Hitting the high way (Vlog)

The are two options to head east from Dushanbe: “North” via the actual Pamir Highway is the more direct route though the road condition is worse and it crosses a very high pass, or “South” via Kulob (splitting from the Pamir Highway at Vahdat and rejoining at Kailaikhum), which picks up following the Afghanistan border earlier and while 200km longer the road is in better condition. Some say the scenery is also better by a pip.

This gave us a dilemma, we’d come to follow the Pamir Highway and in our minds were only going to part from the highway to explore the Wakhan Valley, but with the scenery supposedly a bit better on the South… We tried not to be swayed by the temptation to get to the Afghan border a couple of hours earlier, we’d be following it for long enough.

We thought about flipping a coin but after realising that with either route you end up spending the first night in Kalaikhum (a village on the Afghan border) our desire to follow the highway won. A rougher road, a higher pass and hopefully less tourists, is more our thing anyway….

Below follows what we hope will be the usual pattern for the Pamir Highway blog entries (if we can ever get them uploaded). A vlog, followed by a video of clips of the road that day, followed by photos. The vlogs get better when we’d found our flow…