BUZKASHI!!!!!

This is the story of our journey to Garm to see our first Buzkashi match. If you want to know what Buzkashi is, you'll have to read on. It's a longish tale, but I think it's also a good one and hope you enjoy...

(If you want to skip to the pictures, click the link below)

Garm Buzkashi 2010 JPGS

We set off from Dushanbe in the wee hours of Saturday morning - around 5:30am - with three of our friends. Garm is a small town to the east of Dushanbe. It's only around 115 miles away, but due to some of the road conditions, it takes 4-5 hours to get there.

Fortunately, the first 80 miles or so are on good roads, although we did get a little nervous when we passed through an area still covered in over 2 feet of snow early in our trip. Garm is at a much higher elevation than Dushanbe and, since we were camping, that much snow could be difficult. As it turned out, there was no snow on the ground once we got to Garm.

We took our first rest break just after we left the good roads,

and had a hilarious moment when one of our friend's dogs, (a Maltese about the size of a football), decided to attack a passing goat. She literally scared the pee out of the goat before we could retrieve her. Luckily, the goat's owner also found the situation funny.

The next 30 miles or so took us about 2.5 hours. The roads were sometimes little more than mud pits and we were all thoroughly tossed about. There were steep cliffs, and bridges that looked barely passable.

We also passed the ongoing construction for the Tajik government's huge project - a hydroelectric dam that will flood most of the area we drove through.

This project has also been a reason for bleeding an already poor population of what money they have through a campaign to have everyone buy shares in the project. Both the idea that the investment is voluntary and that shareholders will ever see a return are laughable - but enough politics.The scenery we passed through was amazing - which made it a little sad to think of it all being flooded. I think the dreary weather even added the the dramatic affect. There were times, driving past the red, muddy rivers and desolate cliffs, that it felt as if we could have been on Mars.

Much of the time, we were traveling along flat plateaus dropping off on one side into river-carved canyons, with snowy mountains rising up on the other side.

We could see the signs of the enormous landslides that plague Tajikistan and sometimes had to drive around or over them. Then, without warning, the horrendous roads gave way to a smooth paved road that took us straight into Garm.

I know the sign looks like it says 'FAPM', but that's how they write 'Garm' in Tajiki.

We stopped in town for a quick lunch and then made our way out to the Buzkashi match. Getting there was no simple task. The directions took us out of town and then into the riverbed. After passing through deep mud and boggy areas and fording a branch of the river, we came to the impromptu parking lot.

We all paused for a bit to examine the variety of colorful rocks that have been washed down and deposited by the river over time.

Our next challenge was crossing a swaying wooden footbridge that was shockingly close to the rushing water- quite thrilling

(you can watch this very short video, no sound is needed, it's only me commenting on how bouncy the bridge is).

Then we picked our way over rocks, fishing baskets,

and mudslides along the river's edge to get to the plateau overlooking the part of the riverbank where the match was held.

Buzkashi is an ancient game that dates back to the time of Ghengis Khan. It's played on horseback and there's no limit to the number of players, and no real boundaries. The idea is that each player tries to drag a goat carcass from the starting point to a goal on the other end of the playing field.

Whenever someone has the goat, all the other players try to beat him with their horsewhips until he drops the goat.

It's a very tough sport - rugby players have nothing on this - and very dangerous. We saw some nasty spills, but fortunately no players - and no horses, were hurt.

The game reminds me of American football in the sense that the players often get bogged down in one spot trying to gain control of the goat.

Then every so often, a player will break out with the goat and charge towards the goal in a burst of excitement. It was a lot of fun to watch, and of course there are many more pictures in my Picasa album.

Of course, foreigners always get a lot of stares here, especially outside of Dushanbe and especially women. But there was this one creepy kid at the match who stared at Stephanie for easily a half hour. It wasn't just that he was staring, it was the way he was doing it. He had his shoulders hunched up and was sort of glaring balefully at us. He was still staring when we headed back toward the car - but that wasn't the last we saw of him...

