Pamir Highway - Part 1

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.