To Karakul.

After two weeks of relentless sunshine departure day opened with the patter of raindrops bouncing against the windowpane of the hostel room. We packed up our gear in silence, the mental images of incredible Pamiri mountainscapes fading into nothingness like a PowerPoint effect.

There are a handful of ways to ‘do’ the Pamir Highway, which, as the Lonely Planet writers will go to pains to point out, is “the second highest road in the world” (without bothering to mention which one actually held first place). Real travellers would be working their way up its switchbacks on foot, or would peddle overladen bicycles, their efforts rewarded by long hours spent savouring some of the most striking panoramas in the world. Cheaters will be driving or, even worse, be driven. We were cheaters of the worst kind, for we would be driven not by a desire to try cold steel across our throats - as a Victorian adventurer put it, before being killed - but by a man called Kudaibergen and his Toyota Land Cruiser.

I wasn’t, and I’m not, extremely fond of car travel. Think of motorways stuffed with speed cameras, the perennial quest for a parking spot and the relentless tailback aerobics: clutch-first-clutch-second-brake-clutch-first. This time, though, it felt different. I climbed aboard the old purple Land Cruiser with a sense of expectation, for this was the beginning of a long-dreamed trip, I was in a friend’s company and we had a driver who promised to be another.

Kudaibergen was born in Tajikistan, but had the harmonious features of a Kyrgyz, and the serene demeanour of a Buddhist monk. We were to spend only one day together and in those hours he revealed himself to be a skilful driver, a great travel companion and an extremely likeable person but – in that Osh parking lot – this was still the future. We watched him inspecting his beloved Land Cruiser and then we set off, southbound.

Osh was our starting point. Over the years I’d come to know her fairly well but, on that particular visit, the city felt ramshackle, a clump of 4G SIM card sellers rubbing elbow with gold-toothed babushkas, of murals commemorating the 1980 Moscow Olympics and Toyota billboards. It lay at the bottom of the Fergana valley, a fertile plot of land bordered by deserts and mountains, a plain bisected by the tortured borders of three countries, dozens of enclaves and the memories of countless inter-ethnic riots. After days of scorching sunshine I was happy to be leaving behind this place where the flotsam of the Soviet Union crashed against nascent ethno-nationalism, for we were bound for the Pamir Highway and to what Lord Curzon, India’s viceroy back in the days of the Great Game, called the “frontier school of character”.

We drove through verdant ridges, following a valley where a torrent had been busy digging a bed so deep, and with such vertical banks, that it felt as if a gigantic meat clavier had been used by a Greek god. This was Kyrgyz country, a land of rich grassland where sheep outnumbered cars 10 to 1. Shepherds’ camps dotted the land with their blue metal trailers, Russian-made motorbikes with sidecar and white felt yurt.

Sary-Tash is the last village before the border and, crucially, the last chance for a hot meal this side of Tajikistan. As far as cities went, Sary-Tash didn’t cut a particularly flattering figure as we drove closer; on a sunny day, with the vast valley stretching as far as the eye could see, framed by the hulking slopes of the Pamirs, the location would’ve made for a more impressive view, but today’s low clouds and drizzle gave me the distinct impression of having arrived at the end of the world.

Sary-Tash: a smattering of low, squat buildings sprinkled across the plain without a great deal of order or harmony, surmounted by gnarled electricity poles planted at odd angles. A petrol station stood at the edge of town like an odd gate guardian, two shy toddlers looking at us from the shop’s doorstep. Yellow pipes snaked all around the village, mostly accompanied by abandoned vehicles. We parked and got out, following Kudaibergen. Despite its depressed looks, I felt some sympathy for Sary-Tash. I was born in one such place.

Kudaibergen led us to an izba that didn’t look any different from the ones to its left or right, were it not for a small sign proclaiming, perhaps optimistically, “Hotel”. Inside, past a set of double doors, was a room sparsely furnished with plastic chairs and tables, a counter and a few shelves of non-perishable groceries. A girl and a well-used menu, laminated in plastic, finished the ensemble. Hotel, convenience store and restaurant.

Over a lunch of manty, lukewarm Baltika beer and tea, alone in a room with another six plastic tables, Kudaibergen told us his story. If I close my eyes, now, I can see him again: sitting composed, hands on the table edge, eyes down, his pile cap and phone placed on the empty seat beside him, a shy smile on his face whenever he raised his head to look at us. A former assistant teacher of Chinese at Bishkek university, he’d to quit academia to serve table in Russia, for the pay for professors was only $100 a month.

