The high road to Kyrgyzstan

Discovery Channel Magazine, March 2012

It is two in the morning when we blow a tyre, four thousand metres up in the Pamir Mountains and 90 kilometres from the nearest village. It is minus ten degrees and we are driving through a blizzard. As the driver sets to changing the wheel in the freezing snow, he hands me a torch and tells me to keep walking in circles around the car. “Watch for wolves,” he says.

I could have flown. But where’s the fun in that? When a colleague at the World Bank invited me to come to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to write about how microfinance works in some of the poorest and most obscure nations on earth, it quickly occurred to us that there was an alternative to the glued-together certain-death turboprop flights that bob and wobble between the mountains that separate the two capitals, Dushanbe and Bishkek. We could drive. Doing so would take us over the legendary Pamir Highway – a remote, mountain-top route built by the Soviets in the 1930s and until recently closed to civilian traffic. We would need to make it between the two in 72 hours, far too little for comfort; but still, who could refuse?

Our trip starts in the Tajikistan capital of Dushanbe, after a hefty delay on landing caused by a roaring Afghan dust storm. There are few countries that fewer people could find on a map, so here’s a few things you may not have known: it is arguably the poorest of the 15 nations that the Soviet Union dissolved into in 1991, and was crippled further by a catastrophic civil war. Like so many Asian nations, it is a bizarre shape without much logic to its borders; it brings together not only Tajiks (and not nearly all of them) but other races such as the Pamirs. Two days of meetings tells me something else: increasingly, women are the future of the place. With tens of thousands of working age men dead in the civil war and so many more having gone to Russia for work, often never to come back, the burden of moving out of poverty has fallen to the women. I meet Mastura Asoeva, who started out making baskets from home, got a microfinance loan and built a business not only making baskets but teaching others to do so. I meet Khakifa Sobirova, who has built a family bakery business into something that supports her daughter’s burgeoning embroidery enterprise. I meet Burigul Kholova, who runs a farm, and Nazovat Hafizova, who has used microfinance to open a beauty parlour. Every microfinance bank head I meet is a woman. The chair of the association of microfinance lenders is a woman. The president of Kyrgyzstan, where our journey will end, is a woman. In this conservative and patriarchal society, it is magnificent to see.

Driving out of Dushanbe is dull at first; flat and dusty amid the cotton fields. We have left far too late and it is quickly dark. It is a mistake, as further south it becomes a hopeless road, built by forced German labour under the Soviets during the second world war, and apparently barely maintained ever since. We lose our way in riverbeds, a bouncing and slamming of axles in the dark. But the mood is enlivened when the driver points across a river at hills in the darkness on the other side and says: “Afghanistan.”

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