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to nowhere in particular Voyageur
along the indus #3
3 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☁️ 6 °C
after waking up and having breakfast with some of the locals, we went to go see our new friends gem mine (unfortunately, it was friday, the only day where they don't use dynamite in the mines) and immediately began chiselling away at the walls. didn't find anything, sadly.
but it was super funny because the guy basically only spoke in catchphrases that he kept saying over and over. here's a couple of our favourites that were immediately adopted into our vocabularies:

"gemstone available"
"blast here, blast here"
"tourmaline here"

after that great start, it only got worse. i was struggling a lot, especially around noon, where i really had to keep myself from fainting or throwing up. i chugged some yeast solition, which brought me back to life so far as to at least make it to our target village for the day. some truck drivers helpes us get up a steep climbing section by letting us hold on to their trucks and we even played volleyball (which seems to be the national sport of gilgit-baltistan) with some locals. in the evening, we found a hotel (with internet access!!), but they tried to scam us and we went for a small homestay instead.

(by the way, even if i don't mention it in every entry about the bike tour, the views were great, of course)En savoir plus
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along the indus #4
4 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☁️ 9 °C
just as we wanted to head off and start our ride, we were invited for a cup of chai by some dude who claimed to be an ex-spy. hm.

this time, we found a new system of cycling. me and matthieu would go in front and wait for elias, who would just go his speed. while he was catching up, we always used our spare time to have a chat with some checkpoint guards or playing a game of volleyball with the locals. this way, the cycling was much more rewarding and we got over 70 kilometres done, finally reaching skardu after four days on the road.

on the way there, we were overtaken by nika from georgia, who gave us some bananas out of his car window. we made a plan to meet him for dinner in skardu, and it turned out that he was staying at a couchsurfing host's place, who also invited us over to stay at his place. it didn't have electricity most of the time and no running water, but we were super happy to have found a place to stay so easily.En savoir plus
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skadu #1
5–7 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ 🌙 9 °C
i spent pretty much the whole day lying in the communal sleeping room, planning my next moves. i had heard from stepan (the chap i was in prison with), who had been to the area just two weeks before, that he had trekked a 5000m peak and i was hooked. everybody decided to join, including jasper from the netherlands, who had also joined the couchsurfing party.

because basically none of the guys had any mountaineering/snow gear, we headed to a second hand market where they sell every kind of mountaineering gear from socks to used oxygen tanks. i bought some waterproof shoes and the others got themselves gloves, hiking poles, and so on.

skardu, by the way, was super beautiful and also very chill and liberal compared to the rest of pakistan. it also has a little airport, where all the mountaineers going to the gasherbrums, broad peak and k2 arrive.En savoir plus
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barah valley
6–7 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ⛅ 7 °C
after another trip to the outdoor market, our makeshift international mountaineering team was ready to go. we hitchhiked some weird pickup thing to the bus station, where we were joined by tom from the uk, a friend of jasper. we arrived just in time to catch a minibus going to khaplu, which is pretty much the last stop before k2, which, if we were lucky, we'd see from the top of moses peak. somehow, 18 people were crammed into this little van. we were stopped one or two times by the tourist police, but other than that, the views made up for the discomfort.

we arrived at the trailhead in barah valley and walked a couple of kilometres to a restaurant, where we had some food (grave mistake, as it later turns out) and were even offered to stay for the night for like 3€. we couldn't refuse, of course. somehow, we managed to fit 6 people into a 15m² space. we had some breakfast in the morning, split up our food supplies evenly and got to hiking.En savoir plus
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moses peak #1
7 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☀️ 7 °C
the trail up to moses peak literally started in someones backyard. the first two kilometres or so consisted of walking through tiny mazelike alleys running in between and under old wooden village houses. super cool. then, the path started to incline and we spent some time walking through some farmland terraces with waterfalls and plenty of animals and shepherds around.

that's when the soles of my newly bought shoes just straight up fell off. pakistani quality, there's nothing worse in the world. duct tape didn't help much, so two of the guys went back down to the village and came back with a tube of glue. that didn't really help either, but luckily i had brought my snow cleats. i strapped them on and they actually held the soles in place for the rest of the hike.

after about two hours of walking, i noticed i was really unwell. not just feeling weak like usually with food poisoning, but now also lightheaded and with hard stomach cramps. i got myself together after a couple of minutes, popped a painkiller and a fever pill and managed to make it to the first camp. decided that if i wasn't feeling better the next day, i was going to have to go down.

