I left the events of last night until today's blog half out of laziness and the other half was also due to laziness. We had gone to bed early because there was no entertainment venues in the village, so all seven of us were tucked up in our sleeping bags (plural, the convoy hasn't got that cosy yet) at 8.30pm. Wanger was too happy to be sleeping in between the two Stephens, and had cheerily named it a "Stephen sandwich" unaware how ill a Stephen sandwich can make you. I woke up to a loud thud and fits of laughter from the others in the room. Apparently he had a fever, couldn't sleep and suddenly felt very ill, but was trapped in his sleeping bag. The zip, which was apparently a very reliable zip, had chosen this time to take its revenge. He wriggled to free himself, cupped his hands over his mouth, and dove for the door out the room. Unfortunately the dive for the door turned into an expertly executed swan dive face first onto the floor. As he dove, the sick finally arrived forming a weird human sprinkler over Stephen and Miles. Although the swan dive was perfectly formed and the vomit spraying was a somewhat alternative flourish on an otherwise traditional routine, he failed to land in a gymnastic stance so the judges will have deducted points. This is the point I had woken up to, Wanger was sprinting to the door to escape his shame while Stephen and Miles compared damage, I won't go into the specifics but the coverage was impressive. Wanger was throwing up half naked in the freezing cold outside when a helpful local showed up to speed up the process by shouting angrily in Tajik and leaning on his car's horn. Of course we could hear the commotion outside from inside the "hotel" which made the situation so much more hilarious. Chris was in the corner of the room dying of laughter which finally woke Adam up, Adam was amazed all this had happened within an hour of going to bed. While comparisons to a certain scene from the exorcist were being lobbed around, Wanger returned to try/give up tidying the mess. Needless to say no one slept particularly well for the rest of the night, partly because of how cold it was inside the drafty room and partly out of fear of being the next one to be ill.

 

Luckily no one else was ill over night so the diagnosis of food poisoning was changed to altitude sickness. Chocolate is the best substance for staving off the effects of altitude sickness, or at least that's what I told myself while I bought a mouldy snickers for breakfast from the "hotel's" "restaurant" and washed it down with flat fizzy peach juice. The new and improved fuel pump seemed to be working nicely, but the engine was feeling less confident than its usual cocky self. I assumed Tajik Lewis Hamilton had messed up the gears by being so rough with our tender little car and kept driving. Shortly after leaving the larger town we had been originally aiming for last night, the check engine light was flashing and we lost power. This breaking down business isn't all that fun but at least we choose a scenic location to do it in, the bottom of valley surrounded by huge mountains. Luckily Sharkey was nearby to lend a hand instead of sitting scratching our heads until a local came by. The engine was misfiring on one cylinder, which would explain the lack of engine confidence, so the spark plugs were wobbled around. We restarted the engine and found the warning light had turned off, the problem was in no way fixed but the light was gone so who cares we can run on 2 cylinders anyway. Its a good thing we broke down because this is when we noticed the gaping hole in the bottom of the Yaris' fuel tank. The drip was dripping too fast for to patch it while the tank was full. There was nothing they could do but drive until they ran out of petrol while we limped along on 2/3rds of the engine.

 

The main problem with this plan of ours was the massive mountains lying between us and the nearest city in Kyrgyzstan, unfortunately we were going to be climbing a couple. The car struggled up the small hills, so imagine the look on our face when we came to the climb leading to the highest point on the Pamir Highway. That's right, we were going to climb over the second highest highway with a fully loaded car running on 666cc - well we were until gravity had another plan. The lead up to the 4665m pass was a long downhill stretch and downhill we could do, downhill gravity was on our side. I floored it down the hill hoping to get as much speed as possible before the certain uphill failure. The slope was well over a kilometer long and had a gradient that would make a mountain goat wet it's hypothetical pants, so I'm not too surprised we didn't quite make it to the top. The speed I had gathered on the downhill was quickly lost on the way uphill. We slowed to 10mph and were in first gear when I started winding across the road to lessen the gradient. As we approached the magical hill climbing speed of 3mph I knew things were only going to end one way. I pulled over as we started to approach a negative speed and accepted the reality of dying on a mountain in Tajikistan. Chris wasn't going to go so easily and cracked open his survival food. Luckily we had an army of fit and strong people to help push, well we were down by two people as Miles was also feeling the altitude but the others came walking down the side of the mountain to help. As there were no cars coming in the foreseeable future the plan was to push our car up the hill, so we set about unloading the heaviest equipment. The altitude we were at the air was thin so it was hard enough just walking up the hill never mind pushing it, but we didn't really have a choice in the matter. Adam jumped in the driver's seat as he is the lightest while everyone else pushed, needless to say we didn't manage to push it far up the hill before ending in a panting heap. The lighter car made it easily to the top of the hill, well it gave it a good attempt before dying 100m up the road. While Adam was attempting to drive up the mountain I was reluctantly beginning to load up with bags for my climb up the mountain side, I brought a car so I wouldn't have to walk, a 4x4 showed up to save the day. I waved it down with my friendliest wave and didn't even have to say anything as if they knew the score, every summer they probably find a few people standing on the side of this mountain clutching all their belongings with their car dying up ahead. They didn't even say anything while they bundled all our things into the already full car. I wasn't too sure if they were trying to help or just blatantly stealing my things until they reorganised passengers so I could fit in too. We, the ten Tajiks and I, had no trouble climbing the mountain in our huge 4x4 and soon we were approaching the now completely stuck Peugeot. Of course this was not a problem for my silent Tajik friend, he simply stopped to attach a tow rope and then kept going till we reached the top. That is how we reached the highest pass on the Pamir Highway in style.

