Greg and Mandy's Travels

Are you ready for a huge substitution game? A big coding puzzle?

OK, so:

B is really V

X is really H

H is really N

N (backwards) is really I

3 is really Z

P is really R

C is really S

Y is really U

W is really SH

BI is really Y

Got all of that? Good! Now you can read Cyrillic.

Don’t believe it? Let me prove it to you.

Start with an easy one. What do the Cyrillic words ‘mnhn mapket’ mean?

Mini market. Bet you got that one.

OK, a bit harder.

How about ‘catnh’, and ‘takcn’?

That would be satin and taxi. See – easy.

What about ‘cekc’?

Now a hard one.

What about ‘wifi’?

That would be wifi – obviously. Duh!

So today in the beautiful sunshine, we headed back up the second of the ranges that we slithered across two days ago amidst all the snow, and would you believe that there was absolutely no snow on the roads and they were completely dry. 

Came across a number of professional shepherds walking large herds of sheep down the mountain. Different to Australia as not all the sheep belong to the shepherd. Each family might only have a couple of sheep, and for a fee they entrust the sheep to the shepherd to take up the mountains in Summer. They buy them young and sell them fat at the end of the season as a source of income. Sometimes they even shut the car tunnels for hours to let the sheep walk through. 

The tunnel and road were built by the Chinese at a cost of $US1.7 billion, and of course that has to be paid back. As well as the monetary repayments, they now have rights to mine precious minerals such as tungsten in the mountains, they have been ‘handed back’ land near the Chinese border, and they own a coal mine in the mountains along with the coal in it. Hundreds of yellow Chinese coal trucks are plying the new road, and when they are not having accidents, they are hauling large loads of coal to China.

We traveled up through 21 small ‘lady’ tunnels designed to protect the road from landslides, to the long 5km tunnel under the top of the range, and then down to valley between the two ranges that we crossed on Wednesday. The roads were dry, there was no snow, and the jackknifed trucks had gone.

Once down, we took a excursion through a small side valley along a bumpy dirt road to Iskandarkul (Alexander the Great) lake. Beautiful colours and scenery.

Back on main road and back to the important three way intersection in the valley between the passes. One way to Dushanbe the capital, one road across the other range back to Khujand (the second biggest city), and the third down the valley to Panjakent (the third). After lunch, given that we’d been to the other two, we took the Panjakent road. 

There’s no Red Bull to be seen in Tajikistan, so our driver has been guzzling Green Gorilla instead. 

Once we hit Panjakent, we headed to the Rudaki history museum, named after the poet credited as first writing poetry in the Tajik language using Arabic script, and thereby opening up written language to the Tajiks. Best exhibit was the photo of the president opening the ‘Enterprise for the production of thirst quenching drinks’, commonly known as the vodka factory. 

Then it was off to the old Panjakent excavation site, where lots of digging, and restoration of the old fortress is being done. It is understood to be the remains of the 6th century town of Sogdiana.

A dinner of Pilaf – the traditional dish of the region.

Panjakent Plaza Hotel