i had really strong fever that night, but actually didn't feel that bad in the morning, so on we go.En savoir plus
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moses peak #2
8 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☀️ 6 °C
what can i say, we did a lot of walking, mostly through big boulder fields. as always, at about 3.5k metres asl, i started noticing the thinner air more and more. unlike the first day, i felt pretty good, but it might've just been the fact that i took some meds in the morning. elias was struggling quite a bit, so i gave him my pole, which he somehow managed to bend to shit. in the afternoon, we reached the snow border at around 4300 meters and set up camp there. i went a bit further into the snow trying to find a small shepherds hut that should've been there as the end point of that day's hike, but didn't see anything. had an amazing sunset and some not so amazing pasta.

just as we settled into our tents, nika told us he was "feeling cold from the inside of his bones", which sounded an awful lot like hypothermia. he had underestimated the trek and hadn't brought gloves or a proper sleeping bag. it was too late to go back down, so all we could do was make him some hot tea and send matthieu into his tent to give him some extra warmth. it was obvious that we needed to reajust plans in the morning.En savoir plus
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moses peak #3
9 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☀️ 4 °C
nika decided to head back to camp one and was insistent that he could go alone, so the rest of us continued up the mountain through a rough boulder field topped with snow. it was a treterous mix of stone hopping, sinking into snow and trying to avoid stepping onto air bubbles. after just half an hour, matthieu and elias were already exhausted and made the decision to turn back and catch nika on his way down.

the rest of the group, now down to tom, jasper and me, tried its best to push onwards, but it was h-a-r-d. after 2 hours, we reached some small huts and realized that this was the place where we should've slept that night in order to be able to make the journey to high camp the next day. in short: we were super worn out already and technically hadn't even started that day's hike yet. we decided that it just wasn't going to happen, not at this time of year, not with this equipment, not with this (pretty inexperienced) group.

in retrospective, the others definitely had a lot more left in them than i did. i think i was still more sick than i'd wanted to admit in order to not sabotage the trek for the others. whatever, we decided to set up camp there and spent the day resting for the big descent.En savoir plus
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moses peak #4
10 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☀️ 7 °C
of course we're a smart bunch, so we tried to learn from our previous mistakes and to get up as early as possible for an alpine start. this way, we could traverse the snow fields while they were still frozen. getting up and packing the tents in those temperatures was an ordeal, but it paid off well. we made some good progress and quickly reached the previous camp site.

i chugged my red bull there, which was, as my tradition dictates, reservered strictly for the summit, but i figured it would help with the weight. def tasted weird, but at the time, i just assumed it's like with tomato juice on an airplane.

we continued to make great progress and checked off camp after camp. i was still feeling super exhausted and weak though. i assumed, like i had been for the last four days, that it was just the height. i proved this theory wrong by vomiting on the ground and immediately feeling way better. must've been the restaurant we ate at before heading up.

back in the village after a day of walking, we even managed to hitch a ride back to skardu in the back of a pickup truck. it was objectively horrible, but we still had a lot of fun. at a checkpoint, the tourist police managed to spot us and forced us to get out and stopped a minibus for us to take to skardu, where the other three guys were already waiting for us.

and just like that, our little hiking adventure is over. more to come.En savoir plus
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skardu #2
11–13 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ 🌙 11 °C
one by one, our group split up again. first, tom left, then elias and matthieu, and finally jasper. only me and nika stayed for a couple more days. i had no choice, really, because i had to find out that our host and his kids had used my bike while i was gone and had somehow managed to break multiple spokes and jack up the derailleur and bend the luggage rack.

luckily, there was a bike shop (one of only two in the whole of gilgit-baltistan) whose owner fixed some of those problems, but made some others even worse. he did it for free though, so i can't complain. i realized that this was as good as it was going to get, so i packed my stuff, said goodbye to skardu and hopped on a bus back to gilgit. pretty crazy to cover the distance of four days worth of cycling in a couple of hours.En savoir plus
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gilgit #2
13–14 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☀️ 16 °C
in gilgit, i was looking for accomodation, when some very energetic guy on the street made me a good offer and took me to his hotel. i ordered some food up to my room, when the server asked me if his filmmaker friends could interview me for a couple of minutes after my dinner. i was really tired, but of course i agreed.

