Back in Khorog, via the border town of Ishkashim

In the morning we had breakfast and then settled up for our room and board. Aydar asked 50 somoni but was open to negotiation. Meggy thought this was a bit much, but given that official homestays cost that much for a bed and breakfast alone, I thought his price was quite fair, especially given that we each had our own room and there was a western toilet... and especially since it had been a rough year for tourism with the region closed for tourists for most of the peak season.

We ended up paying 50, and Aydar helped us find a ride into Ishkashim. There's a fort near Ishkashim, on a hill between the road and the Pyanj river, which many tourists stop at and which is somewhat known for being frequently occupied by Tajik border guards who don't take kindly to unannounced visitors, but since we weren't in a private car we didn't stop. Most of the excitement involved in stopping at this fort seems to center on interacting with the border guards, anyway, so I don't think it was any big loss.

Once we alighted in Ishkashim we first headed west of town to the location of the cross-border Saturday market to confirm it wasn't being held, then came back into town and explored the regular, daily market. The market was pretty basic, but we picked up some fruit and snacks. Ishkashim seemed like a pretty basic town, and in 2012 there were somewhat surprisingly no real places to stay there, even though it was the jumping-off place for exploring the Afghan Wakhan. And even though not a lot of tourists explore the Afghan side, there are plenty of traders and local who do cross over into Afghanistan (or vice-versa), so the lack of options is somewhat surprising.

West of Ishkashim, near the Saturday market, looking towards Afghanistan.

Cool bus stop. Does this mean they had proper bus services in the Soviet era?

More Lenin, with some of Rahmon's words of wisdom on the walls behind.

Interesting construction techniques: concrete supports on the lower level, stone walls, and rough wooden logs as floor and ceiling supports.

Building new shops in Ishkashim's market area.

Strange happenings on the ride from Ishkashim to Khorog

We managed to find a car heading back to Khorog without too much difficulty. All of the other people in the SUV were young guys in their twenties, and out bags were stuffed in the back.

As we left town, we made a brief stop at a farmhouse just outside Ishkashim. These kinds of stops to pick up passengers and cargo are pretty normal, but this was a bit different, as we stopped about 100 meters from the house and they didn't want us to get out. The driver and his friend headed inside, then a couple of minutes later they came running back to the car, jumped in, and we immediately sped out of there. This is all very strange, as you never see anyone running, and usually no one is in a rush to get into a car (even if the driving is often quite manic). The concern was amplified when one of the guys in the rear seat started stuffing things into someone's bag—we couldn't see what he had r where he was putting it, but something was going on. 

Meggy and I exchanged slightly concerned glances, and we were both a little apprehensive when we reached the checkpoint between Ishkashim and Khorog, as we were both thinking that possibly these guys had picked up (or stolen) some drugs or other contraband and put them in our bags to help smuggle them through security. It turned out we had no problems at the checkpoint and there was certainly nothing removed from our bags before we left, so while the circumstances around that little stop remained a mystery, it was likely much more innocuous than we imagined. Or maybe not. 

Anyway, during the post-checkpoint ride to Khorog, we talked a bit with some of the guys, and it turns out that a couple of them were Afghanis from Afghanistan's Ishkashim who were studying and living in Khorog. I was a little surprised to hear this, as I kind of figured that Tajikistan would make things difficult for foreigners (from poorer countries) who wanted to live and study in Tajikistan, but apparently it isn't that uncommon in the region.

Back in Khorog

In Khorog we were dropped off at the taxi lot, and then decided to head over to the botanical gardens for the afternoon. Meggy was going to stay with the family she had stayed with the last time she was in Khorog (she had met a woman on her car ride from Dushanbe, and the woman had invited her to stay with her), so she went there while I headed back to Lalmo's. We met a half hour later, and took a marshrutka to the botanical garden, which is on the east side of town on a bluff south of the river overlooking the town.

I'm not quite sure what your typical botanical garden looks like, and October probably isn't prime viewing season, but this garden seemed to be mostly trees, with a path winding through it and a few picnic areas. On the south edge of the garden, overlooking the valley below, there is a large and impressive European-style house (currently undergoing renovation)—this building doesn't really have anything to do with the garden, but is one of the President's residences.

Behind the President's house is an orchard full of regularly planted apple trees, which were full of fruit when we were there. There was some fruit on the ground, and many apples which could easily be knocked loose by shaking the tree or throwing sticks up at branches.

Khorog's botanical garden on the east edge of town. It's meant to be the second or third highest botanical garden in the world. It was pretty abandoned when we were there, but they had lots of trees full of ripe apples which we stocked up on.

After filling our pockets with apples, we returned to the President's house and headed down the grassy slope to the valley below, where we had spotted an interesting building near the river. It turned out to be a fancy chaikhana that was surrounded by a chain-link fence and locked up. I think it was used mainly during big events like Presidential visits and weddings. The guard came out to the entrance gate and after chatting with Meggy he let us in and gave us a brief tour of the exterior. It was impressive overkill: the sort of ostentatious but useless buildings you see being built in Dushanbe by people like Rahmon, and not the sort of functional infrastructure built in the Pamirs by the Aga Khan.