“Russia was not good for me” he summarised in embarassment. He lasted two years there, before returning home and, stupidly, I asked why he’d done so. He raised his eyes to meet mine and repeated that it simply wasn’t good, but his looks and hand – mimicking a punch – told me everything I needed to know. It wasn’t infrequent, for Central Asian immigrants, to fall victim to real pogroms by the hands of Russian racists and I’d just asked Kudaibergen to remember all of that. Back in Kyrgyzstan he applied for an American visa, failed, and resolved to learn English. He had been at it for six weeks now, and already he reached a level that Italian students couldn’t even dream to achieve after years. “Driving tourists helps” he smiled shyly at our congratulations.

We left Sary-Tash soon thereafter. We turned left as the main highway continued right and almost immediately our road degraded to a hole-ridden sheep track, whilst snow stuck to the telegraph poles like flies on sticky paper. “It’s worse in Tajikistan” commented Kudaibergen, and we didn’t believe him. But he was right.

Two gigantic golf-ball made of concrete, part of an old Russian radar installation, were the partying gifts from Kyrgyzstan. Then it was only the road, the clouds and us. At times the murk would lift and our world enlarged tenfold to reveal that the road was in fact running on the margin of an enormous valley constellated by boulders the size of houses. In those fleeting moments it felt as if we were space explorers and, all of a sudden, the whole galaxy had opened up to greet us.

Switchbacks soon arrived. The weather closed back in and the Land Cruiser thermometer collapsed to 20F. By now the road was distinguishable only by a handful of concrete pillars placed on both sides at regular intervals. Kudaibergen looked right in his element. He put on a pair of old sunglasses, slapped in the low range gears and drove on with confidence, as if he had an innate sense of where the road was.

A red billboard appeared out of the murk after clearing the Kyrgyz border, deep into no man’s land. I couldn’t read what its Cyrillic letters said, but the numerals – 4,282 – were unequivocal. We posed for photos, Kudaibergen joining obligingly, too polite perhaps to point out that the highest spot of the road, at 4,655 meters – was still to come.

If border posts are in any way, shape or form indicative of the country they guard access to, then Tajikistan was definitely going to be an interesting place, in the “raised eyebrows” sense of the term. Officialdom had gone completely out of the window. There were no glass panes left intact in the first hut we stopped at, marked “Customs”. Out of it emerged five or six men who had evidently had to share three full uniform sets: one wore the trousers, one the padded coat, another the jacket. The rest was made of Adidas tracksuits and slippers. The commander of the group asked if three of his men could use our car to reach Karakul, some hours downhill; given that he was holding our passports, the answer couldn’t be anything but an enthusiastic yes.

Our new travel mates wore camo trousers and those leather jackets that were the real uniform of the piece of world stretching from Sarajevo to Kashgar. They didn’t share any of Kudaibergen’s ascetic Mongolic traits, looking instead like Mediterranean fishermen; amongst them they spoke a soft, harmonic language that had nothing of the guttural sounds of the Turkic family. They were indeed Tajiks, and we’d just crossed not just a physical watershed, but a demographic one as well: from the grasslands to the deserts, from the Kyrgyz world to the Iranian one. The language our newfound companions spoke, in facts, was a Farsi dialect.

Generation of travellers passed through these lands en route to somewhere and, almost inevitably, left disheartened comments in their wake. A Chinese pilgrim named Hiuen Tsang noted gloomily that, since “the soil is almost constantly frozen, you see a few miserable plants and no crops can live”. Marco Polo’s labelled the Pamirs “nothing but a desert without habitation or any given thing”. Francis Younghusband, quintessential stiff-upper-lipped Lieutenant of the Dragoons, wasn’t a lot more congratulatory: these lands were, for him, “desolate” and “barren to the extreme”.

Yet I was becoming increasingly addicted to these views, to their colours – the browns, the tans, the greys, the whites – and their pure, unfiltered emptiness. Buzz Aldrin’s “Magnificent desolation” was my favourite quote of the Apollo 11 lunar landing party; as we drove on in silence I felt I could begin to appreciate what he meant.

A man-made line, a scar on the pristine ground, ran parallel to the road to our left. It was an endless theory of telegraph poles, but what lied strung between their outstretched arms wasn’t an electric cable; rather, it were lines after lines of barbed wire, four deep. More of it was woven between the poles themselves, creating a net, a cage for the tumbleweeds, a wall separating nothing from nothing. It was a desolating, unsettling view under those dark skies. No Hollywood actor had ever protested against the Neutrality Line as Kudaibergen said its name was, being erected between Tajikistan and China. The impassable Tajik soldier riding pillion above the transmission box grimly commented in Russian, and Kudaibergen translated: the wall lay fourteen km inside Tajikistan’s territory.

