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By the time we started on the Pamir I was almost fed up with it. It had been on our minds for so long, and often our chats with other tourers ended up involving the Pamir. Have you been? Are you going? North route? South route? Wakhan? On and on. There's a mythology to it, but now I think we can understand some of it.
One is because it is beautiful. Like, really beautiful. It is also remote and challenging and borderline desolate but I suspect coming from the East like we did prepared us for what was to come. When we think back of it we realise that riding in Kyrgyzstan was equally challenging, with incredibly beautiful mountains but much more varied landscape (from a gorge to an alpine forest to a canyon to a lake to a snow-capped mountain on the same day). Tajikistan, on the other hand, feels like a high altitude desert. Rocks, wind, salt, not much else. At least in early August.
We rode the Pamir on the opposite direction of most tourers, which worked super well. We had to climb a few days out of Osh, but once we got up there the passes were reasonably easy. Altitude was never a problem, and we had a good tailwind all the way to Murghab. We had to pay for it with three days of strong headwind but I guess that's fair enough. The worst of it was a full day against a wall of 50kph wind, we ended up riding for 11h that day because stopping was so uncomfortable we just kept plugging along in misery. Even so, I think we were quite lucky with the weather.
Seems like everyone rides the Wakhan valley these days, but we kept to the M41. Every rider we came across complained of fine sand on the valley road, which resulted in lots of pushing and we didn't fancy that with a loaded tandem. We also wanted to ride the main road all the way, traffic really died down after the Wakhan turnoff ('traffic' in the Pamir is 70% overlanders and cyclists), and the approach to Khorog was beautiful.
In Khorog we decided to hitch a ride to Dushanbe. It's a gorgeous road, but super rough so cyclists struggle to make quick progress. It'd have been slow going and set us back a couple of weeks (even by car it took more than 20 hours to cover the 600km). We also thought that we had already ridden the area we really wanted to, the plateau and the high passes over 4000m. But honestly, that road is incredible. I ended up regretting our decision, it'd have been wonderful to ride this road, even if it'd be hard work.
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are definitely places that would be worth going back to with a proper off-road setup. But for now we're super happy to have done this bit on the tandem, we feel much fitter and more confident in our riding after Central Asia.
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After Dushanbe we rode to Samarkand, another beautiful mountain road. Less fun was the tunnel at the top of the pass, pitch dark and not ventilated. Like most cyclists we hitched a ride with a kind Tajik driver, but those 10 minutes in his van were the scariest shit ever. We should have filmed it but we were so terrified we couldn't move. We took a pic of the tunnel exit, the fumes are much worse inside, couldn't see shit.
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Fantastic photos
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Wonderful!
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Loads happened. Plans changed, we scrapped Turkey and decided to ride towards London, at least get as near as we can. Been to Azerbaijan, Georgia, tiny bit of Ukraine (Odessa), Moldova, Romenia, Hungary and then been Eurovelo'ing our way to Austria and Germany, where we are today.
We'll finish the trip in Zurich in 4 days. It's an emotional time for us, occasionally ruined by flathunting and the general shitiness that comes with that.
I'll try to post some pics of where we've been through, lots of places we really loved — Romenia and Azerbaijan probably the biggest surprises.
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We expected Azerbaijan to be dry and dull, but that’s just the Eastern end of it. A couple of days after leaving Baku we were already riding through forests, which was super nice after so much time in deserts. The main roads are quite busy, but also good. Full of Ladas. Azerbaijan was one of those places where nothing really stood out, it’s not the most scenic or exotic, but for some reason we had a really nice time there. Guesthouses are nice and plentiful, lots of restaurants are just tables under trees, and they have a delicious way of cooking egg and tomatoes (pomidor-yumurta).
Our route was Baku - Shamakhi - Sheki - Balakan, and onwards to Georgia.
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A lot of cyclists we met on the road recommended Georgia, it seems to be pretty near the top of most people’s list. Our route was a bit too straightforward to really explore the country, we didn’t go to the mountains on the North or South, but we also like it quite a bit. Crossing from Azerbaijan the first thing we noticed was how much poorer it seemed to be, a bit a of a surprise to me. But it is also more rural, cuter, and a lot more familiar to us who grew up in Christian countries. Wine and cheese were back on the menu, but what we liked the most was khinkali (dumplings) and Borjomi water. The towns were pleasant, Tbilisi perhaps a bit less interesting than I thought it’d be, but still nice. The highlight were the small roads in the countryside, usually unpaved and following some river through the mountains, with more cows than cars.
Our route was Lagodekhi - Sighnaghi - Telavi - Tbilisi - Gori - Kutaisi - Batumi
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From Batumi we took a ferry to Odessa, Ukraine. Had a quick look at the beaches and rode out to Moldova. We entered through Transistria, a Russian separatist territory that attracts tourists fetishising about this sort of thing. Tiraspol, the capital, is a small town with little going for it so we just carried on to Moldova proper. Roads were much worse than in Transistria, but the further West we went the nicer it got, especially near the Romanian border.
Crossing to Romania and entering the EU was quite a moment. From here onwards our passports weren’t getting stamped anymore, it felt like we were almost home. Iasi was our first stop, a pleasant and wealthy city. The landscape around it was just large-scale corn farming, a bit boring to ride through (especially on some very busy main roads). Thankfully after a couple of days we started getting near the Carpathian range, and we had some amazing days around this area. The Bicaz Gorge is one of the most beautiful stretches of road we’ve ever been to. Cluj was also very nice, and we got the feeling that there was much more to be explored that we didn’t manage to cover. I’d love to go back.
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skinny
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greentricky
Lolo
russmeyer
SasenFrAsen
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Thrasher
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About
Asia on a tandem
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@ough
What @Thrasher said. Pamir highway looks breathtaking/scary!