Thanks for sticking with me. Much on which to report, and caffeine on which to report it.
A week ago today – on 4 May 2024 – I finished a 24-day massage therapy course at TTC Massage, Bangkok, under the tutelage of Brendan, Alissa, Duang and Nita. Launching into this was fairly premeditated, but also, you know, it was one of those things that lined various stars up with each other. I love a project. And now I have a certificate, and a string to my bow, and something I can do with my hands besides typing on a keyboard, kneading dough and strumming a gee-tar. Anyone considering learning this skill would do well to check out TTC. They are absolutely lovely, teach in English, laugh readily, and (I guess most importantly) know what the heck they are doing.
Besides kneading folks’ backs and legs, numerous fun things occupied my time in Bangkok. I caught up with old Chengdu friends, which has been a dear thing. Made one or two more along the way, too. I have been climbing, and learning how to play padel tennis – it’s awesome, you should try it. But if you do it during the hottest month central Thailand has ever known, in a warehouse without air conditioning, know that you will lose half your bodyweight in perspiration during the course of a single hour.
I boogied, several times; made actual bread in an actual oven, and cookies galore, the sum of which led the Frenchmen whose flat I’m staying in to jest that I should replace, as a full time resident, the man whose room I’m staying in. Eugene, a man I’m glad I know, and not just because his bed became available at a most convenient time. I’m very fond of my French flatmates, too. I did not do much of the tourist stuff I thought I might. I went to one temple complex. But I did watch a series of nationally syndicated muay thai fights, one of which was over after no more than 15 seconds. KO. Kid on the floor. Kid helping him up. Kids fighting, tooth and claw. Blood and sniffing salts. My face was on telly at least twice, in sharp focus.
I interviewed an Australian poet whom I like very much for The Friday Poem. We’ll publish that in a few weeks’ time. Before that, I wrote a piece about a small handful of poets using social media to their advantage. Like Rupi Kaur, but more contemporary and (I think) more creative. Darby, whom I interviewed, is one of those poets. And yesterday, my (sort of) review of Taylor Swift’s new double album The Tortured Poets Department went up. I pitched it half as a joke, but my dear editor took the bait. For a while I felt like I’d bitten off more than I could chew, like I was out of my depth in music criticism and pop sugar land. But actually I think it turned out all right. You may not need to be a Swiftie to enjoy reading it.
I have also been working sporadically on a poetry pamphlet and my Substack, but can’t offer much new information on either of those at this stage.
This week, I have mostly been eating: tofu massaman curry. I’ve been on the island of Koh Tao. Or, since koh, sometimes written ko, is a transliteration of the Thai word for “island”, I’ve been on the island of Tao. I came to learn freediving. Did a basic course. Did an apnea clinic, which is the first day of the advanced course. Held my breath for 3 minutes and 15 seconds, a Personal Best. Advanced course was fully booked by the time I’d finished that, so yesterday I went snorkelling in choppy, low-visibility waters. No sweat. Plenty of Dorys and a big silver-pink fish I would’ve called something like Marvin, or Graham. I have a low CO2 tolerance, apparently, but while holding my breath for 2 minutes and 40 seconds my oxygen level didn’t drop below 96%, which means I should, in theory, be able to hold my breath for a long time if I can train my body to chill the F out about CO2 buildup.
At some point I would like to return to Ko Tao to continue my underwater studies. There’s something very beautiful about the stillness of the line – the line you dive down – and the oblivion you enter when you leave the surface. I’m hardly in a position to wax poetic about the joys of underwater life, I know, but my brief exposure was enough to motivate me to want to continue on that journey. All in the fullness of time. On the first day, there was a wicked storm. Rain lashed the seas. A harsh wind blew. And, looking up at the surface from a few metres under, it looked like it was being smashed by a blizzard. Froth and foam. But still and silent beneath.
I’m pressing pause on the Trip, for those of you who don’t know this yet. On 27 May, I’ll fly back to the UK, see some Very Important People in London, Bristol, Sheffield and Devon, then France and possibly Amsterdam; make some cash; celebrate my 30th birthday with dear old friends; and recharge my batteries (by drinking REAL ALE, eating FISH and CHIPS, and shivering in the British summer winds). I don’t know yet how long I’ll be back for. Word is, approx 3 months (i.e., June, July and August), before returning to Bangkok to pick up where I left off and do some real earning in Australia, or approx 7 months, to take in Christmas and NYE, be around for a Very Important Birthday, soak up festive spirits, and earn on British soil, before returning to Bangkok to pick up where I left off.
Some days, I lean one way, some days the other. Factors affecting this include how my dear friend Edward feels about me occupying his spare room for an extended period of time. Before then, I will fly to Borneo to see the Most Important Person. Malaysia will be, I think, the 64th country I have visited.
People going through things, I salute you. Here’s a short poem.
The train to Kampot has teal cushions but you might call them green, or blue. On its way out of town it passes all the colours and flavours of Phnom Penh: a critical mass of scooters and remorques, old men poking around in heaps of plastic, women in patterned skirts dutifully sweeping their patios, young men in livery eating breakfast from tin bowls, wrecks of cars buried under layers of dust, occasional smooth stretches of road, overgrown waterways, plumes of smoke carrying the scent of grilling pork and bananas, billboards advertising “premium German beer”, white-plastered low-rises, slum communities clustered around the tracks, dogs hollering their responses to the locomotive’s incessant blasting horn, and everyone watching the windows of the train, making half-closed-eye contact with the passengers as we rattle and scrape on by. Until, at last, the buildings give way to Cambodia’s sun-baked flatlands, ridged by endless water management systems and scrubbed clean by the tongues of thirsty cows.
I’m eating Indian food in a hotel in Vientiane – dal, vegetable pakoras, coriander sauce and masala chai. You know, I had dinner with three German women in Vang Vieng (a town north of here) at an Indian restaurant, and not one of them had ever had masala chai = had never lived! They didn’t even know what it was! So I said they should try mine, and their lives were changed forever. And then I started dreaming about the ice cream I used to make in Sri Lanka, with homemade coconut milk and a masala chai base, with whisky-soaked raisins. God almighty. So anyway I had to move to this hotel from a hostel, where I spent the last five nights, because I needed peace and quiet. My social battery gradually emptied, and when I topped it up with alcohol, the alcohol beat me round the head. Tale as old as time. Now I have air conditioning and Indian food, and I’m the one laughing.
I just wrote a poem about how chance encounters can feel serendipitous. Things fall into place when you least expect them to. You can read it here. And, naturally, in the writing of it, I went on a journey through all the meetings I’ve had with people while on this journey, especially since the beginning of this year, when I’ve been travelling independently.
And I dwelt on a conversation I had with a Nigerian British man called Dele and a Bolivian woman called Maria, which was one of those conversations you could transcribe and, with some editing, make into some pretty entertaining TV dialogue. Lots of callbacks and cute bits of self-referentiality. We were talking about China, obviously, and at some point, Dele said something along the lines of, ‘the things we take for free often turn out to be the most costly’. In other words, be careful what you take for granted. As an aphorism, it’s not dissimilar from ‘if it looks too good to be true, it probably is’, which is almost bomb-proof. I might have my mum to thank for that one, along with ‘buy cheap, buy twice’.
All of these phrases, to varying degrees, discourage optimism. What if I buy cheap (from, er, China) and it turns out great? What if something looks too good to be true and it turns out to be as good as it looks? But optimism can only take you so far, and if it’s blind, it won’t take you very far at all. You have to pair it with something. And anyway, the point of an aphorism isn’t that you can turn to it for answers whenever you’re in a bind. An aphorism is like a torch in the darkness. It provides a limited view. Or it’s a lighthouse, keeping you off the rocks.
And then, a day or two later, there was something I said that Maria interpreted as containing some sort of wisdom, and she wrote it down. If this has happened to you then you, too, know what it’s like to feel like a sage. We were talking about adaptation, and how unforeseeable events can derail even the most well planned and well researched itineraries. (This recently happened to me. The trip from Vientiane to Siem Reap is in two parts: part one, to Pakse, is on a bus capable of transporting a bicycle; part two, from Pakse into Cambodia and down to Siem Reap, is in a minivan, which apparently cannot guarantee carriage of a bicycle. So I’m cycling straight into Thailand instead, across the First Thai–Lao Friendship Bridge, and will shake my groove thing from there.)
I digress. I said something like, ‘a plan you made yesterday is better than one you made a year ago, because it was made by a more recent version of you’. Because – and I appreciate this now more than I ever have, and it’s especially true during periods of flux and accelerated development – you are not the same you that you were then. The plan you made a year ago, or ten years ago, can be a source of comfort. Falling back on it can feel safe. But in doing so, you run the risk of ignoring your present self – a self with different priorities. Growth happens when you update your priorities.
