You know it’s going to be a good story when it starts with “so we accidentally drove into Taliban controlled regions of Afghanistan. Twice. Then another two times intentionally.”
We should probably back up and tell this one from the beginning.
A few weeks ago we were in Dushanbe, Tajikistan about to start the Pamir Highway. It is part of the original silk road, has incredible scenery, is highly remote and known to be more than a little punishing on anything less than a LandCruiser. It is the second highest road in the world peaking at 4655m and it was one of the parts of the rally we were most excited for.
By this stage our original convoy had broken up and we had started afresh with The Ladateers, Jonas and Torjus from Norway in a 1976 Lada. Hilarious blokes with a brilliant car; Lada’s are known to be extremely tough and it’s been said you can fix anything on it with a hammer. Shame that’s the only thing they forgot to pack.
The Lada needed some work done so although we needed to move on due to Jeremy’s ever looming flight we waited a day there because the boys are funny and we hooked up in the first place to convoy on the Pamir. That night something splendid happened. Josh and Caroline from the Sightseers and our original convoy rock up to the same hostel after being 3 days behind and somehow catching up!
There was a literal double take moment when they tapped Mitch on the shoulder who turned around, said hi, then turned back, then realised what just happened and much screaming and hugging ensued.
Anyway back to our little detour. We were initially planning to head east from Dushanbe straight onto the M41 (the Pamir) but word on the street was the view isn’t as good as looping south then re-joining it. Additionally, even though it’s far longer to go south, the roads east are so bad it will likely kill the car and take longer anyway. So south we went.
We stopped for lunch at a place called Qurgonteppa to decide if from there we continue south or start moving east. Now we have been using a combination of Maps.Me, an offline map/GPS app and physical maps we bought in Sydney.
Let’s not beat around the bush here, Maps.Me is absolute shit. If it doesn’t put you on a road that is actually for trams only (we went tram dodging with the Micra in Istanbul) or is one way or not yet built or just doesn’t actually exist (all of which have happened to us) it uses the shortest possible route which last year resulted in a team stranded in the desert for 36 hours drinking their own piss.
It also estimates your ETA as if you average 100 km/h no matter the road so it’s a running joke amongst ralliers to just double the time estimate.
As you can imagine, we take Maps.Me advice with a pinch of salt and as it said go east and the paper map didn’t even have a road going east whilst both said going all the way down south to a place called Panj then looping back up was a main road we went south. Big mistake.
There were many moments we could have listened to intuition and turned back. For instance, we overtook a 50 truck convoy of Russian soldiers going for the Afghani border. There was a lot of police checks. The view was rubbish and was said to be spectacular.
Eventually we get to a police check with a gate and stop (most checks we drive straight through as we’ve learnt unless there is a gate stopping us they don’t chase us and it’s a waste of time). There seems to be some mild confusion and they ask for permits and we show our GBAO permit as the Pamir is part of an independent region of Tajikistan and you need a special visa. Everything seems fine but one of the police wants to get in the car with us, so the Norwegians make some space; maybe he is knocking off and wants a lift home.
So he leads us to the local police station and says we need to do “registration”. By now it’s getting late and we need to have made more ground so we are anxious to leave. The car owners go inside and show paperwork whilst the other teammates waited with the cars. Mitch was quite wary not to hand over his passport but to show it to him it in his hands. There was just something about this cop that seemed dodgy and Mitch didn’t trust him. Unfortunately he got hold of Jonas’ passport and demanded everyone else’s but said once the other police from upstairs see it in 5 minutes we could go (I assume, there was a lot of mime involved but that was the gist).
Meanwhile people are crowding around our cars outside and before the non-owners come in with their passports we move the cars in front of the station where we can see them. Everything seemed a bit off.
We wait for an hour and two guys show up in business clothes and Mitch starts to get frustrated at their general lack of doing anything and get more and more assertive about needing our papers so we can continue on our way back north before dark (so much for 5 minutes). Eventually the secretary calls their neighbour, an English teacher, who explains we have broken the law coming into town without a permit and the police point to the corresponding offence in their remarkably small law book. Apparently we have to go to court in the morning and a judge will decide our fine or penalty. What a shambles.
Now everyone gets very angry because if the police had done their job and stopped us instead of guiding us into town we could have turned back hours ago. We continue to demand our passports and argue our point that they should never have let us in but the dodgy cop just seemed to enjoy himself and smirk the whole time. Mitch asked for him to point out where in the book it says he gets to keep our passports and the smirk goes, the book goes away and he tells us we can stay here overnight (in a cell), at the English teachers house or a hotel (which we couldn’t check into without our passports). We also learn that this area is apparently very dangerous with the Taliban nearby and the road north is just as dangerous.
