beside us with a beaming smile and
offerings of water and help. It’s the
kindness we came to expect in Uz-
bekistan, everyone beeped, waved
and stopped to check on us (perhaps
because we were constantly fixing the
bike and looking sorry for ourselves
with empty bottles). The people were
friendly but the terrain wasn’t.
We rode 800 kilometres from the
border to the Aral Sea through empti-
ness. And once we arrived, we found
even more emptiness. Moynaq was
a thriving and integral fishing port in
Uzbekistan – until the Soviets divert-
ed water away from the sea in the
1960s, causing it to dry up complete-
ly, creating serious health problems
due to toxic dust clouds, putting thou-
sands of people out of work, turning
the sea into a literal sand desert and
Moynaq into a ghost town. All that
was left were abandoned rusting
ships and two sun-burnt Brits.
We carried on until we finally
reached the oasis of Khiva with its
incredible walls circling the city.
Although, during the times of the Silk
Road, it was the furthest you could
get from an oasis. Khiva was the most
important slave trading city in Cen-
tral Asia – infamous for some of the
most barbaric treatment of humans
in history. Notorious Turkmen
raiders pillaged and captured any-
one they could find to sell in Khiva’s
markets. Once the most dangerous
city in the world - renowned for inde-
scribable torture and death - now a
place to buy a nice carpet.
The cities of Bukhara and Samar-
kand were two more welcome stops
on the long road to Tajikistan. Sa-
markand’s Rajasthan was once the
heart and jewel of the Silk Road,
intrinsically built and glistening blue
in an otherwise sandy-yellow world.
We dreamed of Tajikistan’s fabled
Pamir Mountains and Afghanistan’s
remote Wakhan Corridor for years.
Clutching our visas and passports, we
slid through the Uzbek border and
TRAVERSE 69
waited patiently as the Tajik guards
mulled over our passports. Happy
with our paperwork they drew back
the curtains to reveal pretty peaks
and a tease of the towering Pamirs
to come. With grins so big they
poked out the side of our helmets, we
clicked into first gear and started our
journey to the Pamirs.
Days passed by riding to the cap-
ital, Dushanbe, and then onto the
start of the Pamir Highway. But we
didn’t ride all that way to glide along
tarmac, so we opted for the rough off-
road route heading south along the
border with Afghanistan’s Wakhan
Corridor. Being so close to Afghani-
stan we knew there would be plenty
of police and military checkpoints,
and in our brief research before leav-
ing we read about bribing and cor-
ruption along the way. But the guards
only seemed interested in sharing
their watermelon.
Kids ran to the road as they heard
the bike (and they could hear us