Despite being right next to each other, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are vastly different countries. They are both mountainous but whereas Tajikistan is relatively barren, Kyrgyzstan is lush and green. Therefore, we set off from Osh intent on taking our time through Kyrgyzstan and enjoying the scenery before we hit the deserts of Kazakhstan. The drive was absolutely stunning and the road construction was infinitely better than Tajikistan. For the first time in a fortnight, the Subaru once again became a long distance cruiser as the potholes of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were left behind. Night one was spent by a lake; it was amazing to be in the middle of nowhere with only a farmer and his sheep for company, with the added bonus of there being no mosquitoes for some reason. We therefore also planned to spend the next two nights at another lake, Lake Issyk-Kul. On route we managed to rack up our first speeding fine as Charlie got done for doing 110 km/h in a 90 km/h. Sadly no amount of rubbish about being told false speed limits by the border guards would sway the policeman and so we were forced to pay our $7 fine, in cash of course. The Lake was amazing; Lake Issyk-Kul literally translates as the warm lake but as we soon found out that this was because it doesn't freeze in winter and not an illusion to the temperature of the water. However, with water inevitably comes mosquitoes and so as soon as it was dark it became a race to soak yourself with DEET in an effort to keep them at bay - the less glamorous side of camping (if in fact there is a glamorous side). We spent an amazing two nights by the lake before setting off to Kazakhstan. It was on this journey that we had our second piece of contact with the Kyrgyz police. We had stopped to look at the GPS when a policeman beckoned me over to his car. He then proceeded to explain that unless I gave him 1000 som he would arrest me. As I didn't have 1000 som I asked him for his dollar rate which turned out to be $20. This wasn't a great exchange rate and so I kindly pointed this out to him - the rate is more like 75 som to the dollar. Sadly he didn't want to budge and so I was forced to hand over the cash as I had no wish to visit the local police station. Definitely not value for money. Oh well - its now five days in Kazakhstan before we head off to Russia! KBO.  

So we have finished the Pamir Highway. We have crossed the length of Tajikistan, risen to altitudes of over 4,600m and have made it to Osh. Luckily the road going out of Khorog was better than the road going in and so we managed to make some good miles. Whilst the road was hardly the M1, it did have some stretches 'sans-pothole' and so we were able to climb 2000 meters in just three hours. Now at this height altitude sickness can become a problem but it seemed more of an issue for the car than us. Whilst the Subaru was understandably low on power, it's quite difficult to feel out of breath when sitting in a car - the joys of the internal combustion engine. The scenery at this height was amazing. Endlessly straight roads ringed by mountains made the miles fly by as we headed towards Murgab, a small town near the Chinese border. Its difficult to gauge how big towns like these are going to be. Murgab according to the map had an airport and so we made the reasonable assumption that such a town was likely to have some sort of shop in which we could buy something for supper. Well having been to Murgab, I can assure you that they haven't had any jumbo-jets coming in for land recently. There was no such shop and so we looked to be in for another night of ration packs. However, such a fate was avoided when in return for helping a local car out of a ditch, we were invited in for tea. Despite the locals having very little, we were shown incredible hospitality and given a meal of bread, lentils and some sort of yogurt. At least I think it was Yogurt; it was slightly smile and force it down you. Having camped the night at around 3,700 m, we headed for the border with Kyrgyzstan. We crawled over a pass of 4,655m and soon arrived at the Tajik side of the border. This was all very pleasant and the only thing of note was the customs official telling Charlie that Subaru's were rubbish and that we should have a Toyota Landcrusier. Then it was over into no-man's land. At most borders this stretch typically lasts for about 10m, perhaps even less. Well due to a bit of a balls up from the Russians, the stretch of no-man's land between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan is 17km. Given that no-body owns this road, there's very little incentive for either of the two governments to maintain it; this results in 17km of the worst road conditions that we have had so far this trip. Almost an hour later we arrived at the Kyrgyz side of the border. We were met by a customs official who asked us whether we had any drugs. Obviously we replied no; this was met by the reply 'why not, everyone has drugs here.' There followed an amazingly surreal 30 mins as the border official joked about all the kilos of heroine that we could have stashed in our car and the sacks of cocaine we could have put in our sleeping bags. After a two hour wait due to the immigration system being down, we left the border and headed to Osh. Here ended the M41 and so the Pamir Highway. Its now a few days in Kyrgyzstan and then to Kazakhstan. KBO.