This is getting very self-helpy. Eugh. But it’s super relevant to my current situation, and I daresay relevant to many others. It’s part of the reason I’ve always been so baffled by people who knew what they wanted to be when they were older. What I’ve wanted to be has constantly changed. And sure, this has, thus far, held me back from sticking with anything long enough to master it. I’ve played many instruments and currently play none. I’ve tried writing in several formats, but never really stuck with any of them. I’ve never committed fully to a job in a way that allowed for much professional development.
And when I conceived of this trip, it looked a particular way. Actually, I idealised that vision to the point where I became inflexible regarding it, and it clashed with reality. For years, I deferred to this plan that I’d made in the past, all the while doing very little to ensure that it was a plan that worked for me/us in the present. I didn’t update my plan to suit our (then-)present circumstances. And in doing so, I ignored my own advice – advice that was sufficiently wise to be written down!!! I bet there’s an aphorism for that. Or a paradox. Oh yes, it’s the Solomon Paradox.
King Solomon was known for his legendary wisdom, and loved dishing out advice. But he struggled to follow the advice he gave to others. For example, he warned others not to marry many wives, saying ‘he who loves many women is not wise’. He then proceeded to marry 700 women, and had 300 concubines to boot. Oh, Solomon. I mean, come on! He also wrote about the futility of building large monuments, describing such things as ‘vain’. And then he built a big temple. So, he was able to impart wisdom to others but not heed it himself. Personally, I don’t think I impart much wisdom to others. But I am trying to be a bit more deliberate with the wisdom I follow.
Everything they told you about Laos is true. It’s basically a magical land. There are whole squadrons of albino carabaos, the earth and dust are tinged with a Seuss-esque purple, kids run along the road in Spider-Man costumes and onesies, hollering ‘bye-bye, bye-bye!’ as you pass by, men and women of all ages beckon you into their houses to drink potent lao-hai out of bamboo straws from large earthenware pots, cows trot skittishly alongside, nimble as foals, and the cockerels truncate their calls so that they cry a staccato ’cockerdoodld-’. Laotians eat more sticky rice than the people of any other country.
While here, it’s been impossible not to think about, learn about, and weep at the ongoing suffering caused by, America’s bombing campaign of Laos.
The Indochina wars of the 20th century brought ruin to much of Southeast Asia, and in some ways, history regards the Laotian Civil War of 1959 to 1975 as a footnote to the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese call it the American War), but pretty much as soon as you get here, you can see the carnage it caused. The roads are broken. There are bomb craters. Unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to maim and kill people working in fields and the jungle. Horses swallow sub-munitions that explode in their stomachs. Ducks stumble upon fragments of cluster-bombs. In Vieng Xai you can tour the caves where the Pathet Lao – the communist resistance fighters – hid during the worst years, from 1964 to 1973. You can snoop round the bedrooms and living quarters and kitchens and meeting rooms of the generals, and walk through the unlit, rock-walled maternity wards, where women gave birth and nursed their babies in the dark while American bombers searched desperately for innocent people to kill.
In excess of 270 million Estimated number of sub-munitions (in Lao they’re called ‘bombies’) from cluster bombs dropped over Lao PDR (Laos’ formal name: Lao People’s Democratic Republic) between 1964 and 1973.
30% Estimated failure rate of sub-munitions under ideal conditions.
80 million Estimated number of sub-munitions that failed to explode.
446,711 or 0.55% Number or percentage of estimated unexploded sub-munitions destroyed by UXO Lao from 1996 to May 2010.
The French army withdrew from Laos in 1954 and it became officially independent. Except it wasn’t actually independent, because no one would leave it alone. Before it started bombing the proverbial and literal shit out of this unbelievably beautiful landlocked nation, the US was funnelling money into its elections (and was paying 100% of the Lao military budget in 1955, paid its generals’ salaries, etc), manipulating it politically from the inside and hoping against hope that the bloody communists (with support from the east, aka North Vietnam, and later the Soviet Union) would stop being communists. It supported the 1960 neutralist coup and simultaneously supported covert counter-coup efforts. Ultimately, election fixing, diplomatic meddling and funds-funnelling failed to win an entire country over to a political ideology that was completely alien to them (and whose inherent Westernness smacked of its colonial past). A Soviet military air bridge into Vientiane, flying artillery and gunners in to reinforce the Neutralist/Pathet Lao coalition may have been the straw that broke imperialist America’s back, because the US then went into overdrive. It flew in napalm-carrying B-26 Invader bombers from Taiwan, then T-6 Texans (gunner planes), and H-34 helicopters.
But 1964 is when the shit really hit the fan. The Baffler, my favourite magazine, recently published a piece called ‘Inglorious Bastards’ comparing Joe Biden’s domestic/foreign policy dynamic with that of Lyndon B Johnson, who was president from 1963 to ’69.
What connects them, writes Toby Jaffe, is their ‘stubborn faith in outdated modes of thinking during periods of historical tumult, as well as their complicity in the failed politics that brought about the tumult in the first place. For Johnson, this most obviously revealed itself in the Vietnam War. For Biden, this has most explicitly and recently revealed itself in his callous, fly-by-night response to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which is now spiraling, unchecked, into a broader regional conflict.’
The audioguide you get when you tour the caves in Vieng Xai contains some nauseating details. Laos’ population at the time of the US bombing campaign, from 1964 to 1973, was more or less 1 million. And the US dropped 2 million tons of explosives on the country, = 2 tons per person. Laos is famously the most heavily bombed country (per capita) ever. Villages have been destroyed that no one will ever know existed, because there was no record of them. Too remote, too disconnected, so uninvolved in the vagaries of geopolitics as to render their destruction entirely meaningless. During this period, villagers would soak their white clothes in puddles and roll them in the mud, so as to be less visible to the bombers that flew overhead. One captured pilot said his orders were simply to look for the colourful crests and bills of ducks and chickens: signs of human habitation. So villagers culled any animals that were too brightly coloured. Many Laotians had never even heard of America. They had no idea of why they were being killed, what the Cold War was, or what was meant by their meaningless slaughter. All they knew was that at dawn, the planes started, and a while after dusk, the noises would stop. Knowing any more might not have made it any better. Either way, the injustice fuelled their anger, which strengthened their resolve and motivated their resistance.
I came to Laos with high hopes but few expectations. As with other countries that have a history of being brutalised, either by hosting proxy wars or being seemingly beaten into submission by regional superpowers, it’s had quite a profound effect on me. Cycling through tiny hill villages, I’m greeted with a whole range of facial expressions, and I find myself wondering how much of their own history these people know, and how that knowledge affects how they interpret and respond to my presence. Going days without seeing any other foreigners, it’s clear they don’t see many white faces. And their reactions run the gamut from extraordinary excitement to something that looks like suspicion, or wariness, and it’s hard to predict. Age is an indicator but not a reliable one. I sit on a hill somewhere under the midday sun, with forested hills expanding in all directions, and imagine planes flying overhead, scouring the trees for signs of human life. Overall, it feels a world away from the hills of neighbouring Vietnam: there’s an economic disparity, but topography is also important. This entire region of northern Laos is basically mountainous, and has historically been hard to access, meaning it’s ‘retained’ a ‘simpler’ way of life, while most of Vietnam is within an hour or two’s drive from a substantial town or city – it has a very developed coastline, multiple urban centres, hubbub, sprawl.
Tigers used to roam over much of the forested north, but they now only occupy isolated and fragmented patches of land – 7% of their historical range across Asia, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. The Vieng Xai caves audioguide said that well into the 20th century, the way you’d find out there were tigers in the area was by ‘stepping on one’. Zoiks!
I recently found out about Manifa Elephant Camp, on the way to Luang Prabang. It was set up by an elephant enthusiast called Vilaluck Vothivong who, with help from a German NGO, now looks after a herd of 17 elephants. It sits on 100 hectares of riverside forest. I may try to camp there. I also need to do some work on my bike. Front rack issues. And I’ve run out of chain oil. And my alan key can’t get enough purchase in the bolt that holds my rear brake cable in position. Work needs doing. But first, I think it’s time for a second croissant.
Love from me. X
Oh, by the way, in English we pronounce the country Laos as Laos, with the ‘s’ sound, just as we say Germany instead of Deutschland. But in Lao (the language), Laos is pronounced Lao. We say Laos (country), Lao (language) and Laotian (people), they say… I think… Lao, Lao and Lao. Oh, and lao in Lao means alcohol. So lao-Lao, a Laotian rice whisky, means alcohol of Laos. Language ♥︎
(A few pics below)
Buy me a coffee, an inner tube, or fresh brake pads!
