the road. But after a bit of scouting it was clear that there was a line down nearly all of it; I say nearly all, because the American river notes had failed to report that at one point most of the river disappeared over a nasty weir and the rest was channeled into a hydro-electric project! Despite this it was a brilliant river and to top it all off, the run finished back at the house we were staying at!

The following day we headed up one of the tributaries of the Gunt, the Shakhdara. On this the river notes were fairly accurate – gd4/4+ in its upper sections, easing to gd3 in the middle section and then building back up to gd4 again about 5km before the confluence.half hours from Khorog. It was a fun paddle, with some fantastic scenery and some very ‘sexy geology’ as Tom would put it. On the down side Autumn seems to be arriving and paddling a glacial river with the wind in our faces, we were definitely glad to get to the finish – the confluence with the Panj river, which is the border with Afghanistan.

That evening we drove on along the Panj and then up the river Vanch, staying in the town of Vanj over night. We got up at 6am on Friday morning intending on finishing the river nice and early and getting most of the drive back to Dushanbe done in daylight. We paddled the river in about an hour – we only did a relatively