My trip has now come to an end. Its been an amazing experience and some time in the future I will try to write a summary of all my experiences during this trip. Thanks to everyone that followed my progress and gave me encouragement. It especially helped during the sometimes very demanding stages.
I have some future plans for new challenges which are to be shorter but more physically demanding, but nothing is set yet. My plan now is to stay in Asia for an unknown period of time and take the rest as it comes.
Here are a few of my favourite pictures throughout this trip:
As the headline mentions I have not updated in quite a while. This is due to the fact that I am not yet sure as to what I will be doing the next coming weeks. After I arrived in Istanbul I decided to take a flight to Bangkok and decide what’s next once I arrived in Bangkok. My travel partner Nicklas decided that he had travelled enough and headed back to Sweden, which was fully understandable considering the fact that he had cycled for more than 8 months and covered over 20 countries. So as to my plans I am staying put for at least another week or two until I know what’s going to happen regarding a project in Geneva that I have been contacted about. If this project does not fall through then I will continue towards India and then China, but if it does fall through then I might head to Geneva in a couple of weeks time.
My bicycle has been sent back to Sweden due to the China issue, so I will instead get a new crappy bicycle in China if I decide to cycle the last bit to Beijing. Also I have a ticket back to Sweden in December, but I have decided not to fly back at all, instead I will stay in Asia until I have travelled enough and decided where I want to work.
Believe it or not, but I am actually back in Istanbul (where I started the trip) when I’m writing this. When I applied for my China-visa I was told that I could not take my bicycle over the border from Kyrgyzstan to China. Since I was in Iran at the time I thought that I would face the problem at a later stage when I actually arrived at the border. As it turned out, crossing the border was as no go and since I don’t want to throw my bicycle away I returned back to Dushanbe in Tajikistan and took a flight to Istanbul. Ironically enough I was almost not allowed to get on the flight from Tajikistan due to some registration that I had missed to do when I arrived in the country. They wanted me to go to the registration office and pay a penalty since registration when entering the country is apparently very important. Since my flight was leaving and I had no intention what so ever to return to Dushanbe a third time I refused to leave. After discussing with the guard and his boss for quite some time we all came to an agreement that I could pay them 200U$ which they of course would pocket themselves and then I could leave for my flight.
I will now continue my way up to India where I will first spend some time in Hyderabad with some Indian friends that I know through a project I managed earlier in Sweden. After my visit in Hyderabad I will continue to travel through India and head north towards Kashmir and then head into China and continue towards Beijing. This was a quite an unexpected turn for my trip, but things change and you have to adapt. I am also looking forward to India a lot and I think it will be much more interesting than the deserts in west China. Less cycling, but more fun!
So, as the title mentions I have had some absolutely amazing cycling the last week since entering Tajikistan. Both Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were quite dull countries with regards to cycling since both were flat and mostly covered with cotton fields. I really started getting bored with the same type of flat landscapes, so it was extremely nice to finally see the natural border between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. As soon as you get closer to the Tajik border you start seeing the mountains and the start of the Pamir mountain range.
Before going on this trip I had done some brief research about the countries and I had very high hopes regarding Tajikistan after reading about its landscapes and mountains. It only took a few hours after entering the country to understand that I would definitely not be disappointed.
It also only took a few hours to see that this country is much poorer than any other country visited so far. The standard housing is mud- and stonehuts and people burn cowshit to keep warm.
All projects in the country such as building of new roads, bridges etc are done by foreign countries. The Chinese are building the roads and bridges and you see a lot of EU sponsored projects in the villages, such as new water pipelines. There is also a great presence of UN and WPF (World Food Program) vehicles on the roads. Although poor the people are very generous and the level of enthusiasm when you cycle past a village is crazy! Usually you get around 30 kids running next to you and screaming “Hello”.
After cycling through a lot of villages and ascending gradually during the first three days I finally started hitting the beginning of the longest mountain pass on this trip. The Anzob pass is at an altitude of just over 3300 meters above sea level and the views are spectacular.
Four hours after starting at the bottom of the pass I finally made it to the top.
At the bottom of the pass the temp was around 30C and as you can see on the pictures I had to put some more clothes on. The top of the pass was around 5C and the wind was quite strong. As I got to the top and started preparing some food I was invited by I guy living at the top of the mountain pass. He was a Tajik meteorologist who noted down numbers about the weather using old ex-Soviet equipment from maybe the 70s?
He generously offered me to sleep on the floor in one of the empty rooms, which I kindly accepted. He also made some tea and food, but I kindly declined the food since most of it smelled very old and did not look very healthy.
After a night sleep in a very cold room 5-10C, I cooked up some noodles (the same noodles I have eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for the last month), gave the “meteorologist” my headlamp as a gift and started heading down the pass.
After rolling down the pass for a few hours me and Niklas made camp just outside Dushanbe, had a few bears and headed into the city the day after. I will stay in Dushanbe for another 4-5 days and then start cycling towards the Pamir Highway. It’s going to be the highest pass I cycle on the trip with an altitude of 4600 meters. Nighttime temperatures are around -10C so I will finally get to use my winter equipment. Unfortunately I lost my tent in Iran and had to buy a 2 season (summer and spring) tent which consists of a mosquito net and a rain cover, so I will most likely sleep with a lot of clothes on under my sleeping bag since the tent is made for 15C+ temps.
The distance from Dushanbe through the Pamirs to the Kyrgyzstan border is around 1200km and I should reach Kyrgyzstan around October 10. Once I enter Kyrgyzstan I will spend two weeks in the country looking around and then FINALLY enter CHINA!
One change to my initial plan is that I will visit Tibet for two weeks and trek to Mt Everest base camp and some nearby glacier. The visit to Tibet will be in November and I will walk up to around 5200 meters of altitude. After Tibet I head to Xian and continue to Beijing which will be my final destination before flying back to Stockholm for a few weeks.
Published by Stefan Pinckney
