Food and meals have been the main highlights of otherwise monotone days which leave us dreary and drained. In the beginning, kebabs are ubiquitous and on one long highway detour we choose a cafe (in a manner of speaking) where a haunch of lamb is hanging up, from which slivers are cut into small bits, to be speared for the grill with pieces of lamb liver, onion and fat.

That the chopping block has only rarely known the sweet caress of a clean sponge is something I ignore. In the kitchen, flames leap and roar out of a blackened stove pit. Atop it, the equally grizzled wok with oil sizzling in it doesn’t begin to quench the flames.
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After who knows how many days of mind-numbing, spirit-sapping driving, we are in Golmud, China. Three more days and another 1,000km to go to reach Lhasa. Behind us stretch hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers of drab and dreary Taklamakan Desert, through which we drove under a pall of dense, yellow-grey smog that lay thick from the near to the far horizon. We coughed and wheezed our way through it, eyes watering. We drove on and on, slept, awoke and it was always there. The culprits, coal-fired power plants, were easy to spot, smokestacks spewing black smoke.

In the 2,800km we have slogged since Kashgar, we had to go round thousands of trucks, rumbling, overloaded, toward the Kyrgyz or Kazak border. We have been on the Taklamakan Highway ( as I call it) pretty much the whole way, and for most of the way it’s been spanking new, gorgeously tarmac’d, multi-lane highway, bounded by baby blue railing on all sides to the point where if an exit were missed it might be another hundred kilometers before one could find a way off. It’s been a wearying, uninspiring, distressing time, as we imagine there must be something of interest or curiosity or charm or, dare I say, beauty to alleviate the drudgery that driving has become on this stretch of the trip. But there isn’t.
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Tajik women, if they wish to cover their head, do so with a floral scarf pulled low over their forehead and knotted behind their head, pirate style. The older women still wear long dresses with scoop necks bordered in sequins, thick socks and sandals. But the young women adore their tight jeans, their sexy tops, their barrettes and braided hair. So many here look of European ancestry, with fair skin, pale green/blue/hazel eyes, freckles and sharp chins.
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I met my match in Kyrgyzstan, as I got lip to glass with a beverage even I could not drink. It seems only yesterday I was riding an Akhal Teke horse in Ashgebad, yet we have crossed all the “stans” and tomorrow we enter China. It’s high time I sent out some wordshots (as opposed to snapshots), culled from the images swirling in my head. And before I forget, SEE BOTTOM OF THIS DISPATCH FOR A CONTEST!!!!

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We bump at 15mph along the stony road, a brown cliff rising steeply to our left, the great roiling mass of the Oxus (now called the Panj) following to our right.

The river’s turbulent slate-grey waters move in the opposite direction from us, and far more swiftly than we can.   We are in Tajikistan. If my pitching arm were any good, I could say we were a stone’s throw away from Afghanistan, which claims the other bank of the Oxus for its own.
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