After a half-fine, half-miserable 13.5-hour drive from Khorog to Dushanbe, which featured a flat tire, a splitting headache (not a migraine, though) and some nausea that peaked with me throwing up into a triangular hole in the ground in the bathroom of the restaurant where we stopped to eat dinner in Kulob, I woke up this morning feeling fine.
The days since my last post were filled with visits and conversations with people in villages along the Panj and up and down the tributary valleys. We had tea, dried fruit and nuts, and some of the purest, most delicious honey I've ever eaten with the head of a village that lost 80% of its farmland to this summer's floods. We were treated to poems, number exercises, and a dance by preschool kids in a village where we are going to help build a seven-kilometer-long irrigation and drinking water pipe. We talked to a group of women who have begun packaging and selling dried mulberries and apricots, and one woman who is putting the rest of them to shame in terms of the volume of her production. We walked through a dairy processing plant in Khorog and learned about the major supply and storage problems that the company is facing. We ate enough Tajik food to be polite along the road -- Tajiks are extremely hospitable and it's unthinkable to take up their time and then refuse tea -- and then a ton of Indian food once we got to Khorog and checked into the Delhi Darbar Hotel and Restaurant.
The weather was cool and crisp and the valleys are gorgeous, green oases beneath the steep brown mountains. Poplar trees are everywhere, turning from green to bright yellow. Then the weather turned on us at just the wrong time, as we were supposed to fly back to Dushanbe on Friday but switched to Land Cruiser at the last minute because the flight had been cancelled. It doesn't take much for that to happen, unfortunately, just low clouds through the mountains. And because the weather is supposed to be spotty through the beginning of next week, our return trip to Khorog for the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the cross-border transmission lines that is one of the two anchoring events of my trip had to be postponed again. Our AID colleagues can't do the one-day drive that we do all the time because of security regulations, and they're not allowed to fly commercial on the Dushanbe-Khorog route. So AV and I (mostly him) spent some time in the car trying to figure out what the hell to do and playing phone tag with the key players on each side. Mobile phone service is not great in big chunks of the Panj valley.
In an hour and a half AV and I are going to meet with the owner of a fruit bar processing company whose Khorog facility we visited the night before last. Then I'll go to the gym, eat lunch, and get cracking on the work that's piled up over the week.
Here are a few photos from the trip.
The days since my last post were filled with visits and conversations with people in villages along the Panj and up and down the tributary valleys. We had tea, dried fruit and nuts, and some of the purest, most delicious honey I've ever eaten with the head of a village that lost 80% of its farmland to this summer's floods. We were treated to poems, number exercises, and a dance by preschool kids in a village where we are going to help build a seven-kilometer-long irrigation and drinking water pipe. We talked to a group of women who have begun packaging and selling dried mulberries and apricots, and one woman who is putting the rest of them to shame in terms of the volume of her production. We walked through a dairy processing plant in Khorog and learned about the major supply and storage problems that the company is facing. We ate enough Tajik food to be polite along the road -- Tajiks are extremely hospitable and it's unthinkable to take up their time and then refuse tea -- and then a ton of Indian food once we got to Khorog and checked into the Delhi Darbar Hotel and Restaurant.
The weather was cool and crisp and the valleys are gorgeous, green oases beneath the steep brown mountains. Poplar trees are everywhere, turning from green to bright yellow. Then the weather turned on us at just the wrong time, as we were supposed to fly back to Dushanbe on Friday but switched to Land Cruiser at the last minute because the flight had been cancelled. It doesn't take much for that to happen, unfortunately, just low clouds through the mountains. And because the weather is supposed to be spotty through the beginning of next week, our return trip to Khorog for the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the cross-border transmission lines that is one of the two anchoring events of my trip had to be postponed again. Our AID colleagues can't do the one-day drive that we do all the time because of security regulations, and they're not allowed to fly commercial on the Dushanbe-Khorog route. So AV and I (mostly him) spent some time in the car trying to figure out what the hell to do and playing phone tag with the key players on each side. Mobile phone service is not great in big chunks of the Panj valley.
In an hour and a half AV and I are going to meet with the owner of a fruit bar processing company whose Khorog facility we visited the night before last. Then I'll go to the gym, eat lunch, and get cracking on the work that's piled up over the week.
Here are a few photos from the trip.
Breakfast with a side of bodybuilding in Kulob
Hundred-year-old graves exposed when this hill washed away in July's flash floods; the black line was the former level of the ground
A waterfall across the Panj River in Afghanistan
School kids on their lunch break in Yazgulom village
A typical Tajik lunch, for guests anyway, in Yazgulom; lunch is served on a topjan, a raised platform with cushions on it that are ubiquitous in the Tajik countryside; boiled goat and turkey not shown (the goat was surprisingly delicious but I did not sample the turkey)
Dried fruit storage facility under construction
This is what 12.5 metric tons of dried mulberry looks like
The awesome promotional poster for Delhi Darbar in Khorog
Dairy processing plant in Khorog; I sampled some strawberry yogurt, which was delicious
Replacing a flat somewhere between Khorog and Darvoz
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