Karakul Lake appeared behind a cloud, first like a pale blue mirage, and then gathering more and more credibility as the road drew us closer. A collection of ramshackle buildings lay as an afterthought on the near shore, pale against a dark mountain background. Karakul village looked as if a slow-moving monster had hit it and then spent some time chewing ponderously the remains. Amongst the inhabited compounds, walled fortresses with seldom a window facing the rocky roads outside, lay the gutted shells of abandoned houses: roofs caving in, doors missing, walls blackened by the smoke and anything of value long since gone. Our Tajik companions dismounted and walked towards a military installation, a forest of antennae lying behind a low, sun-bleached wall. Barely a soul stirred around the roads, not a splash of colour adorned the place. Kudaibergen grabbed the steering wheel. “It’s hard to live here” he said, looking into the distance. “Very, very, cold”. We believed him.

We drove to the shore. With the exception of two lonely-looking cows, we were alone. Clouds raced each other across the sky. It was dark and cold on our side of the lake, but the island standing in the middle gleaned in the sort of light that Vermeer would’ve used for one of his paintings. I had jotted down a number of quotes from travellers who preceded us on this route, Younghusband being one of them. Remembering that he’d been along these shores, I fished out my notebook and read his impressions as he stood on the foreshore one day in 1891.

“A terrific wind was blowing, washing the water into waves till the whole was a mass of foam. Heavy snow clouds were scuttling across the scene and through them, beyond the tossing lake, could be seen dark rocky masses; and high above all this turmoil below appeared the calm, majestic Peak Kaufman”.

I closed my notepad and glanced around. Kudaibergen was ready to go, having tended again to his car.

Murghab.

Looking back, the handful of hours we spent on the road between Karakul and Murghab were my favourite of the entire journey. It wasn’t because of specific highlights, or some particular memorable points; rather, I felt that the entire journey between those two villages was continuously brilliant. At every corner, the road kept on giving.

We met two cyclists as we left Karakul, indomitable forerunners of the dozens that were to follow them as the season continued, and a man braving the shoddy tarmac on nothing but an old, 1st series Volkswagen Golf. Then the road was ours for hours, dust devils our only companions.

The landscape was, to put it mildly, a triumph. As we climbed atop Ak-Baital pass, 4,655 meters, we crossed an invisible border between the low-pressure front that had been following since Osh and what lay ahead. And what awaited was magnificent.

We stood on a rocky outcrop that, in Europe, would’ve sat in the top-five of tallest places in the continent; yet here we were dwarfed by mountains that stretched into the mesosphere. Looking down ahead, an enormous valley opened so large that the pass we were standing on seemed nothing more than a side entrance. Space, untarnished by human meddling, rolled on for kilometres until more mountains rose sharply to close off the perspective.

Nothing betrayed the presence of man. The Highway’s asphalt had decayed into a state not too dissimilar from dirt and was barely visible. Apart from that, nothing. No houses, no ski pistes drawn onto the mountain sides, no pastures irrigated with sprinklers, no skilifts or snow cannons, only the gigantic disco-ball effect of the alternation of sunlight and clouds on the sand and rock.

The road arrived to a large wound in the ground, where aeons of floods had dug a canyon through the soft ground; a bridge made of prefabricated concrete, which had once linked the two banks, lay in tatters, its pieces dragged downstream by the waters. Undaunted, the Highway had found, as it was to do countless times later, a way around the problem: the old road was blocked by large rocks and fluttering rags strewn across the carriagewayn whilst a new set of tracks swerved to the left, down the slope, through the water and then back up again. A solution had been found, but for how long it was anyone’s guess.

We stopped shortly afterwards to fill up the tires with more air, and I elected to walk a little bit further. The road followed the course of the valley, gently arching behind a spur that, as we were to discover later, hid Murghab from view. To my left, growing larger and larger the further ahead I walked, opened another enormous U-shaped valley leading east towards inevitably spectacular mountains. I knew where we were.

Pamir Gap. Back in those days where men were ready to kill and die for Queen Victoria and the Tsar, this plateau held became the flashpoint of a confrontation that could’ve triggered an ante-litteram world war. Here passed the roads leading from the Russian steppe to China and, crucially, the Indian subcontinent. In the eyes of Britain, control of this territory by the Tsar put a bullseye on India and, over the years, dozens of adventurers, conquerors and murderers faced one another amongst the deserts and mountains of the Pairs.

The worries of men with handlebar moustaches who lived 140 years ago faded into the background as I continued walking along the Highway, climbing an imperceptible knoll. Apart for our lonely Toyota nothing and no one was visible for kilometres all around me. Then, past a lone arc, Murghab came into view.

