| Location: | Murghab |
| Mileage: | 6,361 |
It’s a glorious day today and sun stays shining. We’re headed even further south to the Wakhan Valley before we climb again, north to Murghab and then into Kyrgyzstan for the one night. This route remains stunning and we take the group up to the 3rd century Yamchun Fortress, which overlooks the whole valley and across the Hindu Kush into Afghanistan – the enormity and serenity of the view belies a turbulent past. It is in Langar, our overnight stop, that we learn that the road ahead in closed – another landslide. Tajikistan is as unpredictable as expected. Apparently it’s gone only about 5 miles out of the village, so we decide to take a look before having to back track. We’ve got over landslides before!
This landslide is a bit different. Rather than the road being impassable because there is a huge heap of rocks on top of it, this time it is the road that has collapsed and has formed a huge heaps of rocks further down. The road just has a massive, definitely un-crossable gap. The GS would need wings for this one. So we have no alternative to head back to Khorog and try another road to try and get to Murghab. We’re covering a lot more diversion miles in Tajikistan than I expected but it sort of falls into place because we have to miss out 3 days in Kyrgyzstan. Its 2 days and 300+ miles later and we’re back in Khorog. On the bright side, it was another chicken curry!
We’re on the alternate route today. With a 4,600m pass and then a high altitude lunarscape plateau to get to our last stop in Tajikistan – Murghab. This town has a frontier feel to it – it’s bitterly cold, we buy fuel from drums and settle down to another group home-stay experience. It’s a good job we all get on! It’s time to crack open a bottle of Welsh single malt to go with the bread, yak and onions. We share it evenly around the group and get a good night’s sleep.
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