We wanted to find a mechanic to see if there was anything we could do about the right rear suspension – the broken leaf spring. Someone at the hotel said that they knew a mechanic and they would meet Mitch early that morning. When the guy got there Mitch went outside and started showing the guy what the problem was, and then disappeared back inside. I went outside to grab something from the car and the “mechanic” was still there and pantomimed for me to pop the hood. Strange request considering it was a suspension problem, but I acquiesced and let him take a look. After I was done I went back inside and told Mitch the guy was still there. Turns out that guy wasn’t the mechanic at all, he was some guy that saw our car parked in front of the hotel and wanted to buy it. He also had a Fiat Doblo and wanted it for spare parts as they are hard to come by in this part of the world. No kidding…
The next 3 hours could best be described as absolute hell on wheels. The road became a combination of hazards that are almost impossible to describe. Imagine take a thick rubberband and giving it a few twists until you’ve created a corkscrew pattern, then make that a road.
Mitch did manage to bring it to a mechanic down the street and within about 30 minutes had a spring rigged up in the back, so when he got back we headed out. The ride was considerably nicer! For about an hour. A couple big bumps in the road and it managed to shimmy itself out. At least it had the courtesy of making a big noise when it popped out, so we stopped to grab it and continued on our way. We were trying to make it to Murghab, which is about 320 km to the east of where we stayed the night.
We had heard that the roads leading out of Khorog were nice for a while, and they were. We were able to keep a speed of over 40 mph for almost 3 hours, basically setting a speed record for the last few days. Eventually we started climbing to the top of one of the mountain passes, which was incredibly beautiful. Somewhere near what we hoped was the top of the pass, the car started overheating like crazy. It spiked all the way up almost to the red, so we stopped to see what the problem was. The car had a slow radiator leak since Turkey, so every morning and halfway through the day we would check all our fluids and top off. Some days we’d put as much as a liter or so of water back into the system. Radiator fluid was too expensive to keep dumping in there, and rather hard to find so we were only using water. The combination of the hill being pretty steep and our car being underpowered and heavy meant we were creeping up the mountain in first gear, which was revving the engine over 4k rpm of about 7 total. We were close to 14,500 feet above sea level, so the air was super thin and we weren’t getting enough air into the engine going so slow. Combine all that together with a lower boiling point of water and you get a car that is trying desperately not to melt itself. We let it cool off for a little while and topped it off again before continuing on and soon back down the peak. Not an ideal place to break down. It was extremely cold and very windy. Really had to be careful if you needed to pee…
The next 3 hours could best be described as absolute hell on wheels. The road became a combination of hazards that are almost impossible to describe. Imagine take a thick rubberband and giving it a few twists until you’ve created a corkscrew pattern, then make that a road. It would be slanted up to the right like you’re hitting the corner of a NASCAR track, but then immediately alternate with the road being slanted up to the left. It’s absolutely incredible how something could be so terribly built and then not maintained. Then there would be potholes the size of your car which we named moon craters. At one point the spikey minefield gravel road dead-ended into a steep concrete hill. I kid you not, the concrete did not touch the ground by damn near a foot. Thankfully on the side of the “road” the dirt was still there so we were able to (barely) ramp the car up onto the concrete. I can’t understate how stressful this kind of driving is. It requires 100% of your focus at all times because one of these moon craters can just pop up in front of you, and if you hit that thing at a decent speed you are destroying your car in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Around 6 or so we eventually hit Murghab. While passing through we didn’t see anything that really looked like a hotel so we continued on out of town to find somewhere to camp. This presented a unique problem. We were in a valley and the sun had already passed one of the mountains so we were losing light fast. The valley was also incredibly flat so it was very hard to find somewhere to pull off to and have at least a little bit of privacy. There’s an app called iOverlander that is really great. It’s a list of just about every campsite in the world, as well as places that people have camped before and marked as a decent place to stay. We had gotten the GPS coordinates of a spot that said it was close to a river and far enough from the road to be decent. The closer we got to the spot we realized that it wasn’t going to be nearly as remote as we hoped, and when we got into the general area there was a little dirt path that dropped off the road and the “spot” was off to the right by a couple hundred feet. It was completely flat and within easy visibility of the road, but we were losing light as well as energy to press on and find something better.
It was so windy that we had to park the cars nose to nose and set up our tents up right against the cars on the less windy side. It was also very, very cold. We cooked up a nice little dinner and the Brits pulled out some new Tajiki wine they had bought, which we all hoped was better than the last batch. It wasn’t. It was worse. Way worse. I cannot stress enough, if you ever see a bottle of wine from Tajikistan, either stay very very far away from it or try it to see what the worst wine ever tastes like. I choked down about half a bottle to help sleep as it was only around 9pm. Oh what a day…
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