We stayed at a homestay that boasted flush toilets and heated showers, both commodities worth boasting in a place where no houses had running water and pumps bought by the EU and the Aga Khan were everything people had to wash and cook. In addition to these comforts, the house featured frosted windows enriched with pineapple motifs and a full set of Angry Birds quilts. The clientele included a young Belgian couple, another small platoon of the army of cyclists scattered along the Highway, and a Tajik trucker who kept us suitably well supplied with vodka over a dinner of cow liver, potatoes and fresh vegetables.

It was the end of the road for our travelling companionship with Kudaibergen. We hugged and then we watched drive back towards the China-bound truckers’ accommodation. I’d hired him perchance, after having doubts over the paucity of shared taxis on the road we were due to ride on, and I was sad to be parting ways with him.

We went for a quick wander around Murghab as the sun fell behind the mountains. It was late, but the village was buzzing with activity. Be it playing volley, pumping water into buckets or simply standing guard at the army base, undoubtedly knocking one day off from those remaining until the end of the conscription, everyone seemed keen to make good use of the light whilst there still was some. Then, as soon as a cold penumbra invaded the plain, they all scattered whilst the pungent smell of dried dung fires puffed out of the tin chimneys.

The next morning brought a dusting of snow on the higher peaks. A handful of elderly men – ascetic Kyrgyz, serene faces beneath their Kalpak hat, and Taijks sporting long, white goatees – ambled around the dusty sidewalks, studying thoughtfully each pebble, hands tied behind their backs. Besides them, the trickle of kids in school uniform and beanie hat became a torrent streaming towards a series of buildings I’d mistaken, a day earlier, for a chicken farm, erupting in waves of “Hello!” each time the foreigner happened to cross their path. Two women pushed a wheelbarrow laden with a broken table. From the steps of the bank – where no cash was issued – and the exchange office – where no currency was traded – throngs of layabouts oversaw Murghab’s rush hour.

Lenin’s statue, here, was a lot less imposing – and refined – than its cousin over in Osh. It looked coarse, roughly cut out from a slab of white stone, its expression the one of a man who’d just legged it above the highlands from Kyrgyzstan and all he wanted was a pint and none of this revolution malarkey. Around it, men in civvies and in uniforms kept talking on, ignoring the pleading Lenin, their small sons waving at us.

We walked into a neighbourhood of hovels that clung on to the escarpment below an Army base that looked as if it’d just suffered a major kitchen accident, judging by the charred buildings and the crumbling outer walls. By accident more than by design we walked into somebody’s backyard, attracted like moths first by the lime-green carcass of a rare Zaporozhets sedan and then by the views. A massive dog, a hulking beast of sand-coloured fur, rose on all four, sniffed in our direction, sneezed and then sat down again. “

A door opened and revealed a man in a fleece and pile sailor hat, coupled with the mandatory Adidas tracksuit bottoms. We expected to be kicked out of his property but, with the naturalness that we’d by now learnt to associate with the locals, he saluted us in the polite Islamic way – hand on heart, “Salaam aleikum” – and then shook our hands, as if it was absolutely normal to find foreigners nosing around his yard, and then proceeded, in a halting English, to introduce us to the views.

We stood on the margin of the Murghab River plain, at the extreme border of the city; beyond it, no other building dared braving the seasonal floods but for a yurt with a fence and four minuscule minarets – “Ismaili majid” confirmed our unnamed host. Past the verdant wetland, were a lone calf grazed, the ground rose sharply, losing colour as it went. Dark green immediately gave way to a paler shade, and then it was prairie yellow where banks of sand and pebble lied abandoned by the last passing of melt waters. Even that didn’t last long, for a mammoth cliff of rock and snow followed suit. “Gank Mountain” said our newly appointed guide. I was later to search for that peak, but without success; hardly a surprise in a place where there was such an abundance of summits that it defied the Soviet cartographers’ will to name them and the alpinists to climb them.

Before retreating again indoors our host, ever so gentle, pointed up the valley and said “China”. He then looked to the south-west, following the course of the wide corridor, past a few rickety bushes, and said “Khorog”.

To Khorog.

A minute man waited for us in the homestay’s courtyard. He stood up as we returned, looked at the landlady – who nodded vigorously – and came to greet us. He pistoned forward a hand, beamed a smile and said “My name Komron, driva”, succeeding in introducing himself and exhausting his English vocabulary at the same time.

In spite of the klingonesque assonance between their names, Komron and Kudaibergen couldn’t be more different from one another. Our Kyrgyz friend was tall and slender, his Tajik colleague short and stocky; Kudaibergen was pale and hairless, Komron looked as tanned as a Sicilian fisherman and seemed the kind of chap who’d shave at 6 AM and could do with another pass of the Bic before the clock hit 10.

