murghab

in order to get to the tajik border, some hitchhiking was in order. in china, this is just as complicated as you'd assume, but we gave it a shot. equipped with a sign that said "free ride" in mandarin, we started waving down cars on the main road. people in china rarely know the concept of hitchhiking, so we got a lot of rejections. the police even came to us because they also didn't understand what we were trying to achieve. they were nice though. finally, a younger chinese guy agreed to take us. overall, it went better than i had thought. he even stopped on the way for us to take pictures and we also saw some mountain-type camels.

we then reached the chinese customs, where, similarly to how they did it in pakistan, they vet you at the bottom of the valley instead of on top of the pass. we were pretty much the only people there, but unfortunately, it didn't go as smoothly as the immigration two days earlier. while axel and hannah got through immediately, they had me wait for over an hour because there appeared to be a problem with the chip inside my passport. after some more checking, they finally let me through though.

we had to take a shuttle up to the border pass at over 4300 metres and pass tajik immigration there. this was considerably easier, we were through in 3 minutes. they didn't even have a computer up there.

to our luck, a trucker immediately invited us to jump in and drove us the first part of the way to a truck stop. the landscape was way different than in china in the sense that there was absolutely nothing there. no grass, no trees, no rocks, no rivers, just miles and miles of pure, unforgiving wasteland. also, the street, even if it's called "the pamir highway" really is just a bumpy dirt track. we rarely exceeded 30 km/h in the truck, so even small distances took years to cover. oftentimes, there were even long sections where nobody was using the road, because it was easier to drive offroad next to it.

there was barely any traffic, maybe one truck every 15 minutes, so we improvised a little shelter and waited for a while until a guy importing a brand new car from china agreed to take us to our goal, murghab. he was great, we sang some german classics in the car for him.

we made it to a little guest house and even managed to buy some sim cards right away. then, we noticed that there was a huge crowd gathered in the town square and it turned out to be a big party, celebrating, coincidetally, the 20th anniversary of that same stretch of road that we'd just taken. there was traditional music and dancing and overall great vibes, which made for an amazing introduction to tajikistan.

there, we also met some other travellers from germany and shared a dinner and one or two or three drinks with one of them. he turned out to be batshit crazy, but it was great fun.

one more thing about murghab: at 7000 inhabitants, it's the biggest city in the region and it has a very special bazaar that fits the general post-apocalyptic atmosphere of the region very well. you can see it in the pictures, it consists of a bunch of containers foming a sort of mazelike marketplace. really feels like a place straight out of fallout 4 or far cry 3. just thought that was pretty cool.Read more