Photos

Silk Road travel from Toshkent to Kashgar:
After mastering the Anzob pass we arrived in the pleasant city of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. To the right you see our "Gostinitsa Dushanbe". It is a hotel in the good-old Soviet style, with a huge number of unqualified personnel who sit around watching TV. 4 people guarded the entrance but were not helpful. Most rooms stayed empty. Here we met other cyclists, English Dutch and Swiss, willing to travel in the Pamir.

In the center you see the monument of Sadriddin Aini (1878-1954), a Tajik intellectual engaged in writing, journalism, history. At the time of his birth Tajikistan was part of the Emirate of Bukhara. He helped to propagate the Russian Revolution in the Emirate, but also instilled a sense of Tajik nationalism that survived the Soviet Union. Some characters of his novels are immortalized to the left. (Gleaned from WIikipedia).