They did, however, have some common traits. Both were young, quick to smile and desirous to communicate. Both had a quiet adoration for their vehicles, which in Komron’s case consisted of a tattered Hyundai minivan, toughened up but seemingly no match for the road we were on. Both, finally, wore as much Adidas garments as humanly possible, with Komron going to the extent of sticking two gigantic copies of the brand’s logos on his van.

A couple of gesticulating conversations later and we were ready to go. A sharp bend to the left was all that was needed for Murghab – whose last inhabitant we were to see was a Kyrgyz man riding a sidecar – to disappear as if it’d never existed. We stopped at a check-point in the large, verdant valley and piled out of the van while Komron went on to negotiate with the officers of the law. The checkpoint consisted of a prefab hut, a pole strewn across the road, two cops, a truck with two drivers and a three-legged-dog.

Pretty soon the trip assumed, for me, dreamy connotations, whether because of the panoramas of canyons and dried-up salt lakes or because of the effect of breathing unburnt petrol (which the van seemed prone to discharge into the cab rather than into the combustion chambers) I didn’t and don’t know. In any case, it was hard not to be carried away, yet again, by the spectacle of nature kindly offered by Tajikistan.

The sun was shining and we were careering down a large valley. Around us cliffs of sedimentary rocks, stratum after stratum of organic matter orderly stacked like pancakes, were thrusted skywards at impossible angles. I ransacked whatever memory of high school geology remained in the colander of my brains and remembered that sedimentary rocks were typical of the seabed, being formed by the remnants of millions of years’ worth of dead mollusks and fishes. Yet here they were, arcing their way north of 5,000 meters.

Every now and then we encountered large snowfields; in other occasions a turn revealed a panorama of soft rolling hills covered in white tiger streaks against a backdrop of tall mountains. We were travelling along a time machine, dancing between summer and winter – with a sprinkle of spring thrown in for good measure – in the space of a valley.

We didn’t encounter any vehicles up until Alichur, but that didn’t mean that we were absolutely on our own on the highway. A herdsman cruised in the opposite direction, conducing two sturdy ponies somewhere. Flocks of sheep hunted for grass amongst the rocks. Two men with bulging packs on their shoulders worked their way towards Murghab.

It is cliché to say that a place has a certain “frontier-town-feel”, but it was a platitude that fitted Alichur like a glove. Dusty roads with walled compounds raising from the ground as if they were excrescences of the Earth, a smattering of tin-roofed buildings with faded posters hanging from their walls, a school with a skeletal playground, the usual jumble of telegraph poles.

Corinne, an intrepid pensioner from near Hamburg, hitched a ride with us. She was travelling on her own and had her eyes set on the Wakhan valley, the large corridor separating Tajikistan from Afghanistan. We, instead, were going on along the Highway proper, towards Khorog. Now, it would normally be preposterous of me to claim the paternity of good ideas, but this time I can safely claim that if the German Federal Foreign Office didn’t have to mount an international search-and-rescue mission for Corinne they had to thank yours truly.

See, her idea was to get us to drop her at the actual junction for the Wakhan valley, some 50 kilometers south of Alichur and whilst I appreciated her “Good-things-happen-to-good-people” attitude, I was feeling a lot less Hakuna Matata about the prospective of leaving somebody alone on a road where we hadn’t seen any car yet, on a high mountain pass, with only the shelter that could be granted by a Jack Wolfskin fleece jacket. Long story short, we managed to persuade her to leave us at Alichur and to check into a house marked “Guest House” in blue letters.

Past Alichur the road became a lot worse for wear, but the views were something out of an Andean altiplano. Dry lake beds mingled with specs of water of a turquoise blue, whilst the mountains brought up to the rear as we climbed up and up again. In one of the most surreal experiences of the entire journey Komron, who had no idea of our nationality, chose this precise moment to play Toto Cotugno’s most famous song. We bounced from pothole to pothole with him telling anyone that they’d better let him sing for he was a real Italian, as mountains and salt pans and desert rolled past our windows. I knew that Toto Cotugno, together with other 1980s Italian pop stars, had gathered something of a cult following in the former Soviet Union, but to have the peninsula’s answer to Tom Petty in the middle of the Gorno Badakhshan region of Tajikistan was uncanny. It felt like finding Paul Newman’s own salad dressing at a café in Vietnam or discovering a Nickelback fan amongst the Taliban.

The junction for Wakhan came soon afterwards and it looked exactly as I thought it’d be: high, exposed, forlorn and absolutely lonely. I spent the briefest of the moments congratulating myself for having spared Corinne from this and then we were weightless, floating above our seats. We’d hit the mother of all potholes; a crater, in fact. Komron stalled the engine and, with the same urgency of a parent who’d seen his child fall off the swing, catapulted himself outside. We followed.

