Guesthouses in the Wakhan Corridor

All along the Wakhan Corridor the Norwegian government has funded small guesthouses to aid the nascent tourism industry and give NGO workers somewhere safe and comfortable to stay. The guesthouses are, by western standards, rather basic but they provide a welcome change from camping and the chance to get a hot meal.

Each guesthouse is of more or less the same design: there is a large, square living room with a skylight and bright rugs laid out on the floor; 2-3 dormitory rooms with single beds or a pile of rugs and carpets; and a simple washroom with a squat toilet and a tank of water that may or may not be heated from below by a fire. In every guesthouse we visited we were the only guests, curiosities that attracted an assortment of local residents as the evening drew in.

Guesthouses are an excellent source of revenue for their owners: guests pay $25 per person for bed and an evening meal, which is a huge sum of money by local standards. The hosts are genial  and exceptionally helpful, chattering away at length even when you share not a word in common. On the guesthouse wall you'll inevitably find a picture or two of your smiling host with a local dignitary or receiving an award for tourism promotion or local wildlife conservation.

One of the key attractions of the guesthouses is the food. Standards differ, as you might expect, but fresh bread and hot tea are always plentiful and much appreciated after a long day on difficult roads. Those hosts with a culinary flare (or rather their wives) may also serve up tasty potato or mutton soup, copious pilau rice, dal and yoghurt. There is little variety in the type of food (ingredients are hard to come by in the Wakhan), but it is wholesome and reflects the local diet.

Sarhad e Broghil: The end of the road

Sarhad e Broghil is quite literally the end of the road: the rock-strewn track peters out amongst this small cluster of mud houses and from there the only way onwards is on horseback or on foot. The buildings are well camouflaged against the hillsides and a heavy rainfall would probably wash them away entirely. Small children with weather-beaten faces wander here and there; I see a small girl towing a bottle on a string behind her as a toy.

In Sarhad the harvest is mostly in - it gets colder here earlier than further down the valley and the snow is already falling on the passes. A creamy yellow stubble colours the fields, accented occasionally with hand-tied ears of grain in orderly piles.

From my perch on the hill I can see two families threshing their crops. In each case half a dozen small donkeys are roped side by side and marched round in circles, crushing the grain beneath their feet. It is time consuming but seemingly effective; even the smallest child can keep the donkey team in check, leaving other people to fork more straw into the threshing circle.

Into the Wakhan Corridor

The Wakhan Corridor seems to begin in earnest after leaving the village of Qazideh. The gravel track that serves as a road mirrors each twist and turn of the Oxus and as the evening draws on, houses on the Tajik border twinkle with light. Afghanistan is cloaked in darkness.

Every few miles the landscape of the corridor changes, often dramatically. The whim of the rives dictates where is fertile and where is barren, and where rocks, sand and morrain fall. We drove through boulder-strewn plains, rocky riverbeds interlaced with streams, dustbowls, and patchworks of lush, irrigated fields. Even in a 4x4 we could move at little more than walking pace and so there was ample time to take in the views.

September is harvest time in the Wakhan. The women's shawls and dresses are a passionate riot of colour against the golden grain and burnt brown stubble in the fields. In the distance, framing each scene, are barren grey slopes with scattered snow tips: the peaks of the Afghan Pamir.

Driving the so-called road is draining; the surface is incredibly poor and often non-existent. In the course of a morning we waded through two rivers, checking their depths and holding our breath that the water would not flood the car or carry us away downstream. In one area, a short distance past Qala e Panj, a torrent of water has swept away the road entirely and you must pay a $15-20 toll (a truly exhorbitant sum, especially by local standards) to a local farmer to cross his deeply rutted field. Once out of the mud you must then take your chances on the steep gravel ramp hacked in to the base of a decidedly unstable cliff.

Progress along the corridor is slow: 10mph is a respectable pace for the few people passing this way. You are unlikely to see another vehicle from one day to the next: the other road users come by donkey or on foot.
We stopped for lunch in an idyllic location close to the confluence of the Panj and Wakhan rivers. The valley there is wide and flat. Animals grazed on the grass and I ate my own weight in pistachio nuts whilst soaking up the sense of serenity.

