The Anzob Tunnel

This morning it felt like we were starting a new chapter of this trip. The mountains of Tajikistan are (almost) all behind us, and we are headed into the heat, lowlands, and bureaucracy of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran. Once we enter Uzbekistan our days of relaxed travel and pulling off to camp whereever we feel like it will be over, at least and maybe until Iran. As in Both Uzbekstan and Turmenistan we have to nominate where we will be almost every night and in most cases have to have a hotel booked.

We organized our friendy taxi driver of the past few days to show us the way out of town this morning. Many of the main streets in Dushanbe are closed to trucks and we did not want to run afoul of the every present police or low bridges, so our solution was to have Surob (the taxi driver) lead us out of town. This turned out not to be to an entirely successful strategy as we still managed to get stopped by the police and squeezed for 100 soms (about $20). But given that we must have passed a dozen groups of traffic police pulling over drivers and we only got stopped once, I guess it was not too bad.

We parted from Surob once outside of the major built up area and just onto the first leg of the toll-way (called the M34) that travels north towards the town of Khujand. Initially the road followed the narrow valley of the Varzob River along which were situated many restaurants and/or hotels with shaded swimming spots right on the river bank.

After leaving the river the road deteriorated somewhat and climbed steeply into some impressive mountains. There was a lot of evidence of recent rock falls on the road and we passed through many avalance tunnels. However the driving highlight of the day was surely the Anzob Tunnel. We never did figure out how long this tunnel was but it took about 20 minutes to traverse, so it was maybe 5 km in length. It was a masterpiece of terrible road, there were no lights in the tunnel (other than vehicle headlights), no ventilation (so the fumes from all the trucks were almost suffocating), the floor of the tunnel was a mass of broken concrete with large water filled holes, steel reenforcing rods flapping all over the place and to make things even more interesting, some of the holes where sufficiently deep that they effectively closed one lane of the road - and by the way these were not marked with anything more visible than a pile of rocks. Finally every so often a large piece of mechanical equipment was parked in one of the lanes causing another lane blockage. It is without doubt the most hair raising piece of road on the entire trip. Unless the Shahriston tunnel ahead of us is worse.