A HITCHHIKER ON THE ROOF RACK?
I’ve joked about it previously, but now we’ve actually done it! Not long after turning off the roughly paved Pamir Highway for the route to the Wakhan Valley via the Khargush Pass, we spotted a walker ahead of us.
“Oh look, a hitchhiker”, said Sylwia. “No one would be hitchhiking here!”, I replied. My immediate response was in part informed by my reading of Lonely Planet, which strongly recommends against attempting to hitchhike through the Pamirs given the very long wait you could be in for. We weren’t even on the Pamir Highway - we’d departed it for a more remote route and to top it off it was mid-October, which is after the end of the main season for visitors to this region. The odds of a hitchhiker catching a ride on this route were pretty slim indeed, yet there he was, and there we were too.
The chap’s name is Sacha and he’s from Germany. After a bit of a chat I learned this maverick gentleman has walked solo all over the world, including through remote and risky parts of Africa. Sacha travels so light as to carry neither a tent nor a sleeping bag! He was fed by guards at the corrupt military checkpoint I described in my previous article (they’re better known for taking your lunch rather than giving you it!) and he expressed his hope of being offered lodgings at the Khargush Pass military checkpoint that we were heading for… good luck with that I thought!
He also hoped to hitch a ride with us. I showed him that with the kids in the back there was literally no room at all to spare. “No worries, I’ll just hop up on the roof rack,” he offered. (Hey, why not, it’s a Rhino Rack Pioneer Tray after all!)
Ordinarily I wouldn’t allow this – there are important roof weight limits to respect, which we were already pushing and which are even more important to respect when off-road. But in his circumstances, I made a rare exception – for a short distance.
We took him up to the top of a pass to save him a climb and reduce his distance from the Khargush Pass. The large military post there strictly does not take lodgers… but equally, he would have made it there late in the day – would they turn away someone not really equipped to survive a minus 10 degree night in a remote location?
If this bloke could survive on his own in Africa’s Sudan, then I’ve no doubt he managed to do likewise in the Pamirs… so long as he didn’t encounter a Pamir snow leopard after we left him – a hungry one of those would make a meal of a lone hitchhiker. (Just kidding!)