Pamir Highway part 5 & Dushanbe

The last couple of days of the Pamir Highway road trip spent driving along dusty mountain roads through deep dramatic valleys. These roads seem to be constantly in a state of construction so we had to stop many times while the road was blocked for construction workers, sometimes for hours at a time. In these deep valleys there is no way around, so people would just park their cars up and wait in the shade of the vehicles until the road opened to let people pass.

The mountains gradually gave way to hills and gentle valleys as we got closer to Dushanbe, the capital. Dushanbe is another ex-soviet city, but a lot of its charm had been diminished as the Tajik government removed much of the old architecture and tree lined alleys. There were still some interesting monuments, including a flashy monument to Ismail Somoni, the ruler of the 10th century Samanid dynasty, whose mausoleum I had visited a few weeks earlier in Bukhara. Somoni is also the name of the currency in Tajikistan so they obviously really like this guy!Read more