Pictures from Pamirs: The truck adventure

Here are displayed some pictures of the trip between Osh and Murghab. I used a very old truck of the Agha Khan fundation. This fundation brings food and devellopment's help to the Pamir region since the civil war. The truck I was using where bringing milk for the schools of the Wakhan corridor, in order for them to be able to drink milk on a daily basis. (it has been expained to me by the head of the AGF in Ishkashim as we were waiting to cross the border to Afghanistan). But each truck has free room for local businesswomen (mainly women) who bring stuff from Kirghizstan to Tajikistan and sell it in the bazar of Khorog. It this sense, the benefit of the AGF are manyfolds. If those trucks would not exist, many business would simply die off.

The first pictures shows one of the truck drivers with his daughter. His was mathematician in the soviet time. His daughter spoke a very good german.

Here is an example of Chaikhana on the road between Osh and Murghab. During daytime, truck drivers and passengers eat here whereas during the nights, the tables are taken away and we can sleep on the floor for almost nothing. Blanket are furnished by the chaikhana owner.

The road at the kyrghiz side was in a very bad shape, due to the floods of last spring. But the AGF drivers are really bad also. They are bad mechanician, even if the soviet mechanic of the old Zyl truck is so easy that the kyrghiz use to say that a hammer would be enough to repare it. Our truck stopped more than 10 times during the first couple of hours because of small avaries. The second truck of the convoi managed to slip down between the kyrghiz and tajik border. We needed the whole afternoon to unload it, recover it and load it again.