I Can See Afghanistan From My Car

In which I have more foriegn policy experience than Sarah Palin.

For hour after bumpy, circuitous hour, the road into the Pamir mountains winds along the Amu Darya, the river dividing Tajikistan from Afghanistan. There it was, a literal stone's toss away. I could see women washing clothes and children swimming, haystacks collected in nearly vertical fields, mud houses, processions of donkeys along the parallel cliff side paths. It is hard to reconcile the peaceful vista with the tragedy of the American aid workers who were killed by the Taliban in Afghan Badakhshan. In the Afghan villages there is less new paint, fewer satellite dishes, but I have a slight sense of anti-climax that so much appeared the same between the two countries. I suppose that could make me nervous here, but I can't help feeling slightly more reassured about the Afghan situation instead.

There has been too much rain this year, and the river is muddy brown and racing through the valley. It covers the road in places - drivers get out of vehicles and wade across to test the depth, then drive gamely on. I thought about Alexander the Great ordering his soldiers to stuff their tents with straw and sew up the seams to make boats to cross this river after the retreating Persian army burned the bridges. Upstream the valley widens into the Wakhan, a strip of land tacked on to Afghanistan so that the Russian and British empires wouldn't touch borders. The river there is silver, the mountains purple and capped with snow, the wheat in its carefully hedged and terraced fields is golden and blowing in the wind. The ruins of forts on the hills were built by princes before the coming of Islam. Ignore a power line and it is easy to imagine you are a sentry scanning the horizon for invading horsemen (which made it all the odder to bump into Yale professor Elizabeth Hanson and a group of Americans in a village guest house!)

 Pamiris are proud of their ancient history, and a time when, even in their isolation, they were connected and contributed to the great civilizations. The nostalgia however is mostly for the practical advantages of a relatively recent past, the Soviet era when the electricity worked in winter and everyone had a job. We rode in a jeep that must have also seen better days under the Soviets. When it broke, we sat on a rock and pick apricots, and I learned how to smash open the pits to find the nut inside. Finally, success with the wheel- the cars are old, but they are simpler to put back together - and we rolled on. But I relaxed too soon. 10 km later, it broke again. Another 10 km, again. Gradually it became clear that Ishkashim would be many hours off. Our new friend from the taxi suggested we abandon ship - we were only a few kilometers from the hot spring at Garm Chashma.

Two Americans and a Russian walked along the silent border in the dark, each of us maybe thinking that we were once enemies, and this was our battleground. The ghosts of war and politics don't disappear from places like this, but at the moment the Cold War seemed as distant as Alexander. A car stops for us, stereo blasting Russian pop hits, and two young men drive us up the mountain. From the night emerges a strange sight: a Las Vegas-style hotel, covered in flashing lights the green, white and red of the Tajik flag. Yet when we sit under the bright stars in the warm, sulphurous pool, surrounded by otherworldly mineral formations, the timelessness reemerges. The mountains don't care about borders or empires.

On both sides of the border, the people are Ismaili shiites, a branch of Islam persecuted across much of the world. The Aga Khan, the hereditary leader of the faith, has done much to try to connect his follows across the border. The weekly Afghan bazaar in Ishkashim is one of these tenuous links. Anyone can freely walk through the border crossing on either side, to meet outside an aircraft hanger in the no man's land in the middle of the river. I saw no indication that I couldn't have simply walked on into Afghanistan myself, but, have no fear, I resisted the temptation. The Afghan men were largely bearded and turbaned; I saw one Tajik teenager wearing a tight t-shirt with "Let's Talk About Sex" written across the chest. Tellingly, though, the goods were mostly the same, no matter the origin of the trader. With plastic shoes from China, and canned goods from Iran and Pakistan, the bazaar perhaps lacked the glamour of the silk road of my imagination, but the bargaining and enthusiasm were infectious.

Next time: how to get an Uzbek visa in 10.5 not-so-easy steps.

- Your Car-Window Correspondent.

Men Who Yell At Goats (and Other Stories)

A guest post from "Mehri":

I've promised that this post would include all the memorable "goat quotes" of the past week, which we spent mostly in Vanj. We had an interesting week. The low point, perhaps: stumbling around by our campsite, I stub my toe and yell "Ow! Rocks! Ah! Goat poop! I hate this f--ing country!" I don't mean it, of course. I would never insult my adopted vatan in such a way. And jokes aside, the mountains were beautiful. At night, there were more stars even than I've seen in northern Maine. There was a wonderful, pastoral smell of crushed mint, wild rosemary, and.... yes, goat poop.

"Tajikistan makul shod?" everyone we meet asks us. The correct answer is yes, Tajikistan is fantastic. I mean it, or I wouldn't have come back. Therefore, please excuse the slightly whiny nature of this post. Anna points out that most travel writing in Central Asia falls into two categories: the romanticized, Orientalist type, or the "I will now proceed to complain about everything" genre. We may be guilty of a bit of both. A few nights ago, I sat on a boulder more than 4,000m up and drew a map of the Hazards of Tajikistan, featuring Bears, Small Kids Who Pee Everywhere, Crazy Mashrutka Drives, Sinking Lotkas, and Evil Mosquitoes Probably In the Employ of the KGB. But you know what, the mountains are beautiful, people have been very kind, and the rest we can deal with.

We see a lot of cowpaths. They say the streets in Boston were laid out by cows - well, cows, it turns out, are physically incapable of going straight up hills and take about a thirty degree angle at every hillock of grass. In the end, it looks like the lines of a topographic map have been traced onto the mountain for you.
Our interviews also go a bit like this - roundabout. It's rude to cut too directly to the chase. I heard about one survey in which a researcher with a clipboard went around asking folks "On a scale of 1 to 5, how important is identity to you?" Ay vay. I'm not saying we're doing much better - but we're taking more tea, and more sweet melon, and more time, to ask our questions. Most of the time we haven't been in the mountains, but sitting around a dastarkhan, talking with old ladies about when their family moved to town and whether they'd marry their daughter off to a guy from the next region. (This often gets misinterpreted as our own interest in marriage - see Anna's previous post). We've gotten our share of awkward questions on this trip, usually while stuck in a shared taxi from town to town. "Is it true that the President of America is a black-skinned guy?" "In America, can a black man marry a white woman?" "Why are your families so small?" Maybe our research questions are equally awkward. Wearing Tajik clothes (the last we had clean) and tsumkas, or backpacking packs, we got roundly laughed at by a pair of goatherds near the Gishkun pass.

We were tired by then. We'd gone up to the height of the snow, filtered water running off the glacier, realized we were too tired to push any further, and turned back - and at that moment, the nakhjir appeared. There were two of them, Marco Polo sheep, I think, running across the pass above us as though it were easy. They made my week. Anna, I think, was slightly more excited to get back to camp. She perched on a rock above the pasture, while I found a flat bit of grass to lay out the groundsheet and sleeping bags. As it started to grow dark, I circled back to her: "Marco!" I yelled. "Polo!" she responded. There's Central Asia for you.

Anna after the day's climb, reading Salman Rushdie under the plastic sheeting/tent

An epilogue: We're in Khorog now, home of such luxuries as showers and internet, and the most fantastic sour cherries - spent yesterday making a fruit crisp out of them. Repacking this morning, something fell out of Anna's bag. A cherry pit? I asked hopefully. A stone? Nope, she responded. Goat poop.