Dushanbe

We're getting ready to head off from Dushanbe tomorrow to Penjikent, near the Uzbek border and the Fan Mountains. Its been a good restful few days here. Dushanbe is an attractive city, with lots of pastel coloured neo-classical Russian buildings and tree-lined streets, if a little dull and more than a little sleepy. The Tajik parliament building still has its Christmas tree up.

We headed out to see an ancient fort yesterday and for a walk (and swim, if you're brave about cold water like I am...) in the hills today, but haven't otherwise been up to much other than dragging ourselves round the museums and enjoying having BBC World in our room. Our most exciting discovery was a second hand book stall with English books for a pound (in the underpass outside TsUM, if anyone ever reads this for travel advice). Nothing remotely literary unfortunately but we are now well stocked with fantasy, courtroom drama and aga sagas. This is a big relief as we were running low of all three genres.

Dushanbe is dominated by an army of NGO workers. Every tenth car is a brand new white Land Crusiser or Nissan Patrol with a big aerial and a mysterious acronym and logo. Not sure how much they acheive from driving round Dushanbe in fancy cars other than making hotel rooms and decent restaurants way overpriced compared to other cities in the region. Of the 6 other tables in the Georgian restaurant we ate in last night, 3 were occupied by Americans. Gemma had 3 flies in her wine, but my beer was unblemished by insect life.

The trip here was a bit of a nightmare. The road from Istaravshan to here crosses two passes, both of which are being repaired by Chinese crews. The second has a long tunnel that was closed whilst they were working on it, so we sat in the dull town of Aini waiting for it to re-open from 2 until 6. We bumped into some other British travellers there who are driving from the UK to Australia in their Land Rover and were kind enough to make us tea. You can read about their trip at http://www.jollyfollies.com/. The tunnel itself was awful: Really long, dark, flooded, incredibly hot, dusty and filled with construction equipment. We've no idea how much of this we'll need to endure tomorrow. Our best guess is that we need to do the lot again, probably including the agonizing wait until the road crew finishes and the road opens. At least, that's what we're assuming, which handily also means there is no point getting up too early to set off.