Tajikistan: The Seven Lakes Road Through Fann Mountains

🕌 Goodbye to Samarkand, and Hello to the Last of the Stans

Our time in Samarkand had been great. It’s an interesting place, and history doesn’t so much hang about there as sit you down and lecture you. The city was already ancient when Alexander the Great turned up in 329 BC. It was called Maracanda then, and it sat on a site now known as Afrasiab, just north of the modern centre. Alexander is said to have remarked that it was even more beautiful than he’d been told, which is high praise from a man who had seen a fair amount of the world and generally knocked it about a bit. Later on, Samarkand was the place where the secret of paper-making is said to have escaped from China. Some Chinese prisoners were taken after the Battle of Talas in 751, and apparently they knew how to make the stuff. Within a few generations Samarkand paper was being shipped all over the Islamic world. We found that rather cheering, as it meant the place had been producing bits of paper long before it was producing coach parties.

Then in 1220 Genghis Khan came along and flattened most of it, as he did. Samarkand picked itself up, dusted itself down and carried on, until the 1370s, when Timur, known to us in the West as Tamerlane, made it his capital. He spent the next thirty-odd years filling it with turquoise domes and enormous gateways. He was a man who sacked cities for a living and then built mosques with the proceeds, which I suppose is one way of balancing the books. He dragged craftsmen back from every place he conquered, from Delhi to Damascus, and told them to get on with it. The Bibi-Khanym Mosque was built in a tearing hurry after his Indian campaign, and by the look of the cracks it went up too fast for its own good. The Registan, the great square with its three madrasas, took the best part of two centuries to finish, which shows what happens when you don’t have Timur standing behind you with a stopwatch. His grandson Ulugh Beg built an observatory outside the city and mapped the stars with remarkable accuracy, then was murdered by his own son. That is the sort of family where Christmas dinner must have been a tense affair.

Our hotel had been marvellous. We had managed two nights of proper sleep on a comfortable bed, and anyone who has travelled through Central Asia will know that this is not to be sniffed at. Mattresses in this part of the world range from “quite firm” to “is this a door?”, so we made the most of it. We also made the most of our last breakfast, which was a real highlight of our eating in the Stans. After weeks of bread, more bread and the odd bit of mutton, a breakfast with real choice felt like Christmas morning. The bread, by the way, is called non, so when we said “non bread” we were really saying “bread bread”. It’s usually round, stamped with a pattern of little dots and baked on the inside wall of a clay oven, and it’s very good. But there is only so much of it a person can eat before they start dreaming of a plain slice of Hovis. We took our time over breakfast. Possibly too much time, if the look from the waiter was anything to go by.

🛂 A Border Crossing That Took Less Time Than a Bus

Straight after breakfast we met Ismael, who had been our trusty driver for the past four days. He drove us east towards the border with Tajikistan, the fifth and last of the Stans on our trip. We’d already ticked off Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and we were starting to feel quite pleased with ourselves, in the way you do when you’ve got through most of a long list without losing your passports.

For years this would have been a far less relaxed journey. The trouble goes back to the 1920s, when Soviet planners sat down with a map and drew lines through Central Asia. They were creating republics out of what had been a patchwork of khanates, emirates and tribal lands, and the result was that Samarkand and Bukhara, two of the great Persian-speaking cities of the region, ended up inside Uzbekistan. Plenty of Tajiks have never quite got over it. After the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, things went from bad to worse. Tajikistan then fell into a civil war that ran from 1992 to 1997 and killed tens of thousands of people. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan got on about as well as Karen and a cliff-edge road. The border was mostly shut, parts of it were mined, and getting a visa for one country while standing in the other was a lost cause. Things only thawed after 2016, when Shavkat Mirziyoyev took over as Uzbek president following the death of Islam Karimov, who had run the country since before it was a country. By 2018 the crossings had reopened and families who had been cut off for the best part of twenty years could visit each other again. It’s worth remembering that when you’re moaning about the queue at Calais.

At the border we got our bags out, said a fond goodbye to Ismael and walked over to Uzbek border control. We were through passport control in no time and soon wandering across the bit of no man’s land towards Tajikistan. Things were just as easy on the other side. Customs barely gave us a glance, which was faintly insulting after all the effort we’d put into looking like honest people. Changing countries had taken us about fifteen minutes in total. We’ve waited longer for a bus on the Holloway Road, and the bus wasn’t even going anywhere interesting.

🏺 Sarazm, Nyioz and a Happy Driver

We crossed near Sarazm, and it would be rude not to mention it because it is very old indeed. It’s a proto-urban settlement that was lived in from around the middle of the fourth millennium BC, so well over five thousand years ago. A local archaeologist found it in the 1970s, and since then the diggers have turned up houses, workshops and a grave holding a woman buried with a great deal of jewellery, who has been nicknamed the Princess of Sarazm. It was one of the earliest places in Central Asia to mine and work metal, and it traded with places as far off as Iran, Turkmenistan and the Indus Valley. They were passing around lapis lazuli, turquoise and shell beads when most of Britain was still deciding whether to bother with farming. UNESCO made it Tajikistan’s first World Heritage Site in 2010. In short, people were doing deals and making copper bits here when Stonehenge was a twinkle in some Neolithic chap’s eye. We didn’t actually stop, which we felt faintly guilty about, but we did look out of the window with great respect.

