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@ough
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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