27th June – 2nd July 2026
After a border crossing where we almost bypassed passport control completely, we were immediately greeted by mountain views and quiet roads. As the landscape became more populated, we received a barrage of “welcome to Tajikistan!” and high-fives from small (and not so small) children. This welcome felt worlds apart from the one I imagine these people would receive on arrival to the UK.
We were in a new country and needed cash. We had barely stopped at the first cluster of ATMs we came across when we were approached by a Russian motorcyclist. He was not, as Ben first assumed, trying to scam us, but suffering from the same problem that we were about to discover we would face throughout Tajikistan. Only a very small fraction of banks accept Mastercard, and none of these were currently in front of us. We had dutifully ensured that between us we had a range of bank cards, but we had not considered checking these included a range of network operators, and every one of our cards was of course Mastercard. Thankfully the next cash point we came across worked for us and we were able to take out enough money to see us through to the capital, Dushanbe, but this was the first of a number of logistical challenges that we soon learnt would be a common occurrence over the next few weeks.
We were aiming for a camping spot by a bulge in the river that night, and as we approached we were waved over by a German couple making the most of their summer off after university to cycle around Central Asia. It was the first time outside official campsites we had shared a camping spot with anyone else and was surprisingly nice to have company while we cooked and set up and dismantled our camp. It was a gravelly start to the next day and for a while we travelled almost at walking pace, largely because I was indeed walking large sections of the route.
The next few days felt like a dress rehearsal for the Pamir Highway, which we’d officially start in Dushanbe. The distance we travelled each day was hotly debated to ensure that we balanced covering sufficient distance with surviving the heat and change in altitude. We discovered there was truth in the reports that all you can buy in many rural areas are snickers and instant noodles when we stopped at the first shop we passed. We then decided to stop at any and every shop we could find and with persistence we had soon gathered some resemblance of an evening meal.
After taking shelter in a ruin for the night from the headwind which had been slowing us down, we began to climb deeper into the mountains. The Fann mountains are like nothing I have seen before. You can feel their vastness, with the threat of rocks balanced precariously above you and channels of mud and dust flowing down their many faces and sometimes spilling over into the road, reminding you how truly small you are. We climbed a narrow gorge which ran the path of another muddy river, which we have encountered far more frequently than the crystal clear pools I’d imaged taking my daily bath in. As we passed through the last of the towns before the climb we acquired increasing volumes of water which we strapped haphazardly to our racks and encountered our first dust storms which covered our faces in a fine layer of what resembled soot.
I could have cried when we heard the rumble of thunder in the distance and saw dark clouds ahead as we started to made our final, and very steep, ascent of the day. We implemented the plan we had learnt we should have carried out when we had previously been caught in a storm, leaving our bikes at the top of a track and going down the hill from the road to crouch down vaguely sheltered by the rocks above us. It turned out many people had adopted this exact same pose before us: the spot, hidden from the road, seemed to function as a popular toilet.
For once, the strong winds worked in our favour and quickly blew the storm across to another valley, leaving blue skies in its wake. The climb was tough: the wind persisted and the combination of this, the closeness at which some cars overtook and the additional weight of the many, many bottles of water resulted in us walking the more challenging gradients. Soon enough though, we’d reached a flat-ish valley before the final kick up where we pitched our tent for the night next to the river. The spot was very scenic to look at, but easy to over romanticise through images alone. Photos show the sunsets and picturesque settings but fail to capture the almost constant road traffic noise, the discarded plastic bottles just out of shot, the fear that the fast moving stream could rise overnight or the frantic feeling of trying to dig a shallow grave for last night’s dinner in rock hard soil. After the exhaustion resulting from the climb, none of this really mattered and we slept soundly, enjoying the novelty of needing sleeping bags in the cool mountain air.
We cycled on up the hill towards the dubiously nicknamed tunnel of death: at 5km long it was poorly ventilated, poorly lit and poorly surfaced. There seem to be various unsubstantiated rumours flying around about how it got its name, including people dying in accidents during its construction or being trapped in a traffic jam and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. The conversation about whether we’d hitch a ride through was a very short one, we didn’t want to add another cyclist related rumour to the mix. I kept an eye out on whether any of the passing traffic looked vaguely hitch-hikeable with two very heavy bikes, and saw a lot of oil tankers. I quickly dismissed them as an implausible option, but in one of the most surreal moments of our trip so far, an oil tanker was waiting at the mouth of the tunnel to offer us a lift.
Initially the driver wanted us to pass the bikes up to the top of the tanker fully loaded. After trying to lift one he quickly had second thoughts and gestured to remove all of our panniers. He was far more agile than either of us and had quickly hoisted up our bikes one by one as if they weighed nothing. Driving through the tunnel felt almost as nerve-wracking as I imagine cycling it would be. Breathless due to adrenaline and the thin air at around 2700m, we sat in the cab and peered down at the pitch black road ahead of us. The ride was bumpy and our bikes and luggage weren’t tied down so at every lurch I imagined another pannier lost to the belly of the mountain. I needn’t have worried however as everything miraculously stayed in place, and the careful way in which the driver passed the bikes down to Ben made me suspect he’d done this all before. Bikes back on the ground and many gratitudes expressed to our driver, we were ready for a long descent through beautiful mountains.
The cumulative impact of our troubles acquiring cash, food, water and a lack of internet coverage meant that I arrived in Dushanbe prepared to do an awful lot of planning. I have begun to learn that if I ever find myself turning to Google’s AI overview when I should be sleeping, I am having a mild last minute panic. It is essentially a direct line to every anxiety I have ever possessed – melodramatic and in the majority of cases wildly inaccurate. On this occasion I realised enough was enough when it informed me that we must ensure we have sufficient cash to avoid the “nightmare situation” of running out of funds in the middle of nowhere and having to barter our worldly goods for food and water at very poor exchange rates.
The next day was filled with an endless to-do list. It felt nothing like the rest day we had agreed we needed. By the time we got around to lunch it was getting on for 5pm. By 8pm we’d yet to consider an evening meal or start some essential tinkering with the bikes. I was very happy to let Ben make the executive decision that we would stay in Dushanbe another day to get ourselves feeling more rested and prepared.
The Pamir Highway is one of the parts of the trip I’m most looking forward to. It’s one of the wildest and most remote places you can cycle on the planet. For these very reasons, it’s also one of the parts of our trip I am most terrified of. After a day of ticking off those final tasks on the to-do list, a good stretch and a blissfully long afternoon nap, we felt far more prepared and filled with excited trepidation to set off on the (largely unpaved) road which lay ahead of us.
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