We looked under the bonnet, and then waited a little for the dust to settle and Komron to bring a torchlight. It emerged that the car suffered nothing wrong, much to Komron’s relief, and soldiered on. Soon we began losing altitude as a series of fast switchbacks delivered us in a cloud of dust and hardbass music to lower grounds. Life, there, was flourishing. Huddled between barren mountains and ogled by snowy peaks, our valley grew greener and fertile by the meter. Orchards, woods of tiny poplars, villages and flocks whose main preoccupation was to stand still on the asphalt began appearing one after the other.

We followed a torrent which grew larger and larger until it flowed into an artificial lake; then a bridge carried up a ravine, morphing into a crumbling viaduct. Large slits opened on the vertiginous drop as we bounced along the concrete road, again losing altitude. Finally, things we hadn’t seen in a while appeared: sidewalks, houses with more than two stories, billboards, cows munching on the lowest branches of mulberry trees planted by some city council. We’d arrived in Khorog.

To Dushanbe.

My memories of Khorog are fleeting, for such was the nature of our permanence there. We took possession of yet another room furnished with beds with garish quilts and immediately dashed out in hope of finding a money changer or an ATM.

Khorog lay in a steep valley shielded by tall mountains at the confluence of two rivers: Gunt and Panj. From the waterside cafés one could sit cross-legged on a shaded topchan and gaze at Afghanistan on the other bank, looking exactly the same as our side but feeling incredibly exotic and novel.

We stayed at a house clinging on the south side of the slope, just off a lane pompously named after Yuri Gagarin. Descending from the road dedicated to the first cosmonaut meant meandering through cow-spattered alleys and beneath precarious modern condominiums with tin red roofs and wafer-thin walls. Everything there gravitated around the main road, still called Leninskaya.

The Tajik president’s sour mug beckoned from dozens of posters and billboards: there he was holding two girls, looking miserable as himself, by the hands; here he was standing a bit perplexed in a field of red poppies. Land Cruisers of all sorts roamed up and down the main drag, some sporting NGO logos – Red Cross, Aga Khan Foundation, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières, even the UN – and some with the tinted windows and chrome inserts that justified the claim, made by a Vice reporter, that “How many kilos did it cost?” was now the new way of asking for prices in town.

There’s no denying that Tajikistan stands smack bang across the best path to bring Afghanistan’s opium to the world, and Khorog seemed to be at the epicentre of it. The town felt one of those Wild West outposts where things could be done quickly and be undone even quicker. In spite of all its urban refinements – the Aga Khan University, the coding courses sponsored by Microsoft, the riverside cafés – it still remained a village with a decisively rough edge. To see how rough one only had to look at what happened five years prior our visit when the head of Tajikistan’s intelligence, General Nazarov, was dragged out of his car on Leninskaya and stabbed to death for a divergence over contraband. As if to prove the point, a sudden gale swept through the valley, chocking at an instant everyone with a tornado of pollen, dust and sand coming in from Afghanistan.

Somebody pounded the gate of our house, bleating some unintelligible pleading. It was 7 AM of a glorious morning and, knowing that our meeting with our marshrutka driver wasn’t until 7.30, we didn’t move from the topchan parked under a mulberry tree where we were indulging in a scrumptuous breakfast. Only fifteen minutes later did our landlady wander to the gate to find out that it was indeed the collective taxi driver, by now utterly pissed off. Things weren’t off to a good start.

Marshruktas are institutions in the former Soviet Union. The rules might differ from place to place, but by far and large they consist of vehicles used as collective taxis leaving from an agreed location once a sufficient number of punters has been found and cajoled on board. One of the key differences is the definition of “sufficient”. Whilst in places such as Georgia or Armenia it equaled to one bum on every seat, in the Pamirs it seemed that every driver was hell-bent on beating the Guinness’ World Record for the maximum number of men, women and ewes they could cram into their Toyotas. I’d seen GAZ vans with four heads sticking out of the front seat, and Corinne told us of sitting on the back bench with four other people and a puppy. Considering these premises, it only made sense for us to choose a marshrutka and not a private hire for the longest leg of our journey, a 600-kilometre marathon that could take anything between twelve and twenty hours.

We drove on to the station on Leninskaya where, by tacit agreement, anyone wishing to go to Dushanbe and those willing to take them there met. Half an our passed, and no one joined us. Another half hour passed and my fear of having to play human Tetris in the back of a Land Cruiser wasn’t going to materialize at all. The sun rose higher and higher, the air grew hotter and hotter and the blue drained away from the sky; still, we had no one to share our ride with. Many other cars seemed to be in our same situation and our driver grew increasingly pissed off. It was at this point that I realised how staggering his resemblance with Grumpy Cat of meme fame was, and the name somehow stuck.

