had to wait while a man in a JCB shifted tons of rubble from the road.
Megan and I decided to push ahead to try and reach Dushanbe. We’d scout the place and find a hotel- maybe put a brew on. It was only 130 kilometres, no big deal.
We made it through the crumbling rock formations into fertile river valleys where the once wide waters had deposited beaches of rounded grey, pebbles, threaded with streams and canals. The water was heavy with minerals, looking chalky grey and when we dipped our feet in at a ford we found it icy cold- straight off the glaciers.

It was there that a jeep from the Red Crescent passed us. There was a German inside who seemed shocked we had driven a Trabant out into the Central Asian mountains. He didn’t seem pleased. I would have been delighted to find a Morris Minor our there, but he had a stern demeanour.
We asked them about the Pamir highway: “The Pamir is very high. This could be a big problem for your cars. The road is ok, but very steep. You are going to Dushanbe? The next pass is very high, very difficult, maybe the worst in all Tajikistan,” he told us, “It will be a good test for you. You best approach it during daylight. It is not safe at night.”
With his warning fresh in our ears we stocked up on water, petrol and Snickers bars at a town made entirely of mud and rocks. The Anzob Pass peaks at 3,372m. We began the ascent.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FEZ didn’t sound good. The engine was throaty, guttural. We needed high revs in first just to make it up the steep paths. He began to lose power, so I got out and popped the bonnet thinking maybe the exhaust had come loose and was making that god awful coughing sound. I couldn’t see anything so cleaned out the air filter, let the engine cool for a bit, and we carried on, spiralling up the craggy grey brown slopes.
But the revs got higher with even less traction, I felt the steering shift. Suddenly turning right became incredibly light but turning left was stiff and awkward. Then Fez just stopped. The engine continued to rev, but to no avail- the wheels weren’t turning. It was the same symptoms as in Turkmenistan and I guessed that the transaxle had gone again. The last time it happened it was not a quick repair job.
I went to the front and looked under the bonnet, Megan and I stood on one side of the car and wondered what had happened. She circled around and then I heard here laughing with what sounded like a mixture of shock and despair. She was hiding her face, afraid to look.
“I think I’ve found the problem,” came her voice, muffled by her own hand masking her expression, “The wheel has come off.”
It was true. The right front wheel was no longer attached to the vehicle. That could be the problem.
This was the same wheel that TP had removed back in Tbilisi a month ago to check the brakes. And again back in Khiva last week. I remember him saying to me: “Just tell me if it sounds like its gonna fall off.”
Well it did.
It was perfect timing. We were high up the mountains, the sun was setting and within a few minutes we were smothered in a dark night time and the temperature began to drop. We had to laugh. No tools, no torch, not even a box of matches. Fucking awesome. 3,000m up the worst pass in Tajikistan without two sticks to rub together.
We ravaged our backpacks for warm clothes and resolved to hitch down a few kilometres to a café we had seen and weight for the others.
There, a few young boys served us a delightful selection of fat and chewy mutton.
Fat is a delicacy here and every time I picked at the plate in the hope of finding a piece of nicely barbecued meat, I seemed to come up with a huge lump of fatty lard. Decorum insisted I ate it.
They set up a bed for us- out in the cold Tajik night. The café was based around a stream which someone had funnelled into a hose. The water was apparently famous because throughout the night truckers stopped to fill their bottles and dowse their overheating engines.
Every time I woke up, protective of my bag of highly valuable but completely useless western electronics. I remember coming to in a daze, being shaken by a dirty man in a greasy jacket who was demanding that I open up the café.
Its not open I muttered, but he continued to hammer at the door until it began to give. I saw one of the boys open up and reason with him, then he left. The same thing happened again a few hours later.
At some point the other Trabbis arrived, we had left them a note on Fez and they came back down the mountain to find us. The diagnosis was bad: “Fez is fucked.” Thanks Lovejoy.
And of course, the job would be a lot easier with one of the A-frames we threw away earlier that day.
Nothing could be done that night, they were heading back down to find food and shelter, we’d try and do repairs and attempt the pass again in the morning. I opted to stay up in the hills for a fractured night of dosing and half dreams.
As a place to kip it was one of the stranger ones. But we managed. And in the morning, as the sun broke over the peaks to warm my bones and lift my chill, I was treated to some of the best views yet.
I watched an eagle fly low overhead, grazing the trail and circling the thermals, gradually ascending as the warm air lifted its wings. The mountains are veined with hundreds of icy streams- they shine out in milky grey, carrying abundant deposits of the minerals they have crossed, and imbuing the local drinking water with an earthy taste and the local legend of healing qualities.
The streams trickle down from the melting glaciers throughout the summer months, leaving the hillside sliced, channelled and carved.
We were in the Anzob Mountains according to my hosts, though the guide called them the Fan Mountains.
Truly it felt like the roof of the world, and I told Megan that I could stay up there- maybe open my own café I joked, pointing at an old ruined stone shack along the path.
We were waiting for the cavalry, but I wanted to be active and so I decided to go for a jog. Within minutes my lungs were burning and I stopped by the road to take deep lungfulls of the dusty air.
A passing family told us they had seen the Mercedes on the side of the road four kilometres away, leaking oil. So we headed down and met the others.
It was decided that a group of us would get a lift with some truckers all the way to Dushanbe. That would help reduce the weight in the cars and they could sort out a hotel, there was no point in eight of us staying here on the side of this mountain.
I went ahead, and endured eight hours in a Soviet truck with two locals. One was everything I’d expected of a Tajik- thin aquiline Iranian features, a long slender nose, with wide, close-set eyes. The other felt whiter- more European. They shared chewing tobacco between themselves the whole trip. To my alarm I was asked to move over for three hours of the descent while one put all his weight into pushing the gear stick into second. He explained to me in charades that if he let go the engine would pop out of second and into third. Then we go straight down the mountain, he explained with some dramatic flourishes.
They were an interesting double act. One of them would ask me question in Russian, I would answer as best I could, and the Iranian-type would transfer my message to his partner, no doubt convoluting it as much as I had done to his original question.
At one point I was presented with an apple that worms had at the very least tasted.
Bolox, I thought as I bit in, that means I have to share my Snickers.

