Khorog had the advantage of an airport with one or two daily flights out of the mountains to Dushanbe, the national capital.  With the alternative being 16 hours on a horrible road, we decided to try to get tickets.

Tajik Air was like no airline I've ever seen.  Not even China in 1987 could compare. 

The Khorog planes fly only in perfect weather, which is understandable since their propellers have to skim the thin strip of land between the river and the mountains.  But they also fly only when there are enough people on the outbound flight from Dushanbe. 

Tickets go on sale the day before.  To get a ticket, you must go to the airport at 8am and hand over your passport, which they keep until the plane is in the air.  Only then do they take your money and write the ticket.  I guess that saves them having to give refunds for the frequent cancellations, but it means no one knows if they're going to be flying until they're on the plane.

We were hoping to get out the same day, which might have happened if they had had a second flight.  Our passports disappeared through a small hole and I learned that this meant we were on for the second flight if there was to be one.

Meanwhile, a dozen Tajik men were screaming through the hole to the ticket seller.  The next day's flight, whose forty seats were supposed to just be going on sale, were already overbooked by people who had paid bribes to move their passports to the head of the queue.  So the airline already had forty passports and no tickets. 

After a few hours, I finally got a straight story with the help of an aid worker who spoke Tajik and English.  There would be no second flight that day because not enough people had shown up for the outbound flight from Dushanbe.  They would be happily keep our passports overnight and maybe we would get a seat on the next day's flight.  Or maybe not, since there were already more than 40 passports waiting for 40 seats.  We said no thanks, retrieved our passports, and went to Plan B – the long drive.

With the help of some friends of the aid worker, we chartered a taxi partway, traveling the six hours of daylight that remained that afternoon.  The taxi didn't have the right license plates to go to that district, so we were joined by a policeman who could talk us through the checkpoints.  He turned out to be quite nice and spoke some English with Marcia.  We paid the driver and slept in a homestay, whose owner found us another taxi to take us the rest of the way, another ten hours.  Although it was long, we quite enjoyed the scenery, which mostly continued down the Panj (upper Oxus) river with views into the trails and rudimentary villages of Afghanistan.

Driving through Tajikistan was an experience.  The roads were generally bad except in isolated patches where the Chinese road crews had built beautiful new blacktop that had not yet deteriorated.  And the roads were especially bad in the extensive patches of construction, which tore up everything and left only a cross-country route around the worksite. 

And then there were the police checkpoints.  Neither locals nor foreigners can move around the small country without a passport.  We had to show ours about ten times in 350 kilometers (200 miles).  Our visas were in order and we avoided any unpleasantness.  But the Tajik man who had bought the remaining seat was traveling with a friend's passport, probably since he didn't have one of his own.  At most of the checkpoints he sailed right through, since the policemen never looked at his picture.  But one looked and quickly realized the man didn't match his picture.  Shouting and cell phone calls ensued and probably a bribe or two, because before long we were on our way again as if nothing had happened.  No wonder all of these checkpoints do nothing to stop the rampant drug trafficking.

We weren't so lucky once we arrived in Dushanbe.  We had reserved a nice but small hotel and no one could tell our taxi driver how to find it.  Trying to take a short cut to the main street, the driver took a turn down a street marked no entry.  We were immediately surrounded by police yelling and wanting to search our car, including our bags.  It turned out that that street was the entrance to the presidential palace, and with a suicide bombing only a few months before, the police were a little on edge.  I prevented any search of our baggage, but our driver was fined the equivalent of $40, a huge sum for a country taxi driver.  (We bumped into him later and paid him back, which quite amazed him.)