Eventually, a man who spoke English was towed on to the phone, a bit of haggling ensued and we agreed on buying two extra seats at a reduced price and to be joined by a third traveller. We then drove out of town and went for petrol as we waited for the third passenger. That done, a latest-model Land Cruiser, black with black windows and chrome wheels, came to a stop next to us. Grumpy stopped doing what he was doing – which was shoveling wads of chewing tobacco in his mouth – and trotted sheepishly to the car; a black window whirred down, revealing two guys in leather jackets.

I know that I’m way too ready to jump at conclusions, but if the two gents weren’t fervent adherents to the “How many kilos did it cost?” school of thought, then I didn’t know who would. In the worst parody of secrecy ever seen outside of 1980s Turkish B-movies, the players gave Grumpy a small parcel wrapped in masking tape which he safely absconded in the secrecy of the compartment under his seat’s armrest. Which, if it wasn’t the first place where a narcotics cop would’ve looked, it had to be the second. Still, at least it made us blend in on the so-called Heroin Highway.

Eventually, before Grumpy could add weapons smuggling to tobacco abuse and potential drug trafficking, we were joined by our third passenger. Fully expecting a Tajik matron with six bags of onions, we were surprised to see a lively 18-year-old Dutch girl, Marieke. The perspective of having to carry three camera-toting tourists made Grumpy so livid with joy that he just ordered us aboard, slapped in a gear and got into the westbound traffic.

Much has it’d been since Osh, even here the ‘Highway’ was such only in name but the beginnings were nonetheless auspicious and the mood almost jovial. Not even Marieke’s confession of listening to Justin Bieber could spoil it. We stopped at a first of a series of nine security checkpoints, the only one where we needn’t a bribe to go on, and the policeman on duty seemed genuinely saddened by the fact that we didn’t have an expedition logo to stick on his sentry box’s window. We then continued, coasting Afghanistan.

The river changed at every turn. One time it could’ve been wide, shallow and placid, so much that you could ford it practically on foot, walking to the Afghan kids playing cricket on the far shore. Turn a bend and it’d be looking all stately and pompous, filling the space between the banks like the big river it’d become in a few hundred miles. Then there would be those places where the road had to be carved out of the cliffs with dynamite and the banks were so close you could roll down the window and caress the other side: there the Panj became a raging, foaming beast, crushing all those thoughts of canoeing down it that you were toying with just a few meters before.

Regardless of its state, life flourished on both side of the Panj. Orchards as well kept as finalists of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show followed each other, peppered with vegetable patches tilled to perfection. Goats and cows chewed ponderously in their allotments, whilst their owners watched us pass by and kids waved. Nature aside, though, the two side of the river had very little in common. Coming from a continent where a border crossing brought little differences besides new road signs, speed limits and propensity to fix potholes, the chasm between Afghanistan and Tajikistan made me wonder whether the border wasn’t a division not just in space, but also in time.

We were travelling on a road that, with a healthy dose of fantasy and goodwill, you could’ve defined ‘surfaced’, encountering sporadic but not infrequent traffic. Above us danced electricity cables suspended from new, shiny zinc poles. Buildings sported fresh licks of paint, which the cynics would’ve said covered the bullet holes of the recent civil war, but still. Shops had refrigerators and coolers, packed with mineral waters and imitations of all Coca Cola soft drinks. On the streets, soldiers in green and yellow fatigues, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, marched at intervals along the border line.

On the other side of the border, though, everything that had to do with human activities was different. For starters, there was no traffic at all. But for a handful of motorbikes, ridden by two or three men in khet partug and skull caps, nothing moved on the road. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the road itself had a habit of disappearing, mostly when it hit a ponderous rocky spur, or an equally massive overhang. In a few occasions, these natural challenges had been met and dealt with a herculean chiseling effort, seemingly made without explosives but only with sledgehammers, at least judging by the scars on the rock.

The trails often led to villages, clots of brown homes huddled together so tightly that you’d thought the whole shebang would’ve come crashing down if only one wall was to be inadvertently removed. Something – besides cars or painted walls – was amiss in these villages, but it took me a while to put my finger on it: there was nothing to suggest the existence of an electricity grid there. No poles, no generators, no solar panels, only the occasional satellite dish. There was no recycling of the rusting scraps of modern technology – no truck cab doors turned into henhouses, no containers refurbished into roadside shops – mainly because there were no scraps.

