We entered the Wakhan Valley which is an offshoot of the Pamir Highway that runs further along the Afghanistan border.

Day 5:

The bolt to the windshield broke and we lost a piece of the mounting hardware so we strapped the windshield to the back of the bike on top of our camp bag.

I (Ellie) recruited some local village boys to help me find a missing part while Austin worked to MacGyver a solution. The boys helped me look for about 30 seconds and then thought it was much cooler to go watch Austin work with tools, haha.

Tajik military monitoring the border..the only word he knew in English was "dangerous".

Tajik military truck:

There were hundreds of shooting posts throughout the ride along the Afghanistan border:

Day 6:

Before the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the island between Afghanistan and Tajikistan was a neutral zone where they had a shared-market every Saturday. You can see the Taliban white flags across the river signaling the entrance to Afghanistan from the old neutral zone.

We continued the ride along the river. Some of the mountains around us were over 25k feet, phew!

The Wakhan Valley is known to have many ibexes roaming. Unfortunately, we did not see any so we think summer may be the wrong time of year to see them and it was not the migrating season. You can see the people use their horns as decorations above the entrances to their homes/property.

Some of those snowy peaks were all of the way in Pakistan. The photo does not capture how massive they were but in real life, the mountains were breathtaking. We also hiked around the Yamchun fortress ruins (behind me in the photo).

Yamchun Fortress ruins:

 We went to the Bibi Fatima hot springs and the men and women had two separate pools since everyone is nude. The women's pool was a wild time! The local gals were jumping in and shallow diving in less than 1 meter of water. I (Ellie) joined in on the fun and all of the women chuckled hard. We didn't speak the same language so we shared a lot of laughs and smiles!

 Bibi Fatima hot springs:

Day 7:

This was one of the homestay families from the Wakhan Valley. Akim (man with the mustache) ran the place with his family. One of his daughters lives there with her children and his other kids live in other countries around the world. His grandchildren practiced their English with us which was really neat to see them use their skills! Akim's grandson practiced saying large multi-digit numbers with Austin and Austin was able to help him out whenever he got stuck - he did really really well, it was impressive!

Some of the homestays had showers, others did not. We were grateful for this water bottle shower head after a hot and dusty day!

Local gas station:

Broken bridge (we got to ride through the river instead of over the bridge, haha):

Shepherd boy: he came up to us and asked if we saw any of his cows down the road and when I say "asked", I mean we played charades to communicate with one another.