Ends
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Gunther’s reprieve

Gunther’s reprieve
Fan Mountains, Tajikistan
14th September, 2007
by Dan Murdoch


WE WAITED for ten minutes then turned back to see what had happened to the others.
Gunther was pulled over to the side of the road. OJ and Carlos were emptying out the boot.
“We’re ditching Gunther. The oil pans gone again.”
My first thought was agreement. The oil pan has now cracked three times. I did the first one in Georgia a month ago. We used resin to fill the crack, but it took a day, and a seven-hour tow along some appalling roads.
When we got to Yerevan in Armenia I drove around the city’s mechanics trying to find someone to weld a protective plate under the Merkin– it took another day and another $100.
But in Turkmenistan it went again – this time sheered completely off by the plates that were supposed to be protecting it. Ooh the bitter irony.
That took a day to fix, but ended up costing us five days and hundreds of dollars when we over stayed our visas.
It always happens on the same sort of road- the boulder strewn , cratered paths through sandy desert or rocky mountains. We should probably drive slower on them.
But it isn’t just the oil pan that has given us trouble.
The windshield smashed in Romania, although that was entirely our fault, and we had to remove the remains of the LPG tank that Gabor, our Budapest mechanic, forgot to take out. More time, more money.
The hydraulic suspension has been a mare. Often refusing to go up, which limits the Mirkin to about 10mph. On occasions we have to jack up the back and rev the engine for a while to get it to lift. And the Red Barron, which handles like a boat, has had more punctures than all the Trabbis put together.
But Old Gunther cost us just $3,000 and is hopelessly overloaded. We filled it with enough spare parts to start our own junkyard. Odds and ends that I will never understand. Huge arced chunks of metal riveted to rusty plates on springs. Small, loose bolts in plastic dishes with light bulbs and bent washers. Greasy rods wrapped in plastic bags, tangled with dusty sheets and frayed rope.
But it’s Tony’s domain and we mostly leave it to him to organise. He uses a thoroughly personalised filing system undecipherable to even the most sideways thinking cryptologist.
Carrying a junkyard across the world in a 1979 Mercedes station wagon is almost as stupid as trying to get three Trabbis across. Perhaps this should be Merkin Mission.
Lovey was a bit more realistic about the prospect of ditching it. The Merc is meant to be our workhorse. If the Trabbis themselves were carrying all the extra weight, they would probably be breaking down regularly too.
We discussed the consequences:
More weight for the Trabbis, so probably more breakdowns.
Less spare parts, so a higher chance that we don’t reach Cambodia, or lose a car on the way.
Where do we leave it? On the side of the road? How will Tajik customs feel when we show up with one less car than we arrived in?
And the car is registered to Zsofi in Hungary, she has to present some papers to the authorities in Budapest to show what’s happened to the car.