Playing Doctors and Nurses

My brother is the doctor in the family. The thought of me doing anything more than applying plasters and handing around paracetamol would probably make him laugh - I go green at the sight of blood and, if it is my own blood, have been known to pass out entirely. Needs must, however, and as the person with the First Aid certificate and the largest First Aid kit, I have been designated team doctor.

Caring for our trekkers is a relatively straightforward affair: they can communicate their symptoms and know the advantages (and limitations) of living on a diet of Immodium and electrolyte solution. They keep themselves relatively clean and drink plenty of water. My greatest challenge, therefore, was with the seven porters and guide.

One tiny, spartanly equipped medical clinic covers the whole of the Wakahn Corridor. The nearest hospital is at least two days drive away in Faizabad. Maternal mortality is the highest in the world, life expectancy at birth is just 44 years, and most people have never set eyes on a qualified doctor. Anyone who carries a bag of davai (medicine), therefore, is not only an extreme curiosity but also up there with the gods.

The first two sets of symptoms presented to me on the trip were, not surprisingly, upset stomachs and headaches. These resulted almost certainly from a) drinking dirty water and b) getting dehydrated. It was rather a catch 22 situation but I felt the latter to be more pressing, particularly given that even in the villages the water tends to come straight from the river. Having heard on the grape vine the miracles of davai, the porters in question were keen to simply pop a pill and wait for the effects. They seemed rather disappointed when I explained they needed to increase their water intake by a couple of litres a day. It was only when I offered a couple of paracetamol along with the water that they cheered up.

Of more concern to me were the infected cuts. Nobody had explained to these men the link between dirt and infections, so simple cuts and grazes quickly turn in to abscesses. Not only is this painful but here, where there are no antibiotics, it can be life-threatening.

I started by making each porter clean his own cut thoroughly with boiled water and then antiseptic, and became increasingly fierce as they cleaned around the wound but avoided the bit that actually hurt. In one case I actually got out the latex gloves and cleaned the wound myself as unless the dirt was removed it wasn't going to get any better.

Once cleaned I applied Savlon spray or a topical antibiotic cream to the wound. The non-comprehension of the importance of cleanliness was reinforced when one porter went to use his finger, black with dirt, to rub in the cream. I explained as best I could why this was a bad idea, but I think the lesson will take a while to learn.

To keep the newly clean cuts clean, I dug out giant plasters and surgical tape. They're both fantastic inventions. The porters could also show their plasters off proudly - proof they had indeed seen the doctor. Where appropriate I made sure that each man had sufficient sterile wipes and replacement plasters for the days to come. There was no point undoing the good work they'd done so far. In one case where the wound had already swollen nastily - the one in fact I'd cleaned myself - I dug out a course of broad spectrum antibiotics and explained in a hotch-potch of languages how often he needed to take them. Had we been in reach of a proper hospital it'd probably have been better to lance the wound, give him an injection of antibiotics and stick him on a drip for a few days, but there are no such luxuries here. You can only use what you have to hand.

Sometimes I become infuriated when I travel. The lack of access to basic healthcare and education always chafe most of all. It costs next to nothing to teach people basic things to help them keep healthy: boil dirty water before drinking it; wash your hands after you've been to the toilet; clean any cuts and keep them clean and dry if you want them to heal. It's not rocket science but if no one ever tells you whey you get an upset stomach, a headache or a skin infection, you can't prevent it happening next time. In parts of the world where the doctors don't reach, prevention is undoubtedly your best chance of survival.

Noshaq

I am truly in the back of beyond. As I write this evening I am three days walk from the nearest track (calling it a road would be overly generous) and most of the way to Noshaq, Afghanistan's highest mountain. The peak, some 7600m tall if I recall correctly, straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and is similarly inaccessible from both countries. The call of the wild has a certain appeal, however, and so here I am.

Trekking in this terrain is hard. September is a good itime to visit as the rivers are no longer in spate and the first snow is yet to fall, but still the barely visible path is steep and incredibly loose under foot. I half stumble and half crawl across hundreds of yards of last year's avalanches and wonder quite what I'm doing here. You need confidence and good balance in equal measure but whenever I run low on blood sugar, I fear I am short on both. The bruises on my knees certainly attest to that and I have twice ended up in the river. Wet boots are somewhat less than pleasurable and I am at the very limit of what my body can physically manage. I am not sure this is exactly fun.