Over the years the Pamir Highway has developed a bit of a reputation as an amazing road that has a tendency to ruin cars. The road climbs to over 4600m (making it the second highest in the world), follows the Afghan border and is notorious for rockslides that can block the road for days. With this in mind, we set about transforming our low riding Subaru into a machine that could tackle the struggles ahead. Given the size of the potholes, our primary objective was to increase the ground clearance at the rear. This was achieved by putting springs from a Toyota Land Crusier onto the car thus thereby massively increasing ground clearance. So far, so good. We were then left with two options - do we take the car crushing 'northern' route or the slightly better 'southern' road for the first part of the highway. We opted for the latter. I know what some of you will be thinking reading this back in the UK - 'what a bunch of wimps.' However, given the state of the road later on, I think this was a justified decision. The only slight downside was that this route was longer and putting the springs on the car had delayed us by some four hours. With this we set off on what promised to be the toughest challenge for the car so far. The first part of the road was good; pristine tarmac built by the Chinese and so early progress was promising. However, the southern route has the downside of following the slightly dodgy Afghan border for an extra 200km. It was now 6pm and starting to get dark. For obvious reasons we wanted to stop before it got dark and yet could find no decent camping spots in the deep valley and so had to keep on pushing further towards the Afghan border in hope of one. Finally, just before it got dark we found an amazing campsite by the banks of a river; a river that just happens to mark the boundary between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. I'm fairly certain that our mothers, following the tracker on our website, were not best pleased with our choice of location. Anyway, the next day we set off following the river as it snakes along the border. This is where the car got its first real punishing. The road, given its history of landslides was in a shocking condition. The Subaru voiced its disgust almost immediately. The suspension started to rattle - the force of the bumps meant that part of the housing for the spring had sheered off. One of the tyres also joined in the revolt along with a whole host of other rattles and squeaks. Crawling along at 25 km/h, progress was not fast and so it took us two days to do a distance of only 250km; the landscape more than made up for this however, along with the knowledge that we were only 20m from Afghanistan. Finally arriving at Khorog, we have hopefully managed to sort the suspension and the tyre but as the title of the post suggests, that was only part 1 of the adventure. KBO.      

The Uzbeks are definitely on a very different wavelength to those in Turkmenistan. As such, it was a bit of a culture shock as we head into Bukhara for a few days after the stresses of Turkmenistan. Hotels were once again normal prices, there were no weird photos of the Turkmen President and we could have our first proper shower in four days. Bukhara is a seriously cool city. Once we got past the rather grey soviet city suburbs, the madrassas of the silk road revealed themselves. Whilst I'm certain that the Lonely Planet Guide did some serious editing on the cover of their 'Central Asia guide' (which is set in Bukhara), it is none the less a very photogenic city and well worth a visit if you're looking for a destination that is a little more off the beaten track. Perhaps the best find of our stay was the local Uzbek beer. It must be said that it tastes a little funny but when you consider that its 12% AVB its easy to see why. After 3 days of soaking up all the air-conditioning we could, it was off to Samarkand. Harry B had been back in the UK for a funeral so it was there that we were going to reconvene the trio. What we thought would be a relatively easy 6 hour drive threw up some issues. Firstly, the roads were awful. Secondly, petrol is apparently a very rare commodity in Uzbekistan. We must have driven past a 100 closed petrol stations and it was only as we arrived into Samarkand that we found a working pump. With the ginger back in the team, we roared around the sites of Samarkand and then sort to find some petrol for the journey to the Tajikistan border. Apparently the only petrol in the city itself was to be found on the black market and so we had to settle for some stuff that smelt like petrol but had a slightly yellow tinge that BP pumps in the UK definitely don't produce. The following day we set off for the border and the six hour drive was regularly broken up by police checkpoints. It has to be said that I struggled to see the point of such checks. All the information was written down in a notepad and even then they didn't really know what they were looking for. The British passports seemed to confuse the hell out of them to the extent that Charlie's surname was recorded as 'British Citizen' at one stop. Eventually we reached the border. The Uzbek side was relatively straightforward - we had the routine car search but the customs official was apparently more interested in the car itself than what was in it. This carried on to the extent that he wanted to see what this 'Subaru' (not a household name in Uzbekistan) could do and so drove it around the customs area with his mate in the passenger seat. The Tajik side started well; we got our passports stamped and them were pointed to the 'car guy'. Then he dropped the bombshell. 'You are not allowed to bring right hand drive cars into Tajikistan.' This obviously created a bit of an issue considering that our car is very much right hand drive. After a not inconsiderable amount of pleading he decided to ring his boss who then luckily let us off the hook. Phew. Its off to the Pamir's tomorrow. KBO.      

