With some trepidation, I approached the departure gate at Istanbul's airport on the evening of September 8, after two relaxing and interesting days puttering around the city. I was bound for Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and hardly knew what to expect. With relief, I spotted Maeve, a fellow trekker from an earlier trip, who greeted me with a hug and an incredible account of how her passport and visa had reached her at San Francisco airport only hours before departure.
So we were off, on one of Turkish Airlines's twice weekly flights to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. We landed at 3:45 a.m., were given a few hours to rest in a hotel, taken on a short tour of the limited sights of Dushanbe (an attractive, modern, Soviet-era city), and then driven into the Fann Mountains over perilous roads with breathtaking switchbacks. In less than 24 hours, I'd been transported from the urbane pleasures of Istanbul to a small tent in a huge, primitive, mountain wilderness.
I was one of twelve hikers -- all British except myself and Maeve. We were accompanied by a Welsh chief guide, a Tajik "translator" who also served as an assistant guide and jack of all trades, a couple of cooks, and a varying cast of "donkey boys," most of them teenagers, who handled our pack donkeys and pitched and struck our tents each night and morning.
Tajikistan, bordering Afghanistan to its south, is the poorest of the former Soviet republics. It's also the only one in Central Asia that speaks a form of Persian, rather than a Turkic language. Ethnic Tajiks represent an interbreeding of Iranian and Mongol peoples, but not all Tajik citizens are ethnic Tajiks -- there are plenty of ethnic Russians, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian peoples living in Tajikistan -- nor do all Tajiks live in Tajikistan. The ancient Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan have always been dominated by ethnic Tajiks, and Tajikistan long pleaded with the Soviet government, unsuccessfully, to transfer those cities to the Tajik republic.
Central Asia, as we learned, is really a stew of various nationalities that once roamed willy-nilly about "Turkistan." It wasn't until Stalin's time that an effort was made to carve the Turkistan region into various republics, each dominated by a distinct ethnic group. The effort was only partially successful.
Tajikistan was, unsurprisingly, once part of various Persian empires. Like Persia, itself, it was largely Zoroastrian (together with local minor religions) until the Arab conquest forced Islam on the people in the seventh century A.D. Since then, it has been part of whatever empire was dominant in the region, ending up with the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Present-day Tajikistan, independent since 1991, has inherited a few modern cities from the Soviet era, along with reasonably good health and education systems. The vast majority of the land, however, is dominated by mountain ranges -- notably the mighty Pamirs in the southeast and the Fanns (actually an extension of the Pamirs) -- where we did our hiking -- in the west.
The Fanns, although perhaps small in size compared with the Pamirs proper (highest peak, Chimtarga, is 18,000 feet), to me appeared awesome in their jagged silhouettes and plunging valleys, in their sweep and vistas, and in their virtual emptiness. We hiked roughly six to seven hours a day, usually from a lower campsite over a pass and down into the next valley -- usual elevation gain between 2,000 to 2,500 feet. We camped every night, except for one night about half way through the trip when we reached a small village and stayed in a "gite," or primitive hotel, several hikers to a room, sleeping in our sleeping bags.
We met one other party of hikers -- an Israeli couple -- and a few shepherds tending flocks of goats and sheep.
After eleven days of hiking, we finally emerged on the opposite side of the mountain range, bid our local staff farewell with the usual presentation of tips and participation in orgiastic singing and dancing before a giant bonfire, and were hauled back to civilization in the morning by two vans that, happily, rendezvoused with us as planned. Our destination was Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, not far from our mountain point of egress, but ethnic disputes had closed the local border crossing. So we drove five hours north to Khujand (née Leninabad), a pleasant city, where we visited a market, checked into a tiny (but honest-to-goodness) hotel, and had much-needed showers!
We crossed the border the next day -- a fantasy of bureaucratic delights -- much filling of forms and stamping of documents. The crossing had been projected to take three hours, and we all felt oddly delighted and relieved that we were in fact able to cross the national border -- between two countries that used to be fellow states like Oregon and Washington -- in a mere two hours. We drove another five hours south to Samarkand through endless fields of cotton (Uzbekistan is the world's second largest exporter of cotton, after only the United States. The Soviet government, unfortunately, drove the fields to partial soil depletion by setting ever higher annual quotas, with no crop rotation permitted.)
I don't want to be harsh on Samarkand. Samarkand is a remarkable city with an amazing history. A history nearly as complex and power nearly as great -- during its heyday under Tamarlane -- as Rome or Florence. The problem, from a tourist's perspective, is that -- unlike Rome or Florence -- its antiquities were reduced virtually to rubble by the passage of time, repeated earthquakes, and Soviet distrust of ethnic pride in local history. Once again, the Soviet government created a modern city -- a very attractive city -- but didn't do much, for many years, with the historical monuments.
But in recent years, Uzbekistan has done an amazing job of rebuilding the ancient mosques and madressas, with their characteristic blue barrel domes and complex ornamentation. Exhibits show the "before" state of the ruins, and explain how the buildings have been accurately rebuilt. Unfortunately, to me, reconstructed buildings in the midst of a modern city are beautiful and instructive, but they lack the feel and smell of history. I could never ignore the fact that most of the work to create what we were viewing had been done in the past twenty years.
In any event, we were given a very satisfactory tour of the city by a native of Samarkand, an ethnic Russian whose grasp of history and architecture seemed several notches above what one generally expects in such tours. After two nights at a pleasant small hotel, with meals in an open courtyard over which loomed the blue dome of a major mosque across the street, we took the train to the capital city of Tashkent, some 3½ hours to the north. A quick afternoon tour of Tashkent (about which I had the same complaints as I did about Samarkand), a final group dinner at a local restaurant, a fast night's sleep -- and we found ourselves saying goodbye to each other as we flew back to Istanbul, and thence to our respective homes.
Not only a wonderful hike, but an opportunity to get a quick introduction to a part of the world about which I knew very little indeed. I have an urge to return -- if not to Tajikistan itself, at least to the general region of Central Asia.
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* Half-hearted apologies to Alexander Borodin.
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