The Tajikistan Pamirs are an incredibly remote part of the world. To get there you either need to drive for 16 hours (sometimes 20) from Dushanbe (Tajikistan's capital city), on a road that makes a milkshake seem tame or you can take a tiny plane that doesn’t quite get up above 6000m cliff faces. Despite the horror stories, the flight was worth it. Looking out the window to the south, the Hindu Kush mountain range of Afghanistan was clearly visible and at times too close!

After notably fuelling the car in Khorog for our 600km journey, we took off South towards the Wakhan Valley. This fertile valley has been inhabited and used as a Silk road trade route for centuries and is littered with archaeological markers. Age old petroglyphs, 3rd century BC Forts, Buddhist stupas and hermit caves, Islamic mausoleums, and burnt out army tanks document the valley’s colourful history.

This valley straddles the Tajiki-Afghani border and looking right across the Pyanj river is Afghanistan and the magnificent Hindu Kush. Famously known as the Wakhan Corridor, it was divvied up as a “no-mans land” by Britain and Russia during the Great Game era.

Today, it is a border heavily guarded for obvious reasons including drug trafficking. The Tajiki side of the road is maintained but at points little more than a steep bumpy mountain track (I hope the footage doesn’t make you too seasick!).

The local people are mountain farmers who get around in 4wd jeeps and constantly breaking down trucks. The means of living is poor and economic programs such as tourism home stays in the summer have been set up to help subsidise income. In winter, the temperature here can plummet to –40 degrees.

When living amongst it, the most striking feature of the valley is the local warmth and friendliness (even at the military checkpoints). Because of the years of trade and movement, it is difficult to recognise the ancestory of the people’s faces, the looks and features are diverse from Persian, Asian, Greek and Hindu. I added a couple of pictures of the shy but photogenic kids at Belunkul to give you the idea. To travel to this place you will need a special GBAO military permit on your Tajikistan visa. Its probably also worth noting that as we travelled further south east, towards the Tajik/Afghan/China border we had to get permission from the KGB.

Originally posted on Teacup site, my video postcard can be viewed here:

http://teacup.net.au/roadtrip-through-western-pamirs-tajikistan/

Repinted from Travellers Teacup blog by Citt Williams

Art by Arpitam 

An undercurrent and thought provoking keynote from Rop Gonggrijp who opened the annual Berlin hackers event, Chaos Computer Club in a sold-out Congress Center 27/12/10

‘…Looking at TODAY

As we enter uncharted terrain, we are the first generation in a long
time to see our leaders in a state of more or less complete
helplessness. Most of today’s politicians realize that nobody in their
ministry or any of their expensive consultants can tell them what is
going on anymore. They have a steering wheel in their hands without a
clue what – if anything – it is connected to. Meanwhile the brakes are
all worn out and the windy road at the bottom of the hill approaches.
Politics is becoming more and more the act of looking at least
slightly relaxed while silently praying the accident will happen
sometime after your term is up.

Now of course I am not being completely fair. The fact that
politicians are generally helpless in terms of public policy doesn’t
mean to say I think they are stupid. They do have a vague sense of
what might be coming and they’re acting accordingly. To judge their
efficiency take a good look at the remaining public funds and public
infrastructure and see who owns it in 5 years time.

Our leaders are reassuring us that the ship will certainly survive the
growing storm. But on closer inspection they are either quietly
pocketing the silverware or discreetly making their way to the
lifeboats.

[ citt: interestingly read this @climateprogress post on "abandon earth" rhetorics  http://bit.ly/fNG3nD ]

Even politicians that are the exception, ones that “get it” and that
want to help get us out of this mess are increasingly
indistinguishable from those that just pretend. We will have to learn
to navigate a world in which every imaginable aspect of being genuine
or sincere has 10.000 spindoctors working on how to transplant it to
the fake turds that run things.

Now this all sounds really smug. Like we, the hackers, the geeks,
somehow have all the answers. We don’t. But we do have some important
parts.

For one we understand the extent to which complexity can be our enemy.
We’ve optimized our privatized world to get that last 2%
profitability. And we’re already in a situation where everything we
need comes just-in-time from China, assuming that we’ll need exactly
the same things today as we needed this time last year. Everything is
interconnected and if one thing fails the whole system goes down. The
winter chaos that has broken out all over northern Europe is just
another sign of this lack of slack.

We also live in a world that increasingly has different pockets of
reality, different narratives. In that context, I think we can all see
that our narrative is gaining importance.

At the same time Apple, Google, Facebook and the more geographically
challenged traditional governments will try to make all of humanity
enter their remaining secrets, they’ll try to make attribution of
every bit on the internet a part of the switch to IPv6, they’ll
further lock us out of our own hardware and they’ll eventually attempt
to kill privacy and anonymity altogether.

We still have to tell most of the people out there, but privacy is not
in fact brought about by some magic combination on the intentionally
confusing privacy radio button page on Facebook. It does come from,
among other things, code some of us have already written and code that
we still need to write: we need many things by yesterday. And we need
to properly security-audit the tools we build, even if that means we
can’t put in new features as quickly.

THE FUTURE

As for the future, I stand by our basic story in “We lost the war”:
it’s going to be a mess. I’ve just calmed down a lot when I decided
for myself that this is not only bad news. Let’s face it: the current
situation was never sustainable anyway. And people, both in rich and
in poor countries, are not very happy now. Just remember the massive
loads of ant-depressants apparently needed to keep us going. The
decline of the Roman Empire was probably a very interesting period to
live in and for most inhabitants life simply went on, with or without
Rome.

OK, so the world is going to be a mess for a bit… You are maybe asking
yourself: “What do I do with this knowledge?”. First of all, John
Stewart nailed it when he recently said “we live in difficult times,
not end times.” The future is not about finding solitude and a farm on
a hill, it’s not about guns and ammo. But it is about having working
trust relationships with the most varied group of people you can find.
And it is about imagining beyond today and picking up a wide range of
skills. It’s about positioning yourself such that you have some
flexibility…”   Full speech here

And for those of you who got this far through the post… .. some interesting words from media and digital culture theorist Greg Smith

“This is the ground-zero moment for DIY citizenship and there is definitely a wealth of opportunity available for individuals that are able to capitalize on this leadership vacuum. The tech-savvy and fiercely imaginative are charged with making sense of big (civic) data, assessing and re-imagining crumbling infrastructure, building prototypes, finding business models and inviting themselves into the free-for-all of policy-making. To quote Adam Greenfield’s “Elements of Networked Urbanism”, we need to shift from being “consumers to constituents” – who would have thought an ethics of interaction design could be the rallying cry for a generation?

Member for

6 years 15 weeks