Tajikistan

The Pamir Highway is one of the great overland routes on earth - a road that crosses the Pamir plateau at altitudes above 4,000 metres, through a landscape so bare and so vast that the Soviet engineers who built it must have wondered what they were doing. Dushanbe is a small, warm capital with good bread and a national museum that makes the country's pre-Islamic history legible in a way the landscape alone cannot. The Wakhan Corridor - a sliver of Tajik territory stretching toward China, with Afghanistan on one side and the Pamirs on the other - is the kind of place that travel writers reach for superlatives and then put the pen down.

Our guide is being written from the ground up, with the time this place deserves.

We are still gathering the notes that make a guide worth keeping: Pamir Highway logistics, Wakhan village homestays, Dushanbe's bazaar and the border crossing timings that determine whether the whole journey works or does not.