Choose an amount
£1.50
£6.00
£14.00
Or enter a custom amount
£
Every bit of support is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
This is the fourth (and final!) part in a series I’ve called Postcards from Tajikistan. Feel free to read the other three parts before you read this one (not essential). The first is about cycling in Tajikistan, while the second and third are actually more about Afghanistan’s Taliban government and China’s BRI than they are about Tajikistan. Oh well. This one is about the borders Tajikistan shares with neighbours China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, how they’ve changed in recent years, and conflicts that have arisen during the process of officially demarcating them.
In Europe, for the most part, we’re used to borders being more or less fixed and, at the same time, relatively benign. Elsewhere not so. And the examples of where borders present a complex issue in Europe, such as between Serbia and Kosovo, or where the question of whether or not a border even exists has caused anguish in the 21st century, such as around the self-proclaimed independent region of Transnistria, in Moldova, or between Abkhazia and South Ossetia (as we call them) and (the rest of) Georgia, shed some light on how the border question plays out in Central Asia.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its long arms retreated to its heartland, leaving the nations and/or regions it had imperialised to piece themselves back together. Macro level operations, which had distributed and shared resources between parts of the union, ceased to exist. And in the absence of slick and well organised government – Tajikistan was plunged into civil war after the dissolution of the USSR – grassroots cooperatives and communities suddenly had to fend for themselves.
But that’s easier said than done, especially if you live many miles away from a source of potable water, and you previously relied on edicts from a distant authority for access to water that now belongs in, or comes from, another country. Which is one of the complications that has led to conflict between Tajikistan and its northerly neighbour, Kyrgyzstan.
The border the two countries share was closed in spring 2021 – a three-day armed conflict began on 28 April. And it remained closed until late July 2023 (although maybe not officially until early August). Even now, the protocol for crossing between them has yet to be ironed out – although it is getting there. We crossed by bicycle in October 2023.
The crux of the conflict, argues Kyrgyz author Viktoria Akchurina, is a clash of logics between the immovability of a border and the always-movingness water. Water is life, and it is volatile and unpredictable, especially in mountain regions. For this reason, dams and reservoirs have been essential to ensuring water security in Central Asia. In recent years, Kyrgyzstan and its neighbours, especially Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have been trying to officially demarcate their national borders, and water management appears to be the biggest obstacle to a peaceful and just resolution of the nations’ border disputes.
Seen through a purely political-economic lens, the calculation needed to work out how to fairly distribute the water is immensely complex. This is because much of it is stored in reservoirs built using – for example – Uzbek money, Kyrgyz workers and Tajik materials. If a certain percentage of a reservoir’s water comes from a river that flows two-thirds through one country and one-third through another, or part-way along two countries’ shared border and part-way along another, and has tributaries that originate in mountains that belong to one country or another, you can see how the mathematics of it can be headache-inducing. To whom does rainfall belong?
Add to that the different speeds at which each nation’s population is increasing – meaning changes to how much water each populace requires – and you have a very complicated problem indeed. Which is why Akchurina, in her book Incomplete State-Building in Central Asia: The State as Social Practice, advocates taking a humanistic, grassroots approach that focuses first on community building and working across borders – even ignoring them – in favour of pragmatism. At the same time, she severely discourages using terms like ‘interstate conflict’ or ‘interstate war’ to describe the situation, since it only leads people to see these as issues that must be solved using a top-down, political-hierarchical approach, and only lead to more escalations.
(Article continues after picture)
Meanwhile, Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan is delineated, at least in part, in arguably the cleanest and most convenient way: along a river. Find more on Tajikistan–Afghanistan in the first part of this series (links in intro).
We spoke to a Tajik homestay owner who told us the reason China wanted the land so much was because it contained rare earth minerals. Whether or not this is true, the benefit to both countries, and indirectly to the region as a whole, is that the length of border that’s disputed has been reduced. Nevertheless, Tajiks were polarised on the issue, some seeing it as a triumph of diplomacy, others as a loss to the nation – and not necessarily without reason.
Hamrokhon Zarifi, then Tajik foreign minister, celebrated the fact that his country had handed over just 3.5% of the area in dispute (as opposed to a higher percentage). On the other hand, Muhiddin Kabiri, then the leader of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, saw it as a violation of his country’s ‘inseparable and inviolable’ territory. No doubt others felt similarly.
Assel Bitabarovza of Hokkaido University interviewed Tajiks from a range of backgrounds and found the protocol, and its ratification, to be a sensitive issue. This was, she writes, in part because all of the contested lands between Tajikistan and China were ‘situated within territory under de-facto control of Tajikistan’. Previously they had been part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.
She talks about a ‘discourse of territory loss’, experienced in complex ways that have to do with treaties signed by Czarist Russia and the Qing Empire, questions of imperialism and postcolonialism, and the Tajik government’s general approach to the deal. Some people think they rushed into it – the opposing view might be that the government was refreshingly decisive.
Back to the possibility of rare earth minerals: Bitabarovza mentions theories regarding ‘precious metal deposits’ and ‘gem mines’ in the Sarykol mountain range, ‘alluvial gold deposits’ near the Markansu River and Rangkul Lake, and uranium mines within or close to the ceded land. What’s curious is that Bitabarovza spoke to several academics – including those in support of the border protocol – who weren’t able to show her where exactly the territories transferred to Chinese sovereignty were. And she tried ‘fruitlessly’ to contact someone ‘competent’ who could give her an accurate and official map.
But: whether or not Tajiks recognised it at the time, the land-sovereignty transfer seems to have had a positive indirect domino effect for Tajikistan. After the opening of the Tajik-Chinese border crossing at the Kulma (or Qolma) Pass, which only happened in 2004, formally demarcating their shared border was an important stepping stone in establishing strong diplomatic relations between the two countries. Bilateral trade has since increased, and China is making huge infrastructure investments in Tajikistan via the BRI – see postcard pt. 3!
Bitabarovza talks about ‘breaking [Tajikistan’s] isolation’, and relays the view that ‘the resolution of territorial dispute serves as a basis for fostering friendly relations with China’. Which is obviously good for Tajiks. Chinese investment is improving their road network and connecting them better to each other. Also important is that improving Tajikistan’s internal road network makes it easier for Tajiks to conduct trade with its neighbours besides China, such as Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan – win-win-win(-win?).
OK. That’s all for Postcard from Tajikistan. Thanks for reading. Find links to the other parts in the series in the introduction to this article. And other fun and games elsewhere on this website!
Buy me a coffee, an inner tube, or fresh brake pads!
Choose an amount
£1.50
£6.00
£14.00
Or enter a custom amount
£
Every bit of support is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
This article is the third in a series I’m calling ‘Postcard from Tajikistan’, a lot of which isn’t actually about Tajikistan but is instead about what I was thinking about while we were cycling through it. (Find parts 1 and 2 here and here.) Afghanistan, China, the US, Sri Lanka, etc. This one’s (mostly) about the Belt and Road Initiative, and how it gets misrepresented in the western press.
A Chinese construction company is rebuilding the part of the M41 (aka the Pamir Highway) that runs from Qal’ai Khum to Rushon. Note: there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on how to spell the names of all the towns. Some people write Kalaikhum, some write Qal’ai-Khum, etc. Rushon is sometimes written Rûshan (as in the title). It’s a hodgepodge. Here I’m mostly using spellings copied from a Tajik news website, with a few inconsistencies for fun.
The Qal’ai Khum–Rushon road is about 110km long, very winding and quite mountainous, and will ultimately reduce to 90km, because of the construction of two long tunnels. The project also includes a 490m-long avalanche gallery and 15 bridges with a total length of 634m.
Once that’s done, they’ll move on to rebuilding/renovating the road connecting Rushon and Khorog (163km), at an estimated cost of $200m, and the Khorog–Kulma (Chinese border) section (396km), for which $567m has been earmarked.
Obviously the temptation is to condemn news media censorship as typical of an authoritarian government, something that would never happen here, except it did happen here, very recently, when European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called for the censorship of two major news agencies. In February 2022, she announced measures to ‘turn off the tab for […] information manipulation in Europe’ by banning Russia Today and Sputnik, from broadcasting in all of Europe.
And the narrative that China cancelled Sri Lanka’s debt in exchange for control of the Hambantota port is both oversimple and misleading. Still believed by many despite being thoroughly discredited, it was summed up neatly by former US attorney general William P Barr, who claimed that Beijing ‘load[s] poor countries up with debt, refusing to renegotiate terms, and then tak[es] control of the infrastructure itself’.
According to The Atlantic’s research, it was in fact a Canadian company that carried out the initial feasibility study for the Hambantota port project, followed by a Danish company. In 2007, Sri Lanka’s government approached the US and India for help building it, but both countries said no. Eventually, China Harbor won the contract, with China Eximbank agreeing to fund it.
Seven years later, the port was haemorrhaging money, so the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) signed a deal with China Harbor and China Merchants Group to have them continue to develop, and to operate, the port for 35 years. In 2015, when Rajapaksa was beaten at the polls by Maithripala Sirisena, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than it did to China.