i assumed his friends to be some high school students, but actually two grown ass men with a gopro in hand introduced themselves to me and drove me to another hotel with a nicer lobby as a backdrop to film an interview. i was too polite to say no at this point, so in the end, i sat there for hours, recollecting everything about my trip and answering all of their questions. then, they staged some scenes of me entering the hotel (by the way, looking like an absolute hobo after all that time spent outside), me being interviewed, yada yada yada.

they then also wanted hundreds of pictures and videos from my trip for them to use in their documentary. i was super tired, all my stuff is on a cloud and it would've taken hours to send them everything, so i just told them i'd do it later. i never did, it just didn't feel right. i still have mixed feelings about the whole thing... i'm really sorry to have wasted their time, but if there's ever a documentary about my trip, i want it to be on my terms and not made to harvest views on some pakistani youtube channel.

anyways, i got myself a got bit of rest, before finally setting off on my solo bikepacking trip the next morning.En savoir plus
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cycling the kkh #1
14 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☀️ 14 °C
before i left gilgit, i still needed a tire pump. a guy from the hotel luckily helped me and took me to a hardware store. got a cheap pump and headed off towards china.

exiting gilgit on the beautiful windy mountain road, i noticed that the cycling felt really tough, as if the brakes were on the whole time. i tried putting more pressure onto the tires, but it didn't help much. i told myself that it's just the weight. the other thing was the sun, absolutely blasting heat, really not fun on inclines (which made up most of the way xd).

i kept my spirits high and at the end of the day, i had made it exactly a third of the way to sost, where the bus to the chinese border would leave. pakistan is regarded as one of the worst countries for wild camping, but i managed to find an agreeable spot in a road bend. i thought i was invisible there, but didn't think of the possibility that there could be gardens in the hills above me.

sure enough, after an hour, two men came to me to tell me that it was dangerous to stay here and that i should go to a hotel down the road. luckily, after some negotiation, i managed to convince them to let me just do my thing. it really paid off. i decided to just sleep outside without the tent , watched a great movie and fell asleep under an amazing pollution-free night sky.En savoir plus
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cycling the kkh #2
15 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☀️ 10 °C
this day was even more scenic than the first one. i rode all the way through hunza valley and up to attabad lake, which has the craziest colour i've ever seen in nature. the sun was banging again and there was a fat climbing section, but with a few eating & reading breaks, it wasn't too bad.

until i got to the pakistani-chinese friendship tunnel and my entire rear casette broke off the bearing with no way of fixing it on the spot. i had to push the bike a couple of kilometres out of the tunnel, but still had 20 or so to go to my goal for the day. i was figuring what my next moves should be, when some sort of police convoy stopped next to me and threw me and my bike onto the back of a pickup truck and drove me through the rest of the tunnels.

from there, i managed to hitchhike a transporter for a couple more kilometres. then, i just pushed or rolled the rest of the way, until i finally made it to a little mechanic shop. although they had no experience with bicycles, they managed to fix it at least temporarily, so that i could ride the rest of the way. needless to say, i was veeery relieved when i finally saw the hostel sign.En savoir plus
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gulmit
15–20 mai 2024, Pakistan ⋅ ☀️ 8 °C
stepan had recommended this hostel to me mainly because of the guy that ran the place, an old mountaineering grandpa with plenty of stories to tell of 7- and 8000m peaks. there were also one or two other guests there, which was great.

still, that didn't fix my bike problems. the closest (and only) bike shop was back in aliabad, half a day's ride away. i thought i could maybe hitchhike there, so i set off the next day, only to find out that all the transporters that i banked on went up empty and down filled to the brim with gravel. after a couple of hours, i gave up and went back to the hostel.

then, the next day, i set off early to try to just cycle the whole way, hoping that my bike would still make it that far. it didn't. and then, just as i had makeshift repaired it again, i realized that it was friday, which is like sunday in pakistan, so there was a good chance the bike shop wouldn't even be open. i went back again.

i was pretty frustrated at this point, so i slowly made the decision to just take the financial L and sell the bike to the hostel owner, who had already asked me if he could have it. it was a shitty situation, but i think i made the right call.

around the same time, i met hannah and axel, a hitchhiker couple from austria, who turned out to also have the same route in mind as me. we went for a hike in the mountains together and got along great, so we decided to partner up for the china crossing and maybe even as far as central asia.

