Re:Routing

Project Re:Routing with Nicolas and Charlotte from France to Japan.

9,000km ridden. 90,000m of elevation. 10 countries crossed.

Landscapes so far:
deserts, high-altitude mountains, grasslands, farmland, alpine peaks, forests.

Hardest sections:
Last two months.
Kyzylkum Desert
The Pamir Highway
The Wakhan Valley

Best food: Greece and Georgia
Worst food: Tajikistan
Best scenery: Tajikistan
Best mountain views: Georgia
Worst driving: Kyrgyzstan
Worst toilets: Uzbekistan

Ten years ago I was watching YouTube in between online lectures, in my Bristol uni accommodation room, when I found a video called A Journey Beyond, telling a story of a german cyclist riding the Pamir Highway. I'd studied German through high school, but that barely got me through the video without subtitles. The wasn’t the important bit. High altitude plateau, rugged terrain, food poisoning, the kind of desolate that looks like another planet. I definitely romanticised the Pamirs from then. Wondering if I’d ride them one day.

The plan when we finally got there was simple enough on paper. Ride from Dushanbe to Osh, taking the Wakhan Valley loop along the Afghan border.

Out of Dushanbe

We left the Greenhouse Hostel, a kind of mecca for backpackers passing through Dushanbe, with Leo, an Australian on a hardtail we'd met at the hostel. Watermelon sellers stopped us within the first few hours, handing over slices of watermelon and honeydew and waving us into the shade of a tree. Further on it was kefir and ice cream, anything to make the heat bearable. We camped that first night nursing a bit of food poisoning from something dodgy in Dushanbe, and cracked on the next morning anyway.

At Obigarm the road turned from paved to unpaved and we left the new highway for what would have been the original Pamir track. Steep, sharp, aggressive gravel climbs set the tone for the two weeks ahead. This was the northern route through Tavildara, higher and rougher than the southern road through Kulob, which is warmer, flatter, and easier. We chose the harder one deliberately and it paid off. Stunning views, lakes and rivers to swim in, camping every night all the way to Khorog.

From Qalaikum to Khorog the road runs right along the Afghan border. It was a surreal thing to actually be there, given everything I'd grown up hearing about Afghanistan in France and the US, the stories of war and of how women are treated. You stop for a break, a meal, a camp, and you're just there. You're watching Afghans across the river. They're watching you. You can't hear a word either side says, and it still feels like worlds apart. Tajikistan had Chinese investment and Chinese roads going in, imperfect but developing. Across the Panj, mud houses, crops covering every inch of usable land, women riding on the back of motorbikes driven by men, covered head to toe, and only boys walking to and from school.

We rolled into Khorog a few bumpy days later and took a few days to freshen up in a bikepacker hostel before the climbing really started. Khorog is where most riders consider the route to actually begin. We had made it to the Pamir Highway.

The Wakhan Valley

The Wakhan Valley itself is tied to the Wakhan Corridor, the strange narrow strip of Afghanistan that stretches out toward China, also touching Pakistan, extremely remote and extremely high. We rode the Tajik side of it, which is more populated than the Afghan side but still felt wild, with the Hindu Kush rising across the river, seven thousand metre peaks and glaciers stacked on top of each other. Hot springs and water clear enough to filter straight from the source. All of it came at a cost though, the road from Khorog to Langar is choppy, and gets worse the closer you get to the high Pamirs.

From Langar the real crux starts, about 150 kilometres of rough gravel, washboard, sand, loose rock, everything we'd been warned about. We had to see it for ourselves anyway. The altitude was the final layer on top. We ended up pushing the bikes for long stretches, the bikepacking trip briefly turning into a trek, until we reached Kargush Pass at 4,300 metres, a few military checkpoints along the way. Out of breath but moving, we pushed through and back down onto pavement, the descent almost as slow as the climb, somewhere around 3 to 6 kilometres an hour. We hit tarmac at dusk and kissed it in an almost biblical way. Road relief at last!

