Paryan

These pictures are all from our trip to Paryan two weeks ago. It's the most remote district in the province, about eighty kilometers northwest through the valley, and it's a long, bumpy, four-and-a-half-hour ride in a Land Cruiser. This first picture is what I think is one of the most dramatic areas I've seen around here, where the road climbs up the mountain from the river and the valley narrows out and gets extremely steep. They're hard to see, but if you look closely enough at the small plain on the right side of the picture there's a Russian artillery piece laying down and the front end of a truck poking out from behind the hill. The truck has a rack of rocket launchers in the back, although they're not visible in the picture. The road home climbs up the mountain behind the plain with the Russian equipment.



Looking down from nearly the highest stretch of road. I'm not sure exactly how far it is to the river, but I think it's a couple thousand feet.



Donkey traffic jam way the hell up on the mountain. We let them take the outside of the road and passed them against the mountain, since I trust a donkey's footing up there more than a several thousand pound Land Cruiser perched on the edge of a questionable road. We also passed a group of camels, which was somewhat more nerve-racking, since camels are surprisingly huge, and the nomads around here can pack a lot of stuff on top of them - their children included - which makes for a lumbering, unweildy, and kind of unpredictable obstacle. I'll dig up and post a picture of a camel all loaded up; they have to be the goofiest looking animals I've ever seen, but they're kind of stately in a bizarre sort of way. Moving on...



One of our sixteen-room school houses. They're simple, but they're very nice buildings when they're done. The tent in the top right corner of the picture is one of several the locals are using for a classroom until the new building is done.



In a move described by Joanna as a "stupid American thing to do" - I'm not going to lie, she's a little bit right - we paid a guy a dollar to ride his horse around the field. It only had one eye, which I think contributed to it's desire to only turn one direction, but the biggest problem was just getting it to move at all. It was kind of fun, and I'm pretty sure the guy who owned it got a kick out of watching us ride around.