Baby Got Bactria

I know that Dushanbe may as well be the be-all, end-all but sometimes it's nice to get out of the city.  So why not head to the countryside in the south, which was a hotbed of rebel activity in the 1990s?  My destination was Kulob*, for several reasons.  One is that it's on the highway to the Pamirs so I figured that I could simply catch a ride there to Khorog.  That's actually the only reason I had for going.  It is also the 3rd largest city in Tajikistan, and I had such a blast in the 1st and 2nd largest ones that why not continue down the list?  Furthermore, it was a major stronghold of Alexander the Great as the region of Bactria, and the delicious two-humped camels supposedly got their start here.  

Little in the middle but she got much back.

Taxis to Kulob left from the very south of the city and it required a taxi to get to the collection point.  In the parking lot I chatted with the taxi drivers to try to figure out the optimal rate to Khorog, and they told me it would be $100 just to get to Khorog.  I did some quick math and realized that the trip from Osh to Khorog was $250 for 4 people, so like I would have to spend around $60 minimum after that.  This was all hard to stomach because I didn't have a lot of cash on me, or access to future cash flows if I plunged myself into the Pamirs (or even if I stayed in Dushanbe, as ATMs were not exactly widespread and it seemed hard to locate hard currency).  The other deciding factor was that the drivers all told me the roads were in such bad shape due to the snowstorm that there was no guarantee of getting through.  Even a few days earlier I had met with some local couch surfers who told me that they were waiting on some French guy who was supposed to arrive three days earlier but seemed to be trapped in the Pamirs.  Who knows what happened to him?  

Anyway, I decided on Kulob because it was en route to the GBAO and I figured if I had the opportunity to hop a ride to the Pamirs I would take it and no one could stop me.  I negotiated to pay 70 somoni (and it turned out that all others would pay that too) and shared a ride with an outrageous old woman, a 23-year-old biznezman (who had like 3 kids) and someone else but the driver and the guy in the front seat were fairly forgettable.  The fact that I didn't get the front seat bothers me to this day but I got some pretty great pictures from out the window.  Like pictures of people selling apples.  And pictures of the enormous reservoir that supplies the country with something like 100% of their power 60% of the time.  

The drive was actually beautiful and I have since resolved to return to Tajikistan.  I love Tajikistan more than you may believe, and while it was glaringly obvious that much less cash was allocated to the non-Dushanbe regions of the country for simple things like roads, there was a magic to the geography, both physical and human.  Lots of apple vendors who decided to set up shop at inopportune switchbacks, and large Kamaz trucks turning at inopportune moments, and people in souped-up Ladas aggressively and impatiently passing us at inopportune and really quite dangerous places.  It was all magic, and I loved the trip.  

Dushanbe face, Qurgonteppa booty.

We stopped to pray at a town just near the turn off to Qurgonteppa (a hotspot for heroin trafficking, rebel activity, and cotton farming) and then just before Kulob we dropped off the lady and her three bags full of fresh persimmons at the market.  She thrust 4 persimmons in my hand and I said “No, please.  No.”  I am sorry but I do not like persimmons. Have you ever seen the Simpsons episode where Homer buys a farm and throws all the seeds he can on the ground and then fertilises it with radioactive waste and then tobacco and tomato seeds cross-pollinate and they create tomacco?  That is what I feel a persimmon is and tastes like.  I have no way of proving this but I don’t think that changing my mind at this stage in life is an option.  

*Okay, so in Hungarian the "ly" sound is a "y" and so in Russian I could not remember if Kulob was pronounced with a "K" or "Kh" and with a "l" or a"ly."  So you'll understand my problem when I called it "Khuyob" instead of "Kulob" and everyone laughed at me.  Get it?  No?  Okay, so Kulob is the name of a city in Tajikistan, and "Khulyob" in Russian would basically mean…Dickville.