The way East (Caucasus/Central-Asia/Mongolia on a motorcycle)


Back on the main road again, heading towards north but the weather turned bad quickly.


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Stream we could refill our precious water sources from (Kodak Aerochrome color infrared slide-film)
 

Kodak Aerochrome has a very funky rendition of green. Surrounding mountainous terrain makes it like being on another planet.



Afghanistan side. Treelines higher up mark the water canals from mountains to pass the water onto their few farming field they can fit on deep slopes. Afghans work really hard to make this extreme environment livable and microfarm-able.
 

Afghan Hindu-Kush (Hindu-killer in translation) looming. Infrared film exposes water canal lines diverted from the streams. For me it was amazing to see people live and survive there with no infrastructure.



Those small islands look like perfect to smuggle opium from Afghanistan to Tajikistan. Tajik soldiers do check the area occasionally though.
On the Tajikistan side you see a lone power line coming there, but on the Afghanistan side there's nothing, yet people live there.
 

White peak in the Hindu-Kush range.


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Buddhist monks have lived in those caves more than a millennia before Islam took over the area. It's mind bending to think that this remote area has been a major religion flow highway.
Maybe too much faith directs people into extremes - when you don't want to go around mountains you go through them and risk with death crossing those unpredictable high passes to forward the message.
 

Yamchun fortress from 3rd century B.C.



View from our wild camping spot. The mountains you see are in Afghanistan. We could see lone people roaming there, mostly herders.
 

Delta and Afghanistan's Hindu-Kush mountain range looming behind it. Kodak Aerochrome IR film translates lush
green as red, hence the only living things you see are red-colored bushes, the rest is mountainous rock, water or snow.
 
Margus, Thanks for putting up these marvellous photos. Very lovely pictures of a beautiful region that so few of us get to see. Even if you don't do a book of this trip like you did for the earlier one, I hope you put these photos up on your blog.
 
Margus, I can only thank you for bringing us in such a wonderful journey through your excellent pictures. The wild spaces, the special people you met, the not contaminated nature give me such an emotion I cannot find the words to describe. Thanks!
 
pyeh said:
Margus, Thanks for putting up these marvellous photos. Very lovely pictures of a beautiful region that so few of us get to see. Even if you don't do a book of this trip like you did for the earlier one, I hope you put these photos up on your blog.
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Cheers! We'll see how it goes. I haven't blogged much lately since apparently there's little interest in it. Just kept it up as a hobby this far. Hopefully I'll find some time and motivation to update things in the near future.


robert blu said:
Margus, I can only thank you for bringing us in such a wonderful journey through your excellent pictures. The wild spaces, the special people you met, the not contaminated nature give me such an emotion I cannot find the words to describe. Thanks!
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Thank you Robert!

retinax said:
Is that a rock drawing of a gazelle near the left edge of the frame?
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I think so yes - it wasn't so easy to see with a bare eye, I guess infrared film draws it out even better. Rock art! :)
 

Every good thing must come to an end, we were to cross the Ak Baital pass at 4,655 metres (15,272 ft) coming down from the Pamir mountains we have grown so fond of. Good thing the Tian Shan was waiting for us...



Once you hit the lower grounds you get a completely different view to the magnificent Pamirs.
 
I don't recall that this question has arisen... How do you communicate with local people there, and any officialdom you encounter? Shared Russian influence?

And you must know where your next fuel stop will be? I expect that's a major concern, as your range must be fairly short on those cycles...
 
Doug said:
I don't recall that this question has arisen... How do you communicate with local people there, and any officialdom you encounter? Shared Russian influence?

And you must know where your next fuel stop will be? I expect that's a major concern, as your range must be fairly short on those cycles...
Click to expand...

I'm one of the last who could understand and speak some russian in Estonia with my age nearing 40. People younger than me don't speak much russian anymore unless they're from the russian minority family, thus their second language is mostly english. Hence I managed fine with my knowledge of russian which still works in decent amounts in most ex-Soviet bloc countries (as said, with middle age or older people). My wife's from a mixed estonian-belorussian famility so she's a language person, speaks russian, french fluently, a bit spanish and portugese also so this has been a lot of help everywhere in the world we've been. I.e. most of West-Africa it's hard to do without french, South-America hard w/o spanish (with the only exception being Brazil with portugese).

Our bikes are a bit modified and suited for long distance overland travel. Both have bigger fuel tanks as well, i.e. my bike does around 600-700 km with tank, wife's bike is so economical that it does around 800 km. Anything over 400-500 km is good thus we never needed more, even in the most remote places of the world you can buy some fuel from village people etc. The only place we needed extra fuel has been Turkana cattle track, which is around 1000 km of sandy offroad piste in a rarely visited remote part of Africa (and interestenly Turkana area is where the human kind is actually from).

Margus
 

Once the sun sets it creates temperature differences in the valley thus soon a savage snowstorm hit us and we had to hide into our tent.
It was the last picture I could shot with my cold numb hands that I could hardly push the shutter button on my trusty Pentax 6x7 camera.



In the morning the view was sublime. Peak Lenin looming in the top, my work colleague who's over 60 years old was just climbing this peak,
it was so cool to think about it and the reason I came for this very view.
 
Margus,
I’m so glad you started posting on this thread again! This has been one of my favorite threads on RFF of all time.
 
I just found this and I'm sorry but all I got is WOW.

These images are amazing as is the journey. Thank you so much for sharing these with us here.
 
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