It’s pretty darn hard to sleep in when you’re camping, even when the weather is pretty nice. As soon as the sun comes up your tent starts glowing inside, so we were all packed up and on the road by about 7. The goal for the day would be to make it to Kevron by a decent time and then decide if we were going to proceed along the M41 Pamir highway, or to take the alternate route to the north. Kevron was only about 180km away and the roads were supposed to be decent enough, so we’d hopefully be there around noon or so.
We hadn’t made it but an hour before we hit our first set back. We were winding our way up this mountain path when we noticed that the third team in our convoy (the Aussies) weren’t behind us any more. Sometimes someone will disappear briefly to switch drivers or pull over to pee and then catch back up. We slowed down considerably but they weren’t catching up, so we just stopped and waited. When 5 minutes went by and they were still nowhere in sight, we assumed there was a problem so Hendrick and Dave turned around and headed back to check it out. They returned a few minutes later and told us that the Aussies had a major problem so we headed back down the hill.
They were fucked. Probably catastrophically fucked. Their gearbox had seized up completely to the point where the car would not even roll freely in neutral. Bad news bears. From what I recall they had had work done on their gearbox before the rally, or at least at the start of the rally. They were also one of the teams that managed to drive their car to the door to hell fire pit and managed to get back out early the next morning. If you happened to have read one of our earlier entries, our Danish friends had managed the same feat but ended up destroying their gearbox on the way out the next morning. That could be a total coincidence, or it could be that the work they had done previously wasn’t done well enough, or it was and they had rattled their transmission apart. Whatever the case, they were fucked and that really sucks. This put us in a pretty awkward situation. We could definitely wait around for a tow truck and perhaps even ride into town, but it was highly unlikely this would be a quick fix and unfortunately we just didn’t have time to waste. Alex hopped in Hendrick’s van and they went back into Kulob to find a mechanic. In the mean time the rest of us soaked in some Tajikistan sun and played the classic “who can throw a rock closest to the big rock far away” game.
Eventually the van returned with a mechanic in a car behind them. The guy took a look for a second and determined that they would have to disconnect the driveshaft in order to tow the car back to town. While they were doing that the rest of us discussed our exit strategy. We were all pretty disappointed to have to leave them, but like I said there wasn’t anything we could do and it would take a solid half a day to full day to diagnose the problem and figure out if they could get the parts to fix it. We reluctantly said our goodbyes and headed back up the hill as they went back down.
The interesting part about this drive, while in theory not ideal, is that we would shortly be driving along the border of Afghanistan. Granted, there was a huge roaring river separating the two countries and that side of Afghanistan is not really populated due to the massive cliff faces, but still it’s…Afghanistan. If we were going to do the Pamir highway there was a 200ish km stretch where we would be on the other side of the river, but because of the big detour we had to take we’d be across the border for about 350 km. I don’t think any of us were genuinely worried about any of this, but that’s not to say that there isn’t an inherent unease. Nothing we could do about it though, so moving on.
The road was great, and when we finally got to the top of the mountain pass we were trying to cross we stopped to enjoy the view of this incredible valley. It took us a few minutes before we all realized, holy shit that’s Afghanistan. I have to say, it was gorgeous. It’s not on my list of places to go, but definitely very beautiful countryside from a distance.
When we got to the bottom of the hill we were surprised to find a bunch of teams hanging out next to the river. We knew a couple of the teams so it was great to catch up for a little bit. A few of the people were trying to figure out how to get down to the river and take a dip. The river was pretty muddy so we passed on that and pressed on.
An hour or so we arrived in Kevron and went to a place called Soup restaurant to get a meal and figure out what we were doing next. The owner’s kid was around 10 and he was in charge of helping out all the tables. He told us they had soup and a rice dish, so that’s what we ordered and he even ran down the street to get us some beers to enjoy with our soup. Did I mention the view? The restaurant was situated right on this little river that was runoff from the top of the mountain somewhere. The water was an incredible turquoise color.
We were leaning towards avoiding the Pamirs. What really sucked about this is that we would have to go back west on the M41 – which is the highway that we avoided getting to this spot in the first place. It would be about an 8 hour drive to get up to the border. Thank god we looked up the border crossing on Caravanistan to check the hours. It turned out that that particular border was only open to nationals of the 2 countries, no foreigners allowed to cross there. That would have been a terrible mistake had we headed that way without checking as it would have cost us 2 days and then we’d be back where we were. So with this newfound revelation we were committed to the Pamir highway. Oh boy.
The first hour or so weren’t bad, but around 4 all that changed. It got bad. Really bad. Stretches of pavement were few and far between, we were in the land of gravel, rocks and dirt. Doesn’t sound terrible, but our speed dropped to about 20 mph or less as we had gravel potholes to avoid, not to mention the massive rocks that hadn’t been removed from the road. Hit one of those things fast enough and you can easily kill a wheel, and if you’re really unlucky that thing could do a number on your oil pan.
Our suspension has slowly been dying, as a matter of fact before we headed out of Kevron we noticed that our rear right suspension was basically gone. Turns out the leaf spring had gotten damaged from the battery we had put it through. The car was already sitting low because of all the weight, but now the back left was almost rubbing the wheel. We were so low that we were continually bottoming out on dips. We had knocked the exhaust off of the hangars and broken the rubber mounts, so we attempted to hang it back on with bailing wire. That worked for about 30 minutes before the exhaust just fell off completely. I have no idea why we decided to keep it, there was no reason to ever have it put back on because we’d probably knock it off again. Our car now had a pretty awesome growl to it. Vroom vroom.
I’ve said it before and will continue to say it. This stretch of the Pamir was the worst road we’d seen in it’s own unique way. At the pace we were going we weren’t going to make it very far at all. The sun started going down so we decided to we needed to find somewhere to pull off and camp. Easier said than done. We were on a road that had been carved out of the side of a mountain, that was barely large enough to have 2 cars drive on it. There just weren’t a lot of places to stop. The road started getting sketchier and sketchier but we just couldn’t find anywhere to stop. Eventually we did come across a little clearing with a couple abandoned houses on it. It was not ideal as there were a couple of houses very close by that were very much being lived in, but it was just getting too dangerous to continue on. We decided to back our cars up to the furthest little building and set up a small camp there.
We had barely gotten our chairs off the roof when a man and a few kids came down from the hill. It was pretty clear he was coming our way so we let him get a little closer before approaching. It was a little awkward trying to ask if we could stay there, but he didn’t seem to mind at all. He said goodbye and walked off. We wondered if he even lived there since he never walked back by, but whatever. We cooked up a quick meal on the camp stoves and cracked open some wine that Hendrick had bought after lunch. It was hands down the worst wine I’ve had in my life. Unfortunately for Hendrick he had bought 6 bottles of it. Whoops.
