Photos

Silkroad travels: Pamir
This picture of the Pamir plain is different from my foregoing ones in the sense that a fertile green plain and a village (Alichur) become apparent. The Alichur river is draining the valley, salt deposits cannot form. The soils are frozen much of the year, trees cannot grow.

Alichur kishlak (=village), 3875 m alt., is a summer- but also a permanent settlement of Tajik and Khyrgyz people. They speak Tajik, a language close to Persian Farsi and writing it with the cyrillic alphabet or Kyrgyz, a Turk language, also written in cyrillic. The lingua franca is Russian! We met the English teacher, Rachinda, that teaches the Tajik as well as the Khyrgyz children: Silkroad lifestyle! The village people live from pasturing and services, some work in the Bazar Dara mine.

The Pamir region is formed by a series of important mountain ranges that are more or less east-west oriented. On our trip through the Wakhan valley and up the Pamir we followed the Shakdara- Southern Alichur range (seen here); Karla Marksa pik is the the highest mountain of this range (6723 m).