After leaving Hanis guest house and Vali its friendly and helpful manager we set out down the Panj River valley towards Khorog. The scenery today was a bit like a combination of the previous two days driving. The Panj River valley narrowed and steepened and instead of a wide valley floor and a meandering river we had a narrow gorge (sometimes less than 100 meters wide), a raging river and steep valley sides with the road often cut into those steep sides as a shelf. Interestingly though even in this much steeper country the locals had managed to find patches of soil that could be cultivated and turned into house compounds or small villages. With the river much narrower we got some closer views of people and farms on the Afghan side.

Harvest is underway and all over the place we have seen people out cutting grain or grass stock feed in the fields with scythes or hand held blades. The cut grain stalks are being stacked into "sheaves". The sheaves of grain are stacked in the fields and the stock feed is being stacked on the rooves of houses.

Mid morning we came upon our friends Alexander and Anna again hitching in a small village; so we stopped to pick them up.

The road surface today was nominally pavement but in many many places it was broken or non-existent. So another day of somewhat rough roads.


We got to the town of Khorog around 4:00 pm, dropped Alex and Anna at the main bridge and then went looking for the Pamir Lodge, which according to the Lonley Planet is the place where all overlanders congregate in Khorog. We eventually found a small side street off the main thoroughfare where we were supposed to turn, but the narrowness of the street gave us pause. However a local man came up an assured us that this was indeed the way to the Pamir Lodge and it was "OK" for us to go. So we crawled up this incredibly bumpy, narrow street past men painting a fence (who had to get out of our way), over broken drains, around piles of rocks (another man was building a fence) until we came to a straight narrow section of street at the end of which we could see the gate to the Lodge. The only problem was that between us and that gate was a canal with a concrete cover and the cover was not quite wide enough for us - with some encouragement from another volunteer guide I drove over the canal with a piece of each tire hanging off the side of our little "bridge".

That however was not the end of the delicate manouvering as getting into the lodge's yard was another exercise in "squeezing" our truck into a place that was honestly too small for it. Once parked we did not take long to realize that getting out tomorrow would be even more interesting as there was nowhere nearby to turn around, so we would have to reverse out and back down that straight street over the canal - however that was a problem for another day.

At the lodge the showers where good, the wifi did not work most of the time, and the people managing the place were a little reserved. They seemed friendly but we know that other people have found their reserved nature to come across as unhelpful. This is not a place for 4 wheeled vehicles like ours. Anything bigger than a Landcruiser would find this place a squeeze.