The arguments for ditching it:
It’s a fucking pain the arse.
Fewer breakdowns, we’d make better time. Disputed.
It’s a gaping hole that we’re pouring cash into.
Less cars at the borders means less money to cross.
Nobody likes driving it.

Factored into our thinking was the Pamir Highway, the next great test for out motorcade.
The Pamir Mountains. As the Indian subcontinent pushes at the belly of Asia, the ripple and shock forces up the land right into the heart of Asia. The tectonic plates crack, split and push skyward, creating epic ranges that grow every year.
The world’s highest ranges collide here, the Tian Shan to the northeast, the Hindu Kush to the west, the Himalayas to the south. This is the roof of the world according to locals, and it feels like it.
The highway itself is a feat of Soviet engineering, built to link this remote outpost of their empire. It scales passes 5,000m high, rising and dipping through remote deserts and snowy plateaus in the sky. Icy mountain lakes leak clear clean water down the hillsides.
The valley kingdoms there are so isolated, so remote, that they have entirely different languages.
Why settle here in perfect isolation? Inhabited islands in the vast wilderness.
The world’s highest highway is not in terrible condition. But parts are incredibly steep, perhaps too steep for our overloaded Trabbis. The East Germans never imagined people would be taking the cars high above Europe’s tallest peaks, and we cant be sure how the engine will respond to the atmosphere’s thinning oxygen supply. Tony thinks he can adjust the carburettors to let more air in, but no one really knows.
Breaking down in the Pamirs would not be good. And without the Mercedes we would have even less of a chance of repairs.

In the end we compromised- we would keep the Mercedes but ditch a load of weight to try and reduce the amount of breakdowns.
There’s no doubt we didn’t need all the spares – something we blame Gabor for. I just know that we’ll need some of the parts that we have thrown away– probably just when we get to the other side of this mountain.

Ends
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To Samarkand

Samarkand
Samarkand, Uzbekistan
September 13, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

LONDON is big on stone, but here the thing it tiles – clay baked, aquatic colours, pieced together in delicate mosaics that shimmer across and inside buildings.
If ever you need someone to retile your bathroom, I would recommend an Uzbek.
People have lived and traded here since before Christ, even Alexander the Great was struck with wonder at the city. But Ghengis Khan sacked and levelled the place, leaving it a shell until another famous Mongol leader made it his capital.

Fourteenth Century Samarkand was the centre of an empire so remote that Europe new it mostly from the raids coming across its borders. The hordes sacked and pillaged their way across the Caucasus, Middle East, India and deep into Eastern Europe, destroying what they couldn’t steal.
The man who created the empire was Timur the Lame, Timurlane. A petty chief from a small Mongol settlement 50km from Samarkand. His reputation is hero and villain, neatly encapsulating the paradoxes that history knows of him.
He marked the cities he sacked with huge pyramids of human skulls, 80,000 counted in a heap in Baghdad. A keen chess player, he invented his own, more complex version of the game, with twice as many pieces and a larger board. Historians count the numbers he slaughtered in the tens of millions. A lover and collector of fine art, the illiterate Khan installed galleries of neat Islamic inscriptions in his palaces, but could never read them.
His empire stretched from Poland to Delhi, and although he sacked much of what he conquered, he took artists, scholars, philosophers and craftsmen back to Samarkand, which became a glorious hub of creativity, masking Timur’s own dispassionate mercilessness.
And despite his terrifying reputation, the travellers and traders who returned from the empire’s hub spoke of a vast and beautiful city, that became romanticised in Western imaginations. To Poe, Marlowe and Keats this was a city that encapsulated the majesty and mystery of the east.
But the empire crumbled, and so, as the Silk Road withered, did the city’s influence. Though Timur’s legend lives on.


