ماجرای تابستانم، بخش دوم: در میان مرز

There are a number of places where I think it’s completely ok to have no idea what’s going to happen, and something as simple as going forward can be an exciting challenge.

Kyzyl-Art is not one of those places.

Let’s start from the beginning. After driving for several hours (and our pit stop in Karakol), we finally arrived at the Kyzyl-Art/Bor Dobo Pass.  This place has a long name, but it’s pretty underwhelming. Some 4000 meters (give or take) up, when we pulled up in our jeep, there was literally nothing. An old Russian sign welcoming travelers into Gorno-Badakhshan. A burnt-out yurt and vehicle garage. Some storage containers converted into offices and a barracks. And absolutely nothing else for miles around.

Now, as we were handing in our passports and identification to the guards, my new travel companion Shorat promptly got up, grabbed his rather large bag, and exited the jeep. This seems like an appropriate point to mention that I’m 99% certain that Shorat (obviously not his real name) was trafficking heroin. Before the border, there were a few hints that this might be the case. When asked what he did for a living, the most detailed answer I eventually got was “exports from Afghanistan”. Alright, yes, Afghanistan does export things, but what exports does it have that “don’t get checked at the border”, to paraphrase my friend. But still, this guy might have a mystery Jeep that was somehow smaller on the inside than it should’ve been, and he might be incredibly protective of the “mystery shed” at his place in Murghab, but that doesn't mean anything…right?

Well, then we got to the Narcotics office on the border. And the officer on duty asks to see our bags. While I’m arguing in my head if Tajikistan is nationalist enough that me selling out the “dirty, drug-dealing Kyrgyz” might keep me from getting detained/shot, Shorat calmly reaches into his bag and pulls out…more US cash than I've seen in months. He proceeds to give sizable wads of dollar bills to every single person running security there. And everyone seemed to know this was coming, and was chatting with Shorat like they were old buddies.

So yeah…that happened. Thinking there was no way we could have any problems after that, we moved onto passport control. For Shorat, the driver, and the Kyrgyz woman we’d picked up in Karakol, no problems.

For me…alright, here we go, new story.

I get called into the barracks/passport area by one of the guards, who asks me to explain what exactly I’m doing at Kyzyl-Art. So I start saying, in Tajiki/Farsi, my plan to travel the Pamir Highway from Dushanbe to Osh, and then continue up to Bishkek, before flying back to Dushanbe. When asked about how my visa was going to expire on the 28^th, I explained that I’d talked to the visa office, and they’d said everything was fine, and I could leave and re-enter with the same visa. So the guard stamped my passport, and said quite calmly I now needed a new visa to re-enter Tajikistan…

You may be wondering what the hell just happened.

So this is almost entirely the fault of an unfortunate coincidence in the Persian language, and Tajikistan in general. To understand this, you need to know the clause “dar Dushanbe”. This consists of the preposition “dar”, which means “in” or “on”, and Dushanbe, which can be the name of the capital of Tajikistan…or the word for Monday (hence, punny blog title). So when I told the passport guy that I’d talked to the visa office last week ‘dar Dushanbe’, I meant that I’d talked to the office in Dushanbe. The officer thought I’d meant I’d talked to the visa office on Monday, and the office in Bishkek at any rate. So naturally, why would I need my same visa?

As you might imagine, I was starting to shit bricks, when the situation decided to get a tad bit worse. The driver from the jeep comes to me and says they have a schedule they need to keep, so they’re leaving. You know, without me. So I find Shorat, somehow smoking at 4000 meters, and ask what exactly is going on.  He confirms that, yes, they are on a schedule and need to leave. However, I’m “not supposed to worry”, because they’ll wait in a town in southern Kyrgyzstan for me, and I just have to tell whoever picks me up to take me there. No big deal, right, let’s just start hitchhiking in Central Asia? What could go wrong?

In retrospect, I probably could’ve just applied for the visa in Bishkek. But at the moment, I figured the most logical course of action was to ask for whoever was in charge at Kyzyl-Art, and see if we could figure this out. I find this guy sitting at his “office” in the burnt-out garage, drinking something (as we’ll find out, no one’s quite sure what it is), and try explaining what happened. I feel like giving myself some credit here, maybe it was the thin air, or the travel exhaustion, or the fact I was operating in my third language, but I was reasonably calm and collected as the commander told me to come back with him to the barracks. He then proceeds to genuinely beat the shit out of the recruit in charge of stamping passports, yelling about someone could be so stupid as to not realize that ‘Dushanbe’ could mean two things in a country which has a capital named, well, that.

So frightening abuse of military personnel aside, we all sit down around the table with my passport, and try to figure out what to do. An eraser can’t get rid of the stamp. Spit can’t rid of the stamp. I won’t let them use a knife to “scrape the ink off.” Finally, the recently-beaten recruit says he has an idea. He disappears for a bit, before coming back with a jug of some clear liquid. After a few minutes of literally scrubbing my passport, the stamp is blurred enough that they’re able to write something hastily over it. The commander then says that, if I have problems re-entering Tajikistan (SPOILERS: I do), I can tell them to call the Kyzyl-Art post, and they’ll explain everything.

One problem down, one to go.

Waiting for a truck or jeep or something to be heading north, the guards start asking me questions, where are you from, how old are you, stuff like that. However, upon learning that my birthday was yesterday, the commander jumps up, salutes, screams “ZODRUZ MOBARAK!” (Happy birthday), and hands me the jug of clear liquid. Now at this point, there’s a bit of confusion. The commander calls the liquid “vodka”, the recruits ask why he’s making me drink “benzin”. And after a few sips, and a massive urge to vomit that morning’s yogurt and shir-chai, I’m inclined to agree with the recruits, that shit was not made for consumption.

While I hate doing these, it’s time for a retrospective. I must’ve waited for about an hour or two at Kyzyl-Art for someone going north to show up. And, between chatting with the grunts on/off duty, playing Russian card games, and drinking utterly gut-wrenching mixtures of chai and “vodka”, I was genuinely enjoying myself. Yeah, I was worried as hell about how exactly I was getting into Kyrgyzstan, but that would be then, and this would be now.

Eventually, a fuel truck headed north did show up, and with the commander as an intermediary, I was able to negotiate my passage into Kyrgyzstan. Crossing into Kyrgyzstan itself would prove majorly uneventful, aside from some jokes about my last name, and references to me being a doppelganger of Peter Parker (while a common occurrence in Kyrgyzstan, a first for me overall), I was in a new country without too much hassle.

Time for the fun to start…