GUIDEBOOK
JAN BAKKER (with Christine Oriol) Trekking in Tajikistan
T
ajikistan was love at first sight.
Shortly after driving out from the
capital Dushanbe with our Land
Cruiser, we hit the Pamir Highway and
followed a glacial blue river towards
a horizon filled with snow-capped
mountains. The road was in a terrible
condition, adding to the sense of true
adventure. It was a short trip, sixteen
days of cycle touring in the Southern
Pamirs on mountainous tracks, partly
along the border of Afghanistan.
In Tajikistan I finally found the place
I was looking for. An ultimate place for
adventure travel with hardly any other
foreign visitors, incredibly high and
remote mountains and warm, welcoming
inhabitants. My wife and I tried to plan
a few walks along the way, but it was
impossible to find any information,
other than a 1:500,000 map of the Pamirs
with a number of trekking routes drawn
in and a Soviet-era guidebook.
I wanted to take a closer look at this
mountain called Pik Engels, a 6507
meter high ultra-prominent monolith
soaring high above its surroundings.
After studying Google Earth imagery all
around its base, I believed I had found
a trail to a large meadow at the south
end, just a kilometre from the terminus
of the main glacier. We packed our
camping equipment and set off into
the unknown, hoping to hit the trail I
thought existed. It was better than we
14 Outdoor focus | winter 2019
Jan Bakker has a special
relationship with the
Pamirs, on both the
Tajik and the Afghan
sides. Here he explains
how his book, Trekking
in Tajikistan came to be
written.
www.trekkinginthepamirs.com
Cicerone Press
ISBN 1852849460
www.cicerone.co.uk
could have imagined. A perfect path
was carved along an irrigation channel.
Looking over our shoulder, we could see
the seemingly endless mountain chain
of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. The
path made a sharp left turn and my jaw
dropped. The bulk of Pik Engels, framed
by the gorge we were walking in, looked
like the perfect mountain, a climber’s
mountain with vertical rock and ice on
all sides. Apart from intrepid alpinists,
nobody knew about the existence of this
world class route, just a day’s walk from
the road. ‘That’s it! These mountains
deserve a guidebook!’ I proclaimed on
the top of my lungs. This was October
2009.
The book’s publication has been a
long and uncertain process. On my first
research trip I was caught up in an armed
uprise in the city of Osh in southern
Kyrgyzstan, from where I intended to
enter the Tajik Pamirs. I was evacuated
back to Bishkek and had to change the
trekking itineraries that I wanted to do.
Believe it or not, the same happened in
the city of Khorog just two years later.
Government troops and local warlords
clashed and, as all foreigners were
evacuated back to Dushanbe, I somehow
managed to get a self-arranged
evacuation in the other direction, into
the Pamirs. The security service, still
called the KGB in Tajikistan, didn’t want
any onlookers and upon arrival back in