Tajikistan: Iskanderkul — Tajikistan’s Sacred Alpine Lake

🏔️ Iskanderkul: Alexander’s Lake in the Fann Mountains, Tajikistan

The plan for the day was simple enough. We would drive to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, and on the way we would stop at a lake called Iskanderkul, high up in the Fann Mountains. On paper it looked like a pleasant day out with a bit of scenery in the middle. In practice it turned into a day of roadworks, a closed resort, a man with a leaf blower, a very friendly dog and the worst tunnel we had ever been in. We’ll come to the tunnel in due course, though frankly it deserves a post of its own and possibly some counselling.

🗺️ A quick word about Tajikistan

It’s worth saying a bit about Tajikistan first, because most people at home couldn’t find it on a map. Until fairly recently neither could I. I’d have pointed vaguely at the bit between Afghanistan and China and hoped for the best.

Around 93 per cent of the country is mountains. The Pamirs in the east have peaks over 7,000 metres. The highest, Ismoil Somoni Peak, stands at 7,495 metres and has had three names in my lifetime alone. The Russians called it Stalin Peak, then Communism Peak, and since independence it has been named after a tenth-century Persian ruler. The Fann Mountains, where we were heading, aren’t much shorter in spirit. Several of their summits are over 5,000 metres, and the highest, Chimtarga, reaches about 5,489 metres. For comparison, the highest mountain in Britain is Ben Nevis at 1,345 metres, which on a wet Tuesday in Fort William feels quite enough.

The country was part of the Soviet Union until it declared independence on 9 September 1991. Almost straight away it fell into a civil war that ran from 1992 to 1997. It killed tens of thousands of people and left Tajikistan the poorest of the former Soviet republics. It has been slowly picking itself up ever since, mostly by building roads with other people’s money. China and Iran have both put a good deal into the roads and tunnels here, and that turned out to be a theme of the day.

🍑 Orchards, cotton and unimpressed cows

Our route took us through the countryside. Tajikistan may be mostly mountains, but the valleys between them are farmed hard, because when you only have seven per cent of a country to grow things on, you don’t waste any of it. We passed orchards, small plots of maize and fields of cotton. The cotton is a hangover from Soviet days, when Moscow decided Central Asia would be its cotton field whether it liked it or not. The effects of that policy, on the land and on the people, are still being sorted out.

There were also lots of apricot trees. The Zeravshan valley is famous for them, and dried apricots from round here have been traded along the Silk Road for well over a thousand years. So that bag of them on the shelf in Sainsbury’s has quite a pedigree. I’ll never look at one in quite the same way, though I’ll still buy the cheap ones.

Donkeys pulled carts, cows wandered across the road at their leisure and showed no interest in us whatsoever, and every so often a small boy waved at us as if we were the most exciting thing to happen all week. Given what was to come, we may well have been.

🚧 Racing the asphalt

We left the main road near a place called Sarvoda and passed through a village where a large crowd of workers was getting the road ready for asphalt. There were trucks, rollers, men with shovels and a lot of standing about, which is how roadworks look the world over. I’ve seen the same scene on the A12 and I can confirm it’s the same men.

Nyioz, our guide, told us the asphalt would go down in the next few hours, and if we weren’t back through by then we might be stuck on the other side for some time. Possibly overnight, possibly until it set. Freshly laid asphalt doesn’t care who you are or what your schedule says, and neither, it turned out, do the men laying it. We thought this sounded like a very good plan to avoid. So we weaved our way past the trucks and the workers and pressed on, with a slight sense that we were on the clock. It’s not the best feeling to carry up a mountain, but it did stop us dawdling.

🛣️ Up the gorge, eyes open

The tarmac soon gave out and we were on a gravel road that wound up a gorge alongside the Iskanderdarya river. Eventually it started to climb the gorge wall itself. The river got smaller and noisier below us, and the road got narrower and dustier.

A few days earlier we had been to the Seven Lakes, the Haft Kul, in the Marguzor valley. The road there was so narrow and the drop so sheer that Karen spent most of the journey studying the floor of the car. Karen is from the North of England, and like a lot of Northerners she will tell you exactly what she thinks of something, usually before you’ve asked. She had a fair bit to say about that road, and I won’t repeat most of it.

This one, though, was wider. Not wide, you understand, just wider, and that made all the difference. Karen was greatly pleased. Or at least she kept her eyes open, which for her counts as greatly pleased. We counted it a victory and carried on up.

💧 Iskanderkul at last

At last we reached Iskanderkul. The lake sits at about 2,200 metres above sea level. It is roughly 3.4 square kilometres in area and in places it is over 70 metres deep. It was formed when a landslide and glacial debris blocked the valley thousands of years ago and the water had nowhere else to go. The Iskanderdarya river drains out of the far end and starts its long journey down towards the Zeravshan.

The colour is the thing everyone talks about. It’s a deep turquoise that changes with the light, set against bare brown and grey mountains with snow on the tops. We had come on a slightly gloomy day, and I’d been quietly worried the whole thing would look like a puddle in a quarry. It didn’t. Even under a flat grey sky it was a fine sight, and I can only imagine what it’s like in July with the sun out and the tour buses in.

