Makhfird 10

A botanical display requiring some imagination

The botanical garden, promoted to us as the second highest in the world, "is closed", informs our guide Makhfird. We are otherwise in a beautiful lush flower-filled quarter anchored by the president's dacha - an imposing property suitable for Knightsbridge (a guard directs me away when I try to take a photograph). President Rahmon stayed here doing Covid. While Makhfird cannot tell me what the president actually does, she does say that during the Civil War he called on Tajiks to return from Afghanistan, Russia and the neighbouring Central Asian countries where they had fled and they responded. He may be a strongman - or a propaganda tool - but he also delivered stability when the country most needed calm.

Our guide Makhfird is from the mountains and the first in her family to go to university where she studied in Dushambe. She says that her school of 5,000 students 'has maybe 800 women' pursuing history, medicine, linguistics and other serious degrees; her program - tourism - is 90% male. There are very few female guilds.  Here she is :

Makhfird