I drove once before through the Aznob tunnel and, though I blogged about it then, I still feel the shere horror of the experience makes it worthy of another mention.
Albeit without the flames licking up around your ankles, the Aznob tunnel is the 3km mouth of hell. Semi built by the Iranians, the tunnel has been open for several years but it is still a very long way from completion. One narrow tunnel carries traffic in both directions and is also used to remove rubble generated by boring the second tunnel hat will ultimately run in parallel. Those piles of rubble extracted but not yet taken away are simply left as unlit obstacls in the obstacle course that is the carriageway.
The surface of the road is unmade and huge stretches are flooded with water,masking the po holes beneath. We crept along at a limp, still thunking against the rock more often than I'd like. We narrowly avoided the unmarked drill rig another heavy plant that appeared suddenly in the gloom, and held our collective breath each time a homicidal vehicle lurched from the darkness to swerve or overtake.
Two thirds of the way through the tunnel we realised why completion is taking so long. Indeed, since my previous visit over a year ao it scarcely seemed to have advanced at all. The construction crew has no equipment - at least not any that is fit for the job. We passes half a dozen men digging with shovels; a second team was breaking up rocks with pick axes.
The icing on the cake, however, was the small. group of men attempting to chane one of thetunnel's ew but desperately needed lightbulbs. In the absence of a step ladder they had parked a Chinese-made digger across the road,completely blocking the traffic. We switched off the engine so as to reduce the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning and watched transfixed as the used the digger's bucket to lift two men the 10ft or so to the ceiling, enabling them to reach the bare wires.
Tajikistan is not a wealthy country - it is thepoorest of the Central Asian states - but the Aznob tunnel is still no less a national disgrace and a danger to all who drive through it or work inside it. The technology required to complete the job properly is not complicated and, as Chinese road crews across the region have shown, when properly organied this kind of project can be completed safely, cost-effectively and to a high standard. There is absoluely no excuse for this mess.
Albeit without the flames licking up around your ankles, the Aznob tunnel is the 3km mouth of hell. Semi built by the Iranians, the tunnel has been open for several years but it is still a very long way from completion. One narrow tunnel carries traffic in both directions and is also used to remove rubble generated by boring the second tunnel hat will ultimately run in parallel. Those piles of rubble extracted but not yet taken away are simply left as unlit obstacls in the obstacle course that is the carriageway.
The surface of the road is unmade and huge stretches are flooded with water,masking the po holes beneath. We crept along at a limp, still thunking against the rock more often than I'd like. We narrowly avoided the unmarked drill rig another heavy plant that appeared suddenly in the gloom, and held our collective breath each time a homicidal vehicle lurched from the darkness to swerve or overtake.
Two thirds of the way through the tunnel we realised why completion is taking so long. Indeed, since my previous visit over a year ao it scarcely seemed to have advanced at all. The construction crew has no equipment - at least not any that is fit for the job. We passes half a dozen men digging with shovels; a second team was breaking up rocks with pick axes.
The icing on the cake, however, was the small. group of men attempting to chane one of thetunnel's ew but desperately needed lightbulbs. In the absence of a step ladder they had parked a Chinese-made digger across the road,completely blocking the traffic. We switched off the engine so as to reduce the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning and watched transfixed as the used the digger's bucket to lift two men the 10ft or so to the ceiling, enabling them to reach the bare wires.
Tajikistan is not a wealthy country - it is thepoorest of the Central Asian states - but the Aznob tunnel is still no less a national disgrace and a danger to all who drive through it or work inside it. The technology required to complete the job properly is not complicated and, as Chinese road crews across the region have shown, when properly organied this kind of project can be completed safely, cost-effectively and to a high standard. There is absoluely no excuse for this mess.
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