we spent a couple more days at the hostel while i sorted out the bike sale with the owner. in the end, i got my five nights at the hostel for free, plus a bit of extra money for the last bit of pakistan. with the bike gone, i felt like a weight had been lifted that i didn't even knew was there. it felt great to be back to good old flexible hitchhiking.En savoir plus
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tashkorgan
20–22 mai 2024, Chine ⋅ ⛅ 16 °C
on monday, the border reopened after the weekend and we got up early to catch a bus to china. first, we were driven from the hostel to sost (which would've originally been the third day of cycling), where we got some food for the way and went through customs. then, we found a bus and were soon on the way to the highest border crossing in the world.

before you can go there, though, pakistan doesn't miss the chance to give you a last slap in the face. because the road to china goes through a national park, tourists are obliged to pay a fat 40$ fee, without even having the chance to actually see the park. the price doubled out of the blue last year and it all goes straight into the pockets of some corrupt official. everyone leaving pakistan this way leaves absolutely pissed.

the next big attraction was the world's highest atm, but i didn't get the chance to use it. finally, we crossed the border monument and entered chinese customs. there's a general preconception that the chinese officials are very unfriendly and overly strict, but they were actually all super nice. i had heard that they will go through all your pictures and not let you in if they found anything they didn't like, or even install spyware on your phone, but they didn't even check. got a nice red passport stamp and set foot into the land of the not so free.

after more than a month in pakistan, arriving in tashkorgan was like entering a different world. everything squeaky clean, everyone non-intrusive and respectful, and the whole city is quiet and has noticeably fresh air because all the cars are electric. also, the huge crowds of people you'd expect in china were nowhere to be found. it was almost eerily empty and as you can see on the first picture, it looks more like a small swedish town than anything else. and of course the best thing: chinese food. i could finally eat good food without knowing that i'll pay for it with two hours on the toilet. and there was a huge meadow next to the city (we had to jump a fence, but better than nothing), where you can just chill with all sorts of animals, including yaks, for hours. but as always, it's impossible to put all of this into the 10 pictures i'm limited to on here.

there were a couple of difficulties of course, mainly the heavily restricted internet access and cash-free society, but we got around to it.

in short, i loved it so much more than i expected and can't wait to go back. but after just two nights in the hostel there, we were already on the way to the next country again.En savoir plus
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murghab
22–23 mai 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ 🌩️ 11 °C
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.En savoir plus
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sasyk-kol
23–24 mai 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ ☀️ 7 °C
getting out of murghab turned out to be quite challenge. about every 10 minutes, someone came by and either told us they're just going 200 metres or offer to drive us for no less than 100$. i have no issue giving a tip for people who offer me a ride, especially in the poorest country in central asia, but the fact that they didn't want to negotiate the price at all just pissed me (and the others) off. thank god for truck drivers, who are always willing to help, no matter where.

most of the time, truckers don't want to squeeze three people at once into the cabin, so when one offered to take one of us, we decided to split up and regroup later. although i had a headstart of over an hour, somehow the others overtook me and already waited in a container café when i finally arrived after 6 or so hours of driving through no mans land. in the first settlement, where i met the others, we restocked some groceries in a tiny little babushka store and waited for another hitchhiking opportunity while taking in the nature and the village life. it's crazy to think that people live out here.

eventually, we got a ride in a car with another great dude, but it was already pretty late, so when we saw two bikepackers seemingly heading for a campspot near a lake next to the road, we just decided to stop there and join them. good call.

the two cyclists turned out to be germans as well, of course, and they were super happy to have company for the evening. we found some wind shelter in a little abandoned soviet era military facility, where we set up our tents and made some dinner. the landscape around us was amazing, it kind of reminded me of the scottish highlands. a good movie in my tent and the sunset was the cherry on top.En savoir plus
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khorog
24–27 mai 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ ☁️ 7 °C
in the morning, we said goodbye to belinda and tizian and got right to hitchhiking again. sadly, as we packed up, we saw about a dozen trucks go by, and by the time we made it to the road, there was nothing for hours. finally, two trucks pulled up and agreed to take us. communication is always a bit hard, so i tried to learn a bit of russian before going to tajikistan and it really paid off. still, i can't hold a conversation, so after the usual "what name, where from, where go, where wife", i always had a lot of time to read, if the road condition allowed for it.

this was the third day in a row where i had a hitchhiking headstart and still arrived hours after my companions. i must've spent 12 hours driving that day, but eventually, i met the others in a guesthouse in khorog, the biggest city in the pamir range. we stayed there for three days to get some rest, and more importantly, register at a government office, which you have to do after a maximum of 10 days in the country.

