A few days into our adventure, my companion asks me the question that has been on his mind for several weeks and on mine too. Why does a 77 year old, who admits to a fear of heights, choose to spend his 78th birthday attempting a passage through Afghanistan’s Pamir Mountains that has never been done by a foreigner and requires him to ascend vertical cliffs. He is a smart, articulate and resourceful and most important is my interpreter. The route we plan is new to him too; as far as we know it has not been attempted by a foreigner before That is partly because Afghanistan has been in war, civil war and foreign occupation for the last 45 years and before that the route was the Soviet border and strictly forbidden.
My answer starts with the context for self-assurance;….in 2007 I went to the Wakhan Corridor, which is the eastern Pamir. The purpose was to find again the ‘Ice Cave’ that George Nathnaiel Curzon had chanced upon in 1895 and established as the source of the Oxus. He made his claims in a series of three successive Monday lectures at the Royal Geographical Society. As far as I knew then it had not since been visited. But following a hunch inspired by some old Russian maps we did further exploration of the Little Pamir and its river system. We concluded for sure that the true source of the Oxus was in fact a stream called the Chelab, which splits into two and feeds two other rivers which join to form the main Oxus parent stream. (as related in Halfway House to Heaven 2010) This conclusion has not since been questioned and was confirmed by the Leeming/McCowan expedition there in August 2025 (see Royal Society of Asian Affairs Vol 57, Issue 1).
….the other, and better, reason is curiosity. That is a gift I am lucky to have. The lure of an unexplored route will attract the curious traveller irrespective of age, even one with acrophobia. But I addressed that last month by going on a ‘fear of heights’ course in the Derbyshire Dales and it seems to have been worthwhile.
The route we are attempting is a 700 kilometre loop around the north of Badakshan following the course of the Oxus.
We knew from Google maps that there were villages with some agriculture on the route and The Aga Khan Foundation, foremost of Afghan NGO’s, gave me details of work that they had done for communities on the first hundred kilometres. Further north we had local and UN reports of Ismailis being subject to discrimination and violence at the hands of local Taliban.
This I witnessed in a small Ismaili village. Two long haired, big bearded unsmiling Pashto Taliban join us where we were eating the usual rice and bread meal one midday. They had arrived that morning and collected all the boys between 7 and 17 years old, put them into a truck and sent them to a madrassa far away to learn to become better Sunni. The price to be paid for reduced conflict is intellectual intolerance and a generation in chains.
An undercurrent of threat runs here, as much as in Kabul or Herat, but I never felt myself a target. The perceived confrontation is Pashto Taliban and acolytes at odds with Tajik Afghans. No one was very sure where I, as a foreigner, would stand.
There were only two possible outcomes to our ambitions: we either find our way around and back down to Fayzerbad or we have to turn and come back whence we started. There is no middle way as there are no other routes through the mountains.
We had camping equipment but did not need it. At each village we are greeted with a crowd and unhesitating invitations from hosts. The invitation will usually develop into a village gathering. I am taken to a carpeted reception room with cushions around. Tea is served and one by one more people arrive. Then a lino cover is thrown over the floor between us and the various dishes are served; the women have cooked but are not seen other than flitting past the door. Small speeches of welcome are made in Dari, to which we reply. I am usually greeted as their first foreign guest. Then the lino is folded with all the food and utensils, if any, inside. The other guests leave and the room becomes our sleeping area with cushions and thick wool covers. Sometimes several others sleep there too.
Only in one village did we have to find our own space, which was an alcove off a communal eating area, again shared by many others. Taliban inspectors come in to examine my credentials and plans in the middle of the night.
These are very poor villages in a very poor country with no employment opportunities. They are hemmed in by the river and border on one side and escarpments of Pamirs on the other. One morning we are confronted with what looks like a white mountain top, but is in fact a peak covered with the tents of gold miners a thousand metres above us. Gold or hints of gold have been found and a klondike type fever has taken hold. Heavy smashing and grading machines are being hauled up mountain paths to be operated at the entrance to myriad tunnels. Men who have no other means of earning are dynamiting rocks and panning for the tiniest specs of gold. Our host here is one big investors in the new business. He claims that his teams and projects yielded five kilograms last year. But local Taliban commanders are demanding their share and there is a tense atmosphere, which I understand to have broken into violence in the weeks since I left.
The route that we hoped to take away from the river was closed according to the information we got from a motor cyclist coming north. A contributory river was too fierce to cross, so we are forced to leave the Amu Darya gorge and try to cross another pass southwards. A trail of lighter grey across the vertical face shows the route. Terrifying is too insipid a word to describe the grimness of the QATIR gap as we later discover it is called. It is followed by a three hundred corner switchback up the other side.
Ten hours later we reach a ferry across the Kokcha river that will take us eventually back to the road linking the two main towns of Badakshan. It is closed by multiple landslides, but we are down and done.
The reward for these adventures is always the pleasure of being in some new place, only anticipated on a map, even a rather blank one in this case.
