Mountain Passes
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Final Mile View from the top MOUNTAIN PASSES BY ZAND B. MARTIN nowdrifts and sandbags wrap Passes come in succession and mark kilometers away, Tajikistan 20, and prefab huts at the head of the our story’s chapters. Our travel, powered this narrow corridor, often closed from Spass. Two soldiers step out onto by noodles, apricots, and Snickers — by heavy snow, provides the only access to the pitted concrete to halt us, the light human stubbornness — describes the the eight million Uzbekistan citizens oil on their Kalashnikovs glinting rare true shape of the land. You feel each who live beyond. Embarrassed by mountain sun. An oil drum set out of the undulation of the plain and understand the attack, the government has since wind emits a dull glow and occasional the shape of hills and the cruelty of fortified the road where it plunges into pop. The uniformed boys behind the stacked, barren ranges. Gaps appear, the mountain. sandbags keep looking to the fire, paths are run through, and trails are The soldiers are familiar. Up close, longing to return to warmth. A chipped haphazardly upgraded from horse tracks after making eye contact, you realize thermos of black tea is visible through to highway. These are the punctuation they are very young. They look nervous the rebar-clad window of the nearest points of our story, sketched in the with a gun in their hands. They do not hut. It sits on a turquoise table, steam terrain. see cyclists coming this way very often, wafting into union with the cold draft This point is Kamchik Pass. Ten especially not in winter. But from the open door. We have never years ago, Islamic Movement of smiles come easily. been here, but this pass, like those that Uzbekistan fighters descended As they check came before and those that will follow, from the adjacent peaks and our is familiar. closed the pass, cutting Our journey is a story of ascension off all roads to the along a thin line, bounding across the valley beyond. basins and mountain ranges of Central Kyrgyzstan Asia. Extremes dominate: we lay down is eight in green orchards near Tashkent, then crossed the snowline in the morning and the last turn for Angren in the afternoon. We have been climbing ever since — a run anchored on one end by this high point, and on its arc showcasing the ecosystems that shift with altitude. 30 ADVENTURE CYCLIST M AY 2016 passports and rummage with interest in Nationalities, dreamed up the idea They live on the pass for weeks our panniers, we ask if they are Uzbek, of dividing conquered peoples to at a time and feel its moods. We pass a naïve question as we try to piece better integrate them into the whole. through, hurtling past with dreams of together the ethnic puzzle of Central When the USSR was dissolved, overheated Intourist hotels, concrete Asia. “Nyet. Uzbekistani,” they answer. the jigsaw borders closed and and grim, that meet immediate needs They are trans-ethnic, nationalist, not families were separated by the now- but fade quickly. The rarified air and Uzbek or Tajik or Turkic, but simply piercing imaginary lines, fortified cold sunshine of a pass in winter will citizen soldiers of Uzbekistan. in bureaucracy. Today, 2,267-meter remain when much else withdraws into The pass is the cyclist’s summit, Kamchik Pass is the only way to reach the landscape. and it informs our journey. We are the Ferghana Valley from the capital On the far side of the tunnel, white not seeking to stand atop peaks but without going through Tajikistan. mountains stack one upon the next are content to travel among the high That morning, we wake on hard, to the horizon and we ride down the places of the world. The cyclist follows dusty boards decorated with straw. A canyon to the fertile plains of the the land’s contours. These moments fire crackles in a scrap-welded stove, Ferghana Valley. To our right, a tiny stretch across a continent in the and the men file in for breakfast. Atash sliver of Tajik territory comes into view, ranges radiating north from various has been stepping over us since 4:00 walled against the Uzbek land that collisions and mark our progress. Alps, am, gathering vegetables and butter completely surrounds it. The enclave Carpathian, Pontic, Caucasus, Tien from the larder we slept in. This crew of Sarvak holds only 150 people, and Shan, Altai — the tentpoles of the world. lives in a crumbling barracks below there are many like it. As chai, naan, When the Bolsheviks reclaimed the pass and spends the day in orange and shashlyk populate bright geometric Turkestan after the revolution, they vests shoveling gravel into yawning tables from Tashkent to Namangan, we split the region into separate republics potholes. They sit in silence, cutting are told again and again, “This is how to dampen pan-Turkic sentiment. Each book-thick slices from a three-kilo it is.” Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) was built block of butter and passing them into Out of the mountains, bazaars around an ethnicity: Turcoman, Uzbek, stubbled mouths with crusty bread and advertising Snickers bars begin to Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Tajik. Internal borders Nescafé. The night before, they had populate the crossroads, and heavy were fluid, and people paid little urged us to stay with them, saying the irrigation appears in the gorgeous ripple attention to the new administrative snow would only get worse as we moved of moving water. Local legend places the units or Soviet-prescribed identities. higher and evening set in, yet somehow first cultivation of apples, apricots, and Stalin, when he was Commissar of they continued shoveling into the almonds here in the valley, and it was swirling twilight. We sit on cots around the mythical stories of the horses of the a rippling hot woodstove looking at Ferghana that first drew the Chinese cell phone pictures of wives, children, empire out of its cradle. We feel as if we and parents. I show them a photo of are entering another country, greener my partner, who they assure me must and nestled between the sharp ranges of be Tajik, despite a last name like the Tien Shan and Pamir-Alai. Behind O’Neil. us, far up among the peaks, we can see the high tide traces of the great Russian and Soviet empires, and our story. Zand B. Martin is an explorer, teacher, and writer. His first bike trip, Silk Road in Winter, took him from Istanbul to Kazakhstan through occasionally unfortunate weather. You can read more about his travels at zandmartin.com. ANDREW CERRONA ADVENTURECYCLING.ORG 31.