Even though the hunt just happened it was truly an adventure. This bucket list hunt of mine lived up to the expectation.
My trip started with flights from Columbia to Chicago to Istanbul. In Istanbul I met up with Kevin another hunter who I would be sharing camp with. We didn’t book together but we hit it off both being primarily hardcore diy hunters. It couldn’t have worked out any better.
From Istanbul we flew into Dushanbe our flight landing at 2:30am local time. We were immediately met by our contact in Dushanbe (Mustafo) and our interpreter (Nabi) that would be with us the duration of our trip. Both guys were nice and spoke English pretty well. After about 90 minutes all our paperwork cleared and we were on the road with Nabi and our driver who spoke no English, but he was good natured and looked and sounded like every Russian you’ve seen in the movies. There are multiple languages spoken in TJ but according to Nabi most people speak Russian to a certain extent due to soviet influence back in the day.
We drove on good roads for about 9 hours then we hit the Pamir “Highway”. The Pamir Highway runs along the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan for hundreds of miles. You can go between 10-25mph usually averaging about 15 depending on road conditions and weather. Villages are scattered along this road here and there. Everything from motorcycles and walking to semi trucks drive this 1-2 lane road. A good portion of the road is a rock wall on the Tajikistan side and a 100’ cliff down to the river with the rugged Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan on the other. It’s interesting. People over there don’t really follow any type of driving rules. It is pretty crazy. We also went through about 10 police and military check points. They were everywhere. Nabi said it was for safety to try to mainly look for illegal people in the country primarily taliban. For the most part these checks were often but uneventful. Some of the officers would look at us and make sure everything matched our paperwork, some would call in our info, one guy thought I took a pic of him (I didn’t) and looked through pics on my phone. Overall Nabi and our driver handled all the situations well and took care of us.
We drove through the night on the highway. The higher we got the more snow and ice there was on the road which added some excitement. We drove in a 4x4 Land Cruiser with good tires. We stopped in one of the small villages around 10pm to to let backed up semis and military trucks through. We were notified that the road wasn’t great ahead of us. So we put chains on the rear tires… kind of. One chain fit perfectly, the other was about 3” short. They rigged it up with some wire. Surprisingly it held.
We made it to the guest house in the village at the bottom of the valley we would hunt around 3am. I think it was 23hrs total. They had a warm meal ready for us and insisted we ate. FYI they eat a lot over there and they fully expect you to eat too. Lots and lots of bread. We had a meal and went to sleep around 4am with the alarms set for 8am to load up the yaks and donkeys and head up the mountain. Nabi told us there was already a group of guides in the valley locating groups of ibex for us. It was time for sleep.
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