Even now the city’s skyline is dominated by the imposing turquoise dome of the Bibi Khanim Mosque, built using the riches looted from India in the winter of 1398 when Timur sacked Delhi and beheaded 100,000 prisoners. Ninety elephants were needed to bring the haul back to Samarkand.
The mosque’s dome towers over the modern buildings that surround it, as if it were built by a breed of giants or aliens. Arriving at its gargantuan arch it is easy to imagine how dumbstruck a foreign traveller would have been in the 14th Century. There would have been few other monuments of such height and scale in the known world.
But the buildings ambition was also its undoing. The great dome of the mosque was too big, within years of completion great cracks had appeared in it and the buildings quickly became unsafe. This is earthquake territory and perhaps the shifting sands undid the construction. But the dome is a nice analogy for the end of all great empires – they reach their zenith, and the fulfillment of their own opulent glory is also their death sentence. Timurlane’s empire, like his architecture, became too big, too overstretched and ultimately crumbled from within.

Carlos told me a legend of the mosque. It was commissioned by Timurlane’s wife while he was away fighting. She wanted it to be a surprise for him upon his return, but the architect responsible became infatuated with the queen, and on the point of completion demanded a kiss before he would not finish the job.
“Because the queen was a slut she kissed him,” Carlos explained, “They probably did more than that, but the book did not say.
“So when Timurlane got back, he hears about this and he is not happy. The architect of course gets killed, he’s a stupid. But then Timerlane orders all women wear the veil across their face so that no man can see their lips and then they wont be filled with the desire to kiss them.”
Interesting. But probably rubbish.
The best story is every guidebook’s favourite.
An inscription on Timurlane’s mausoleum warned tht anyone who disturbed the great king’s tomb would unleash war on the land. In 1941, Soviet archaeologists opened up the cracked jade tomb that had sat in the Samarkand necropolis for five hundred years. Inside they found the perfectly preserved body of a short man, with mongol features, who was lame on his right side. Flecks of muscle still clung to his body, and a Mongol moustache still whisped across his lips.
Within a few days Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia.
True story.
After Timur’s death a succession of leaders followed, but his grandson Ulugh Beg is best remembered for his progressive vision and love of the sciences. Begh built a huge observatory that calculated the exact length of a year to within a few seconds of modern computers.


It is a credit to the Soviets that the buildings here have been so meticulously restored. By the end of the 19th Century they were little more than crumbling ruins. Many of the domes had collapsed, minarets fallen in on themselves, tiles and mosaics littered away. And that was before the great earthquakes that struck in the 1890s. They left Samarkand a hollow shell of its former glory.
But the Soviets went about the renovation with vigour. Their work is magnificent. Once again the buildings gleem with the reflection of millions of mosaic tiles.

The necropolis here has some of the best examples of tile work. They have stood here for millennia, even Genghis Khan’s troops refused to touch them. The mausoleums stretch back to before Timur’s time. Shirin-Beka-Oko was built by Timur for his sister in 1385. Inside it is beautiful cool blues and crisp whites. But the renovators have painted on the designs, which I imagine would have been tiled originally. The effect is crisp, clear and impressive, but somehow false.
Opposite the entrance, stands the Shadi-Mulk Oko, built for Timur’s niece. The tiles here are actual originals –the chipped and faded mosaics don’t shine as crisply or brightly, but they look and smell original. You can see that 14th Century ovens baked the tiles, 14th century hands painted the individual pieces and then pieced them together like a huge jigsaw.
The restoration of Samarkand is so stunning it has forced me to reassess my thoughts on Khiva. If Khiva had looked as ruined as pre-restoration Samarkand would I have gone there at all?