In 2017, Sri Lanka paid a total of $4.5 billion in debt service. Only 5% of that was because of Hambantota. And when it opted to raise some funds by leasing out the port – which was still underperforming, apparently because the SLPA had ignored planning advice regarding how to run the port in the first place – to an experienced company, it used the $1.12 billion infusion to ‘bolster its foreign reserves’ (per The Atlantic), not to pay off the Chinese bank.
Basically, political and economic turmoil in Sri Lanka meant that American and European creditors wouldn’t go near Hambantota. Then, when Chinese firms picked up the tab, Sri Lanka’s economy imploded, leaving it unable to repay debts to several international creditors, of which China Eximbank was one.
As The Atlantic’s article notes, China’s ‘march outward, like its domestic development, is probing and experimental’. And after constructing the Hambantota port on Sri Lanka’s coast, the companies in question likely learned important lessons about mitigating against the effects of political instability.
And besides, there are a limited number of ways in which a regional (or global) hegemon can involve itself structurally and substantially with the affairs of other sovereign nations. China’s primary approach – i.e., the BRI, which is basically construction projects helmed by Chinese companies, see the video below for British rapper and journalist Akala’s perspective on China-funded developments in Jamaica, in 2018 – China’s approach is undoubtedly less destructive than those of the US and its allies in Europe, which usually involve bombing campaigns, gutting economies, stealing fossil fuels and launching coups d’etat, and this shows in the attitudes of the vast majority of the world towards the two methodologies.
The Vietnamese tourist we met who had been in Afghanistan said that Afghans presumed he was Chinese, and he said he let them believe he was, because they treated him with so much respect for it. Again: they respected him because they thought he was Chinese. Public attitudes towards China in developing countries, research shows, are economy-orientated and positive. On the other hand, in developed countries, people view China through the lens of ideology. This means they’re more susceptible to having their opinions formed by rhetoric (anti-China media narratives and propaganda), as opposed to evidence (bridges successfully built, high-speed railways successfully operating).
Lots of people have a view on China. Some of those views are informed, either by direct experience or investigative research. Others by news outlets that tow governmental lines. We met two Dutch brothers, for example, one of whom said they had worked with Chinese businesspeople and came away from those experiences soured towards the country. Fair enough, I thought. At least it’s based on firsthand experience. But lots of people are critical of China based on headlines they’ve seen in newspapers, online or on TV.
The issue is that mainstream journalists in the West self-censor when it comes to reporting on China and its goings-on. This is self-evident, since almost everything you see or hear from mainstream news outlets in the UK and US is overtly negative towards China. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman explain in Manufacturing Consent, it’s not necessary for news companies to censor by edict. The journalists that make it to the top, to the roles that have editorial impact, only make it there because they self-censor, say the right thing, don’t cross the line. From Chomsky and Herman’s research, it’s clear that this was the case in the US mainstream press in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it’s definitely true to an extent in the UK in 2023. China’s accomplishments are treated with suspicion.
The fact that Chinese people overwhelmingly trust their government is treated as a symptom of brainwashing. When China sends warships into the waters off its own coastline, it is depicted as a military provocation, while the US’ military activity in the waters off China’s coastline is depicted as a defensive measure. China’s crackdown on Islamist extremism in its northwest Xinjiang province, while undoubtedly severe and decisive, was also provoked and arguably necessary, and has been persistently and emphatically characterised as genocidal.
I write this from Xinjiang, where Han Chinese (the country’s ethnic majority) and Uighur people (the Turkic minority) seem live side by side very peaceably; where Uighur language, which has used the Arabic script officially since 1987, is widely visible, on bus stops and shop fronts; and where the bread we’ve been seeing all over Central Asia is widely available. (I edit this from Qingdao, south of Beijing, where we just ate at a restaurant serving Xinjiang cuisine.)
There are a couple of people I follow on X/Twitter who have been consistently really instructive on the issue of western dis- and misinformation, and propaganda, regarding China. One is Kyle (@KyleTrainEmoji). Another is Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand).
So… this is what I was thinking about while we were sitting in the taxi between Qal’ai Khumb and Roshan, or Rushan, as we wended our way between steep rock faces, along the grey-green river, passing Chinese-made Shacman trucks by the dozen. By the time we got to Alichur, the Shacman trucks had disappeared. Things quietened down; the traffic petered out; and the arid, jagged wilds of eastern Tajikistan stretched out on either side of the Pamir Highway.
Alichur is a small town, connected only, via the M41, to Khorog and Murghab. And while it has a certain charm, there certainly isn’t much do there. It has 379 houses and a population of around 1,300, of which 45 are teachers. Before COVID, there were eight homestays. Now there are only three, including Shukrona, where we stayed.
Rahmani, its owner, has lived in the town for 38 years, having been sent here on a one-year teaching contract, by the government, after finishing her studies in Dushanbe. She’s been here ever since and has run the homestay for 16 years. In 2019, a new water pump was installed in the centre of town, reducing the load on the existing one. But hers is the only house in Alichur with electricity, and it gets it by means of an array of solar panels paid for and installed with the help of a foreign charity.
During her nearly four decades here, things have changed, not least with regard to the environment. She found it tough when she first arrived, she tells us, because the hostile winds blew incessantly and it never rained. Now, the local climate has, apparently, calmed somewhat. It rains occasionally, and the wind relents.
The house is heated by burning cakes of cowdung. Fuel is created by taking the cows down to the river, where the grass is relatively plentiful, and harvesting their waste. In this sense it is renewable, but it’s dirty and polluting compared to burning gas or oil. Burning cowdung as fuel is widespread in the world’s poorer regions. In his latest book, Bjorn Lomborg writes that inhaling its fumes can do serious damage to people’s respiratory systems, and that a better organised global response to extreme temperatures would ensure that even the poorest people in the world have access to relatively clean – and still cheap – gas for cooking and heating their homes.
But the global response to extreme temperatures, and climate change at large, isn’t well organised. So Rahmani, and many others in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere, will probably keep collecting and burning dung cakes for the rest of their lives.
To be continued… again again…
Buy me a coffee, an inner tube, or fresh brake pads!
Choose an amount
£1.50
£6.00
£14.00
Or enter a custom amount
£
Every bit of support is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
This article follows on from last week’s, titled Postcard from… Tajikistan (to be read first, ideally). There will probably be one or two more in the following days/weeks, about our cycling in Tajikistan and its GBAO region!
…So in order to learn a bit more about the Taliban, I read Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article on the group – ‘The Taliban confront the realities of power’ – published a few months after the US withdrew its troops. He had feet on the ground at a crucial time, and seems to have gleaned more about contemporary Afghan politics than most journalists reporting on it.
Reading the article, a picture began to form in my mind of men joining the Taliban because of the security it affords them and their families. Like joining the military or law enforcement in any other unstable country, being a member of Afghanistan’s Taliban government, or being affiliated with the group more broadly, likely confers some kind of guarantee of status and income in a country otherwise beleaguered by instability and economic uncertainty.
We thought it would be interesting to compare Afghanistan’s Taliban government with the United States’ current Democratic Party administration. Which one has placed more restrictions on the rights of its own citizens, and the lives of others? Which one has done more to promote universal healthcare and social mobility? Which one has used its Security Council veto power to quash more United Nations resolutions? Or, which has dropped more bombs on the civilians and civilian infrastructure of other sovereign nations?
(President Biden was kind enough to restart publication of the Pentagon’s monthly Airpower Summaries after Trump put a halt to them in February 2020. In the first year of his administration, Biden presided over the dropping of 1,178 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Planes to Israel, to help the Israel Defense Forces reduce Gaza, an underdog enclave of mostly innocent people, to rubble, have ‘already taken off’. The United States has also sent aircraft carriers and supporting ships to support Israel – nothing to support Palestine, obviously.)
Most people in the developed West, even those critical of the US, would probably instinctively say that the Biden administration’s domestic policies are less oppressive than those of Afghanistan’s Taliban government. But when it comes to foreign policy, it seems obvious to me that America has the most dangerous track record of any sovereign nation – post-WII, at least.
In the lead up to the 2008 US presidential election, which Obama ended up winning, CBS News anchor Katie Couric asked the ten leading candidates which country frightened them the most. The question was supposed to ‘go beyond politics’. Biden and Clinton said Pakistan. John Edwards said China.
The rest said Iran (North Korea and Russia received honourable mentions), pinning their fears on the ‘zealotry’ of its theologians (Fred Thompson), the fact that it possesses nuclear weapons and the capacity to deploy them (Rudy Giuliani and Barack Obama), that it poses a ‘threat to stability’ especially with regard to ‘energy supplies’ (Barack Obama), and that it has a leader who is ‘happy to pull the trigger’ (Mike Huckabee).
