Adventures in Asia: Karakul Lake, Tajikistan

I began my morning today playing with the little girl at the homestay, who must be three or four years old and was very excited to greet me when I got up. She found a book I am reading and for some reason found it especially interesting, particularly once she realized it had a few colour pictures in the middle. 

After breakfast, we packed up and headed out of the village, but stopped soon after at this gorgeous spring-fed pool. 

A bit further along the highway we encountered a herd of yak, our first that were grazing right along the highway. Unlike the sheep and goat herds, the yak herds do not seem to require any human care while they are out and about.

In addition to the Marco Polo sheep, the Pamirs are famous for another wild animal, the snow leopard, and a snow leopard sanctuary was our next stop. Sadly, it was a warm morning, and the snow leopards had all retreated into their dens. One of them apparently just had a couple of cubs, so it felt especially disappointing to not get to see them!

We did not see any real snow leopards, but we did see a snow leopard statue outside of Murghab, the next down the highway. Murghab has other statutes, too, such as this one of Lenin. 

Murghab is by far the largest place in the Pamirs outside of Khorog, and it is a bit of a crossroads because a highway branches off from the M41 here and carries on into China. Actually the vast majority of the international traffic we have encountered is not coming from or heading to Kyrgyzstan, as we are, but rather coming from or heading to China. 

In Murghab, we went to a pharmacy, where I could get more antibiotics as Dr. Aitor had recommended I do a couple of days ago. 

Then, we visited the bazaar, which is unique in that most of the shops are in shipping containers! It may not be picturesque, but in a rough climate, I suppose it makes a lot of sense.

Inside many of them, you might forget you were in a shipping container!

After the bazaar we ate lunch in a restaurant across the street.

The bathrooms for this restaurant are two rusting, cut-out water tanks in the "backyard"! 

Onward from Murghab there was far less traffic (not that the M41 is particularly busy even on the other side of Murghab!) as we turned north toward the Kyrgyz border.

Some ways after Murghab we reached the highest point on the Pamir Highway, the Hushang Pass at 4655 metres, and this is what makes it the "second highest international highway" in the world.

We stopped up here, but it was really cold and windy and not terribly pleasant, so we did not stay long!

Another interesting aspect of the highway north of Murghab is the border fence running alongside. Afghanistan is well behind us, now, but the border with China is close, and the fence runs along a wide "no man's land" in between.

Our stop for tonight is Karakul Lake, and as we approached we drove through a herd of yak, and one of them took off and surprised me with his speed!

The lake is large and saline, and salty residue lines the shore. It was miserably cold and windy (we are still at nearly 4000 metres here), so again we did not spend too much time outside of the Land Cruiser.

Home Stay Erkin is where we are staying.

After check in, I braved the cold and walked around the village.

You can tell I am still enjoying see yak, because I tried to make friends with this guy (he was not interested).

(by the way, in the video above, those are Chinese mountains in the distance behind the yak)

Adventures in Asia: Alichur, Tajikistan

Today was my favourite day yet on the Pamir Highway tour. We began our day slowly driving up the switchbacks out of Langar. The road quality was very poor for most of the morning and many times we slowed or stopped; sometimes, for another vehicle . . .

. . . but, much more often, for animals!

The scenery was still great, but different than the prior days, with much less vegetation. 

The Panj River was also narrowing considerably, such that I felt more and more compelled to cross over into Afghanistan. Instead, here, I settled for tossing a rock across the international border.

Further along, we saw a caravan of nine camels. They were visible with the naked eye, and they are in the photo below, but were really too far away to photograph effectively. 

But, around the next bend or two, a whole herd of Bactrian camels had waded across the river to graze in Tajikistan! I was pretty excited to get to interact with them up close.