The city’s centrepiece is the Registan, a town square, surrounded on three sides by grand buildings. I can imagine Timur returning to the Registan with trophies from his latest conquest, the sides flanked by the glorious symmetry of the madrassas, which loom ineffable, reflecting the immutability of god.
Now the place has a swimming pool atmosphere. All those watery tiles and the strict tourist police blowing on whistles to keep visitors in line, sounding like lifeguards warning children not to dive in.

I wish I had stayed longer. But as ever we are at the whim of immigration officials, who have seemed determined not to issue us with decent length visas.
So we left for the short trip to the Tajik border, where we were met by a refreshing lack of paperwork and security.

Ends
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Battle Lines

Battle Lines
Turkmenistan
September

PEOPLE are firmly divided between cars now – there’s been no changing over since the second day of Turkmenistan when I had a row with Lovey about not wanting to drive Fez anymore. There is/was a stigma attached to the car – Megan and Marlena used to drive it the most and they were branded ‘The Muppets’ by someone in the group. They were blamed for ‘breaking’ fez. The little car has had a lot of trouble with its gears.
The problems have been there since Budapest, but the girl’s tendency to over-rev the engine has led to them being blamed for it. They found being called Muppets quite offensive and it created a bit of an us and them mentality. But since Brady’s arrival I have been in Fez too, and some of the flack heading the girl’s way has hit me.
So I told Lovey it was out of order that the girls and I get the blame for everything that’s gone wrong in Fez, when it’s the oldest car, and the one that’s been driven the most – we first had it for the Treffen back in June, and Carlos drive it around Budapest for a month before we even set off. So its natural that there’s more wear and tear.
But Lovey made it clear it was out fault: “It’s carelessness. Your just careless with it.”
I should have pointed out that carelessness is losing your wallet, credit card, camera and $300 of group money in the first few weeks of the trip. But of course I didn’t think of it at the time.
I asked him if h wanted to drive Fez and he said no, he was going to drive Ziggy from now on. And there it was, battle lines.
Megan and I couldn’t help but feel smug when, teo days later, he wrecked thee oil pan on Gunther. Careless, careless.
J Love is good company half the time, but the sometimes he can be a complete twat. Moody, arrogant, rude: “He’s spent all day storming around like a four year old toddler,” admitted Brady, exhausted from spending a day in the car with him.
When I'm feeling off I usually try to take a backseat, so as not to infect people with my attitude. But J Love does the opposite taking his anger out on everyone and trying to make people look bad.
Brady agrees: “He’s really not very good at dealing with it.”
The two have ridden together since Brady arrived in Baku. We call them the Brady Bunch because they are so coupled up. They normally sleep together in Ziggy, or curl up with a movie. I found them watching Brokeback Mountain late at night in Ziggy. So romantic. It’ll be interesting to see who gets invited into Ziggy with Lovey once Brady has gone. I imagine it’ll be OJ, they rode together before Bray’s arrival, but that will leave Carlos chumless. Megan I leaving us from Kazakhstan, so things should even up again there.

Marlena left us in Turkmenistan –she had a hellish time trying to get out of the country and into Uzbekistan too. Ended up having to live in the departure lounge of Tashkent airport for two days while the Embassy sorted it out.
So since then it has been just Megan and I in Fez, Lovey and Brady in Ziggy, Tony P and Zsofi in Dante, and Carlos an OJ in Gunther.
Being divided up has been strange, It has certainly made me more protective over my car – I'm keen to look after old Fez better and check his filters regularly etc. If we’d divvied up the cars sooner maybe people would have taken better care of them.
I get on well with Megan – she’s no girly girl, very hands on with the car, filling the oil, push starting it, defiantly driving around despite the jeers of men who find it impossible to imagine a woman driving.
She’s a great communicator –always expressing what’s on her mind through a combination of word, song and dance. She has a dance and sound affect to illustrate most stories, and you often hear her singing strange ditties to stray animals.
She is a natural pessimist, and sees the worst of every situation, whenever anything goes wrong (ie. Every couple of hours) she freaks out – aaagh it’s the end of the world- and rather than try and find a solution tends to just rip holes in everyone else’s suggestions. Most of the time I can just laugh her off, its just her nature and everyone’s so used to it they don’t take her seriously, but occasionally it does wind me up.
She really wants to be taken seriously by the boys, but her nay saying approach, compared to their solution driven one, means she often gets ignored. Which pisses her off: “I suggested that, like, twenty minutes ago.”
She is the only girl who really contributes. Zsofi was amazing in Budapest, her home city, where she organised sponsorship, press interviews, mechanics, parties- the works. But since then she’d been happy to take a back seat, and rarely inputs on any decisions.
Sweet Home Alabama comes on as we do repairs, and I overhear OJ announcing that: “You know, this old song still makes me proud to me American.”
Johnny America, sitting in a camping chair with his bulging muscles wearing his Yankee hat.