John McCain was one of the few to recognise the role the US had played in creating what it regards as a threat to its own security, noting the Iraq war’s knock-on effects in terms of regional (in)stability and intoning, with disarming lucidity, that ‘when bad things happen, bad things happen’.
Of course it’s interesting and it can be eye-opening to raise a mirror to US politicians’ criticisms of other nations and see how their own country stands up. Zealotry, defined as the ‘fanatical or uncompromising pursuit of a set of ideals’, and the ‘intolerance of conflicting beliefs’, is foundational to American political culture, to the extent that one scholar suggests that counterterrorism policies are the best way to respond to certain political trends in the United States.
The only nation ever to deploy a nuclear weapon is the United States, and it did so twice, having playfully nicknamed the bombs Little Boy and Fat Man, ha-ha. Precedent is a marker of potential. America has military personnel stationed literally everywhere, never more than a stone’s throw from the borders of nations from which is claims to fear uprisings.
And regarding threats to energy supplies, in February 2022 Biden threatened to ‘bring an end’ to the Nord Stream gas pipeline so much of Europe relied on for affordable gas, should the Russian Federation invade Ukraine. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reckons America blew it up in order to sustain the United States’ ‘long-standing primacy in Western Europe’. He called it the ‘perfect crime’.
So anyway, this is what I was thinking about while we left behind our view of Afghanistan, and while I flicked through the Instagram photos of the Kurdish man we met in Dushanbe who was, by this point, several days into his tour of the country. Someone else who had cycled through Afghanistan called it a ‘fourth world country’, but based on what I’ve read it doesn’t seem like the Taliban are responsible for this. Before the US’ direct involvement in Afghanistan was the Soviet–Afghan War. Afghanistan has not had an easy time. The first step to helping people get back on their feet is probably to stop bombing them.
Jon Lee Anderson reports on a bunch of quite interesting things apparently going on there. For one, the war on ‘graven images’ that marked the Taliban’s 1990s stint in power has softened markedly, he says. Enforcing such a strict policy is impossible anyway because of the rise of smartphones and social media websites. Senior Taliban leaders told him that the ‘depravity’ and ‘chaos’ that – in their view – characterised the 1990s made it necessary to enforce sharia law during their first era of rule. Now, they claim to be driven by ‘mercy and compassion’.
At the same time, however, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs has reportedly closed; the new Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice inhabits its old home. Anderson writes that women employed by the government are ‘being forced to sign in at their jobs and then go home, to create the illusion of equity’. Which is pretty stupid, obviously. But then, the US spent $2 trillion over 18 years on maintaining war in Afghanistan, and killed 43,000 Afghan civilians in the process. So you know, potato potato.
To be continued… again…
Buy me a coffee, an inner tube, or fresh brake pads!
Choose an amount
£1.50
£6.00
£14.00
Or enter a custom amount
£
Every bit of support is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
In total, we were in Tajikistan for just under four weeks, and spent most of those days on two wheels: we cycled in from Uzbekistan, in the west; through Panjakent, Ayni and the infamous Istiklol Tunnel (aka ‘Tunnel of Death’); to the capital, Dushanbe, and onwards via the town of Kulob in the south to Qal’ai Khumb; from there we took a shared taxi to Rŭshan, in order to avoid roadworks and mountain blasting led by a Chinese construction company as part of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative; and then onto the Pamir Highway proper, via Khorog, Alichur, Murghab and Karakul, to Kyrgyzstan. We crossed the border at the Kyzyl Art pass in late September. It was very snowy, and I was sick.
On the way, we passed endless streams of fluorescent orange Shacman trucks wending their way like lemmings through Tajikistan’s deepcut valleys. These trucks ply Tajikistan’s rocky highways day in, day out, and are the life force of its several massive ongoing construction projects. They climb hills with their bonnets open so as to catch the cool air and save, so one presumes, their radiators from self-destruction in the unrelenting heat of the country’s lowlands: landlocked, dust-dry.
Those with faulty brakes have a lifeline. Continuous descents are marked with emergency exits in case of brake failure, although they really are for emergencies only. They’re steep off-ramps something like thirty metres long, leading straight off the road to rubbly dead-ends. Pomegranate trees line the highway, dangling their awkward, bulbous, majestic fruits like forbidden apples over residential fences and enticing drivers and cyclists.
Once you get onto the Pamir Highway proper, i.e. past Khorog and up to 4,000 metres above sea level, most of the traffic dies away. The lion’s share of it is tourist traffic. Jeeps on tours and taxis ferrying overland travellers from one town to the next. Cyclists are almost as common as cars.
Toilets are pits dug deep into the ground, with doorless huts around them. They put out so potent an aroma of ammonia that you feel heady as soon as you squat, and you rush so as to get (it) out quicker. There is shit on the floor around you, and there are scraps of sandpaper-like toilet tissue overflowing from the bucket bin. Tajik toilet paper does not wrap around a cardboard tube, like we’re used to. It does not employ a Labrador Retriever puppy to advertise its softness.
As we cycle past, young children scream at us from the roadside, inviting us into their home before even asking their parents’ permission. The parents are more muted in their enthusiasm, but they seem glad to have us. They know by now that we’ll insist on giving them some somoni – named after the father of the Tajik nation, Ismail Samani – on our way out. Money they’ll obstinately refuse, at least at first, despite it matching a week’s wages. It’s culturally acceptable to insist, so we do.
Young men place their hands on their hearts as we pass, sombrely wishing us well. Boys on mountain bikes wave Tajik flags and accompany us like a royal procession through small mountain villages, shouting, singing and waving, their spoke reflectors flashing in the late morning sunlight. We feel like presidents. The whole town knows we’re here. They’ve given us flags of our own, which we fasten with sellotape to our bike frames.
The longest climbs are made no easier by the fruit sellers insisting we take their melons, each one weighing a kilogram or more, piled high on top of our panniers and racks. But their smiles are infectious. Young guys in their 20s, not long out of military service, delighted for the opportunity to give away their family’s crop. Or else it’s middle-aged women with gold teeth and pattened headscarves, magenta socks and matching sliders, filling our bags from their buckets of apples, grapes, pears. September is the month of plenty.
Between villages and oases of green, however, it’s all rock and water. Plumes of dust and razorsharp blue skies, incongruously fresh asphalt sometimes four lanes wide, laid as if by giants in a single strip, and machine guns. Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan is heavily militarised, although there’s no sign of anything military on the other side. Numerous outposts with single-person sort of pillboxes made out of loose rock cobbled together, sometimes with thick cardboard and wiring holding them fast.
Nearing the Tajik–Afghan border, a thick mist – being the rose-tinted interpretation of what it was, the fog consisting, likely in large part, of mountain dust – enshrouded us in yellow, adding to the feeling that the country on the other side of the grey river was hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Two of the people (one half of a German couple and a Vietnamese man) from our hostel in Dushanbe had arrived from Afghanistan; a third (Kurdish) was on his way there. The melon sellers ask if that’s where we’re headed.
The border recently reopened after four years of closure, meaning the handful of more or less weekly Afghan bazaars that dot the border have started up again. Afghans cross the Pyandzh River via rickety-looking pedestrian bridges that wave side to side with the wind. Sharofat, a zealous, kind and asinine woman who runs a homestay in Khorog, told us it was only the second time the town’s bazaar had taken place since the borders reopened, but having visited it in the morning spoke dismissively of its vendors, saying they were Taliban.
Many of those milling around the stalls also appeared to be Afghan, and we spoke to one who has been a tour operator in the country for 15 years. He told us this was a particularly good year to visit the embattled nation, perhaps because, without the military presence of the US and its allies crawling over its surface, the country has had a chance to reassess and reshuffle. The dust is settling.
But Sharofat’s comments prompted some reflection. What does it mean to be a member of the Taliban? Is it equivalent to being a member of a political party in a Western nation? One instinctively thinks it must involve more than that. But is there an initiation rite, an ideological questionnaire, or is it as simple as signing a name on a dotted line and donning a piece of regalia symbolising membership?
To be continued…
Buy me a coffee, an inner tube, or fresh brake pads!
Choose an amount
£1.50
£6.00
£14.00
Or enter a custom amount
£
Every bit of support is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
This article is for anyone planning a round-the-world cycle trip, anyone with a friend currently cycling around the world whose routing decisions they don’t fully understand, or anyone interested in long-distance overland slow-travel, geopolitics and the environment. It’s also a summary of our research and decision-making to date. Since it is written from the point of view of a UK citizen, some of the finer details may not be 100% accurate to you, but with any luck the broader points will still be interesting and useful. It discusses, and in some cases answers, such questions as:
Can you cycle through Afghanistan in 2023?
Is it better for the environment to travel by plane or cruise ship?
Can you apply for a Chinese visa in Central Asia without an LOI?
Why do Brits and Americans not cycle through Iran, while Irish and French cyclists do?
