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A Journey to the Source of the OxusThe Oxus is an extraordinary river. It rises in one of the world’s most inaccessible mountain ranges and two thousand miles later empties itself into the freshwater Aral Sea. It may not have always done so: there are hints in the ancient accounts of Alexander’s conquests that in the third century BC it flowed into the Caspian. The idea of a huge river that never reached a saltwater sea fascinated Victorian explorers, all the more because the river defined the southern boundary of the Russian Empire. Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana is (amongst other things) an account of an unsuccessful quest to see this river as well as being one of the best travel books ever written.
The Expedition A Journey to the Source of the Oxus is an opportunity to travel to the source of this river in the Small Pamirs. Very few Europeans have ever seen it. Under Zahir Shah, few people were given permission to travel there and during the jihad against the Russians no Europeans took the opportunity. A few adventurers have been there in the 1990s, but not many: less than ten in 2001, according to the Khirghiz who live up there. In 2004 Travel Afghanistan became the first organisation ever to take tourists there, following in the footsteps of Marco Polo and Lord Curzon. We had a fleet of 28 horses and donkeys.
There is debate about the actual source of the Oxus, for which there are six candidates. The source of the biggest volume of water is the lake Syr Kul in the Great Pamir – which some locals still refer to as Lake Victoria, the name given to it by a British army officer in 1838 – is on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Lord Curzon won the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1895 for his discovery of the highest source in an ice cave near the Chinese border in the Small Pamir. Both are found at the end of the thin finger of Afghan territory known as the Wakhan Corridor, an extraordinary mountain area with several 7,000 metre peaks.
The inhabitants of the lower parts of the Wakhan are Ishmaelis and we stayed in the guest houses run by the village shahs, or kings, whose leader is the Aga Khan. In the Pamirs themselves the inhabitants are Khyrghiz. They are still nomadic transhumance pastoralists and until about fifty years ago undertook a huge annual migration from the Wakhan to Khyrghizstan in what was then the Soviet Union.
Travel in the Pamirs is not easy. In 2002 it took me a month to assemble everything necessary to get there. We needed a reliable 4WD vehicle, permission from the central and local government, tents, horses and local guides. But it is worth it, not just for the journey itself, but the first sight of Small Pamir from the top of a 16,000 foot pass, herds of Marco Polo sheep and staying in yurts – a felt tent that looks rather like an igloo – at the Khyrghiz nomads’ summer camp.
[Insert picture from Grossart CD: Caption ‘The Small Pamir. Pamir means a long grassy valley at high altitude. Marco Polo wrote of this one: ‘Here is the best pasturage in the world: a lean beast grows fat in ten days.’]
After flying to Faisabad, the expedition drives through the Hindu Kush and into the Wakhan Corridor itself. The road is passable to Boroghil (see map) and the journey takes about three days. The scenery is spectacular and the corridor well named – a narrow fertile strip no more than a mile wide and walled in with massive mountains. The village for the second night’s stop is welcome because it has a very hot spring over which a small bathhouse has been built.
From Boroghil there are two passes leading to the Small Pamir. The main one is the Marpej Pass which leads straight through a cleft to the east of Boroghil. The second, the Gorombez Pass, is slightly longer and has magnificent rocky scenery alternating with green valleys. This adds one day to the journey time. Our 2004 Expedition went into the Pamir by the Marpej and came out on the Gorombez.
Once over the pass, the Small Pamir is a beautiful grassy valley. Marco Polo’s was the first description by a Westerner and deserves quoting at length.
‘this is said to be the highest place in the world. And when the traveller is in this high place, he finds a plain between two mountains, with a lake from which flows a very fine river. Here is the best pasturage in the world; for a lean beast grows fat here in ten days. Wild game of every sort abounds. There are great quantities of wild sheep of huge size. Their horns grow to as much as six palms in length and are never less than three or four.’
What is striking about this is its accuracy. Polo is describing Lake Chaqmartin, the object of the 2004 Expedition, a beautiful turquoise lake fed by the river originating at Curzon’s source. The wild sheep are now known to science as Ovis Poli – Marco Polo Sheep – with extraordinary and extravagantly spiral horns. In 2004 we saw a herd of these sheep whose horns are one of the ultimate trophies of big game hunters. (The record length is over five feet. When a survey has established the size of the current population, the locals wish to re-establish a sustainable hunting programme.) Other wildlife in the area include snow leopard, ibex and markhor.
But the most famous and spectacular animal is the Marco Polo sheep. According to Fiona Gall, who runs Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal in Kabul and who visited this summer, by getting up early in the morning one can see the Marco Polo sheep (Ovis Poli) coming to or from their grazing grounds. These huge sheep with their extravagantly spiral horns used to be one of the world’s most coveted big game trophies, but now please use only binoculars and cameras, at least until a sustainable progamme of licensed hunting is put in place.
An excellent report on the surprisingly positive state of the wildlife in the Wakhan by Anthony Fitzherbert can be found at
http://postconflict.unep.ch/publications/WCR.pdfThe pasturage is the summer grazing grounds of the Khyrghiz who live in yurts at Bozai Gumbad. They are ruled by a terrific character called Apandi (or sometimes Effendi) Bey[1]. He is extremely rich and told us that he owned 1500 sheep and 500 yaks and numerous horses and Bactrian camels (Bactrian camels are, oddly enough, a rare sight in Afghanistan). As Ismailis the women are not veiled and are beautifully dressed.
Our guide, Haji, reproached Apandi Bey for not using his wealth to perform the Haj, a duty incumbent on all Muslims who can afford it. But with disarming honesty he said that his opium habit prevented it. He smoked opium for 6 days and ten slept it off for another six. He claimed to consume 45 to 50 kilos of opium a year, which cost him 120 sheep. (I calculated that – at Kabul prices – this worked out at $250 per kilo, which seems remarkably cheap.)
This is almost certainly one of the last places left on earth which modernity has not yet reached and where one can travel as Thesiger did, in a lost, still-pristine world inhabited by people whose pattern of life has not changed for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years.
Read the Spectator article 'Where no birds sing'
[1] Effendi Bey is strictly a tautology ‘Mister Mister’