Stay Classy, Alichur

On our final day in the Pamirs, we met with disaster: our car broke down. Now, you might be asking yourself, what's the big deal? Just hire another car. If you did ask yourself that, you have never been to Alichur.


Alichur is about halfway between Khorog and Mugrab on the Pamir Highway. In other words, its in the middle of nowhere. When it started to become apparent that our car might not be fixed that day (and we couldn't wait around for it to be fixed, because my visa ran out the following day), we began to ask around about other transport. I was told by one man that we had best wait for out driver to fix the van, because cars don’t generally stop in Alichur, and the village itself had no vehicles in working order.

Downtown Alichur.

Rather than sit around and bemoan our lack of transport, we decided to take a little hike around the Pamirs. The Pamir Region of Tajikistan as also known by the locals as the “Roof of the World.” Alichur’s elevation is around 4000m, and supposedly the plain surrounding it is one of the most fertile in the Pamirs, but it still looked rather barren to us. The entire Pamir region is extremely poor, and Alichur seemed to be no exception. One of the men explained to us that the reason the village didn’t have electricity is that years ago someone had stolen all the copper wire to sell for scrap. Most of the men go to Moscow to work – in fact, almost every man we talked to had just come back from or was just leaving for Russia. Ever the capitalists, after hiking up one of the hills outside of town we contemplated how Alichur could boost its economy. We began by brainstorming their natural resources, but only got as far as rocks and mountains. Other than mountain tourism and stone masonry, we were at a loss for how Alichur could market itself in the 21st Century.


Rocks and Mountains.


On the Roof of the World!

Despite their isolation, the people in Alichur were amazingly kind and welcoming. While they told us they see about one group of tourists a day pass through during the summer, we were told by one man that we were the first Russophone tourists they had ever met, so we were a big hit around town. As I sat around assessing the progress being made on our car, I was approached by the man who we would call The Boss, as it fast became clear that all decisions in Alichur had to pass by him. And with his stylish aviators and dapper sports coat, Alichur could have no finer boss man.
Me and The Boss.

Later my eye was caught by the whimsical fashion choices of another man about town. He seemed to be the village hipster, and thus we dubbed him the Pamipster. While in retrospect it seems so obvious, we didn’t learn until later that evening that The Boss was the Pamipster’s father.


Driver Maksin and the Pamipster

Later in the afternoon, with there being no sign that the van would be fixed any time soon, the Pamipster and Maksin (a guy with a car) volunteered to take us to Murghab, where we could hop a shared van out of the country. After 30 minutes or so tinkering with their car and coaxing it into motion (including pushing it down a hill to get the engine started), the Pamipster and friend rolled by to pick us up and we said our good-byes to the wonderful people of Alichur.

Upon arriving in Murghab and finding us a suitably dodgy hotel, the Pamipster and Maksin went straight for the nearest store, returning with a bottle of vodka. We could think of no better ending to our day in Alichur.


Only in a former Soviet republic could buckwheat count as a chaser.