The ornate and little-used chaikhana.

The weather in Khorog was disappointingly grey and cool, which only served to remind us how lucky we had been with the brilliantly sunny and warm weather we had enjoyed for the last few days. When I got back to Lalmo's she said that she had forgot to ask me if I wanted to eat there that evening, and when I said I did (it was dark and I didn't want to head down into town to find the Delhi Darbar Indian restaurant, which is pretty much the default option for travelers in Khorog) she was kind of pressured to whip something up on short notice. Reminder: always let her know in advance if you want dinner, as if she has notice she can make pretty great stuff.

Speaking of food, while walking to Lalmo's, I had encountered a young boy who offered me some food. I declined, and in doing so I think I committed a serious faux pas. As I said earlier, the Afghan market and the borders with Afghanistan were closed at this time for Eid al-Adha, which commemorates the willingness of Ibrahim/Abraham to sacrifice his son for God/Allah. Today, Muslims who can afford to do so commemorate Ibrahim's sacrifice by sacrificing their best animal, which they then divide into three portions for themselves, their neighbours, and the needy—and that distribution of food is what the boy was doing when I turned him down. This sort of community spirit is something I love about Islam: their religious holidays are still very much about the community and the less fortunate, and taking care of them. Ramadan is all about depriving yourself of food so you can understand how the hungry feel every day, and breaking the fast is about inviting the community to share in your food. Now think of the largest Christian holidays and what they mean (or don't). It's because I found the philosophy behind Ramadan so appealing that I started to observe Ramadan in my early twenties: it's a holiday that makes sense, unlike my equally secular historical observation of Christmas.

Budget

October 27, from Yamg to Khorog: 157 somoni

• Taxi from Yamg to Ishkashim: 25 somoni
• Taxi from Ishkashim to Khorog: 60 somoni
• Room and dinner at Lalmo's: 72 somoni ($15)

One day in Khorog: an oasis of progressiveness

GBAO: the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast

Basically all of the Pamirs and the entire southeastern knob of Tajikistan falls within the administrative region known as Gorno-Badakhshan. And if ever there was a part of the country that could be said to contain nothing but rocks and water, it would be the GBAO, which occupies 45% of Tajikistan but has only 220,000 people (about 3% of the population).

Pamiris are Ismaili Shias, while most Tajiks are Sunni

The region is not only geographically distinct, but ethnically and religiously as well. The northeastern part of the GBAO, along the Pamir Highway from the Kyrgyz border until at least Murghab, is mainly Kyrgyz, while the western GBAO and areas near Afghanistan (which are significantly lower, though still above 2,000 meters) are mainly Pamiri. Pamiris have their own languages, but like Dari and Tajik, these languages are minor variants of Farsi and seem to be mutually intelligible for the most part. The main point of distinction between Pamiris and the Tajik is religious: while lowland Tajiks are Sunni, like 90% of Muslims in the world, Pamiris are Shia—and more specifically, Ismaili (which are only 20% of Shias).

Attending university in Calgary, I knew quite a few Ismailis: we had a sizeable population of Gujarati Ismailis who worked as traders and settled in East Africa, but were then expelled from countries like Uganda after they gained independence (Indian merchants being convenient scapegoats). Many seem to have somehow made their way to Calgary. Indeed, the beloved mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, is an Ismaili Muslim of Tanzanian extraction.

So who are the Ismaili's? Well, here's an excerpt from a great piece on Ismaili Islam on Paul's Travel Blog:

The Tajik Pamirs and northern Pakistan share not only mountainous terrain and certain ethnic/cultural links but also religion: Ismaili Islam. The Ismailis are Shiite Muslims who believe that the true seventh Imam was a man named Ismail rather than his younger brother Musa, as the Twelver Shiites (such as those of Iran) believe. While during certain periods, such as the Cairo-based Fatimid Empire, Ismailis were a powerful force, today they form a small minority of Muslims, often scattered in remote mountainous terrain.

The historical distinction between Ismailis and other Shiites may seem minor, but, over time, this simple succession dispute has led to a universe of divergence, as Ismailis have become among the most progressive of the Islamic sects, in stark contrast to the Shiites of Iran. Indeed, the distinction between Ismailis and other Muslims has grown so great that one (Sunni) Kyrgyz woman in Tajikistan told us that the Tajik Pamiris were not even Muslim. Of course, despite the strong lingering of pre-Islamic beliefs and traditions the Ismaili Pamiris are in fact Muslim, as are the Ismaili Hunzas of northern Pakistan, but it is true that the Ismaili worldview of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is clearly a world apart from some other sects of Islam, and, to this outsider, far more appealing.