So we made our way back along the river, across the scary footbridge,

through the mud and back into town, where we warmed up with a hot meal before setting out in search of a camp site. It took us a little while, but finally we found a suitable spot on a small ledge overlooking the river valley. It was really a great location. You can't see it so well in the picture, but the ledge we were on was a good 50 feet high, with great views.

As we were setting up camp, the clouds broke up a bit in the west and we were all surprised to see that behind what we thought were the high mountains, was a ridge of even higher ones.

It was really hard to comprehend the size of them.

We had picked up some wood in town, but building a fire turned out to be a Herculean task. We had kindling and everything, but the wood did not want to light. We ended up scouring the relatively bare area for twigs and even pulling sticks out of a fence to try to keep the nascent flames going long enough for the wood to catch. Stephanie generously donated her magazine to the cause as well. I amazed even myself with my lung capacity as I repeatedly blew on the flames for almost an hour trying to keep it hot. The other guys helped as well when my hands went numb from lack of oxygen and at one point we even resorted to using a tire pump like a bellows.

It was puzzling as there was plenty of heat and the wood seemed to be catching, but the fire remained recalcitrant and refused to burn. Finally we gave up and retired to the tent for some snacks and card games. Suddenly, there was a burst of light outside - the fire spontaneously combusted. It was hilarious after all the effort we put in.

A short time later, we were all tired and decided to tuck in. I was quite warm in my sleeping bag and ended up giving my feet warmers to Stephanie because they were cooking my feet. Stephanie had to put on about 7 layers before she was warm enough to sleep. I had a bit of a hard time drifting off because of this annoying noise that we thought was a distant car alarm, but turned out to be the mating calls of some of the local fauna. I slept pretty well, but was awakened in the night by the fire coming back to life and raging for a few minutes despite intermittant rain.

We had been hoping the weather would clear for the second day of Buzkashi, I really would have liked to see more of those higher mountains, but were not so lucky. As we were getting up, it started raining harder than ever. By the time we finished breaking camp we were so cold and wet we decided to head back to Dushanbe rather than stand in the rain for more Buzkashi.

On the way home, we had several interesting experiences. An old man gave us what one of our friends told us was a 'death curse' when we passed by. That was strange enough, but then we saw the creepy kid from the day before standing on the side of the road! This was some distance from Garm - probably a good 15 miles - but it was definitely him. After the old man cursing us, the whole thing felt distinctly horror movie-ish. We laughed about it, but I'd be lying if the laughter wasn't at least a little uneasy.

It was amazing to see how quickly conditions change on the roads in this part of the country. There were places with new landslides

or where more of the road had collapsed away, but for the most part it was pretty much the same as on the way there. One small problem was trying to find a gas station. We saw this one, managed by a young girl, but getting gas from plastic bottles didn't seem like the best idea.

We stopped for lunch at a little roadside place and had some very good plov and shirbo (a local soup).

We ate inside because it was warmer, but it was too dim for good pictures. Before heading on we braved a rather revolting outhouse perched precariously on a cliff. I didn't realize how precarious it was until I looked down through the hole in the floor and saw the sheer drop down to the floor of the canyon.

The inside was really abysmal. I couldn't bring myself to take a picture of it.

Continuing on, we enjoyed some more great scenery,

passing the occasional livestock jam, and finally made it back to the good roads. Just before heading back the snowy area, we got some gas.

This boy delivered it with a funnel, but at least it wasn't stored in plastic bottles.

At one point we had to slow down because the road had split in half and was starting to sink on one side, but other than that it was uneventful.

As we neared Dushanbe, it was neat to see the snow give way to bright green fields.

It was too dark to appreciate this when we left and I can't really explain why there would be so much snow so close to Dushanbe and none at the higher eleveations of Garm.

Finally, we drove through the east gate of Dushanbe and made our way home for a relaxing afternoon.

All in all, it was a great adventure and I really enjoyed by first Buzkashi. This is the sort of thing I joined the Foreign Service for.

If you've read this far, I'll reward you by placing the link for pictures here as well so you don't have to scroll all the way back up!

Garm Buzkashi 2010 JPGS