The other side – Escaping the Pamir highway, Part II

2:00 AM

I woke up to see the unmistakable front lights of a large truck in the rearview mirror. I shook Enrique awake, and we waited as the truck got nearer and nearer. I opened the door as the truck pulled up next to us; the driver got out and walked towards the car. In broken English and sign language he told us he had come to pick us up from Murghab, but that the Tajik-Kyrgyz border was closed at the moment, so he would drive up ahead to a rest stop (at least that’s what I understood) and he would come back at 8 AM to pick us up and take us to Osh. With that, he got back in the truck and left. We settled back into our Puntito coccoon to rest some more. We knew we had a long day ahead.

8:00 AM

Surprisingly, the truck showed up promptly at the agreed time. We had barely slept in the uncomfortable cold. We woke up and got out of the car to meet the two drivers who were going to take us to Osh. One of them was young, around our age, and the other one looked to be pretty old and weary. Enrique baptized him as a the “Tajik Morgan Freeman” (TMF); his face had wrinkles like an orange peel. The truck they were driving was at least 50 years old, because it had to be wound up at the front to be turned on (we had never before in our lives seen this outside of a museum) and in general looked like a piece of crap. It had no way of pulling the Puntito on top. Luckily, the road had a steep but shallow drop off on one side, so the truck would drive ahead pull out of the road, and then drive back and back up perpendicular to the road (I’ll upload a picture of this soon). Then we would push the car on top and be on our way. At least that was the plan.

Getting the Puntito on the Lorry

Since we didn’t have the keys, the steering column was locked and the wheels turned at a slight angle (luckily towards the side of the road with the dropoff). We pushed the car toward the side of the road, but once it was at the edge, we had to turn the car by picking up the front and sliding it sideways. This took a LOT of effort and chants of “bir, iki, ewch!” which is “one, two, three” in Turkish and Kyrgyz (Kyrgyz is a Turkish-based language). After an hour and a half, we managed to get the car on the truck and latch it down as best we could. We sent out a Spot GPS saying “Puntito on lorry, on our way to Osh!”.

We thought the worse part was over. It was just getting started.

9:30 AM

Once the car was on the truck, the young driver asked me to pay him. We still owed them 300 USD, and I wanted to pay him 100 then and there, and then the rest once we got to Osh. He was insistent that I pay him 200, and with no bargaining power I reluctantly agreed and paid him. It was now time to get into the truck. It had only one continous seat in the front, where all four of us were supposed to fit. Now at this stage, Enrique and I hadn’t showered for 9 days straight, and we were wearing dirty, oil-stained clothes from when we had fixed the engine. The two truck drivers didn’t exactly look like paragons of hygiene either, so between the four of us we must have had a very interesting combination of human scents. And now for the fun part: the driver indicated for Enrique (who is shorter than I am) to sit with the gear shifter right between his legs, and it had just the right length such that the handle rested right about crotch height. This meant that every time the driver wanted to shift into second gear, Enrique would be in a VERY uncomfortable situation. They started up the truck (by cranking it in the front. Unbelievable) and we started towards Osh. A few seconds later, we passed by the 3PANDA campsite, where they were all awake and started waving wildly when we drove by. We waved back.

We still had 250 km to Osh.

9:45 AM

We got to the Tajik side of the border (we had been so close!), and got off the truck to show our papers and get through. We walked into the customs office with Tajik Morgan Freeman. He got into an argument with the guard, after which we walked outside with him to look at the truck and the Puntito. ‘Kyrgyztan NO’, said the border guard. He pointed in the other direction and said ‘Murghab’. We were a little confused, but assumed that he was looking for what almost every border official is looking for when he sees tourists: money. It was just a matter of how much, so we walked back into his office to try and negotiate a price. A few minutes after we walked in, a blond lady also stepped into the office. She was from Bishkek and spoke perfect English, and she was gracious enough to translate for us what was happening. Tajik Morgan Freeman apparently had a debt with the Tajik government in the thousands of dollars, and so he was not allowed to leave the country. The lady walked outside to talk to TMF and he admitted that he was in debt. Again, it was all a matter of how much the border guard wanted to let us through, but after a while of talking the guard said that he knew we were guests in his country and that it was not our fault, so he would let us through even if we didn’t pay him anything. We gave him 20 dollars anyway and decided to discount it from the 100 that we still owed the truck drivers.

10:15 AM

After passing the Tajik border, we stopped at a small house to have some breakfast. An interesting thing about the Pamirs is that there is very little combustible vegetation, so their source of heat to cook is (yep, you guessed it) yak shit. Most houses have a 1.5-meter tall pile of dried yak shit in front. We saw the lady of the house bring in two giant dried up bricks of it, put them in the small oven, and then get some bread out of a basket and tear it up with her hands. We ate the bread.

When we were done with breakfast, the drivers motioned for us to pay for it. Enrique and I looked at each other for a second, and then started laughing. How could they expect for us to pay for their breakfast when we had payed them so much money for them to take us to Osh? It changed things a little bit: we weren’t surprised, but now we knew that the drivers were trying to squeeze us for every last penny, and in general we had an instinct that they were not good people. This would prove to be almost prophetic.

11:30 AM

We get to the Kyrgyz border, where we had to stop for a little while because they were processing other people in front. The 3PANDA team caught up with us, and we were there talking for a while. A German couple also was waiting at the border, so we talked to them for a little bit, always very aware of the fact the we probably looked like recently released POWs. We told them we had spent 5 days in Murghab fixing our car. ‘5 days in Murghab!?’, said the German guy, ‘I would kill myself!’. We knew the feeling pretty well.

We had no problems at this border, just the typical jumping through hoops and going to several different desks that is the norm at any Central Asian border. We joked around a little with the guards, and then finally we were in Kyrgyzstan! We looked back to see the 3PANDA team still waiting at the gate, playing frisbee while they did. We still had about 200 km to go.

To be continued…