Like its neighbor to the north, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan is 90% mountainous and offers the most beautiful hiking you can imagine without your having to share the trails with many other tourists. I also had the chance to do lots of people watching and soak in some of the traditions of this unique country that sits just above Afghanistan and has been profoundly impacted by the instability there over the years.

Top Photo: Kulikalon Lakes, Fann Mountains

Statue of Ismoil Somoni, Dushanbe

Destinations

Dushanbe: Tajikistan’s capital and largest city has impressive grand monuments, tranquil tree-lined walking paths, and two rivers running through it

Fann Mountains: Just a few hours from Dushanbe, this mountain range offers Switzerland-like scenery at destinations like Artuch, Seven Lakes, and Iskanderkul Lake

Seven Lakes, Fann Mountains

Some Stats

  • Tajikistan is the least urbanized country on my trip so far–only 28% of people live in cities or towns
  • It was part of the Soviet Union and is one of the least developed countries in Asia
  • It’s one of the most corrupt and least free countries in the world (it ranks 150 & 153 respectively in global indexes of these measures) and it’s had the same dictator for nearly 30 years
  • The median age is 25.3 and there are lots of babies everywhere!
  • It’s a majority-Muslim country that shares a longer border with Afghanistan and suffered its own civil war in the 90s

Hitchhiking: It Always Works Out In The End

To get to the aforementioned Seven Lakes, I could have hired a taxi for the day, which would have been exorbitantly expensive for me. Instead, I decided to take a shared taxi (these function and are priced like buses but are 5-passenger taxi cars) to a village along the way and attempt to hitchhike or catch a marshrutka (shared van buses in former Soviet countries) the rest of the way. It’s a 30-mile journey but along very rough dirt and gravel roads so even a straight shot of driving would have taken 2 hours.

I had success getting a ride from 4 men dressed in Islamic clothing who took me a couple villages further before they stopped at a mosque where a big group of men was waiting for them and bowed to them as they walked in (I guess they were local religious leaders?) and then after ~10 minutes of waiting I found a young man driving an SUV who drove me for a few miles before stopping near his family home and offering to take me all the way to the end of the lakes for under $20, if he could bring his family. His parents and two adorable younger brothers piled in and we began the journey, which unfortunately was very stop-and-go since one of their tires was low and they stopped every mile or so to spend 5-10 minutes pumping air into it. Eventually, before the sixth lake, they gave up and told me I needed to walk the rest of the way. I took a long walk along the sixth lake and then up a steep hill to the seventh lake, during which I developed a miserable migraine–at which point I worried about how I could get back to the city from the beginning of my day where I was staying as quickly as possible to get out of the sun.

Unfortunately, there were no cars at the seventh lake and I’d only seen about five cars at the sixth lake so I walked down the sixth lake and, still having no success finding a ride, started walking along it. Just before I reached the end of the lake, a late-model BMW took pity on me and stopped. A Tajik man and two Russian business partners were inside and kindly offered me snacks and water as they took me the entire way down the highway. We had to stop five or so times and each of us passengers got out of the car to decrease the car’s weight and keep it up from scratching against the roughest parts of the roads.

After I expressed my eternal gratitude to them at the highway, they drove off in the opposite direction as I was going and the very first car going my direction stopped to pick me up and it turned out to be an Uzbek-Tajik guy (Tajikistan has a large Uzbek minority) who used to be a tour guide and spoke perfect English so we had a nice chat for the 10-minute drive to my hostel, where he super kindly dropped me off. 

This was one of the most stressful hitchhiking experiences I’ve had (due to the complete dearth of traffic and my throbbing migraine) and I was definitely in doubt that I’d make it back that day, but the #1 rule of hitchhiking is “you always eventually get a ride” and once again this was the case for me.

Driving on any highway in this 90% mountainous country looks like this!

The Surprise Marketer

I found a local digital marketing agency online and arranged to meet with one of their marketers to learn about marketing in Tajikistan as I’ve found it really interesting to meet people who do my job in different countries. We communicated over email and he sounded very formal so I expected him to be a middle-aged or older man but when we met for dinner he was actually very young and I found out that he’s 17! In Tajikistan, it’s normal for high school students to get part-time jobs doing professional work in offices.

My new 17-year-old Tajik friend

Separate Spaces

I was invited for lunch at the home of the aforementioned marketer and unfortunately didn’t get to meet the excellent chef who prepared the meal (his mother) because in Tajik Muslim tradition women are not supposed to hang out in the same rooms as men. She stayed in the kitchen and did not even come out to say “hello” due to this tradition. Meanwhile in the main room I enjoyed a delicious spread of delicacies including the national dish qurutob and I really enjoyed the company of the men and children of the house!