We started to try a different tack and say ok, we’ll turn back cause now we think hours of back tracking is better than a run in with the Taliban and ask if there is any way we could pay the police the fine directly (read: bribe) and skip the whole court thing in the morning. Mr Dodgy says if he was the police chief he would, but the chief told him to send us to court. Mitch asked to speak to the chief but this was out of the question.
Now we want to leave even more, we are getting anxious about our lack of passports and Caroline suggests getting our embassies involved. Josh calls the Brits but didn’t realise we weren’t getting passports back and they just suggested getting a lawyer. Not ideal. Mitch tried the Australian embassy (in Russia) who initially didn’t want to help because he was traveling on an Italian passport but came around when they spoke to Jeremy and Jeremy conveyed that Mitch was a dual citizen.
They said they’d make a call and get back to us. By now the cops seem to be sweating over the embassy calls and the chief of police has shown up. The Australian embassy calls Mitch back and says there was nothing they could do; they are holding the passports for security but could Mitch put on the chief. He refused several times and looked very alarmed but Mitch eventually thrust the phone upon him. Now I don’t know what the embassy said but there was much was yelling and further sweating and then the chief disappeared after the call.
We felt like we were making progress so decided to play nice. We started to offer everyone cigarettes and tried to be as chatty as possible. Their first words were “Marlboro? Marlboro?”; finally proof that Marlboro Reds are still a currency in certain parts of the world.
The English teacher continued to translate our chat and it turned out the guys in business clothes were the Tajiki FBI/Secret Police and they were concerned we were trying to jump the border to join the Taliban.
The penny dropped for all of us. To a suspicious mind this looks very dodgy. Jeremy and Josh had already had trouble in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan because of their beards (they are illegal due to their association with extremists) and there were 5 different passport nationalities between the 6 of us. It looked like we had met on an online forum, been turned, and were going to fight the good fight.
The FBI asked why we had taken this route and we pulled out our maps and explained everyone said go south and this road looked the most major on the maps.
They said, “your map is wrong”.
“What do you mean?”, we asked.
“This road, it is not in Tajikistan, it is in Afghanistan. Over that bridge and through this section of road”, he motioned to the map, “you were in Afghanistan”.
Right. Suddenly we were all very keen to go back.
They also explained that overnight in Panj, you hear gunfights and that 4 police had been kidnapped by the Taliban recently. Makes sense why they wanted us to stay the night.
Meanwhile the English teacher tells us that from what he has overheard, if we wait long enough, he thinks we will get out of town with our passports tonight. The FBI tell us the same; apparently they determined we weren’t terrorists. Yay.
By now, 4 hours has passed and Mitch gets called in for a mono-e-mono with Mr Dodgy and the assistance of the translator. He was told that no-one else can come inside and the English teacher explained that none of this was ever to be told to anyone, ever. So keep it quiet yeah?
Apparently if I offer the police money, they will let us go with our passports. They took down our names and Mitch “assisted” by holding out the passports on the photo page but he really did it so he could then stash them next to him and not give them back. Several times again it was stressed that Mitch doesn’t tell anyone, even his friends outside and Mitch was even asked if he knew how to use computers or the internet. Not at all my friends.
Mitch is told this will be much quicker, easier and cheaper than going to court which would result in a fine of over $1000 US dollars. Mitch had a private conversation with the interpreter to find out exactly how little we could get away with paying and decided to offer $100 US ($16 each). The police officer accepted and Mitch said he had to go and get the money from the car. Mitch actually had cash on him but did it so he could take the passports out and lock them in the glovebox. The convoy saw Mitch walk out with the passports and tried to talk to him but, not wanting to risk the deal, he threw his hand up to silence them and just walked on without looking at anyone.
He stashed the passports, went back inside, and literally like in the movies, shook the cop’s hand with cash in his palm and it was done. The English teacher said the policeman wanted me to apologise to our group on his behalf because he wished we could have gone without a fine. The translator also said that the police officer said in private that they were having a feast on our cash tonight. The policeman also offered his house to stay tonight if we didn’t want to drive. What a scumbag. Mitch also gave the translator some money for his time, although he initially refused saying he was a friend and wasn’t helping for the money.
So we scrammed. We drove as far as we could until we were exhausted (turning east at Qurgonteppa like we should have in the first place) and stopped at this great looking hotel with lights, food still going at 11pm and live music.
Things got weird when we checked the rooms. There were used cigarettes in the ashtrays and bathtub, the beds weren’t made and there was a used condom sitting on top of the bin. Mitch was propositioned by a prostitute downstairs. Another penny dropped. We had checked into a brothel. We were tired. We stayed. It was a bad day.