Our ménage with Afghanistan ended abruptly in the late afternoon. Without warning, Grumpy turned right into a rather nondescript road that, immediately, started rising away from the Panj. It meant we were past halfway and for that I was glad, but I also felt a pang of nostalgia at the thought of losing the company of the river and of the enigmatic country we’d coasted for so long. Grumpy seemingly didn’t harbour any such feelings, for he began tackling a selection of switchbacks with the fury of a man who wanted to be in Dushanbe as soon as possible. But, regardless of his hell-bent resolve, we had to stop to have a last look.

With hindsight, we could’ve stayed there for longer, for barely one switchback had rolled behind our back window that we hit a true Pamir Highway rarity: a traffic jam. A handful of white Chinese trucks and a motley assembly of third-hand off-roaders sat patiently under the sun, their drivers squatting in the shadows for what seemed to be a long time. Grumpy killed the engines and we all dismounted. What followed was an hour stuck somewhere west of Kulob, under a relentless sun, and it turned into one of the most pervasive memories of the journey, made of unfiltered nature, bootleg booze, goat spotters and rocks thrown on the road. But let’s start from the beginning.

A massive yellow excavator had been parked at an angle, effectively blocking the road. Music fluttered out of the cab and the feet of the driver, dangling from a railing, moved in synch with the tunes. Going further down the road smacked me as not being one of the most sensible things to do, for – higher up on the ridge on the right – other excavators were busy dislodging boulders from their earthy embrace, lobbying them down below. The road lay in the crossfire.

There was an air of enjoyment in this transient camp of squatters. No one huffed and puffed, no one complained with the marshal, pointed at the clock or yapped about the delay on the phone. Not a single soul had even contemplated honking the horn. As soon as we got out I was mobbed by a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, who turned out to be a trucker plying the Shanghai-Dushanbe route, one month outbound, one month inbound. He all but lived in the cab of his truck, adorned with a Tajik hand shaking a Chinese one, and distilled his own rot-gut in there. Ever the charmer, he offered a round of it from an old bottle of Johnson & Johnson shampoo.

Another man, one of those Central Asia businessman kind of guys – loafers, polyester short-sleeved shirt and trousers, fake Oakley shades – tapped us on the shoulder and unleashed a barrage of Russian in which the only thing we were able to understand was “Marco Polo” before fishing out a Samsung smartphone whose background screen showed the photo of a large sheep furnished with the largest pair of horns I’d seen. He gestured towards the rocky spur behind us. We’d run into the goat spotters of Tajikistan.

We made a beeline for the spur behind the businessman and his mate, a tragic-looking small man bundled in military fatigues that he’d must’ve worn since birth in the failed hope of filling them fully. Only the tips of his fingers peeked out of the sleeves. A good half dozen people already stood on the thin ridge, walking in flip-flops inches away from the precipice without a care in the world. Some wore military uniforms, some were in civvies and all seemed engrossed in the search for the elusive Marco Polo sheep. A pair of binoculars appeared, and every palm of the mountain opposite hours was inspected; unfortunately, much to the chagrin of the onlookers, the shifty ewe had slipped in the shadows. Some were genuinely saddened by this.

Back at the front of the queue, somebody decided to weight the scrap metal carried in the boot of their GAZ truck. The slight issue deriving from a lack of weighting instruments was swiftly solved by one of the truckers bringing forward a scale of the kind you’d find at the charcuterie corner of supermarkets; serenaded by the roaring of diesel engines and the thumping of rock over asphalt, the men proceeded to load the scale with parts of a truck’s leaf spring and gearbox. Having done the good deed of the day, the trucker and the scrappers shook hands and returned in the shadow. We, too, resolved to sit there, playing card for a little while until, at precisely 17:57, a joyous scream informed that the road workers had finished trying to demolish the highway for today.

We were on the last straight or so it seemed. The panorama had changed as we raced other Land Cruisers through the last ramifications of the Pamirs and nothing, not even roadblocks, could stop us as we drove towards Kulob in a glorious sunset. Grumpy would simply oil their wheels and we’d go on. We stopped for dinner at another of those completely random places that seemed to be the norm over in Central Asia, this one featuring two white Lincoln limousines and a bouncy castle in the backyard.

We soldiered on, floating into an eternal sunset, through hills that, were they lined with maritime pines, could’ve passed for the Tyrrhenian coast. Darkness had fallen when we arrived in Dushanbe, stopping someplace where Grumpy gave his suspicious package, which turned to contain only money, to a waiting scallywag and, finally, led us to our hostel. Mattia, my photographer friend had been running a timer since we’d left Khorog and, when we reached the door of the house, it clocked 14 hours and 57 minutes.

It was a warm night, and we’d just graduated from the frontier school of character.