Wingin it on two wheels: Tajikistan Part 2: The Bartang Valley, Karakul, and Murghab

June 2018

After a brief delay involving a closed gas station and doubling back to fill our fuel bottles, we reached our turnoff and started up the Bartang Valley. We had only ridden a few kilometres when we ran into a German couple who had come from Khorog the day before. We rode with them for most of the day, chatting about our trips and life and the things you chat about when you run into other cyclists on a long tour. They’d met Karen and Jamie in Khorog and were delighted to realize that we were sisters! This was actually a common theme from people who ran into us separately. Most tourists on the road here were European, and they all had a good laugh that the only Canadians they did meet were related.

The first part of the valley was pretty easy riding, bumpy but not too bad, though in some places it was just a track through sand and rocks that seemed like it spent a good portion of the year underwater. The valley was beautiful, we passed villages and farms tucked in between river and mountains. My words don’t do it justice; I’m not sure if the pictures will either. We pushed on after the Germans stopped and found a nice little rock garden to sleep in, tucked underneath steep cliffs on either side. It was a great day, one of those days that make us want to keep riding forever. It was also reassuring to have such a good start to a section I was feeling so unsure about.

The next day the road was still rideable, but definitely getting worse and harder. We cranked up lots of short steep climbs and were rewarded with fun, flowy descents on packed sand. There were a few sections where the road had been taken over by water, so we were just riding up the streams. Even so, it was peaceful riding in an amazing location, so we were enjoying the challenges. We had been lucky so far and hadn’t had any big river crossings, so we were making good time. Not quite halfway up the valley was the town of Savnob, which had a small shop that was the only place to get food. Savnob was guarded by a huge climb, which we came upon right at the end of the second day. The climbs were starting to get bumpier and steeper, and the well stocked panniers were feeling pretty heavy. So we found some abandoned houses to camp beside and decided to tackle the climb after a rest. In the morning, after what felt like a great deal of effort, we pedaled/pushed up and over the hill to Savnob.

As we rolled into the town a few people came out to greet us, and a very helpful man said that he would show us to the shop. As expected, it was pretty sparse, but we bought some noodles and cookies and Snickers bars. Almost 3 years later, I still can’t eat a Snickers without thinking of Central Asia; they were a staple.

The road continued to deteriorate. We were still enjoying the ride, but the suffer-fest was starting. The Bartang Valley climbs about 2000m of elevation over about 300km, with quite a few extra ups and downs in there. The road became less of a road and more of a rocky trail as we moved higher up the valley. If it wasn’t for the location, this ride would have been a lot worse. Even as we were suffering with the loaded bikes, the mountain views just kept getting more and more stunning. The feeling of remoteness was increasing too; the farms and villages that occupied the lower parts of the valley were long gone and we hadn't seen a vehicle in days. Now it was mostly rocks and a hint of a road that was sometimes just a faint track across dry floodplains. At the end of the third day, we came into Gudara, which was the last town we would see for a few days. It didn’t have a shop, but we stopped for a water refill, and we ran into two American cyclists heading down the valley. We had a quick chat with them, and were pretty relieved to know that everything coming up was passable! Until this point we had still been expecting some challenging river crossings. They assured us that there was nothing to worry about, and we did the same for them.

Out of Gudara we had another steep rocky climb that there was no hope of pedaling up. So we pushed, and a friendly young guy on the road stopped to help me push my beast of a bike up the hill. I tried to tell him how much I appreciated the help, and I hope he understood. At the top of that hill, we set up camp and ate dinner on a rock, surrounded by epic mountains and looking back down the valley at where we had come from. My words really will never be able to describe the beauty of this place.

The next day, our 4^th day from Rushon, ended up being the hardest day of the entire trip. We had come to the end of the Bartang Valley, and it was time to climb up some switchbacks to gain the alpine plateau that would lead us back to the M41. We started early and even though we could see the terrain that would take us up and over, it took most of the day to get there. A combination of the huge peaks distorting the distance, and the bad road meant that we didn’t actually hit the switchbacks until the afternoon. When we did get to the switchbacks, we discovered that they were steeper, rockier, and looser than we had been expecting. There was minimal pedaling and mostly pushing. Quite often, we would both push one bike through a section before going back down to get the second. The views, however, were incredible. We could see the river bed so far below us, the channels streaking across the sandy ground and huge peaks rising up above it all. The colours were so vibrant and the air was so clear. We kept slogging, because that’s all there was to do. By the time we made it to the top, we had done almost 1000m of elevation that day and were both destroyed. About ¾ of the way up, I had been joking to Steve that it couldn’t be that hard, because I hadn’t cried yet. I almost made it, but just as we crested the last little hill, the tears came. I sat in the dirt and sobbed while some shaggy donkeys watched from a distance.

