The Bikepacker: Pamir Highway - Travelling to Dushanbe

Introduction

The big day has arrived. After years of thinking about the Pamir Highway and watching others make the amazing journey on YouTube, and months and months of planning and organising, today is the day that I (M1) and brother-in-law K1 travel to Tajikistan to start our adventure.

The plan for today was simple enough. Drive to London Gatwick airport in a hired van, fly from there to Istanbul, Turkey and then catch a second flight to Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Once on the ground in Tajikistan, all that would remain is to cycle to the hotel we'd booked for three nights. Simples?

London - An Early Start

Our day started early. Very early! With our flight leaving London's Gatwick airport at 7:00 a.m., we were required to be there by 4:00 and this meant we had to wake up and get out of bed at..... 3:00 a.m. Gulp!

And "we" was three people at this stage. To get to Gatwick, I'd hired a van that was big enough to carry the partly disassembled bikes in their large cardboard boxes and our luggage.

My son had kindly agreed to be our driver, so he too had to get up at the unholy hour of 3:00. I'm hoping the case of beers I left for him will buy his forgiveness eventually :-)

The van which we loaded up yesterday

So, not so bright and very, very early, we all got out of bed this morning. Even M2 got up to say goodbye.

My son drove the van like a pro and got us to Gatwick airport by 4 a.m. We unloaded quickly so he could get away and avoid having to pay even more than the standard £10 for the privilege of dropping off passengers (such a rip off!).

K1 went to get a couple of trollies to make getting our luggage into the airport easier. To our dismay it turned out that airport trollies have gone the same way as supermarket trollies and you need a pound coin to unlock one. Of course we had no coins at all! My son gave me a couple of £2 coins before driving off but we were unable to split them into £1 coins. Oh dear.

Fortunately, K1 found a single unlocked trolly and we were able to balance both bike boxes on it. K1 pushed the trolley and I carried the two large laundry bags destined for the hold along with my cabin bags. My shoulders felt like they were dropping off by the time we got to the check-in desks.

Getting the bikes and luggage dropped off was more complicated than expected and it took a lot of time and energy. But every one of the airport and Turkish Airlines staff we dealt with were excellent; helpful and friendly despite the early hour.

Details of the issues and the process we had to go through have been added to the end of the Flying with Bikes post for those who want to know.

When we'd eventually got the bikes on their way we proceeded to join other passengers passing through the usual security process. Naturally both of us had our cabin bags siphoned off to one side for further inspection!

In the end it took nearly two hours from arriving at Gatwick to us being through security and in the departures area. A long process for sure but made bearable by the excellent staff.

Our flight left on schedule at 7:05 and the journey to Istanbul was uneventful. That's how we like our flying to be :-)

Istanbul

The airport is modern and comfortable which is just as well because we had five hours to wait for our connecting flight to Dushanbe.

On the whole, we just relaxed, had a coffee and snack and I wrote some of this blog post. It pays to be productive.

K1 also decided to take advantage of the lengthy wait between flights to start to organise a Western Money transfer of cash from his UK bank account. I'd done the same thing a week ago, the idea being I wouldn't need to carry large amounts of physical cash into the country but instead, collect it from a bank in Dushanbe on our first day. For me, the process of "sending" money went fine.

For K1 it was far from fine! Attempting to make the money transfer while in Turkey made his bank's fraud detection systems anxious. The transaction was stopped and K1's bank card blocked!

K1 then had to go through a complicated process with his bank to get his card working again. The Western Union money transfer remained incomplete at this stage.

Not long before we were due to board, A Turkish teenager introduced himself in excellent English and asked us where we were from, why we were going to Dushanbe and so on. He'd learned English from computer games. We exchanged names and shook hands before boarding.

Our flight to Dushanbe took 4 hours and 35 minutes. It too was uneventful. My beetroot based Asian Vegetarian dinner was very nice.

Dushanbe

We landed in Dushanbe at 1:05 in the morning.

I confess I'd been a little nervous about Dushanbe airport. I'd read accounts of corruption with fake fines being levied by officials. One account involved a woman being relieved of £700!

Our experience couldn't have been better. Passing through passport control was straightforward and didn't take too long.

Our laundry bags emerged from the hold of the aircraft and appeared on the carousel. Hooray!

Our bikes in their big boxes appeared a while later on another side of baggage reclaim. Hooray again!

I went looking for trolleys but couldn't see where people were getting them from. I asked a Tajik man who immediately said "Take mine! It is your first time in Tajikistan, you must have my trolley!". I tried to dissuade him but was unsuccessful. He was quietly insistent. How nice was that?

With both bike boxes on one trolley again, K1 did well to manoeuvre the trolley through the sliding doors and out of the terminal. Outside it was busy with taxis, taxi drivers and passengers. We found a quiet corner though and proceeded to unbox and reassemble our bikes.

This all went fine but took a while and we were both feeling pretty tired. Eventually though the bikes were ready and we crudely lashes everything to them just to be able to get everything to the hotel. Packing for flight is not the same as packing for cycling so it was not exactly streamlined but at this time of night we really didn't care.

We jumped on The Mule and Donkey and rode them through the well lit streets of Dushanbe, arriving at our hotel at around 3 a.m. Fortunately we were expected and a member of staff greeted us and showed us to our shared room.

We were both very tired now but cycling and perhaps being a little excited about.. ACTUALLY BEING IN TAJIKISTAN meant we both struggled to get to sleep properly. But we did get some sleep and were up at 9 a.m. But that's a whole other day and the subject of the next post on this blog.

We made it to Dushanbe! We're there! Our luggage is here! Our bikes are here!

Not a bad start :-)