Monday's town

We woke in Khorog with every expectation of catching a flight that would weave through the valleys and land us in Tajikistan's capital - Dushanbe - within the hour. What we actually ended up with was a twenty hour ride in a box with windows strapped unsubtly to the back of a truck. It has worked though and we are soaking up the heat, dietary variety, and severed soviet sinews of Dushanbe. What's more, the disappointment felt when it became apparent, at lunch yesterday, that they had run out of kebab meat was temporarily forgotten when Andy suddenly appeared.

Apparently we had contacts in the airport and with clear skies from the day before clearing any backlog our seats seemed assured. Dr Rajput’s (a.k.a. Dr. Khorog) girls were even friends with the manager’s wife but none of this was enough and we were soon hoisted unceremonially onto the bus and waved off - our hand luggage woefully undersupplied for a day in a tin.

Not a problem. In the villages early on the route, the passengers chopped and changed. Sitting by the door were handed babies and apples. Sent the former to be fed at the back and feasted on the latter. The was quite a cross-section of passengers: twin brothers who paid their 100 somani fare in one somani note denominations; a uniformed guy of unknown office who handed us split peas scrumped from a roadside field; a glamorous twig of a girl and friend whose seat kept collapsing under the lack of weight; a old bearded man with a pair of sticks who kept bullying his grandson for being weak; the rather drained looking mother, toddlers swaying from her chest; a guy in a camouflaged scull cap and shirt spattered with English nautical terms chatting up a girl with a pencilled monobrow and dying hair-dye; and us, three westerners stuck in the reverse-facing seats - we were each other’s audience.

The road clung to the slopes of the Gunt river valley like the road north along the Indus in Pakistan that Andy and I took all those weeks ago - outside, hours of filmstrip. On the opposite bank the route was no more than a donkey track, but where streams joined the settlements we alive: orchards of apricot trees and mulberry bushes, fields of wheat, caravans of donkey traffic, leaf-hidden houses and children playing on swings – the tranquil shores of Afghanistan.

The road peeled away from the border and we stopped a lot look for a place to eat. We toured towns on foot as a coach party before hopping back on finding everywhere too full. Eventually, a place was found and we chewed our way though some very fatty meat that lingered between the teeth all the way to Dushanbe.

It was now dark and the remainder of the route a case of endurance. The mountains had changed but they were dimming fast. Sleep was impossible but we tried our best: balancing on the fuel cans, lying flat down the aisle, new and original uses of a travel pillow, shoulders and hair.

We arrived soon after dawn and the bus was promptly besieged by taxis. Taking the least irritating of drivers we handed him the address given to us by Dr. Rajput and soon bounced into a complex of concrete towers next to the circus. After some confusion as to which building we would be staying in – they seem to be named after the number of floors they have – we took the release-the-button-when-you-want-to-stop lift to the eight floor and sleep.

With late morning, we got though to Andy’s intended hotel and with news that an “Andrew Graham” was in residence we headed to make contact in Dushanbe.