 

At the top of the pass with a lack of oxygen we sat around discussing our achievement, or semi-achievement in our case, while Stephen coaxed some life into the middle cylinder. We set off before the others incase there was another hill climb where we would be forced into a slow crawl, and easily sped down the other side of the mountain. We flew along the road through amazing scenery until we were ridiculously far ahead and were confident there were no huge mountain climbs approaching. I pulled over near a large and perfectly blue lake to wait for the others to catch up. The rest of the convoy were exactly one chicken tikka survival meal behind us, which was convenient as I was tucking into a chicken tikka survival meal at the time. When they finally caught up we sped alongside the Chinese border to the Kyrgyzstan border, and came across a new and exiting river crossing which we got through with minimal effort.

 

Exiting Tajikistan was easy, the only things slowing us down were polish bikers heading the other way. Once they had left it was just a case of handing all our passports over to a man in a shed, there was a distinct lack of sheds at the Uzbek/Tajik border so I wad glad to see they had returned at the exit. After the first man had checked our passports we were sent round the corner to another shed one at a time. Inside the shed they asked for a few slips of paper, including both custom declarations and one of the $3 documents we had gotten in no-man's land - so one of them was an official piece of paperwork, but which doctor/office worker was the real deal? None of the slips could have been very important as they tossed all of mine in a cardboard box without even looking, but when Chris couldn't find his customs declaration they suddenly cared about the paperwork. When Chris came out of the shed the Tajik-shedman followed saying that he had to go back to Tajikistan since wasn't going to stamp his passport without the pointless peice of paper. Needless to say he quickly stamped the hell out of Chris' passport after he paid the $20 "fine".

 

There is roughly 30km of no-man's land between the Tajikistan border and the Kyrgyzstan border to stop the guards shooting each other out of boredom. The problem with having a 30km road through mountainous no-man's land is no one wants to take responsibility, or risk being shot at, for maintaining it. The "road" was one of the worst we had come across with sharp rocks, mud, and potholes that could eat a car - which lead to our first flat tyre of the rally, the van tyres had earned their price tag to get us this far. In the car we have a jack, a  spare tyre and a tyre iron, we managed to find two of them and borrow the third from the convoy pit crew. With our old tyre loosely detached and our new tyre firmly reattached we crossed another river, which was oddly red coloured, and reach the Kyrgyz border crossing. At the border crossing we gave all our passports to a stranger from another rally team and waited outside the building. From outside we could hear manic stamping of passports like the man had not seen a passport in years and was making the most of it by stamping every space available. Shortly after the stamping sound had stopped the passports returned with a disappointing number of stamps inside. Instead of searching the cars the border guards signed a few and released us into their country with boots full of weapons and narcotics.

 

The rumours spread by the polish biker suggested that the roads in Kyrgyzstan were perfect tarmac, what they didn't mention was the sporadic coverage of huge rocks. The lion boys found the single rock on an otherwise spotless road and they found it hard. We were driving behind them minding our own business when they got some air over a rock. After stopping to check all important parts of the car, we set back on the road and noticed their massively flat tyre. Since two people were ill we decided to push on to Osh, even if we were driving in the dark. Chris was driving as we lead the convoy along a dark road, facing a long line of oncoming traffic with their high-beams on as usual. Every time you drive by  someone you lose vision for a short while, needless to say its not too safe to drive in the dark round these countries. It was going well until we reached a slow moving truck approaching us with its high beams on, the moment the vision returned to our eyes we both spotted the family of donkeys chilling in the middle of our lane. Needless to say we both shat ourselves while Chris swerved into the oncoming traffic with his hand on the horn and managed to avoid a donkeyish death. Both eyes were fixed on donkey watch for the rest of the drive until we arrived into Osh for the night.