ends

Maps? Where we're going we don't need maps

Maps
Uzbekistan
September 12, 2007
By Dan Murdoch


DID I mention that we don’t have any maps?
We don’t have any maps.
It’s true.
We bought maps for all of the 20 countries we are crossing. But OJ left them on the shelf of his apartment in DC. So, for two months and 10,000km, we have been asking directions.
“Samarkand,” we shout out of the window at terrified pedestrians.
We pull over in Uzbek towns and ask for directions to the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, which is a little like pulling over in Surbiton and asking a passer-by if he knows the way to Aberdeen.
Initially they gaff off in their local tongue, but when they realise our incomprehension they join us in pointing and gesticulating. In Europe people tend to point in short sharp motions, angular juts and thrusts. Here in Central Asia the movements are more curved, a right hand turn becomes one half of a breaststroke.
We’re often lost. Especially in cities. We break traffic laws left right and centre, performing U-turns, illegal lefts and stopping in terribly unsafe places.

We do have some maps: the little diagrams in our guidebooks. But they are clearly not designed for road ravel, bearing few road names, a strange sense of distance, and marking junctions haphazardly.
I don’t know how many hours our lack of maps has cost us, probably in the dozens. But, it in a strange way, it has been liberating- blundering from one place to the next relying on our own initiative and the courtesy of strangers.
“Excuse me. Can you point me in the direction of Cambodia?”

ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com

Chaos Theory

Chaos Theory
14th September, 2007
by Dan Murdoch

Chaos Theory: A water vole farts in the Thames, and tsunamis strike the coast of Fiji. Or something like that.

Our instigator was the Baku-Turkmenbashi ferry. If that had taken the 12 hours it was meant to, rather than three days, we would have had got to Turkmenistan earlier, and had time to repair Gunther without overstaying our visas. That would have meant we could have got out of the country five days earlier and a few hundred dollars better off. The delay impacted on our Uzebek visas, meaning we had just six days in the country. You could spend six days in Samarkand alone. In the end we probably stayed a night too long in Buckara, maybe even Khiva- we should have pushed on to the wonders of Samarkand earlier. Tashkent, central Asia’s most important city, got missed out all together.

Small details have consequences that reach far into our trek . Perhaps if we’d not bargained so hard at the Baku port we would have got onto the earlier ferry. It left 12 hours earlier and may have got in days earlier for all we know. But I guess there is no planning for these circumstances.

Without a doubt this has been the hardest part of the trek. We arrived in Turkmenistan on the 31st August. It is now September 15th. In a fortnight we have covered just a couple of thousand miles. Constantly, whenever we have hit the road. Something has gone wrong. A car has broken down, mostly Gunther, but Fez has had touble too. It seems like we drive for an hour before a major stoppage. I don’t remember the last time we did a decent ten-hour journey in the right direction (We run out of gas, we run out of water, we take a wrong turn, we break down, we find a spot for a swim.)
We are now tied to our Russian visa – our visas run from September 18th to October 9th. We aren’t planning on seeing much in the way of sites there. The great barren emptiness of Siberia is a supposedly stunning wilderness, and the scenery is our site.
But we have a few thousand kilometres to travel on roads of unknown quality. Even if we arrive in Russia on schedule, we will have nine days to do it- which may be tough.
Making up for lost time over the next few weeks will be crucial.

ends