How are overland round-the-world cyclists getting around Azerbaijan’s border closure?
Thankfully the first part of a round-the-world bicycle trip, even in 2023, is easy. Even if your country is reeling from an unwieldy divorce from the mainland, traversing Europe by bicycle involves refreshingly few brain-twisters. You get on your bike and ride to Turkey. 90 days is enough time to get through the EU/Schengen, and decisions are made by and large according to fancy: which pass to take over the Alps; whether to take the Balkan route or travel down the length of Italy and cross to Albania; to Danube or not to Danube; to stick to Eurovelo routes or plow your own furrow, and so on.
Such dilemmas are luxuries. Challenges are surmountable in the moment, and/or with a small amount of cash. For example, the worst Sicilian drivers can be avoided by taking smaller, inland roads (and they can all be avoided by skipping the isle altogether). If a particular mountain pass is closed due to bad weather or simply too tough, you can reroute. If you arrive at a border crossing to find it’s actually a military transit zone, you can usually backtrack and go around. Albanian ATM fees are a pain at €6-8, but if you plan ahead you can halve them, or avoid them altogether. And the notorious, four-lane D100 into Istanbul can be circumnavigated, or endured, one way or another. Once you get past Turkey, however, necessity takes over.
Anyone cycling ‘around the world’ from Europe sort of has to go east. The alternative is to fly somewhere and cycle back, but for many, flying defies the point of travelling by bicycle. Setting off eastwards also means beginning on familiar ground, and getting further from home as you go. Start easy and get harder. Most go through Turkey or cross the Black Sea from Varna, Bulgaria to Poti, Georgia. (There is also a route from Chernomorsk, Ukraine to Batumi, Georgia, which I took in reverse in 2018. But in 2023, this route is inadvisable.) Frosty diplomatic relations between West European nations and the Russian Federation make cycling through Turkey and Georgia favourable. And the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014, only adds to this.
What is the best route to cycle through Turkey?
Which route a given cyclist takes through Turkey depends on what they want to get out of it.
By and large, the Black Sea route is touristy, trafficky, expensive, dull(er) and easy. You’ll find regular swimming spots, but you’ll have to share them. Taking the ferry from Piraeus (Athens) to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast (whether via Chios, Rhodes or elsewhere) and loosely following the Lycean Way will afford some spectacular views, but the D400 that connects Katça, Fethiye, Kaş and Antalya is a fairly busy road. Avoiding it while still hugging the coast means lots of ups and downs.
The third option is to cut inland, for example from Izmir through Denizli (for the travertines of Pamukkale), Konya, Cappadocia (for Göreme and Pigeon Valley), Sivas and Erzerum. There are two reliable border crossing points between Turkey and Georgia, on the Black Sea coast (at Sarp–Sarpi) and in the mountains, between Posof and Vale – this one’s prettier, and more interesting, but harder to reach. The third is further east, not far from Armenia, and may not be open all year, or to all who wish to pass through it.
Those who cut inland or follow Turkey’s Mediterranean coast have the option of continuing southeast into Turkey’s Kurdish-majority regions. There may be as many as 20 million Kurds living in Turkey, and having cycled through North Kurdistan in 2018 myself, I can say it’s an incredibly interesting part of the Anatolian peninsula. Note, however, that many governments advise against all but essential travel in parts of southeastern Turkey. When I was there, the UK government considered it a red zone.
But: I loved it, and had many fascinating conversations, either in German or via Google Translate, with Kurdish men.
Is it best to cycle the ‘northern route’ through Central Asia, or the ‘southern route’ through Iran and Pakistan?
Choosing which path to take through Turkey depends to an extent on which way out of Turkey you want to take. This is the first major fork in the road for round-the-world cyclists.
Mainland Europeans (plus Irish citizens), Australians and New Zealanders can travel independently in Iran, either by obtaining a visa beforehand or, in some cases, on arrival. For citizens of the US, Canada and the UK, however, independent/solo travel is not allowed. The official line is that citizens of these countries require a government-licensed guide with them at all times. In practice, it may not be as strict as all that. But the fact remains.
So if you’re wondering why all the Instagram videos you’re seeing of touring cyclists travelling in Iran don’t feature any Brits or Americans, that’s the reason. It’s not feasible. Iran closed its foreign missions in the US, UK and Canada some time ago, and for its part, the UK reduced its diplomatic relations with Iran to the ‘lowest possible level’ following the 2011 attack on the British Embassy in Iran by Iranian protesters (protesting sanctions the British government had imposed on Iran… over concerns regarding its nuclear program… it’s a long story.).
Of the three countries with which Iran shares its eastern border, Pakistan offers the least resistance to touring cyclists. The other two are Turkmenistan (which we’ll come to later) and Afghanistan, which needs little introduction (but which we’ll also come to later). Anyone who cycles from Pakistan into India and wants to cycle out again has a few obstacles to consider, namely, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. As far as I know, it’s pretty rare for anyone to cycle through any of these, and rarer still for anyone to cycle out the other side, i.e., into Tibet or Myanmar.
Routes are either mountainous or complicated in terms of visas. Bangladesh does, however, have the longest beach in the world, so there’s that.
Cycling the ‘northern route’ into northwest China via ‘the ‘Stans’ and the legendary Pamir Highway
While the so-called ‘southern route’ takes touring cyclists through Iran (making it effectively closed to citizens of the US, UK and Canada) and into Pakistan and India, the ‘northern route’ avoids these countries altogether, and includes a couple of weeks on the famous Pamir Highway.
The Pamir Highway (Soviet road number M41) is famous for being the second highest international highway in the world. Its highest point is the Ak-Baital Pass, at 4,655m (15,270ft). The first highest altitude international highway is the nearby Karakoram Highway, also called the China-Pakistan Friendship Highway, which has a maximum elevation of 4,714m (15,466ft). Both are really high, and the Pamir Highway is something of a bucket list item for many touring cyclists.
Pre-covid-19, the northern route through Central Asia was in many ways headache-free. Visa-wise, for those with powerful passports, entry into Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgzstan is pretty easy. When I cycled to Baku in 2018, I met quite a few cyclists who were continuing eastwards, across the Caspian Sea, by ferry from Alat (south of the capital) to Aktau, in Kazakhstan. They then made their way to Dushanbe, which many see as the beginning of the Pamir Highway, and onwards to Osh and beyond.
Quick note: similar cargo ferries also ran, or run, from Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan (south of Kazakhstan). But Turkmenistan requries a transit visa to enter, and these visas can be very elusive, taking 4-6 weeks to come through. And to make matters worse, transit visas for Turkmenistan (tourist visas being out of the question, apparently) give, or gave, cyclists an arbitrary, and small, number of days to get out of the country – 4, 5 or 6. Bare in mind those are desert kilometres, with unpredictable winds. So Azerbaijan–Kazakhstan was, is, the preferred route for most.
Azerbaijan’s land border has been closed to foreigners since 2020
Thanks to the sharp edges of Eurasian and Central Asian geopolitics, getting to the Pamir Highway in 2023 presents one or two unique challenges.
In 2018, for me as a UK citizen, getting into Azerbaijan required purchasing an evisa in advance and printing it out at a Xerox shop a day or two before arriving at the border. When crossing, my German friend and I were asked if we planned to go to Nagorno-Karabakh. We answered very clearly ‘No’, as doing otherwise would have led them to deny us entry – and, incidentally, been untrue.
Armenia and Azerbaijan, the latter supported initially by the Soviet Union, and more recently by Turkey, have been fighting over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh since 1988. But the conflict’s roots go back to the breakup of the Russian Empire in 1918. Most of the people who live there are ethnically Armenian; internationally, it’s recognised as part of Azerbaijan. The conflict flared up in late 2020. There was a ceasefire. Then, in December 2022, Azerbaijan blockaded the region (also called the Republic of Artsakh).
Concurrently, in 2020, Azerbaijan closed all its land borders (with Russia, Georgia and Iran) to prevent the spread of covid-19. It’s kept them shut ever since, and nobody knows exactly why. Officially, it’s a health policy, as it was when they first implemented it. On 23 June, 2023, it was reported that Azerbaijan had extended its ‘special quarantine regime’ until, at the earliest, 2 October, 2023, in order to ‘prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection and its possible consequences’.
A lot of people suspect it has to do with the war in Ukraine. But this explanation only makes so much sense, since Azerbaijan hasn’t closed its air borders, so anyone can still fly in. Meanwhile, at time of writing (13 August, 2023), there are reportedly 12 people currently infected with covid-19 in Azerbaijan. So is it or isn’t it a health policy?
Cyclists’ solutions to Azerbaijan’s land border closure
One option is to fly from Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, to Baku. The flight takes barely an hour, and costs relatively little if booked a week ahead. But for touring cyclists, this means going through the motions of disassembling and packaging a bicycle, probably finding a large carry case for 4 pannier bags, and putting everything back together again on the other side.
