François Ragolski’s initial plan was ambitious, to say the least. “If you look at a map of the Himalayas it looks like they start in Tajikistan,” he says. “So, I wanted to fly everywhere it looked big, and where it got less big I would stop.”
To refresh your geography of Central Asia, Tajikistan is that small country squeezed north of Afghanistan, west of China, east of Uzbekistan and south of Kyrgyzstan and Russia. About the same size as Greece, Tajikistan is mainly sparsely populated mountains. Home to the Pamir and Alay ranges half of the country is above 3,000m. Staggeringly wild and beautiful there are numerous glaciers, lakes and snow-capped peaks, which rise to the highest point at Ismoil Somoni Peak, at 7,495m the 50th highest in the world.…