The one positive thing to have come out of the trek so far is that I have seen a Lammergeier, a bearded vulture with a wingspan 9' long. It is one of the largest birds on earth and yet manages to soar and circle over the valley quite effortlessly. Bill spotted this particular bird not long after the start of the trek, adopted a most comfortable bird watching position (see below!) and the bird fortunately hung around long enough for us all to get a good view through the binoculars.

A Wakhi Family and a Wakhi Home

It is commonly understood that men and women live largely separately in homes across Afghanistan. A western woman may, on occasions, be allowed in both areas of the house as she is seen almost as a third sex, but even this is relatively rare. It was therefore with some surprise that our entire trekking party, both men and women, were invited into the home of Malang and his extended family in Qazideh, a village a few miles east of Ishkashim at the western end of Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor.

We were ushered from the street through a wooden door and into the courtyard of the family's mud-wall compound. The grandmother, a wrinkled lady of almost 80, was minding two of her grandchildren in the corner, and a straggly chicken pecked at the dirt floor. We were happy to await our host here whilst he arranged his belongings inside, but instead were promptly summoned through a low-lintelled doorway and into the pitch-black corridor beyond.

Inside everything was black. This was not just from a lack of light but also from a dense, pervasive soot that coated every surface. The floor had been swept clean - this was a house maintained with pride - but it was if the floor, walls and ceiling had first been painted with a black paint.

The corridor soon opened out into a large, square kitchen and this is where the family gathered. The cooking fire was buried in a pit a foot below the floor and the smoke it emitted rose up through the room and escaped through a square hole in the roof. The same hole also let in the room's only light. A kettle boiled over the fire and within a few minutes we were served hot black tea and hunks torn from a large, round flat-bread.

The darkness and the smoke from the fire made it difficult to see how far the room stretched or if indeed there was another room beyond it. I think probably there was not, in which case this kitchen was the core living space for more than a dozen people. Everyone was dark-skinned from the soot and bleary-eyed from the smoke but the whole family had turned out to greet the visitors. I couldn't count the number of children, nor identify who they belonged to: babies were passed from arm to arm and small children bounced off the seating area and central block that served as a kitchen unit.

Seeing this home and this family was an eye-opener. At first glance they had nothing: a soot-blackened mud hut home with neither electric nor running water. There were few material possessions and it would not have looked out of place in a reconstruction of a Viking or Anglo-Saxon village. The longer I sat there, however, the more I understood that they had everything they needed. They were, by local standards, relatively wealthy. The house was large enough for the extended family to live together, meaning that a number of incomes contributed to its upkeep and the feeding of the family. The house was warm, dry and, although inevitably sooty and dusty, otherwise clean. The children were everybody's responsibility, and so were the guests. The family were proud of what they had, and I felt humbled.

Brief thoughts on photography in the Wakhan

In some countries you feel self-conscious about photographing local people and either have to do it surreptitiously or not at all. Stopping to ask permission to take a photo, although polite, often breaks the moment - people look different when they know they're being watched or have been told to "look natural".

The Wakhan Corridor, fortunately, is a place where one can photograph quite freely. Subjects seem perpetually keen to pose, even volunteering themselves and their families on the street, and this includes both men and women of all ages. All you need to do after taking the photo is to show the image on the camera screen - more often than not this is met with peals of laughter as the person realises how serious they look.We were never once asked for baksheesh (a tip) for taking a photo - the most anyone wants is a copy of the picture next time you pass their way.

There is, however, another challenge for photographers in the area, and this is dust. Dust storms appear from nowhere in the bottom of the valley and the camera seems to be caked in dirt the moment you retrieve it from the bag. Whether the dust is on the lens or inside the camera it is infuriating, so its necessary to keep cleaning your kit with a cloth, brush or can of air throughout the day. Looking back at my pictures there are a number with dust spots. Of course this can be rectified in Photoshop but it's irritating nonetheless.