The silver lining is that Azerbaijan Airlines’ Free Baggage Allowance includes bicycles; the cloud is that you’ll still have to pay for extra weight… probably. After landing in Baku, cyclists can then cycle south to Alat, go through the potential rigmarole of tracking down the ferry to Kazakhstan, and carry on as normal. This route sticks to the classic northern route, but loyalists can take it even further. I know of one cyclist who cycled from Tbilisi to the border and back, flew to Baku, cycled to Azerbaijan’s border with Georgia, and then carried on to Alat.
Another option is to forget Azerbaijan altogether. In the WhatsApp groups I’m in, there are cyclists who have flown from Tbilisi to Aktau (the next stop after Baku), to Samarkand or Tashkent (in Uzbekistan), and to Dushanbe (in Tajikistan), to the beginning of the Pamir Highway. Because, runs the logic, if you’re going to have to fly anyway, you might as well milk it.
But there is a third option, which doesn’t involve flying. It does, however, involve getting another visa.
Travelling overland from Georgia to Russia in order to reach Kazakhstan without flying over Azerbaijan
Georgia’s border with Russia is traversable at Zemo Larsi, or Verkhnij Lars, between Kazbegi and Vladikavkaz. According to Caravanistan, it’s been open for international travellers post-pandemic and post-Ukraine War. In theory, touring cyclists can put their bikes on a marshrutka or shared taxi at Tbilisi’s Didube bus terminal and be at the border in a few hours. Or, potentially, cycle to the border themselves. But it might be easier to get a transit visa if you can show that there are transport connections all the way through the country.
Note that it has to be a vehicle with Russian (or Armenian) plates. Georgia-Russia relations have been strained for a long time, and collapsed in August 2008 after the Russo-Georgian War. The two nations have maintained zero formal diplomatic relations since.
You can’t walk across the border zone, but you may be able to cycle across it. If not, there’s the option of hitching a ride all the way to Vladikavkaz. Of course, for most touring cyclists, entering Russia requires a visa, and tourist visas for Russia (and China) are notoriously difficult to get outside of one’s home country. But transit visas are relatively straightforward to get hold of.
Because of the diplomatic rift mentioned above, Russia doesn’t have an embassy in Georgia. It closed on 29 August, 2008 when Georgia ordered all Russian diplomats to leave the country. The Russian Federation is therefore represented via the Embassy of Switzerland. Who else could it be? So travelling overland, whether by bus or bicycle (or train, via Abkhazia – which needs a post of its own) from Georgia to Russia, requires a visit to the Russian Federation Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy.
Applying for a Chinese tourist visa in Istanbul, Tbilisi, Tehran, Dushanbe, Kathmandu, Karachi, Yerevan
Kazakhstan borders Russia and China to the east – the distance between Kazakhstan’s easternmost tip and Mongolia’s westernmost is about 50km. Touring cyclists taking the ‘northern route’ therefore have to work out what to do when they drop down from the Pamir Highway and roll into to Almaty.
Those who have started their trip in their (European) homecountry may have been able to obtain their Chinese tourist visas before setting off, but it’s a push. From the date you pick up your Chinese tourist visa, you typically have 3 months to enter China. As a result, many find themselves wanting to apply on the road.
The complication here is that it’s much easier to get a tourist visa for China (or any country requiring one) in the applicant’s home country. You can do it in a third country, but you might need a Letter Of Invitation (LOI), or to provide more supporting documents than you otherwise would.
Based on the accounts of touring cyclists in 2023, it’s possible to apply for and receive visas to enter China as a tourist in: Tbilisi, Georgia as a nonresident and without a letter of invitation; Tehran, Iran but there is a long queue for appointments (like, a month long), since Iranians don’t have many options for where to spend their holidays; Istanbul only if you’re Turkish, since the city has a visa servicecentre rather than an embassy proper; Yerevan, Armenia, without too much difficulty; Kathmandu, Nepal, but it might take a long time, and the officials there might not like seeing Turkish stamps in your passport; and/or Dushanbe, Tajikistan only if you can prove you have a right to remain in Tajikistan for six months (i.e., a residency permit), or if you have an LOI.
Tour companies provide LOIs, as do employers; work and study visas require them, while tourist visas tend not to. But like I said, applying for a tourist visa is harder outside your home country. It needs more stuff. You might need to book hotels and/or train and bus connections (or even flights, in some cases), print relevant timetables and/or write a declaration vis-à-vis your desire to travel, or even enter and exit the country, by bicycle.
How unsafe is it to cycle as a tourist in Afghanistan in 2023?
This isn’t really a question I’m qualified to answer. But I can say that there are touring cyclists considering it, and it’s certainly an interesting one.
Someone in a WhatsApp group I’m in said they’d talked with someone who recently crossed from Iran to Afghanistan and then onwards into Tajikistan. They apparently described it as a ‘4th world country’ with frequent Taliban checkpoints; advised learning basic Farsi and wearing local clothes so as not to stand out; and warned of landmines. It’s a ‘rough thing’, apparently, and risky. Which is obvious, but hearing it from someone who had actually been there was interesting for me.
Someone else said they had met an Afghan man who said it’s actually ‘pretty safe’ for travelling: you go through the checkpoints, withhold questions about the political situation, and that’s it. The Taliban will protect you, the man apparently said.
A cyclist who was planning on entering Afghanistan by bicycle said they planned to ‘uglify’ their bike, forget camping (to avoid landmines), and learn some Farsi. The regions controlled by the Taliban, they reckoned, should be ‘somewhat safe’ in terms of terrorism and kidnapping. It may be true that the Taliban are more likely to want to protect you (from IS, or whoever else) than harm you.
But please don’t feel encouraged by this to take the plunge. I’m as keen to travel ‘off the beaten track’ as the next person, but there comes a point where the risk outweighs the reward. Now, let’s head off on an easterly detour!
Ferry connections between China, South Korea and Japan
Again, we’ve covid to thank for potential hitches in this plan, but as far as we can tell it is possible to travel between China, South Korea and Japan by boat. Ferries leave Qinhuangdao, which is a few hours’ train ride from Beijing, for Incheon, on the Korean coast, twice a week. There are ferry routes connecting Busan, South Korea with Fukuoka, Shimonoseki, Osaka and Tsushima Island, all of which are in Japan. And connecting Osaka and Kobe, Japan with Shanghai, China.
1. Busan – Fukuoka (Hakata Port) (3 hours, JR Beetle, 2 or 3 per day; also once per day on Miraejet’s Kobee hydrofoil, 3.5 hours) 2. Busan – Fukuoka (Hakata Port) (6 or 12 hours, Camellia Line, daily) 3. Busan – Shimonoseki (12 hours overnight, Kampu Ferry, daily) 4. Busan – Osaka (18 hours overnight, Panstar Cruise, 3 per week each way) 5. Busan – Tsushima Island (1-3 hours, multiple times daily with JR Beetle, Miraejet Kobee, and Daea Express Ocean Flower)
They warn, however, that the relevant companies ceased operations because of the covid-19 pandemic. While they have been reintroducing services, travel frequency might not yet have reached pre-pandemic levels.
But if they’re running, and if we (or you) can get a double entry tourist visa for China, then planning a round-the-world cycle trip that takes in the Republic of Korea and Japan – without flying – is actually feasible. It may involve some hefty train journeys across China in order to make it out in time to comply with visa limits, but as far as I know trains in China accept bicycles without too much hassle.
Are cruise ships a feasible means of transport for touring cyclists hoping to avoid flying?
Yes and no. Yes, cruises are the only bookable boats ferrying passengers on certain elusive routes, such as SE Asia to Australia or Australia to New Zealand, or even across the Pacific. No, cruise ships are not better for the environment than aeroplanes, as a means of transport. Not objectively, anyway, although there are certain nuances to consider, and advantages with regard to experience.
Many travellers – hitchhikers as well as cyclists – hoping to avoid flying consider hitching rides on cargo vessels. But unfortunately, almost everything I’ve read about this option agrees that what once may have been a semi-viable alternative to flying is, in a post-covid world, basically impossible.
A cargo ship’s cargo is likely worth many millions of US dollars, so there’s no financial incentive to welcoming paying customers – a midsize ship pays half a million dollars to pass through the Suez Canal, so anything you can offer is like water off a duck’s back. And cargo doesn’t present a medical risk, whereas you certainly do: travel insurance doesn’t, or may not, include cover in international waters. Furthermore, there are so many rules and regulations stipulating what you can do and where/when you can do it on a cargo vessel that it’s apparently not worth anybody’s timing effectively training passengers for a few weeks at sea. Torbjørn C Pedersen, aka Once Upon A Saga, put it this way: an office manager wouldn’t let you sleep in their office for a month, so why should a ship’s captain? There’s no incentive, and a lot of conceivable risk.
