The pictures that follow are from a recent trip to Tajikistan, which has to rank as one of my all-time favorite travel adventures. Tajikistan is something of an outlier in Central Asia. Tajik, unlike the other Central Asian languages is not related to Turkish, but to Persian. The economic situation here is also far more dire than in any other Central Asian state. Soviet industrialization only reached so far: To date, only two cities in Tajikistan, Dushanbe and Khorog, have running water and electricity and even these services are intermittent.

In addition to visiting the capital Dushanbe, my friend Brian, who is the other Fulbright student in Kazakhstan, and I paid a visit to our friend Kylea, who has the distinction of being Tajikistan's first-ever Fulbright student. As an anthropologist studying maternal mortality, Kylea lives in the remote (and socially conservative) district of Gorno-Badakstan. During Soviet times, Gorno-Badakstan gained fame as one of the Soviet Union's most remote and inaccessible regions. Few people speak Russian and the region is only accessible by something that would be a stretch to even call a road. Both foreigners and locals need a special pass to visit the region since it has long served a gateway for heroin to pass from Afghanistan and on up into Europe. In Khalai Khumb, Kylea's village, we were so close to Afghanistan border that we could see women in burkas walking on the other side of the river that divides the Afghan-Tajik border.

In the picture above, you can see Afghanistan behind me. Kylea and I had sent Brian on a beer run (women are not supposed to purchase or drink alcohol), and then all three of us clambered high up into the hills to where no one could see us to have a beer, looking at Afghanistan. Drinking a beer, looking down at the Afghan-Tajik border, now that's something I won't forget!