Roof of the World The Pamir Mountains are over
7,000m high and widely known as the ‘Roof of the World’.
Glacier Land
Tajikistan is also home to thousands of glaciers as well as the world’s longest glacier outside the polar regins.
Located in the Yazgulem Range of the Pamir Mountains, the Fedchenko Glacier stretches 77km across an area of 700 sq. km.
Over 900 rivers in the country are longer than 10 km. Some of Central Asia’s longest rivers flow through this country; the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya are two of Tajikistan’s biggest rivers.
festooned with several treats. Melamine plates topped high with biscuits, chocolate, nuts and fruits, a Tupperware box of halal beef sausage and white cheese and a variety of tomatoes, cucumbers, apricots, and peaches. Shiny wheels of non (bread) were stacked in the middle of the tablecloth. My stomach rumbled – the multiple days of hiking, coupled with acclimatising hard to attitude, had led to a spike in hunger. Whilst there will always be hardcore hikers that argue a supported trek option is less authentic due to not carrying a 25kg bag by oneself in blistering heat, it was a much welcome luxury to lunch and sample some stunning mountain scenery at a moderate level below 4,000m, saving both our knees and lungs in the process. It’s also worth remembering that at best, a supported trek
through tour operators such as Rasul Tours, gave the trip a freedom from responsibility so that we could enjoy the landscape without worrying about cooking, cleaning, and carrying – and at worst, provide an emergency form of transport to bundle kit and transport an injured person out. We travelled at the pace of the donkeys which carried most of our kit and enjoyed a luxury hiking experience with nothing more than a daypack containing water and camera equipment. Donkeys have always been the villages’ mode of transport in the high mountains in the Fann, and are used by them (and their families who return for summers from the hot cities) to access and work at the uvols (summer settlements). Hiring donkeys is also a useful side hustle for locals to earn additional income to help them through hard winters. Mapping signage and mountain huts don’t exist outside of the valleys and there is no mountain rescue service. While we had the useful pocket guide from Cicerone (published in 2018), the tourist map purchased from a museum in Dushanbe was invaluable in giving an overview of the sheer scale of Tajikistan.
TREKKING THE FANN MOUNTAINS
We were having a moments’ rest during our 11-day trek in the Fann mountains of Tajikistan, located in the Northwest of the country a stone’s throw away from Uzbekistan. Gathered below the Alauddin pass, we watched the donkeys twitch their ears whilst our guide Borbad chatted with Karromat, the mountain guide, and Fazli, the donkey handler. We looked out over dramatic, dark grey clouds swirling over the Dukdon range. It was otherwise remarkably quiet, except for the clicks of our cameras, as we tried to capture both the view and the Eurasian vultures soaring overhead. Karromat made a movement with his fingers as if they were two legs walking uphill and, with Borbad translating into English, proudly told us about his mountain experience on Sher, the striking peak in our foreground. He had guided these mountains for over 40 years, initially with Soviet climbers and more recently Western visitors, and joked that he was known to his family as someone from a different ethnicity; his features weathered by the many seasons spent outdoors in the Tajik mountains. It was certainly a picnic with a view and a great introduction to hiking in the Fann Mountains. For the intrepid trekker, it felt not dissimilar to visiting the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Both locations felt in places remote, involving fully self-sufficient trekking itineraries with no option for resupplies once on the trail but encountering villages with semi-settled people. We often regard these mountains as desolate and unexplored, but in fact there’s a whole infrastructure and communities of people, such as shepherds and their families, who have explored vast areas of the mountain following their livestock during the summer months. To distil two weeks of hiking and cultural exploration into a few thousand words is no easy feat. On our way to the start of the trek
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