The road - again

Today was about the road, views of people and activity on the Afghan side of the border and other travelers. But before getting underway this morning we had a number of curious truckers who wanted to know who we were, what we were doing and about the truck, of course.

The road was the continuing story of the day, rough, narrow and still traveling through the gorge of the Panj River. It is simply amazing; and yet this is a major trucking route. Today again we passed many large cargo trucks on their journey between China and Dushanbe.

Throughout the day we met a number of other travelers. A German couple on a tandem bicycle (the young lady is ethnically Afghan and speaks the local language), a Dutch/Polish couple in a Mitsubishi wagon, and an Australian guy on a bicycle. The coincidence of the day (maybe the whole trip) is that the Australian cyclist used to work with the fellow who was best man at our (Nina and I) wedding. How's that for degrees of separation.

If anything the river gorge was even narrower today and hence we were even closer to the activities on the Afghan side of the border. We are still amazed by the Afghan walking trails called owrrings that wind along the face of the gorge and today we saw some work crews doing trail maitenance. The set of photos below are all of the Afghan side of the border.

As we approached the town of Kalaikhum we had a decision to make. There are two roads from Kalaikhum to Dushanbe. The shorter route and the one called M41 seems to be closed and/or derelict. We had heard from many people that one of the bridges was out, that the road was very rough and that there was no maintenance being done on that road. The longer route (which is even the route our GPS chose) is being upgraded gradually but is 100 km longer. As it turned out the choice was pretty much made for us. As at the turn off inside the town of Kalaikhum there was a "no-trucks" sign on the short route and a bunch of police nearby to ensure compliance.