A wash would be welcome. God knows I needed it; knees with a dirty black shine to them, a thick growth of itchy stubble matted across my face and my hands cracked and broken, with a mysterious sick-grey hue to them that had developed over the past few weeks here at high altitude. No, a wash and shave would be very much appreciated, although where exactly our host Orozbek the hunter was taking us to do it – and why we’d chosen to travel atop a truck laden with freshly-cut grass to get there – I still couldn’t quite figure out. But that was Central Asia encapsulated; you never really could tell what ramshackle road blind circumstance was leading you down, not – at any rate – until it was too late to back out.

Our arrival in Tajikistan had been marked with a car crash. Picked up by two soldiers – fresh-faced recruits from the country’s sunny capital of Dushanbe almost 1000km out to the west – we’d been travelling high and fast across the Pamir Mountains when it happened: a wheel came off the Russian-made Lada. Not a normal tyre puncture, the wheel actually detached from its support column, sending the soldiers’ little white car piling headfirst into the ground in one agonising, squealing thrash of exposed metal on pitted tarmac. Out in the Pamirs there is little chance of rescue, no roadside recovery. Indeed, with no phone reception for miles, not one person had the slightest clue where we were and if we were in trouble or not.

Instead, we jacked up the car ourselves, scraped the scattered ball-bearings up from the floor, tied the wheel’s support column back together with scrap wire and wrenched the errant runaway wheel back in place. We carried on south at well past midnight, the bodge-job miraculously holding together, having experienced our first taste of the Kuhistoni Badakhshon Autonomous Oblast. A place where nearly everything you do, you do on your own – as a keen amateur – with the wrong tools but the right spirit always in hand for whatever job you may face next. These were life lessons we would come to face again and again over the course of the next month spent living in region.

We rattled our way into town with bits of flying grass stuck in our hair and to our faces, like the aftermath of some hasty self-done buzz cut. Hopping off the truck – which it turns out was transporting fodder to be stored for stored over the upcoming winter for the livestock of Orozbek’s cousin – I recognised the woman who’d come to greet us. She’d been at the civic party a few nights back, the tired looking lady who I’d assumed to be a teacher of some description. She led the three of us quietly through the empty, unpaved streets of Bash-Gumbez, to the Russian-style ‘banya’ or sauna.

‘You ready for this?’ I asked Matt with a smile as we approached the tiny adobe-brick bathhouse, its one dusty and cobwebbed window evocative of that old Dostoevskian account of eternity.

‘Sort of,’ replied Matt, ‘I reckon it’s going to be pretty, er, intimate though.’

‘You, shave?’ interrupted the hunter Orozbek in Russian, gesturing to his own face with an imaginary razor.

‘Err, yeah. I will. I don’t think Matt will though,’ I replied somewhat lamely, glancing to Matt, who shook his head. For some reason Orozbek found this amusing and, with a chuckle, gestured for us to follow him through the darkened doorway.