It's been a while since I last put on a blog post and that's because we've been in the 'North Korea' of Central Asia - Turkmenistan. As such, I have deliberately waited until Uzbekistan to post this given the levels of security there. To put it into perspective, Lonely Planet won't publish the name of their author there for fear of retribution. It was a huge cultural shock going from Iran into Turkmenistan. The Russian aspect immediately hit us. For the next two hours we were marched around the border paying various fees and signing forms - by the time we left they had taken $140 from us including a $1 'disinfecting fee'. From the border we headed straight to Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. The best description I have heard of Ashgabat is that it is a cross between Las Vegas and Pyongyang. Everything, and I mean everything is made from white marble. The hospital is white marble, the stadiums are white marble and even the bus stops are made out of white marble. It was in our very grotty hotel (built by the USSR) that Charlie and I made the decision to go to the Darvaza gas crater. This was extremely risky since we were on a transit visa and deviation from a set route incurred a $1000 if caught; unfortunately the Devaza gas crater is about 240 km off route. I think Charlie will agree that they were some of the most stressful kms of our lives as we went through five police checkpoints praying that they wouldn't look too hard at our documents. After about 4 hours we finally arrived at the crater. It's an amazing site and if it were in a normal country I'm sure it would be packed with tourists but it was deserted as we drove up. As we were unpacking our stuff another car drove up, a family from the American Embassy. At first we were a little annoyed about this but being polite and British we offered to help put up their tent. They turned out to be the most wonderfully generous people and so shared their BBQ with us which was lovely as all we had was ration packs. The next day we somehow made it back to Ashgabat without being stopped and so set off towards the Uzbek border. Two days later we arrived; it hadn't been the most interesting two days as Turkmen landscape has a strong resemblance with the Martian surface. We knew the border was going to be tricky - our Turkmen visa ran out on the 16th but our Uzbek visa didn't start until 17th. We explained this to the border guards and we were told to wait until 22:00; this was at 13:00. Eventually we were called through and that's when the fun began. Having had our passports stamped, Charlie and I were separated. Being the driver of the car, they wanted to see my customs forms. I gave them all my forms but they couldn't find one. At this point they started shouting at me in Russian, I think accusing me of being a smuggler. Luckily they soon found the paper they were looking for and then started a full car search. This is fairly rare as the effort required is fairly substantial. They searched everywhere including inside our fold-up chairs. Once they had done this we were free to leave Turkmenistan but not enter Uzbekistan. As such we spent 2 bizarre hours in no man's land as the Turkmen border guards used our car as a smoking hideout away from their officers much like the far astro operates  at Radley. At 00:01 we were allowed into Uzbekistan and once we finally cleared customs at 02:00 we were absolutely shattered. Anyway through Uzbekistan and then it's the Pamirs! KBO

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Persepolis was cool, really cool. Unlike a lot of ruins, the stones are still standing in their original format. The carvings on the staircases are still intact, as are the staircases themselves and so it makes for the most awesome sight. It was strange to think we were walking through the same city that Alexander the Great had burnt to the ground two and a but thousand years ago. From Persepolis we powered onto Yazd. Being a desert city, Yazd proved a vast contrast to earlier Iranian cities. Unlike the others it had no huge square but was rather a maze of covered streets and alleys. Whilst at Yazd we decided to spilt the drive to Mashhad across two days and so set off the next morning to complete 600km of the 900km to Mashhad. Deserts are generally hot and so is Iran; this combination made for a rather warm journey in the unair-conditioned Subaru. