The first thing you need to understand about mapping a thousand-kilometre trail is that someone has to walk it first. All of it. Jan Bakker spent years in Tajikistan‘s Pamir Mountains — the range locals call the Roof of the World — stitching together a route that existed in fragments: a herder’s path here, a Soviet-era track there, long stretches where nothing had been walked in decades except by shepherds moving livestock between summer pastures. The Pamir Trail didn’t exist on any map when he started. Now it does.
Bakker is the author of Trekking in Tajikistan, the guidebook that turned what was once a series of disconnected footpaths into a named, navigable route. One thousand kilometres. High altitude plateaus where the air thins and the sky opens. Villages that see trekkers once, maybe twice a season. Passes that stay snow-locked until July. The sort of landscape that makes you reconsider what you thought you knew about Central Asia.
The terrain varies wildly. Some sections are accessible enough for beginners — gentle valleys, established trails through communities used to the occasional foreign hiker. Others require navigation skills, snow experience, river crossings with no bridges. The challenge isn’t just physical. It’s logistical. Water sources. Resupply points. Knowing which valleys flood in spring melt, which passes clear first when summer arrives.
The work of making a trail.
Bakker’s process wasn’t romantic. It was methodical. Walk a section. Record waypoints. Talk to locals about seasonal conditions. Test alternate routes when the primary line proved impassable or dangerous. Return the following year and do it again, this time earlier or later in the season, to understand how snow and melt change everything. A guidebook isn’t written from an armchair. It’s built from repetition, correction, failure, and the slow accumulation of ground truth.
Tajikistan offers something rare: landscapes largely untouched by the infrastructure of Western tourism. No hut systems. No marked trails with signposts every kilometre. The local communities are Pamiri and Kyrgyz herders, people whose relationship to the mountains is seasonal and practical, not recreational. They move with the grass, the weather, the livestock. For them, these aren’t trails. They’re routes. The difference matters.
The best window for hiking the Pamir Trail runs from June through September, though different sections become passable at different times. Higher passes might not clear until mid-July. Lower valleys can be walked as early as late May if the winter was mild. Bakker’s guidebook accounts for this variability — it has to. A trail at 4,000 metres in June is not the same trail in August.
The culture is part of the terrain. Pamiri hospitality is real, not performative. Trekkers report being invited into homes, offered tea, bread, sometimes a bed when the weather turns. This generosity exists in tension with the region’s poverty. Tajikistan is one of the poorest countries in Central Asia. Tourism, when it works, brings income. When it doesn’t — when trekkers pass through without spending, without hiring guides, without contributing — it becomes extraction by another name.
In this conversation.
We hear about the wildlife Bakker has encountered in the Pamirs — the elusive snow leopard, the ibex moving along ridgelines, the golden eagles that nest in the high crags. We go into the challenges of trail mapping: the distances between resupply points, the sections where water is scarce, the need for cultural sensitivity when passing through villages that have seen war, Soviet collapse, and decades of isolation. Bakker also talks about his work in Uganda, where he’s building adventure tourism infrastructure in a country overshadowed by Kenya and Tanzania but home to mountain ranges, glacier-capped peaks on the equator, and world-class whitewater on the Nile at Jinja. The conversation moves between Central Asia and East Africa, but the throughline is the same: how to build trails, and economies, that serve both visitors and the people who live there.
Call to adventure.
If you love adventure but want variety beyond just trekking, Uganda offers red dirt roads for gravel biking, world-class kayaking on the Nile at Jinja, and mountain ranges instead of volcanic climbs. Landscapes you won’t see anywhere else: glaciers on the equator, vegetation that exists nowhere else on Earth. It’s a small country where you can do nearly everything if it comes to adventure sports. Go. Take your gravel bike. Ride the African dirt roads twice a week like Bakker does.
Pay it forward.
Support Women Rockin’ Pamirs, a project training women to become hiking guides in Tajikistan’s male-dominated outdoor industry. Female guides in the Pamirs are rare. This project is changing that, one trained guide at a time. It’s a worthy cause in a region where tourism can either empower communities or bypass them entirely. Visit womenrockinpamirs.org.
About Jan.
Jan Bakker is the author of Trekking in Tajikistan, the guidebook that mapped the 1000-kilometre Pamir Trail through one of Central Asia’s most remote mountain ranges. He works in adventure tourism development in Uganda and is planning new hiking trail projects in Scotland. He rides a gravel bike on African red dirt roads twice a week and knows what a glacier looks like on the equator.
Some trails exist because someone decided they should. Bakker walked a thousand kilometres through the Pamirs, returned year after year, and turned fragments into a line. The Pamir Trail is now on the map. But maps are only the beginning.