“The Government is Reading My Messages”: Tajikistan’s (Very) Underground Queer Movement

I was connected via the LGBTQ org I met with in Kyrgyzstan to a queer activist here in Tajikistan (Central Asian activists have an impressive amount of solidarity with each other :)). This woman was not able to share her full name or the name of her organization or take a photo with me because the government does not allow LGBTQ activism and monitors the emails and Whatsapp messages of activists in the country. She’s able to run her NGO by billing it as a “human rights organization,” but the majority of their work focuses specifically on the queer community:

  • They do not have a public website or social media presence–they have private Telegram (similar to Whatsapp) groups they invite people to via word of mouth. Because of their invisibility, many Tajik LGBTQ folks actually first find Russian or Kazakh queer orgs, who then connect them to this group in their own country!
  • They provide legal, medical, and psychological aid to local LGBTQ people, who often have nowhere else to turn since the government does not provide queer-inclusive healthcare at all
  • The org also partners with European orgs to help queer folks in danger relocate abroad and seek asylum in safer countries
  • Trans folks with the means can hire legal support and change their gender and name on their IDs as the country has no official guidelines on this. As in many other Muslim countries, parents are often very supportive of female-to-male trans men since this is seen as them increasing their status in society while male-to-female trans women more often face violence and banishment from their families.
    • Many trans women, who have very limited career opportunities in Tajikistan, move to Russia where they can work as sex workers. Imagine Russia being the destination of choice for a queer person! :O (This is because it’s too difficult and expensive to move to more LGBTQ-friendly nations.)
  • Gay men are usually forced by their parents to marry women and have children and sometimes abandon their families to more abroad and live as their true selves later in life
    • Men who come out (or much more commonly are outed by others) are subject to violence from Islamic leaders, who tell them that they have “bad genes” that need to be “beat out of them” so they can become “natural men.”
  • Queer women can easily live in the same home and tell landlords and neighbors that they are sisters and commonly raise children from previous marriages together here
    • Roughly 95% of Tajik women marry before their mid-20s and the queer women among them can’t find freedom until they divorce, a common choice for women who come to accept their sexuality
Qurutob, the Tajik national dish that’s like a bread salad!

Feminism…In Partnership with the Dictator

Tajikistan is a very patriarchal society. Women who have short hair, hang out in public after 10pm (even in the company of others), or smoke or drink in public may be violently harassed by men who are determined to keep them in their place (the home). Women wouldn’t even think of wearing a miniskirt in public here!

  • Harassment has declined in the past couple years due to a very public case of street harassers being arrested and publicly shamed, shifting this norm in Tajik society. These brave victims really made a big difference by pursuing justice!

Surprisingly, the number of women wearing hijabs in the capital city has increased from roughly 30% to 80% in the last year (2022 > 2023), according to one local woman’s estimate. She wasn’t sure how it happened so quickly but attributed it to a growing conservatism in local Islam.

I met with Zulaikho Usmonova, one of the country’s first women to publicly identify as a feminist 20 years ago to learn more about the challenges women in Tajikistan face.

  • Usmonova is an anthropologist who has done field work in rural Tajikistan, where it’s very rare for women to work outside the home and the typical marriage age for a woman is 18, the youngest legally-allowed age. In the mountain village where she’s done the most work, the local people were forced to move to a very warm valley to grow cotton during Soviet times…as Soviet power declined, they went back to their abandoned villages in the mountains and returned to their traditional way of life which persists today
    • Women in villages are usually not allowed by their husbands to work, even though the family really needs the money. Most men would choose to move abroad to make more money before splitting the breadwinning with their wives. (This is even the case for some women in the capital city.)
  • Like in Kyrgyzstan, there are thousands of professions that are officially off-limits for women (such as construction, mining, and other manual labor jobs). Women sometimes do work in these jobs but have to do so under-the-table, usually for less pay and with no workplace protections.
  • The number of women in Parliament has doubled since 2000, to 22% (not much lower than the US and with no quota system). But the highest levels of government are almost exclusively occupied by men.
  • Usmonova praised the country’s dictator (she didn’t describe him as a dictator, but to any outside observer, a president in power for 30 years who restricts freedom and forbids opposition parties is clearly a dictator), who she credits with making the streets much safer for women (15 years ago women wouldn’t have felt comfortable walking on the streets, even in daylight) and creating more educational and career opportunities for women (she said that “any bright woman” would easily be able to get a great job of her choice today).
    • A major driver for his pursuance of such policies is pressure from other countries and international NGOs, who often contingent support on gender equality initiatives
    • When Usmonova gives speeches about feminism, she always mentions that the president (dictator) is in accordance with the ideas she’s touching on
    • Usmonova herself years ago was beaten by a drunk man in public for berating him for loudly singing vulgar lyrics. Bystanders (men) did nothing to stop him.
  • There is a domestic violence law but enforcement is loose and victims often have nowhere to go as they wouldn’t be accepted by their families for leaving their husband
    • Tajik women are perhaps as likely to face violence from their mothers-in-law as from their husbands! (Married women usually live with their husbands’ families.)
  • To encourage companies and public offices to put young people in leadership roles, Tajikistan has a strange law that prohibits men over 63 or women over 58 from being the head leader of government offices or corporations.
    • When a woman reaches the ripe age of 58, she’s told to “relax and spend time with her grandchildren.” Ridiculous that the age is younger for women when women live so much longer than men!
  • Usmonova has little hope for big feminist wins in the near future–the current movement leaders are “aging” and it’s not considered cool or admirable for young women to be feminists
    • What she thinks is needed the most is support for female entrepreneurs and business leaders and male-focused education about feminism