🐎 Alexander, Bucephalus and a good story

The name means “Alexander’s Lake”. Iskander is the Persian and Central Asian form of Alexander, as in Alexander the Great, who came through this part of the world in about 329 to 327 BC on his way to conquering everything in sight. Ancient Sogdiana, which covered much of what is now Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, gave him a lot more trouble than he’d bargained for. The local leader Spitamenes led a guerrilla campaign that tied his army up for two years, and the Macedonians, used to big set-piece battles, found it all very annoying. Alexander ended up marrying a local girl, Roxana, the daughter of a Sogdian nobleman, in 327 BC, partly to calm things down. Not the worst way to settle a dispute, though I wouldn’t recommend it to the Council for planning disagreements.

There are several local legends about the lake. One says Alexander dammed a river to flood out a rebellious village, and the lake is what was left. Another says his famous horse, Bucephalus, drowned in it, and on nights of the full moon you can see a white horse rising out of the water. Historians will point out that Bucephalus actually died in 326 BC in what is now Pakistan, after the battle against King Porus on the Hydaspes river, nowhere near here. But I wasn’t going to be the one to tell the locals. It’s a good story and they’ve had it a long time, and I’ve never yet won an argument with a legend.

🏚️ Skegness at 2,200 metres

There are a few private houses around the lake, some guest houses and a resort. The resort started life as a Soviet holiday camp, a turbaza, where factory workers were sent for a bit of fresh mountain air as a reward for exceeding their tractor quotas. Think Butlin’s with more concrete and fewer redcoats. The President of Tajikistan is also said to have a dacha nearby, which probably explains why the road was wider than the one to the Seven Lakes. Somebody important has to get up there, and I suspect it isn’t Karen.

We parked up at the resort. We were there out of season and the place was shut, and I have to say it was a sad-looking spot. There were buildings with peeling paint, shuttered cafés, empty chalets, plastic chairs stacked in a corner and that general air of a seaside town in February. Think Skegness, but at 2,200 metres and with better views. It looked as if it had been held together with string and hope since about 1985, and the string had probably gone in 1991 along with the Soviet Union.

📸 The man with the leaf blower

We wandered down to the shore to take some photos. There we met a German man and his daughter, and apart from us they were the only tourists there. We had the brief, slightly awkward chat you have with the only other foreigners in a remote place, where everyone is secretly a bit put out that somebody else found it too. We nodded a lot, said it was lovely, and went our separate ways, each pretending we’d had the place to ourselves.

The only other person we came across was a man with a leaf blower. He seemed to be following us around. Wherever we went, there he was, a few yards behind, blowing leaves about in a fairly half-hearted way. We wondered at first if he was simply very keen on his job, or if this was some sort of security arrangement. All was revealed at the end, when he came over and asked for the resort’s fee for taking photographs.

So there it was. He wasn’t a gardener, he was a tax collector with a leaf blower as a cover. You have to admire the dedication, if not the business model. Back home it would have been a clipboard and a high-vis jacket, so I suppose the leaf blower showed some imagination. We paid up, and he went off looking quite satisfied with a morning’s work.

🌊 The Fann Niagara and a pond with ideas

One option at Iskanderkul is to walk to the waterfall on the Iskanderdarya, a short way below the lake. It’s known as the Fann Niagara, which is ambitious. It’s about 40 metres high, and in spring and early summer, with the snow melting, it’s apparently very impressive. Nyioz told us that at this time of year it was only a trickle. We decided we could live without walking a fair distance to look at a trickle. We’ve seen plenty of those back home, usually coming out of a downpipe, and gave it a miss.

Instead we walked up a hill to see Snake Lake. This turned out to be a small fishing lake and, I’m sorry to say, not very interesting. It gets its name from the water snakes that live in it, harmless dice snakes, though we didn’t see any. We didn’t see a great deal of anything, really. It was a pond with ideas above its station, and I’ve been to plenty of those in Surrey.

🐕 The high point of the day

What made the walk was the dogs. A couple of them had followed us up the hill, as dogs in this part of the world tend to do with anyone who looks as if they might have a sandwich. We hadn’t got one, and they stayed with us anyway, which says something about their character, or their optimism.

One of them, a very friendly female, came straight over to Karen and flopped onto her back, legs in the air. Karen, of course, had to give her tummy a rub. Karen has never in her life walked past a dog without stopping to say hello, and she wasn’t going to start in Tajikistan. The dog was in heaven. Karen was in heaven. I stood about with the camera feeling like a spare part.

I’m afraid this was the high point of our visit to Iskanderkul, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know. A lake that has been admired for more than two thousand years, a legend involving Alexander the Great, a mountain range straight off a postcard, and what we’ll remember is a dog’s tummy.

🏁 Beating the road gang

We made our way back down the mountain, along the gravel road and down the gorge. Going down is always the part where you notice what you did on the way up, and Karen had gone back to studying the floor. We got through the village just before the asphalt went down. The rollers were lined up and the men with shovels were looking purposeful, so it was a close-run thing. We felt rather pleased with ourselves for beating a Tajik road gang at its own game, which I suspect is a first for any Englishman, given how often we’re beaten by our own.

💭 Reflections

Iskanderkul wasn’t quite what we’d expected. We’d come for a famous lake and we got it, and it was lovely, but the day will be remembered for the other things. There was the race against the asphalt, the leaf-blowing tax collector, the Soviet holiday camp left to the weather and a dog who knew exactly what she wanted from life.

It also reminded us how much of Tajikistan is still quite raw. Out of season, with nobody about, the lake felt like it belonged to the mountains and not to us, and I rather liked that. There’s no polish here and not much of a tourist industry, and you do get a sense of a country still finding its feet more than thirty years after independence. The roads are improving, slowly, and the lakes will be waiting.