The Pamir Highway, also known as the M41, is a road that traverses the Pamir mountains through Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It’s best known for being a part of the ancient silk road, a network of routes that connected the east and the west and is still the only continual road through the region for trade transport. It’s also the 2nd highest road in the world and that fact will become very apparent to you if you stay on parts of it long enough. To some locals it is also known as the “heroin highway” and it is not advised to drive along it at night in the event that you are unlucky enough to come across some smugglers.
They were fucked. Probably catastrophically fucked. Their gearbox had seized up completely to the point where the car would not even roll freely in neutral.
Is the treacherous road worth it?
Our journey from London to Mongolia had brought us through this part of the world. Reports from previous adventurers on the Mongol Rally swore that the 1300 kilometers was worth it’s weight in damaged wheels and random car troubles.The route we had planned from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan did have us taking the Pamir Highway, but as we got closer to it we began to question whether or not it was an option for us. It would take us between 4 and 6 days to cross – assuming we didn’t have any major setbacks – and time was become a factor because we had a hard end date to get out of Russia by. We started the day from a makeshift campsite in a field somewhere outside of Kulob, Tajikistan. The plan was to wind our way through the mountains until we got to Kevron, a crossroad of sorts where we would decide on our route for the next few days.
We hadn’t made it but an hour before we hit our first set back. We were winding our way up this very steep mountain path when we noticed that the third team in our convoy (the Aussies, not pictured) weren’t behind us any more. Sometimes someone will disappear briefly to switch drivers or pull over to pee and then catch back up. We slowed down considerably and then eventually stopped altogether, but they weren’t catching up. When 5 minutes went by and they were still nowhere in sight, we assumed there was a problem so team 2 (the Brits) in the convoy turned around and headed back to check on them. They returned a few minutes later and told us that the Aussies had a major problem so we headed back down the hill.
That’s all folks
They were fucked. Probably catastrophically fucked. Their gearbox had seized up completely to the point where the car would not even roll freely in neutral. From what I recall they had had work done on their gearbox before the rally, or at least at the start of the rally. They were also one of the teams that managed to drive their car to the door to hell fire pit and managed to get back out early the next morning. If you happened to have read one of our earlier entries, A Danish team we were friends with had also managed the same feat but ended up destroying their gearbox on the way out the next morning. That could be a total coincidence, or it could be that the work they had done previously wasn’t done well enough, but our guess was that they had rattled their transmission apart.
This put us in a pretty awkward situation. We would wait around for a tow truck and perhaps even ride them into town for help, but it was highly unlikely this would be a quick fix and unfortunately we just didn’t have time to waste waiting for mechanic to try to source a part let alone pull apart the gearbox and repair everything. One of the Aussies hopped in the Brit’s van and they went back into Kulob to find a mechanic. In the mean time the rest of us soaked in some Tajikistan sun and played the classic “who can throw a rock closest to the big rock far away” game.
Eventually the van returned with a mechanic in a car behind them. The guy took a look for a second and determined that they would have to disconnect the driveshaft in order to tow the car back to town. While they were doing that the rest of us discussed our exit strategy. We were all pretty disappointed to have to leave them, but like I said there wasn’t anything we could do and it would take a solid half a day to full day to diagnose the problem and figure out if they could get the parts to fix it. We reluctantly said our goodbyes and headed back up the hill as they went back down. (Last we heard their trip did end, or at least they were trying to find other cars to hitch rides in.)
Look Mom, Afghanistan!
The interesting part about this drive, while in theory not ideal, is that we would shortly be driving along the border of Afghanistan. Granted, there was a huge roaring river separating the two countries and that side of Afghanistan is not really populated due to the massive cliff faces, but still it’s…Afghanistan. If we were going to do the Pamir highway there was a 200ish km stretch where we would be on the other side of the river, but because of the big detour we had to take we’d be across the border for about 350 km. I don’t think any of us were genuinely worried about any of this, but that’s not to say that there isn’t an inherent unease. Nothing we could do about it though, so moving on.
