Day 4 – Saturday 3rd August – Bishkek (0km)

By mid morning it had become clear that there was not much that could be done about Marc’s visa situation – he had contacted the closest Spanish embassy, which was in Astana, Kazakhstan, a whopping 1640km from Bishkek. He was willing to get a flight there and back provided they could issue him a passport in time, but the guy on the other end of the line just lectured him for leaving Spain without checking the expiry date on the passport and told him that a new passport would have to be issued in Spain and sent there, which would take at the very least 12 days and that only immediate thing they did was issue a letter of safe passage in case of emergency but he made it clear that a) this was not an emergency and b) that document was only valid to allow a journey back to Spain.

With all the (legal) options studied, we decided that the only thing to do was to modify the route so that we could spend as much time as possible riding together in Kyrgyzstan and then I would go to the Pamir Highway on my own. The original plan was to see part of Kyrgyzstan first, then ride the Pamir mountains in Tajikistan, go to Uzbekistan to see Samarcand and Bukhara, go back to Tajikistan to do a different route on the Pamir Mountains and visit the rest of Kyrgyzstan.

Instead of that, we would do all of Kyrgyzstan first and then go separate ways – I would go into Tajikistan and, starting from the Karakul lake, ride the Wakhan Valley on the border with Afghanistan heading south, then go north on the Bartang Valley back to Karakul lake and then south again on the proper Pamir Highway, the M41 road. After that , I would ride to Uzbekistan and meet Marc in Samarkand, as it was possible to enter visa-free into Uzbekistan. From there, we would ride back to Kyrgyzstan via the Fergana valley in the north of the country.

I would spend 9 or 10 days without Marc, but that did not necessarily mean that I would be riding alone – we had met a British guy in the hotel who was going to do same kind of spiral route in Tajikistan I was planning to do, but he needed a few more days of rest to recover from a foot injury, which meant that we could possibly meet in Sary-Tash near the Tajik border and ride together from there, which was excellent news.