Meanwhile, the advent and popularisation of air travel has rendered many ferry routes obsolete. People would rather fly, since it’s far quicker and often cheaper. There are no passenger boats connecting India and Sri Lanka, for example, despite the shortest distance between the two nations – the Palk Strait – being less than 55km. (Dover to Calais is about 42km.) Nor can you get from Indonesia (or anywhere in Southeast Asia) to Australia by ferry – the population centres are too far apart; from Russia to Alaska (geopolitics plays a role here); or from Australia to New Zealand (because, again, they’re further apart than you think).
Gone are the days, if you ever could, of taking a ferry across the Atlantic Ocean, or across the Pacific. So when it occurred to us that cruise ships ply these waters, that in some cases people travel on them from A to B on them, and that we probably wouldn’t have to disassemble the bikes at all to stow them on board, we had to find out if we could, with a clean conscience, book a cruise in order to avoid a flight.
There are cruise ship routes connecting Singapore with Australia’s east coast, and Australia with Japan, and Japan with Alaska, and the Caribbean with Europe. In other words, if the only imperative is to avoid flying at all costs, you can circumnavigate the globe as a cyclist/hitchhiker – and paying customer – without taking any flights, as long as you’ve got a passport that allows you to. However, if your reason for avoiding flying is to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, or emissions of other chemicals harmful to the environment, then cruising is not a viable alternative to flying. Why?
Why taking a cruise is not the eco-friendly panpharmacon you dreamt it might be
It’s hard to overstate the amount of pollutants cruise ships are responsible for. While there may be exceptions, many still burn fuel oil, which contains 2,000 times as much sulphur dioxide (SOx) as diesel. They often run their engines while moored to avoid paying shore-side taxes, causing them to produce high levels of nitrogen oxide within shouting distance of pedestrianised harbours. Some ships use ‘open loop scrubbers’ to ‘clean’ the cheap, dirty fuel they use, which discharge the pollutant waste (the muck they scrubbed off the fuel) straight into the ocean.
In 2017, Carnival Corporation, the world’s biggest cruise operator, oversaw the emission of more SOx around Europe’s coasts than all of Europe’s cars… multiplied… by ten.
Friends Of The Earth have been producing Cruise Ship Report Cards regularly since 2009. In 2022, they graded 18 cruise lines, and 213 individual ships, on sewage treatment, air pollution reduction and water quality compliance, from A to F. See for yourself, there are a lot more Fs than As. The latest report, says the organisation, takes a ‘continued hard look’ at the cruise industry ‘to see if clean cruising is possible’. In most cases, it concludes, the answer is ‘still a resounding NO!’
So after much humming and hawing, we decided that we couldn’t take all the cruises we’d dreamt, briefly, of taking. And any final decision on individual routes will depend on the rating Friends Of The Earth have given that particular vessel.
The takeaway: You can get around the whole world by bicycle, bus, train and boat
But only if you have enough money for one or more cruises – the cheaper ones aren’t actually that much more than flight tickets – and time enough to wait for them, since each route tends to run once a year, or possibly twice.
And you might not want to anyway, since travelling on a cruise ship is two or three times worse for the environment than flying, even if you include a hotel stay for the duration of the cruise in your calculations.
Depending on skill-set, it might also be possible to lend a hand on a private yacht in exchange for a ticket. We haven’t actually tried this yet, although preliminary research has yielded potentially promising results. I will write more when we know more!
If you have any questions about any of this, or corrections, please feel free to let me know in the comments. I hope this is of use and/or interest. Thanks for reading.
Buy me a coffee, an inner tube, or fresh brake pads!
Choose an amount
£1.50
£6.00
£14.00
Or enter a custom amount
£
Every bit of support is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
It’s a big update: Laura and I are in Athens, preparing to set sail for Rhodes (last minute change of plan – the best kind), [EDIT: that ship has now sailed. We’re in Fethiye.] where we’ll stay a night before stepping aboard our connection to Fethiye, on the Turkish coast. But first a few words on Greece, and all the revelry I, and we, enjoyed here.
I sailed overnight from Brindisi to Vlorë (Albania) – this, too, was a last minute change of plan. On the boat, from a distance, I espied one other “traveller” (in a sea of tourists) out on deck, but I didn’t see their face and they didn’t see mine. The road from Vlorë to Himarë, also in Albania, starts out easy: coastal flats, pebbly beaches, men advanced in years sunning their voluptuous bellies, inviting waters clear as crystal, and thousands upon thousands of loungers making the larger beaches seem conspicuously empty.
But I soldiered on, pouring spring water over my head and eating very salty peanuts, and shortly before arriving in Himarë I met Sina, a kind man with a bright smile and bicycle maintenance skills superior to mine. I spent two nights at a campsite, diving, reading, eating, and set off for the Greek border having consumed one eighth of my bodyweight in baklava and spinach and cheese pie.
Then, it goes up – the road, and the cyclist’s temperature – and up and up, and I remembered it was Albania whose roadbuilders I once cursed for flouting the unwritten rule that all roads should be graded reasonably and within the bounds of your average cyclist’s capability, steepnesswise. It was up and up and up, and hothothot, and then I got a puncture and was putting it all back together when two cows came and stood either side of me – it was a reverse beef sandwich, sort of, but without the mayonnaise – watching my sweat-drenched efforts with a curiosity atypical of bovines. They were sweet; my patched and weakly inflated inner tube was not.
En route, just shy of Butrint, I met Pete and Jojo, Dutch and German. Pete is a man with a warming aura, who loves tomatoes. He, Jojo and I camped by a large stone abandoned house at the end of a rocky road, by the sea, with views of Ali Pasha Castle. We laughed together that evening, and Jojo and I – we cycled together for the following week, to Athens – reminisced several times about our time with Pete.
It’s a small, cable-drawn raft that takes you across the Vivari Channel (which Butrint’s Great Basilica overlooks and which, given the position of Ancient Butrint, forms a sort of moat around the once splendid city). It can take four cars at a time, or one truck, according to the rules. Bicycles cost 150 Albanian lek, or €1.50. On the other side, the hills stopped, and Jojo and I sailed onwards, alongwards into Greece.
During one of our pitstops, either that day or the next, we compared the routes we’d taken to get to where we were, and realised after much consideration and presumed forgetfulness that we had in fact both taken the ferry from Brindisi to Vlorë, on the same day, at the same time – it was the same boat – but by some freak accident had completely bypassed each other. Ships in the night. Invisible bicycles. And then it clicked: it was her I’d seen on deck.
The ride to Athens was marvellous, quite relaxed, full of Greek salads, watermelon and feta, savoury and sweet pies (kopita, as in spana), bee stings – just the one bee sting actually – stuffed vine leaves, and cheesecake ice cream. We were in the sea once, twice or three times a day, usually for a wake-up dip, a prolonged siesta soak, and an eveningtime refresher/cleanser. We saw wild tortoises, communed with wild horses, met a farmer with happy, beautiful cows, and salvaged freshly fallen lemons and oranges.
We met a trio of Slovakian couples, plus kids, on a beach somewhere, who gave us canned prosecco, snacks and wax wraps with bicycle designs on them. I gave mine to Janine. Martin and Martina (whose names I hope I’ve remembered right) told us about their honeymoon – seven months cycling around Southeast Asia. We met two Canadian guys, Erik and Adam, who had whiled away a month biking in the Peloponnese and loved every minute of it. Finally, in Athens, we refound Sina, and he and I had a Big Georgian Feast of khinkali, khachapuri and weird green fizz, flavour of tarragon. It was awesome.
Even more awesome was Laura’s arrival, because it was followed shortly after by the beginning of our engagement, many tears, many dishes of tzatziki, saganaki, aubergine salad and fried courgettes, more ice cream, some prosecco, and ouzo, and then the arrival of some of our friends from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – Toby, Nat, Janine and Becky I’m looking at YOU – and then it was all that all over again, my birthday, more feasts (including the perfect birthday breakfast), four nights in a Love Island villa on the island of Salamina, a fixed bike (thanks to Rip Ride Cycles – excellent work), meeting Carina and Fivos (wonderful, fabulous), and finally, after a short delay, boarding a boat in Piraeus.
So: I’m now writing from the boat. [EDIT: No I’m not, but I already wrote that so I’m leaving it in.] So: I’m now 29. And so: Laura and I have functioning bicycles, packed bags, more books than we know what to do with, an idea of how we’re going to get to Tbilisi, and a looser idea of what we’re going to do on the other side of it. Stay tuned, and cool.
Buy me a coffee, an inner tube, or fresh brake pads!
Choose an amount
£1.50
£6.00
£14.00
Or enter a custom amount
£
Every bit of support is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
ONURBICYCLE 