I slept in the balcony
of our dirty room last night. And as I had expected, the
crows woke me up at dawn. I tried to go back to sleep, but they wouldn't let me.
We left the
hotel at 6:30, and found a good spot to cook omelet 10 km outside "crow"
town. Then, we rode along a beautiful river up, from 1000 meters to 2760 through yurts with horses around them. There were
some nomads selling horse milk on the side of the road.
At about 2 pm, I
got so hungry that I had to stop and eat or I would pass out. I stopped at a
nomad's stand, and had some bread and horse milk.
It tasted like yoghurt.
On our way, a
motorcyclist from Chek Republic stopped to have a chat with us. The poor guy
had a very unfortunate trip until then. He just was happy that he was alive and
going home. On my earlier posts, I had
mentioned that we were not supposed to be on this road; we had wanted to go
from another road toward Bishkek. Well, this motorcyclist, had taken that road
from Jalal Abad, but half way there, he faced some really bad road and flood
that he had to return to the road we are taking now, M41. He had had a
near-death experience in the flood. He lost his camera when he had been up to
his chest in flooded water on the road. He also said that he had not been
allowed to Khorough and Pamir due to some clashes between the Police and drug
traffickers--another reason why we have been so lucky so far. Had we started
our trip one or two days earlier than we did, we might have had a nightmare. Or
had we not lost our way to Bishkek, we might have had to deal with a flood.
Every cloud has a silver lining. Having said that, I still wish we had taken our original route and dealt with the challenges.
At 4:30, after
climbing all day, we found a picturesque camping spot in 2760 meters, by a
creek. The ground was carpeted by colorful flowers. I bathed in the freezing
creek and hiked up the mountain for half hour in search of mountain vegetables
or herbs because we had some pasta and nothing else for sauce. I came back
empty handed, and we ended up eating Pamir pasta, which tasted like plastic, with some
dried yoghurt (kashk)! Who would eat pasta with dried yoghurt? I guess only
hungry cyclist in 2750 meters far away from a shop--us.
Tomorrow, hopefully,
we will go over both passes and camp on the other side of the passes.
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