And then we kept riding, because that’s all there was to do. We were up above 3800m now and the views up on the plateau were even more stunning. We rode into a huge, yellow fertile valley, surrounded on all sides by craggy, snowy mountains that stretched up into the sky and dwarfed the world below them. There was a shepard there who invited us into his hut, but we were too wrecked to socialize. So we kept riding and eventually found a little creek to camp next to. As exhausted as we were, it was pretty rewarding to be up so high on this plateau, surrounded on all sides by this spectacular scenery that made us feel so small.

We probably could have made it back to the M41 the next day, but I got hit hard with food poisoning and an afternoon snowstorm rolled in, so we stopped early. I didn’t feel great for a few days, but we kept riding, mostly because we were running out of food and needed to make it somewhere to resupply. The rest of the plateau was decent riding, mostly sandy tracks, sprawling mountains, and fuzzy marmots chirping at us from their hidey-holes. We came across an alpine desert with tiny purple and white flowers poking up from the sand, and a hazy view of Lake Karakul in the distance. After a handful of easy river crossings, our tires hit pavement for the first time since leaving Rushon. It was a good feeling, knowing that we’d accomplished our goal of riding up the Bartang Valley and were back on the Pamir highway.

Our next move was a choice between riding towards Karakul, which was 25km in the wrong direction, or heading the other way towards Murghab, over 100km away. We were pretty low on food, so we rode into Karakul. The place looked mostly abandoned, and the one small shop had some noodles and not much else, but we did find a Chaihana that cooked us up a hot lunch. It was nice to be in a Chaihana again, just like the desert Chaihanas in Uzbekistan, but in the mountains. After the first good meal in days, we doubled back towards Murghab. We climbed a bit at the end of the day and spent the night tucked into a moonscape just above 4000m.

Maybe the next day was the hardest of the trip? It’s hard to say. We started off strong, climbing up towards the highest pass on the Pamir highway. We’d been able to exchange a few messages with Karen and Jamie who were in Murghab. They said they would wait for us to get there, and we were feeling pretty good that we could make it there that night. It was probably a combination of the elevation, and the fact that I still hadn’t fully recovered from the food poisoning. But climbing up that pass just about broke me. It took everything I had, pushing my bike even on the mellow sections, with Steve’s help. As usual though, one foot in front of the other eventually got us up to 4655m, the top of Ak-Baital Pass and the high point of our trip. We snapped a picture where I look about as dead as I felt, and started our descent towards Murghab.

Eventually, far later than we’d planned and exhausted by a headwind on top of everything else, we rolled into the Pamir Hotel in Murghab. Luckily the kitchen was still open so we sat down for a much needed hot meal with Karen and Jamie, sharing all our stories since Dushanbe. They had taken the also challenging Wakhan Valley route through the Pamirs, so we stayed up late laughing about all the bad roads, tears, and absurdities that had brought us this far.

Murghab was a welcome sight, but not exactly a place we wanted to linger. The only power to the hotel came from a generator, which was turned on for about 4 hours in the evening. Any hot showers or charging of electronics had to happen during that time. We made a trip to the market, which is housed in a collection of old shipping containers, and found some eggs and dried fruit in addition to the standard noodles and cookies. It was interesting to get a glimpse of life in such a remote place, but we were eager to carry on.

Somewhere along the way, between melting in the desert and struggling in the mountains, Steve and I had decided that we were done bike touring. For real this time, and the fact that we’d considered this before and kept riding made us even more confident that this was the right decision. The Kulma Pass border between Tajikistan and China had recently re-opened after being closed to foreigners for years. It seemed like a natural exit point, to cross Kulma Pass, ride the Karakorum highway into Kashgar, and go home from there. So that’s what we decided to do. Karen and Jamie left the next morning, heading towards Ak-Baital pass, and Kyrgystan beyond. They ended up riding for another 2 months, spending time in Kyrgystan and China, and eventually flying home from Hanoi. Steve and I rode towards China, feeling pretty satisfied with what we had accomplished, and with absolutely no regrets that we were down to our last few hundred kilometres.

About 50km out of Murghab we entered the border control area, where the soldiers checked our visas and let us through. In no hurry, we climbed up towards the pass, through rolling yellow meadows covered with the little alpine wildflowers we had gotten used to seeing everywhere. About 10km from the border, some soldiers pulled over to tell us that the checkpoint was closed for the night, but that we could camp in the control zone. Our last night in Tajikistan was spent at 4300m, surrounded by wildflowers, near a remote border outpost high in the mountains. Once again, the stars were epic and the night was dark and silent. It was a fitting end to one of the hardest, wildest, and most memorable countries of the trip.