We needed a place out of the wind that night and found it by luck, running into three cyclists we'd seen before in Khorog, who'd already planned to sleep in some old army barracks down the road. We invited ourselves along. Soviet built, most likely, on a road that carried real strategic weight during the Soviet Afghan war, troops and supplies moved along this same river valley in the seventies and eighties. Five of us packed into one small room, out of the wind and warm, and happy about it. We split off from them the next morning and rode on through Alichur toward Murghab.

Into the High Pamirs

Somewhere on that stretch we caught back up with Xylean, a French bikepacker we'd ridden with on and off since Uzbekistan, lost when he fell sick, now back with us. One of the strange comforts of the Pamirs is how many bikepackers are out there. You're rarely alone for long. There's a thriving little community strung out across the plateau, everyone stopping to check in, share water, food, tips.

Murghab gave us a proper rest day, a guesthouse full of other riders trading stories while we tried to recover from stomach bugs and tired legs, though recovery above 4,000 metres only goes so far. The target after Murghab was Ak Baital Pass, 4,650 metres, the highest point of the entire route to Tokyo. The climb was long, biscuits and short breathers on the roadside, but we made the top. Dragging thirty kilo setups up that high is something neither of us will forget. The Wakhan had already broken us in for the descent that followed, bumpy and washboarded all the way down.

As the sun dropped we came across a yurt that looked almost staged, a small river through the middle of it, yaks, kids playing, smoke curling out of the neighbouring houses. Turned out it was for rent, twelve euros a person. We were tired and opportunistic, so we stayed, ate yak yogurt and pasta, had bread and honey in the morning, and rode on toward Karakul.

Karakul Lake and its village are the last stop in Tajikistan before Kyrgyzstan, the water an almost unreal turquoise with Lenin Peak rising behind it, glaciers wrapped around the whole massif, yaks running along the lakeshore. We stopped for manti and biscuits before pushing on toward the Kyzyl Art Pass border crossing.

They say to never get too comfortable with good weather on the Pamirs. In the last 25km, a fifty kilometre an hour headwind that dropped our speed to nothing no matter how hard we pushed. No idea where we'd even manage to pitch a tent in that. We rode into dusk trying to reach the Kyrgyz side, navigating the stretch of no man's land in the dark. Luckily the Tajik border system was down that evening, so they couldn't stamp us out, and instead offered us five square metres of marble floor in the corner of their barracks, tea, bread, tomatoes, cucumber, and butter. Exactly what we needed.

By morning the internet was back and so was the border. We crossed, climbed briefly, then dropped into Kyrgyzstan just as a rainstorm hit, chasing us all the way down to Sary Tash. We hadn't worn a jacket once in two weeks on the Pamirs, only t shirts and long sleeves against the sun, and suddenly every layer we'd carried across the plateau was earning its keep.

Getting into Osh

The sky cleared the minute we hit Sary Tash, as if the country itself was welcoming us in. A bowl of soup, and Xylean said his goodbyes, turning east toward China. Leo, Charlotte, and I climbed the last two passes into Osh, dodging a steady stream of old trucks running the China trade route, exhaust pipes aimed straight at our faces on the climbs.

Two days later we checked into a hotel in Osh, unpacked, cleaned everything, and started to digest two weeks on the Pamirs. Tired, full, happy to be done, and a little sad about it too. We ended up extending our stay to properly recover and find the will to keep pushing east.

I romanticised the Pamirs a decade before I ever got there, thinking it would be hard but manageable. It was harder than that. Growing up in the mountains gave me an arrogant idea that altitude wouldn't bother me. The off road beat up my wrists for weeks after. Still, if anyone reading this is thinking about riding the Pamirs, go. It might be the best way there is to actually feel a landscape rather than just look at it, vast and high and remote in a way that doesn't fully land until you're standing in the middle of it, breathing hard.