Pamir Highway in Tajikistan

Sheer limestone on your right; a gravelly drop down into a glacier-blue river valley to your left. There’s barely room for a bike to pass at this point – but that’s all right. You’ll be the only ones on this road for the next 100km or so. The most traffic you’ll see is black-robed herders on horseback, corralling their horned cattle to their summer pasture below. You’ve left a Silk Road city in your rear-view mirror and have the highest town in Tajikistan in your sights. Welcome to the Pamir Highway.

Traveling the Pamir Highway (or – for the unromantics – the M41) is one of the highest road trips on earth. Over three weeks and 1,250km, you’ll bump from Tajikistan’s capital of Dushanbe to Osh, the oldest city in Kyrgyzstan, on a road with Silk Road origins. Even better: it’s via a gauntlet of lunar mountain passes, furious river rapids, hot springs and geysers.

This isn’t the sort of region you want to admire from afar. You’ll scramble across mountain passes in a four-wheel drive, hike the alpine meadows, stay with the communities that tough it out at 3,650m, and learn about the history of the Pamiri people who live here. Along the Shuraba Pass (2,267m) – the border region between Tajikistan and Afghanistan – people still tell stories of the shepherds, pilgrims, traders, explorers and soldiers who have traversed these roads for a few millennia.

Read our Pamir Highway guide to find out more.

Your guide will also be your support. The Pamir Highway can be gruelling stuff. You’ll spend much of the two weeks on unmade mountain roads, bumping along at high altitude. But you’ll also soon realise that the lack of tourist infrastructure is a blessing.

En route, you’ll stay in guest houses and homestays run by local families. In Tajikistan’s Eastern Pamirs, you’ll find the Kyrgyz people who still live semi-nomadic lives, moving down to graze cattle in yurt-dotted pastures in the summer and retreating to the mountain villages in the take-no-prisoners winters. Or you might meet the hardy residents who live in Murghab – a town guarded by gleaming 6,000m-plus mountain peaks.

The chance to get to know another culture is a two-way street. After all, taking on the full Pamir Highway is still the privilege of the few who can take on the challenges – and costs – of traveling this isolated branch of the Silk Road. The communities you travel through will be as interested in meeting you as you are in meeting them.

Osh lies at the other end of the Pamir Highway – an ancient trader’s city and the oldest in Kyrgyzstan. Silk was spun here in the 8th century; you can still shop for sheepskin hats and kurta yoghurt balls in the Great Silk Road Bazaar, as nomads and traders did 3,000 years ago.

The wild world outside the cities heaves with history, too. Lenin Peak (7,134m) looms over the Pamir Highway much as the dictator’s legacy loomed over Tajikistan during Soviet rule. The Wakhan Valley is shared between Tajikistan and Afghanistan – a buffer zone that the British and Russian Empires wrestled over during the 19th-century Great Game. Before that, it was a route for traders, nomads and caravans for a good few millennia.

The seasons dictate the best time to travel the Pamir Highway. Life lived along the highway is hard, thanks to short-lived cool summers and long, hard winters. You can only travel the Pamir Highway in the summer months (June to August), when snow, ice and ice melt don’t block the road. Most of our trips run in June – and often only offer one departure date a year.