the people at the foreigner office didn't speak english, wanted us to wait a full day to fill out a form, wanted all our documents copied but didn't let us use their printer, and to top it off, they didn't accept any payment method except card payment with a national tajik debit card. it was a total fuck-up, and we just decided that we'd still have enough time to do it in dushanbe eventually.

there was one more thing in khorog, though: every saturday, the border to afghanistan (which is always right across the river from this point on) opens, allowing the locals of the two countries to have a shared market. of course we went there, and it was pretty cool, but in the end both nationalities just sell the same chinese made stuff to each other. at least after a couple of tries, i managed to convince an afghani vendor to sell me his shemagh. it's my favourite souvenir so far.

khorog, in general, was the closest i've ever come to time travelling. it's exactly how i imagine the udssr must've been like. really fascinating.En savoir plus
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bartang valley
27–28 mai 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ ⛅ 8 °C
we had four days left to get to dushanbe, which meant there was just enough time to go on another little hike. first, we took a shared taxi from khorog to rŭshan along the border river, so we always had afghanistan in sight. what we didn't have in sight was my backpack falling off the roof rack because the driver hadn't fixed it properly. my flags got a bit dirty, but luckily, nothing broke.

from where we had to find some transportation to get deeper into the mountains. to reduce weight, we left some of our stuff in a little supermarket and managed to find a guy there who drove us an hour into bartang valley for about 20$. just like when we were looking for a shared taxi in khorog, an english student helped us translate, it's always great how they turn up just when you need them.

we still had enough time left in the day, so we got right to hiking. it was a really beautiful trek sloping uphill along a valley floor. hannah had a near death experience when she almost stepped on a big snake, but the goat herd we encountered further up the mountain made up for it.

eventually, we made it to a remote mountain village that can only be reached by foot. we met a couple of italians there, but decided to go a bit further to find a camp spot next to the nearby lake. i made some wrong decisions regarding water depths, split a toe nail and almost drowned my electronics, but at the end of the day, we had a beautiful little camping spot.

the next day, we left our bags there and went further up the mountain to see another alpine lake. hannah was feeling weak and dizzy after a while, so we took it slow. i think she had the same issue that i had had on moses peak. after lunch from a friendly old lady back in the village, we headed back down.En savoir plus
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rŭshan
28 mai 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ ☁️ 8 °C
luckily, there was a guy with a flip phone in the village who arranged transport back to rŭshan for us. back in town, we got the rest of our stuff back from the store and before we knew it, we were already sitting in the store owners kitchen, where she made us a whole dinner buffet. apart from the greedy drivers, the hospitality in the pamir is really almost as good as in iran. and they vehemently refuse to take money, even the smallest amount.

we spent the evening with the family and played some backgammon. what's interesting in the pamir is that there seems to be a lot more gender equality than in other islamic countries. just like the great lady that owned the guest house in khorog, the woman seemed to be the boss of the household here too. also, those english students that i mentioned, were all female. it's really refreshing to see all this after all that time in iran and pakistan. we were told that the relatively liberal ismailite branch of islam as well as the aga khan foundation, which provides hospitals, higher education as well as infrastructure to the region. go donate, i guess.En savoir plus
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kevron
29–30 mai 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ ☁️ 12 °C
in rŭshan, we had literally just stepped out the front door when two trucks stopped right away. as per usual by now, we split up again and had a really adventurous day of hitchhiking. there were multiple construction zones and sketchy road segments we had to get through and i met the others in a big traffic jam again, where the road was blocked for multiple hours.

while we waited, we could actually wave across the river to the talibs on the other side and they even waved back. there was also a lot of military presence on our side as well, but most of them were just 16 year olds doing their mandatory service. our truck drivers weren't only really nice to us, but also regularly gave out food and water to those guys. of course, the truck drivers never wanted to accept money directly, so we always paid for their lunch at least.

in the evening, i had to find another ride and everything took a bit longer than expected, but i finally made it to a truck stop where the others were already waiting. to our surprise, we were offered a carpet room there for like 3€, so we just stayed there for the night.En savoir plus
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dushanbe
30 mai–2 juin 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ ☀️ 26 °C
we hitchhiked one last truck out of the pamir and finally, the landscape opened up again as we got closer and closer to dushanbe. instead of the desolate, rocky terrain, we now had incredibly lush hills to either side, no trees, just endless green grass. it's how i imagined heaven when i was a kid, i'm sure they shot that windows xp desktop background there.