Eventually we turned north and said goodbye to Afghanistan as we began getting closer to the M41 again. First, however, we pulled over at the "trailhead" (never would have guessed it was a trailhead, so good thing we have a driver who knows what he is doing!) for the Panorama Ridge hike. Rick and Sarah were not up for the climb--we were at 4,000 metres above sea level now, and the hike involved climbing another 800. But, they seemed genuinely happy for me to do it, and the doctor friend I had made at the homestay last night, Aitor, was here, too, and so the two of us started climbing. This was an incredible hike, but very, very difficult, almost entirely because of the altitude. Aitor had hiked yesterday at a similar altitude, so was much more comfortable (quite possibly he is also in better shape than I am), but I struggled. I ended up setting a twenty second timer and climbing for twenty seconds, then stopping to catch my breath for twenty. Sometimes, I had to give myself another twenty seconds to rest, and once or twice even stopped for sixty seconds! Likely this was not an efficient way to climb, but I did not trust myself to go at a slow enough pace without making myself stop altogether. Anyway, Aitor ended up a good ten minutes ahead of me and summited before I did. He took this picture of me--I am the black dot way down the slope!

I did make it, however, and the views were epic. This photo is looking south and that mountain range is in Afghanistan, but the tallest mountains, behind the front ones, are actually in Pakistan! 

In the photo below, we are seeing the snow packed peaks of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Some of the Pakistan peaks, by the way, are well over 6000 metres tall, and I believe this is the first time I have ever seen mountains that high (it is also the first time I have ever been at 4800+ metres!).

We descended a slightly different route than we had ascended, and ended up wading through a bit of snow. Also, despite the apparent lack of significant vegetation (i.e., food), there were marmots everywhere!

Back down at the vehicle, I said goodbye to Aitor and our Land Cruiser got back on the road. The scenery at this altitude was entirely different than it had been in the Panj River valley, but we did still encounter water, although apparently most of the lakes are quite salty. 

Our next stop was Bulunkul Lake, where there were many birds and what I found to be a surprisingly wide range of varieties. It was only here, an hour or so after descending from the ridge, that I began feeling like myself again (e.g., feeling the need for food).

At a village close by (I think the village is also called Bulunkul) we stopped for a late lunch of fried fish. While the ladies prepared lunch (in the yurt in the picture below, which is apparently their cookhouse), we had ten minutes or so to walk around the village. 

The village was quite interesting, but it must be a tough place to live. Temperatures of -50 C are apparently quite common here in the winter! The average low in January is -24 C, which is more than ten degrees colder than the average low in Edmonton in the same month! 

Yak herding is evidently the major economic activity for the village, and I enjoyed watching the yaks on the edge of the village.

Yak dung is the main fuel for cooking and heating, and many of the houses had paddies drying in the sun.

We ate our meal in the main room of a homestay in the village. In this room they had a picture of a daughter who had recently graduated high school and is now in Moscow at university. Evidently, from the prominence of the photo, the family is very proud of her. We talked to a daughter-in-law of the family, who also went to post-secondary school, but closer to home in Khorog. The daughter-in-law also showed us this head of a Marco Polo sheep. It may be difficult to appreciate its size in a photo, but it is pretty close to the size of a cow head. Because of their size and their impressive horns, they are popular now for trophy hunting, but the daughter-in-law explained that locals can no longer hunt them, a fact she seemed frustrated by. 

After lunch, we rejoined the highway, now the M41 again.

Our stop for tonight is Alichur village. Alichur is a bit bigger than Bulunkul, and seems to get more visitors due to its location more directly on the M41, but do not let that fool you, because it is still a very small place!

The homestay our driver took us to at first was full, but another family had plenty of room. This the house--you can see the solar on the roof, which is something you learn to look for to know if there will be electricity or not. 

The electricity situation here is great, but in other ways this was the roughest place we have stayed yet. The toilets are holes in a shack out back, and the heat source is a stove in the corner (but believe me, this system does work!). 

The lady who hosted us heated a bucket of water for me to shower with. This is the first time I have ever done a bucket shower, but to be honest I would take this system any day over a cold shower or one with poor pressure.

From the pictures above and below, you can see that despite the rough life by modern Western standards, they keep the house very clean and as comfortable as they can. I had the room below to myself, while Rick and Sarah had an adjoining room for themselves (we just had a curtain in between, and they had to pass through my room to go outside, so by our standards there was not much privacy; but, meanwhile, the family and our driver all shared the only other room!).

The photo below is of the main room, with the kitchen and dining area, but it was too cold this evening to eat in, so we were served dinner on a table in my room (which was heated by the stove).

Before dinner I walked around and here are some photos of Alichur village.