On the Tajik side we were met by our guide, Nyioz. It soon became clear that Nyioz was a bit of a joker. He had a whole stock of wry stories and clever sayings from Nasreddin Hodja, the wise fool of folk tales who is claimed by everybody from Turkey to China. The Uzbeks and Tajiks call him Afandi. He is the man who rides his donkey backwards and always has a cracking excuse. The most famous story has him crawling about under a street lamp at night. A neighbour asks what he’s lost, and he says his key. The neighbour joins in the search and eventually asks where exactly he dropped it. “In the house,” says Nasreddin, “but the light’s better out here.” We have all worked for that sort of manager. Nyioz brought Nasreddin out at regular intervals for the rest of the day. Looking back, if we’d laughed a bit less politely at the first one we might have been spared some of the rest. But we’re British, and politely laughing at things that aren’t quite funny is more or less our national sport. Karen, being from the North, is a bit better at keeping a straight face, but even she cracked eventually.

We also met our driver, Khushbakht, a young man whose name means “happy” or “fortunate” in Tajik. It suited him well, and at least one of us in the car was going to be happy by the end of the day. It wasn’t going to be Karen. Tajik, by the way, is a form of Persian, close enough to the Farsi of Iran and the Dari of Afghanistan that speakers can more or less understand each other. That sets the Tajiks apart from their Turkic-speaking neighbours, and they are rightly proud of it. It’s written in Cyrillic these days, a leftover from the Soviet years, which means a Persian language wearing a Russian hat. The currency is the somoni, which replaced the Tajik rouble in 2000. It is named after Ismail Samani, the ruler of the Samanid dynasty, who died in 907 and whom Tajiks regard as the founding father of the nation. The Samanids ruled from Bukhara and were great patrons of Persian poetry and learning, and a Tajik will tell you with some pride that they were reviving Persian culture while much of the neighbourhood was busy doing something else. Ismail turns up on banknotes, statues and just about anything else that stands still long enough. The country’s highest mountain was even named after him, having spent the Soviet years called Communism Peak, which tells you something about the fashion cycle in mountain names.

🏔️ Up into the Fann Mountains and the Seven Lakes

The plan for the day was to drive up into the Fann Mountains and visit the Seven Lakes. Tajikistan is about ninety per cent mountains, so it’s not a country where you have to look hard for a hill. The Fanns are part of the great Pamir-Alay system, sitting between the Zeravshan range to the north and the Hissar range to the south. They are compact as mountain ranges go, but they pack in a lot, with more than a hundred peaks and the highest, Chimtarga, reaching about 5,490 metres. That is roughly four Ben Nevises stacked on top of each other, and it makes our biggest mountain look like a speed bump. The name is thought by some to come from an old word linked to mining, and people have been digging silver, iron and coal out of these hills for well over a thousand years. Some of the coal seams have apparently been burning underground for centuries, which is the kind of fact that makes you check your footing. Alexander the Great passed through here as well. The best-known lake in the range, Iskanderkul, is named after him. Iskander is the local form of Alexander, so wherever you go in this part of the world it seems the man got there first and named something after himself.

The Seven Lakes, or Haft Kul, aren’t in fact in the Fanns proper. They sit in the Shing valley on the slopes of the Zeravshan range to the west, but nobody round here is going to let a bit of geography spoil a good marketing line. The range takes its name from the river Zeravshan, which means something like “spreading gold” in Persian. The same river eventually waters the oases of Samarkand and Bukhara, so in a way we were heading upstream to see where the city got its drinks from. The lakes themselves were formed by landslides and earthquakes that dammed the side streams, so they are strung out one above the other up the valley like a row of beads. The local legend tells it differently. It says a father lost his seven daughters, one after another, and his tears formed the seven lakes. Cheerful stuff. It’s the sort of story that makes the Brothers Grimm look like they were writing for the under-fives.

🚙 Tarmac, Gravel and a Hard Stare from a Cow

The first part of the drive was pretty standard fare: fields, villages, the odd cow giving us a hard stare. Then we began to climb. Before long we left the comfort of the tarmac and went onto rough gravel, rattling through several small villages on the way. Children waved, old men in skullcaps watched us go by, and the scenery got steadily more dramatic. Washing hung from balconies, stacks of firewood sat against every wall, and we saw more than one house with a sheep tied up outside, apparently waiting for its turn at something.

👁️ Lake One: Mijgon, the Eyelashes

After an hour or so we reached the first lake, Mijgon, which sits at around 1,600 metres. That’s already higher than the top of Ben Nevis, and we hadn’t even been breathless yet. The name means “eyelashes”. It was small but a stunning deep blue, much like Crater Lake in Oregon, which we’d once seen. That one formed about 7,700 years ago when a volcano called Mount Mazama blew its top and then fell in on itself. This one, as far as we know, involved less drama. We stopped for a while to take photos and were joined by a young boy on a donkey. Nyioz knew him and helps the family out from time to time, which we thought spoke well of him. It almost made up for the jokes.