as for actually getting to dushanbe, we had no other option except taking a shared taxi. spent three days there resting a bit and other than going for a run, getting my hair cut and doing the damn registration at the office where they tried to scam us, i didn't do much. this wasn't all my fault, it's also because dushanbe ist just not a very fun city. it feels really weird walking through the lavish city center, knowing the state that the rest of the country lives in.En savoir plus
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to nowhere in particular Voyageur
fann tour #1
2 juin 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ 🌙 8 °C
as we prepared to leave dushanbe for another trekking tour, i got talking with georg, a german dude who seemed cool and just decided to spontaneously tag along with me and the austrians. he didn't have any equipment, but we found some used camping gear at the hostel, which he took. hannah and axel already wanted to leave, so we split up to meet later.

we took a taxi to the place where cars left towards the general direction we were heading for and negotiated a price there. luckily, georg spoke a fair bit of russian, which was really helpful in finding a place where i could leave some of my stuff. we then hitchhiked further up into the mountains, but he didn't go as far as we needed to, so we had to hike into the night in order to catch up to the others, who were hopefully ahead of us.

i got along really well with georg, and he had a jbl speaker, so we introduced some techno to the local wildlife and got to the end of the jeep track at record pace. when we got to a resort complex in at the end of the valley, there was still no signal and no sign of our austrian friends, so we hopped a fence and walked a bit further up the mountain, now along footpath. shortly before midnight, when we got to the lake where we were supposed to meet them, there was still no sign, so we set up my tent and got some sleep.En savoir plus
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to nowhere in particular Voyageur
fann tour #2
3 juin 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ ☁️ 9 °C
woke up to a stunning view and the not so stunning discovery that some animal had eaten half our rations by ripping the food bag off the tree where we hung it so no animals would get it. not wanting to feel starving hunger for the next couple of days, i decided to descend the mountain again to try and organize some food at the resort. guess who bumped into me half an hour into my walk. turns out the austrians had decided to stay at the resort for the night. i told them where they'd find our camp and kept going down.

fortunately, there was a super nice girl at the reception who gave me a bunch of bread, cheese, vegetables and sweets for a really good price. also, she told me that it was pretty much impossible that it had been a bear that ate my food, and that i should just keep it in my tent. i hiked back up to meet the rest and we got going for that day's hike.

because it wasn't all that far, we first checked out another lake a bit further uphill, where a bunch of cows were chilling. then, we went back down and started walking towards the mountain pass we had to cross next. we came across some really cool tent houses where a couple of shepherds lived with their families.

it rained a bit halfway through and the pass was pretty hard, but it was worth the view across the wide valley that opened up as we looked down the other side. after a quick nap, we hiked down there and set up camp by another cool lake. managed to get a campfire going and had a super chill evening.En savoir plus
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to nowhere in particular Voyageur
fann tour #3
4 juin 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ 🌫 6 °C
woke up, took a plunge in the lake and started walking through some fun terrain i can't really describe other than it kinda looks scandinavian. pretty quickly, we heard thunder roll in behind us and it started raining pretty hard. to our luck, we saw a little cottage just ahead and it turned out to be a little tea house run by an old couple. just as we were welcomed in to seek refuge there, it started pouring buckets, so we decided to stay for a while and shared some lunch with our two hosts.

through georg, we were able to talk to them and they invited us to stay for the night in the big tent outside. the weather wasn't getting any better, so we made ourselves comfortable. i took a little nap just to wake up to georg and hannah having a dance party with the old man there, we had a lot of fun with them.

then, sunset came around and i left my phone and went off on my own to watch it from the lake shore. that was the perfect end to the day.En savoir plus
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to nowhere in particular Voyageur
fann tour #4
5 juin 2024, Tadjikistan ⋅ 🌫 5 °C
on this day, we had to climb up to 3800 meters to cross the next mountain pass. to make this climb, most tourists that go there (we encountered a surprising amount that day) rent porters with mules to carry their stuff and help with navigation. we're built different tho

we took a little detour to another lake first and then started the climb. we heard a storm rolling in again and quickened our pace to not get caught by it in a bad place. luckily, we were above freezing level when it started, so we only got snow. we passed pretty much all the other tourist groups on the pass and made it to the other side safely. on the way, there were a bunch of mules, including such individuals as lexus, toyota and tesla. they were really cute and i got the idea to maybe buy one in kyrgyzstan.

after a day of hiking, we got to our lakeside camp spot for the day, where we met three of the guides again and before i knew it, i was riding a donkey. my batteries were all dead by this point, so i spent the rest of my evening building stone piles. ooga booga.En savoir plus
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