Fann Mountains 1: Seven Lakes

 

After a comically serious land border crossing from Uzbekistan, I enter western Tajikistan’s main town, Panjakent, to find…a far different circumstance than I left in Uzbekistan.  The humorless passport control officer and the scrutiny from the troupe of headscarved matrons with whom I stood in line should have clued me in.  In Tajikistan, I will not be inconspicuous.

Panjakent bears the hallmarks of a post-Soviet bust town, with a slightly scoured out aspect.  There’s a lively bazaar down the town’s main street selling melons, grapes, tomatoes, pumpkins—all manner of produce.  There’s also a UNESCO site in town, Ancient Panjakent, which is a ruined city dating from the 6^th C BCE, of which much remains of the Zoroastrian cult that flourished here: fire altars and ritual clayware.  There was also a 1600-year-old fresco found in the central structure of the town, but (of course) it’s in Russia, at the Hermitage.

The real story of Panjakent, for my purposes, is that it’s the gateway to the Canyon of Seven Lakes.  Seven different lakes—I won’t bother naming them here because I can’t remember any but a couple of their translations (“Eyelash,” “Lever,” “Last”) and because I’m sure that information is easily googleable.  The seven lakes are famous for their being all within, say, 20 difficult road-miles of one another but each a different color, each one fed by a different glacial collection system.  So the first one is dark blue, the fourth is large and green, the seventh is classically glacial blue, like Canada's Lake Louise. 

These mountains—really spitting distance from Afghanistan—are steep and jagged and braided with fantastically twisted strata in grays, browns, whites, and reds.  The Fanns soar to peaks above 14000, with a couple over 15000.  There is pretty much no vegetation on them, not because of the timberline but because it’s so dry here.  I think the water situation is what has kept Tajikistan from surging into modernity in the way that Uzbekistan (land of so many rivers!) has.  I mean, there are lakes and rivers but they’re not easy to access and they’re also not so clean (see previous post).