The road from Kulob to Kevron was great, and when we finally got to the top of the mountain pass we were trying to cross we stopped to enjoy the view of this incredible valley. It took us a few minutes before we all realized, holy shit that’s Afghanistan. I have to say, it was gorgeous. It’s not on my list of places to go, but definitely very beautiful countryside from a distance.
When we got to the bottom of the hill we were surprised to find a bunch of teams hanging out next to the river. We knew a couple of the teams so it was great to catch up for a little bit. A few of the people were trying to figure out how to get down to the river and take a dip. The river was pretty muddy so we passed on that and pressed on.
An hour or so we arrived in Kevron and went to a place called Soup restaurant to get a meal and figure out what we were doing next. The owner’s kid was around 10 and he was in charge of helping out all the tables. He told us they had soup and a rice dish, so that’s what we ordered and he even ran down the street to get us some beers to enjoy with our soup. Did I mention the view? The restaurant was situated right on this little river that was runoff from the top of the mountain somewhere. The water was an incredible turquoise color.
We were leaning towards avoiding the Pamirs. What really sucked about this is that we would have to go back west on the M41 – which is the highway that we avoided getting to this spot in the first place. It would be about an 8 hour drive to get up to the border. Thank god we looked up the border crossing on Caravanistan to check the hours. It turned out that that particular border was only open to nationals of the 2 countries, no foreigners were allowed to cross there. That would have been a terrible mistake had we headed that way without checking as it would have cost us 2 days and then we’d be back at Soup. So with this newfound revelation we were committed to the Pamir highway.
Maybe this was a bad idea
The first hour or so wasn’t bad, but around 4 all that changed. It got bad. Really bad. Stretches of pavement were few and far between. We were in the land of gravel, rocks and dirt. Doesn’t sound terrible, but our speed dropped to about 20 mph or less as we had gravel potholes to avoid, not to mention the massive rocks that hadn’t been removed from the road. Hit one of those things fast enough and you can easily kill a wheel, and if you’re really unlucky that thing could do a number on your oil pan.
Our suspension has slowly been dying, as a matter of fact before we headed out of Kevron we noticed that our rear right suspension was basically gone. Turns out the leaf spring had gotten damaged from the battery we had put it through. The car was already sitting low because of all the weight, but now the back left was almost rubbing the wheel. We were so low that we were continually bottoming out on dips. We had knocked the exhaust off of the hangars and broken the rubber mounts, so we attempted to hang it back on with bailing wire. That worked for about 30 minutes before the exhaust just fell off completely. I have no idea why we decided to keep it, there was no reason to ever have it put back on because we’d probably knock it off again. Our car now had a pretty awesome growl to it. Vroom vroom.
This is not a road meant for cars
I’ve said it before and will continue to say it. This stretch of the Pamir was the worst road we’d seen in it’s own unique way. At the pace we were going we weren’t going to make it very far at all. The sun started going down so we decided to we needed to find somewhere to pull off and camp. Easier said than done. We were on a road that had been carved out of the side of a mountain, that was barely large enough to have 2 cars drive on it. There just weren’t a lot of places to stop. The road started getting sketchier and sketchier but we just couldn’t find anywhere to pull off. Eventually we did come across a little clearing with a couple abandoned houses on it. It was not ideal as there were a couple of houses very close by that were very much being lived in, but it was just getting too dangerous to continue on. We decided to back our cars up to the furthest little building and set up a small camp there.
We had barely gotten our chairs off the roof when a man and a few kids came down from the hill. It was pretty clear he was coming our way so we let him get a little closer before approaching. It was a little awkward trying to ask if we could stay there, but he didn’t seem to mind at all. He said goodbye and walked off. We wondered if he even lived there since he never walked back by, but whatever. We cooked up a quick meal on the camp stoves and cracked open some wine that the Brits had bought after lunch. It was hands down the worst wine I’ve had in my life. Unfortunately for us all they had bought 6 bottles of it.
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