Ismailis are also different from most other Muslims in that they have the Aga Khan as a living spiritual advisor, whom they see as a direct descendant of the seventh Imam, and more importantly they believe that he is able to interpret the Quran in the modern context. I suppose this might make him something like the Pope, but the Aga Khan is quite different than the Pope in that he is an extremely modern man (in this he more resembles the Dalai Lama), was born in Switzerland, and is something of a playboy. Imagine Tony Stark as the leader of a branch of Islam and you're not too far off. I mean, his parents were divorced and his father then married Rita Hayworth, which tells you a lot about his family and their values—especially given that his grandfather was the prior Aga Khan and passed on his duties to his grandson because he wanted even more modernity from the future leader.

The net effect of having a branch of Islam being led by this Swiss-born spiritual leader is that Ismailis are hugely progressive by the standards of just about any religion, and the hugely wealthy Aga Khan remains close to his followers and spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year through his Aga Khan Foundation and Aga Khan Development Network to advance the development of his people and their surrounding communities.

The impact of the Aga Khan and the magnitude of his contributions are most apparent in the GBAO—and in Khorog in particular—as so many of the things that make the town so special have been funded by the Aga Khan. From quite literally building bridges that connect communities and countries, to providing food aid during the civil war, to spending in the medical community, to providing education, to hearing people in the streets tell you that they do things (or don't do things, like drugs) because of the guidance of the Aga Khan. One area where you see a real difference is in how women are treated. Unlike in the ultra-conservative Fann Mountains, women play a real role in civil society and assume positions of leadership within families. Girls are not second-class citizens, women don't run away from even the most fleeting contact with men, and there seems to be no thought of denying them education because of their sex. It's no coincidence that the homestay I stayed at is known as Lalmo's homestay, and not Lalmo's husband's homestay: women are empowered to a startling degree.

The post-Independence Civil War

Now, in the paragraph above, I alluded to the civil war. Tajikistan is the only one of the Central Asian CIS countries that devolved into civil war following independence from the crumbling Soviet Union, and given the cultural and logistical differences between the GBAO and the rest of the country perhaps it's no surprise that Badakhshanis and the lowland Tajiks were on opposing sides... or that the lowlanders won.

The current President, Emomali Rahmon, came to power as a result of the civil war, and he has basically been the only leader that an independent Tajikistan has ever known. In the wake of the civil war it seems that Rahmon granted government positions to a number of warlords and opposition leaders in a attempt to placate them and ensure a measure of government support—something that was probably of special interest given the strategic importance of the GBAO given its long borders with China and especially Afghanistan.

Despite these concessions, there has been a long history of tensions between the Pamiris and lowland Tajiks. Part of this tensions is religious (many Tajiks think that Ismaili Islam isn't a pure or legitimate form of Islam, epsecially since it views the Quran as open to interpretation by the Aga Khan) and part of it is a resentment by the Pamiris that the government treats them unfavourably (you certainly hear people saying that there were better services during the Soviet era, and although you hear this in lots of former second-world countries, in the Pamirs I think there is the suspicion that the decline has been due to them being Pamiris and not lowland Tajiks). Virtually everyone in the GBAO will self-identify primarily as something other than Tajik, be it Kyrgyz or Pamiri.

First impressions: walking from the Airport to Lalmo's

I don't know what I was expecting from Khorog. Something high and harsh, maybe. Small and rough. And definitely running north-south along the border with Afghanistan. On pretty much all fronts I was surprised. Although Khorog is at an elevation of over 2,100 meters, the town is surprisingly green and full of trees. And for late October, it was a lot warmer than I expected, and pleasant to walk around in the sun. Heck, this would be better weather than one would expect in Calgary, and the climate also supports a greater range of trees. Looking at weather profiles for Khorog, however, it seems like a remarkably temperate city, with the average high in October of 18°C (65°F)—only in January is the average high below freezing.

And despite the harrowing road journey from Dushanbe, Khorog didn't feel as isolated as I expected. The markets were well stocked—certainly much more so than I saw in Kyrgyz Alay Valley communities like Sary Mogul, Sary Tash, and Daroot Korgon. Maybe this shouldn't be so surprising, as it actually lies on the closest road to China, which would run through the Pamir border of Qolma before running through Murghab and Khorog on the way to Dushanbe.

Among the ubiquitous Chinese goods at the market there were some distinctly Pamiri items like huge and bulky socks and knitted toques ("knit cap" in American). Perhaps the only way the town revealed its isolation was in the food situation, as there didn't seem to be many restaurants.

An  old Soviet-era social-realism style painting on a pole.

The "Hitler" look is apparently respectable in Tajikistan. Or maybe it demands respect. Or fear. Or something. Based on some things I later saw in Murghab, this guy appears to be some sort of government official.

Khorog lies along the northern and southern slopes of the Gunt River, just before it joins the north-south flowing Pyanj river, which forms the border with Afghanistan.The Gunt almost seems bigger than the Pyanj.