Reach main-town Khorog by noon – the last larger outpost before Kashgar in China. Internet, shopping, hot-water shower.

Long day. End up at 2,000 meters altitude and small town Rushan – the road climbs slowly as it follows the Panj upstreams.

Since yesterday, the road follows the River Panj, which also doubles as the border to Afghanistan. It’s interesting to have a look at the more simple life on the other side. Although many of the mud houses have satellite dishes and solar panels, none of the villages have road access or telephone (cell phones have no coverage in these narrow valleys). The only way to get there is by foot or donkey.

The Afghans are blasting off explosions on the mountain side to widen the donkey path; the sweet smell of dynamite finds its way across to ‘my’ side.

Once again sleep at a roadside restaurant. They call them chaikhanas – teahouses – but almost all of them offer simple food such as soups with bread, or egg and sausages, as well – and if you eat there, sleep is free of charge.

Another night at a roadside restaurant – this time one which turned out way too busy come evening, so I was left with just three hours of sleep.

Leave Roscoe and Dushanbe and start cycling towards the Pamir mountains.

Sleep at a roadside restaurant, beautifully situated on the mountain side above the Norak water reservoir.

Hitchhike through the water filled, five kilometer Anzob tunnel with Chinese road-workers before I begin the relaxing ride down to capital Dushanbe at 700 meters. The road is downhill more or less all the way – first steeply, cut through the mountain side, then gentle and slow, following a river.

I eat at one of several roadside cafés. The food here is absolutely delicious. A clear soup with mutton, chickpeas, potato, tomato, carrot and heaps of fresh herbs like parsley and coriander. Wonderful!

Stay in Dushanbe with Couchsurfer Roscoe from Australia while I shop for warm clothes and an official visit-permit for the Pamir mountain region.

Climb up to 2,700 meters and sleep at a work camp for the tunnel construction workers. The tunnel is newly built, but problems with floodings inside mean I have to hitchhike through it the next morning.

Iranian Amir who is some kind of a manager, invites me for the stay as well as dinner and breakfast.

The road gets gradually worse – the dated tarmac is sometimes completely gone or else dotted with numerous potholes like a swiss cheese. The road follows a river up streams, and as the valley gets more narrow – the mountain ranges on each side closing in – the incline gets steeper and steeper. Sleep at an Iranian restaurant (!).

Easy cycling followed by the easiest border-crossing so far.

Stay in a guesthouse in the first small town, Panjikent. The homestay owner tells me and a few other foreign guests that he once had a guest who was ill. Oh, in what?, we asked with great concern. ”Gay”, he whispered. We were speechless.

From Mashhad, two cloudy and rainy days of cycling – 185 kilometers – took me to the Sarakhs border with Turkmenistan. It was an easy but time-consuming crossing – way too many stamps and papers. If only the British had pushed on a little bit further north in ‘the Great Game’, I’d have a little bit less of Soviet bureaucracy to tackle.

Ahead of me was 500 kilometers of old, bumpy tarmac to Uzbekistan, to be cycled in the five days my visa was valid. Unfortunately, I got a problem already the second day. My left knee was aching so badly that I had to start hitchhiking, which I did for maybe a quarter of the distance from there on to Samarkand in Uzbekistan. The doctors in main-towns Mary ( Turkmenistan) and Bukhara (Uzbekistan) spoke no English, so any remedy had to wait until the Uzbek capital Tashkent. Good then that the Turkmen and Uzbek people were so friendly – my first hitch-host invited me for lunch, dinner and sleep at his home in Mary. Another good memory was the old men in southern Uzbekistan who invited me for their annual May 1st lunch with lots of vodka (although I was able to escape that and instead drink green tea – delicious and common here).

All the way from Iran was much more lush than I had imagined – irrigation canals were everywhere in southern Turkmenistan and even the desert in the north was surprisingly green with thorny bushes scattered across the landscape of small sand dunes. Historic cities Bukhara and Samarkand were of course impressive – but at least for the latter of them, its name will always be much more magic than the over-tidy monuments it presents.

I’ve also spent some days on a side-trip by bus back and forth Tashkent. Visa to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan – totaling more than 200 US dollar – were the last ones that I had to get for this trip since my Chinese one will come by courier in my second passport from Sweden (thanks to my father!). An English-speaking doctor could finally check my knee – “just a ligament strain in a joint; after some rest it should be fine”.

I’ll now continue East, crossing the Tajikistan border tomorrow and past the famous Pamir Highway reach Kyrgyzstan some two weeks later, and China after another two days on the saddle. The road (the world’s second highest tarmac) will pass above 4,000 meters a few times – 4,600 at most – so I really hope that my knee will cope with it. But given the age of trucks here, and in fact the age of the roads themselves, the inclines should be gentle enough.

Take a shared taxi to Tashkent, where I’ll apply for the visas to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, plus visit an English-speaking doctor to get remedy for my bad left knee.

Information on Visa to Tajikistan
Hand in passport and application (100 USD) on Tuesday at 09.00, as well as an LOI (35 USD) from a local tour agent. Receive passport with visa by 16.00 the next day.

Information on Visa to Kyrgyzstan
Hand in passport and application on Monday at 09.30. Receive passport with visa at 16.30 the same day.

Cycle the last kilometers to Samarkand and a nights hotel stay before taking the bus the next day to Tashkent for getting the Tajik and Kyrgyz visa.

Some 80 kilometers from Samarkand, my knee again makes too much pain. I hitchhike with one Ologbek – but we only get to his home some 20 kilometers further away before he invites me to lunch, dinner and sleep. Samarkand will have to wait until tomorrow.

Ologbek, some ten years older than me, is a faithful Muslim (unusual around here), so he doesn’t drink. Good for a change.

After a long day on the bike – sun almost set – I meet a guy on a bicycle who invites me to his parents’ home in small-town Ziyodin. Farchad doesn’t speak much English – in fact almost none – but makes himself understood through his body language.

He worked as a carpenter at a church in St Petersburg a few years back – like many Uzbeks – and earned good money as well as a video camera which he brought with him back home. He’s proud to film the entire dinner – a greasy noodle soup with his mother, father and siblings also attending. The bread has been ripped to small pieces, spread across the synthetic table cloth like pieces of a puzzle. It’s a poor meal by any standards, but I’m as always happy to be invited and my hosts are proud to invite. Farchad will keep the video for memory.

Later, he insists that I should join him in watching Rambo IV dubbed in Russian. In this case though, I’m a bad guest – I fall asleep after a short while.