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on the Subaru - its partially air-conditioned. What I mean by this is that you get about 5 minutes of air-conditioning every two hours. However, despite our horribly sticky backs, the landscape more than made up for this. Despite its barrenness, there is something really cool about being able to see sand and absolutely nothing else.  Along the way we visited the site where six American helicopters had crashed in the desert during Operation 'Eagle Claw'. Whilst the wreckage itself was interesting, what really caught our attention was the poster announcing the site. On it was a picture of an Iranian soldier machine gunning the Statue of Liberty. Following this, after about 6 hours of this hot and cold treatment (mainly hot), we arrived at an Oasis in the middle of desert. The surrounding landscape was as dry as a bone yet out of nowhere appeared a huge spread of green. There were pools to swim in and so it was a lovely antidote to the sweat machine of the Subaru. Having stopped for the night we then set off for Mashhad. This was one of those nothing drives and so four hours later we arrived at the hotel where I am writing this blog post. We have set about sorting out our car for Turkmenistan. Given that it is a very secretive country, none of us really know what to expect but I suspect it will be fun and games at the border as usual. KBO.  

At the time of my last blog post we had just arrived in Tehran, the capital. Tehran is a huge city of some 12 million people and is covered in a thin film of smog. Our first challenge in Tehran was the Metro. For the equivalent of about 10p a ticket, we hoped on the train and set off for the city centre. One of the most delightful aspects of Iran is that people always come up and ask where you are from etc. Most of these conversations usually end up with a discussion about football. It must be said that the population of Iran are generally glory supporters. I have seen a huge number of t-shirts with Barcelona or Real Madrid but I am yet to see a Swansea or Watford one. The people in Iran seem genuinely interested and such conversations don't tend to lead to the inevitable sales pitch. Indeed one old man came up to us just in order to express his love for George Best. Although Tehran isn't the most beautiful city in the world, the hustle and bustle more than make up for that. We met up with my dad's Godson Robin who was there learning Farsi. He suggested that we go to the Holy Defence Museum. This was an interesting experience. As a museum it attempted to demonstrate the government's line on the Iran-Iraq war; a particular highlight was the 'martyrs stairway to heaven' which was perhaps the most tacky 50m in the Middle East and believe me it has a lot of competition. The most touching expression of Iranian hospitality was when having got on the wrong train, an Iranian man abandoned his own journey in order to set us on the right track.  Having forced our way through the Iranian traffic, we set off for Esfahan. Given that Iranian motorways are fairly mundane, we decided to take a route through the mountains. At this point I must say that the Subaru has been performing perfectly apart from two little issues. The more major of the two is that the air conditioning is a little dodgy. It works perfectly in wet drizzle but as soon as it encounters a morsel of heat, it tends to go on strike. The other small fault is that the engineers at Subaru didn't account for all the kit that we have in the car. As such, she is a little short of power on the hills. However, we made it to Esfahan and were met with a total contrast to Tehran. The central square in Esfahan is incredible and the mosque attached to it is one of the most beautiful spaces I have ever seen. Started in 771 A.D, it makes you wonder what on earth we were doing back in the U.K. Following a great day of sightseeing, we headed onto Shiraz. We again took a mountain road; the Subaru wasn't that best pleased but the views made up for it. In doing so we got off the tourist trail (not a very major one) and saw a different, nomadic side to Iran. We stopped off at a local carpet shop as a carpet on your floor at university is a great way to express the fact to everyone that you have been on a 'gap yaah.' After some fairly intense negotiations we left with four carpets. They looked good in the shop so lets just hope they do on my uni floor.  Shiraz has once again blown us away but our trip to Persepolis tomorrow is the main reason for a stopover here. KBO