Lake Turumtaikul, 4200m, Tajikistan
Ann fells on her bicycle on a rocky trail at 4200m around 1.30pm near Lake Turumtaikul. I’m riding a few hundred meters behind her and see her lying on the ground holding her ankle. The foot is hurting and she is absolutely unable to ride her bike or walk at all. I put a bandage around her ankle and raise the foot on a pile of panniers.
There is no phone signal up on the mountain to call for help. In fact there hasn’t been a phone signal for two days. Additionally we haven’t seen any people in the area either. Our map shows a road 5 km away leading down to the M41, the Pamir Highway, around 500m lower in altitude. I pitch a tent, unpack two sleeping bags and make her as comfortable as I can. I give her noodles to eat dry, two cans of fish, water and an eBook. It’s likely that she needed to stay there for quite a while.
I take a copy of her passport, copy of her insurance card and a map. I also write down the coordinates of the location and save the place on my GPS. I leave my panniers to the spot and take only the necessities (down jacket, dry noodles, a can of fish and water) with me to be light and fast. I’m not taking sleeping gear as I’m hopeful of finding a house to sleep in for the night.
I follow the trail down the valley for a while until it disappears at the first river crossing. I realize that is could be smart to make a GPS track here onwards as the route up to her location is not obvious. Hills, rocks and frozen swamp here and there. By the help of GPS I eventually find the road down to the road M41, reaching it 2.5 hours and 15km after leaving the camp. The road road down from the mountain is in horrible condition and very steep. The last kilometer has been destroyed by a landslide as well, so the access to a bridge across a river is blocked. Based on the tracks leading into a 10m wide river the previous vehicles on the road have been trucks.
There is yet no phone signal. I hide my bike, eat a can of fish and sit to wait for a car. It starts snowing lightly, which makes me worried if any vehicle can ride the nasty road soon. After 15 minutes car comes and I get a lift to the next valley 10km away where is phone signal. I call to Ann’s insurance company to ask for help. They get back to me an hour later asking the coordinates of Ann for a helicopter evacuation the following morning. 37.476401 72.589499. I feel relieved until they call me again and let me know that Ann’s insurance policy is valid only up to 3600m. ‘Try to get local help.’
While I’m walking to the village near by to ask for help a Russian motor home drives by and stops. Apparently the reflectors on my clothes made them wonder what the hell a tourist does alone at 3700m in the Pamirs in the darkness. I explain the situation and thereafter I’m having a team of 4 helping to get Ann evacuated. Could I be more lucky?
We ride to the village motel where they eventually manage to find someone, who knows someone, who has a Lada Niva. Five minutes later the car on the way to motel changes to Mitsubishi Pajero and then the car eventually arriving is a Honda CRV. We make it 50m on the bad gravel road with the Honda until it cannot get further. We need a Soviet truck to get up there the drivers tells me.
The following 5 hours are blurry in my mind now a month after the event. As far as I can tell we ride hours in the mountains from village to village trying to find a truck and a driver. A lot of knocking doors in the middle of the night. Endless number of phone calls. Updates to me from the front seat, where Dmitry (my hero, thank you thousand times again!) does the talking in Russian, are in the lines of:
‘Now we found a truck and the owners brother knows probably how to drive it’. ‘The truck wasn’t there, but there might be one at a gas station 30km away.’
Eventually we stop to wait in the darkness for something. Dmitry informs me that there is a truck on its way to our location. Great! I check our location on GPS, we are 80km from the camp. After awhile a retired Russian army jeep arrives. It’s quite like a truck they say, and it is. Fair enough. We agree the price and then set off at 3am.
Soon after hitting the bad gravel road I come to realization that I’m probably in the only type of car in the Pamirs which could make it to the pass and we are having an extremely experienced driver too. We get across a 50cm deep rocky river in easy and climbed now partly icy, steep and rocky double track slowly but gradually. Luckily there is no snow on the ground. Andrey tells me that he has been in off-road vehicles on off-road tracks before but hasn’t experienced anything like this ride before. That’s how rough it is.
In the retired Soviet jeep
As it’s pitch black the GPS track I made comes to great value. Without it finding the way to the camp could have been impossible at night. We finally reach Ann’s tent at 6am, 15 hours after I left to find help. She is in good condition considering the circumstances, had read good one and half books while waiting, experienced a fierce hail storm and got some sleep. Apparently she had stayed warm enough too despite the temperature of -10C.
We pack the bike and all the gear into the jeep and head down following the GPS trail again. When we reach the near by village in sunrise, Dmitry informs me that the driver has been in drugs the whole trip. If it made him to drive that well, I don’t mind at all, I say.
The machines of mirracle
We pack all our gear to the motor home of the Russians, who take us to the city of Khorog 170km away. Ann’s foot is examined and X-rayed in the local hospital in the same evening. ‘Fractured’ is the first diagnose.
Packing up the mobile home for the ride to Khorog
In the evening of 17th of October, when I finally hit the sack at midnight in Khorog, I have been awake for 40 hours straight. The following night the Pamir mountains get their first proper snowfall of the winter. The timing of the evacuation was spot on.
Two days later, after getting consultation from various doctors in Sweden and Finland, Ann decides to fly back to Sweden. Therefore we book seats to a jeep to the nearest international airport 600km away in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. Ironically we still get to see the high Pamir plateau, but now through the darkened windows of a Toyota Land Cruiser. The views are incredible, but we are not enjoying it. It wasn’t suppose to go like this.
At the Tajik-Kyrgyz border
People say that on a bike tour every day is different and it’s impossible to know how the next week, day or hour would be like. That seem to be very true.
Ann flies to Sweden and I ride into China.
#Tajikistan #PamirMountains #biketouring #Evacuation #PamirHighway
