The Tajik Adventure Begins

As our taxi turns onto Zahran St, we hear a rooster crow, and through our yawns we smile at the thought of chooks cooped up here in Amman’s apartment filled 6th Circle. It is 4 am, and barely twelve hours since our flights to Dushanbe were hurriedly booked online, and the three of us and our backpacks are on our way to Queen Alia Airport clutching booking forms and passports.

Flying from Jordan to Tajikistan is not as straightforward as you might at first imagine. Take a look on a map and you will see that the most direct route would have you fly over Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan- airspace most airline carriers are keen to avoid. So yes, we're leaving the immediate Levantine neighbourhood, but we're not going too far away.

Anyway, it is for this reason that our Kevin Kostner endorsed Turkish Airlines flights have us rerouted to fly via Istanbul, where we will spend 10 hours before a connecting flight will take us back east over Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbeckistan and into Tajikistan.

We arrive at Istanbul Airport having had little sleep, but with a grand plan to bust out of the airport as soon as possible to wander the streets of this gateway city. These plans are foiled by the colour of the boys passports, and though I make it through customs, I am soon heading up the escallators to another queue to have my passoprt stamped again and leave Turkey without ever really having entered it.

International airports are always buzzing with dozens nationalities departing and arriving and chattering away in languages that in concrete corridors blur into an echoey humm, but Istanbul, straddling east and west, has a particular quality that is hard to define. Women at the departure gate for Tehran succumb to the veil, whilst the chador clad arrivals look ominously out of place in passing through the brightly lit aisles of the duty free shops. A group of men wearing large white towels held up by a makeshift belt adjust each other’s outfits before passing through security checks.

We pass the time drinking exorbitantly priced beers at the airport bar, watching the parade of strangely dressed folks come and go until it is time to go to our gate.

On our flight, cabin crew communicate in a mixture of Turkish and English, struggling with the Tajiks on board, whose mixture of Persian and Russian leads to confusion. The westerners on board are a bizarre bunch, including a group of noisy English construction workers, a pair of thrill seeking American Airlines flight attendants, a young fair haired guy carrying a strange looking instrument and what we guess to be a portable amplifier, and us, cargo pant poised for adventure.

When we touchdown in Tajikistan the local time is 4am, close to 24 hours from the time we piled into the taxi in Amman and began this journey. The air is crisp and cold as we exit the airport and the taxi driver who approaches us knows our hotel, and although we know that the fee he is asking is way in excess of local prices, we happily hand over the American dollars and set off into the mist of the Dushanbe morning, bound for warm beds and much needed sleep.