A while into the mountains, I came across a tunnel that I was told would be a struggle to walk through. It was a 5km long Iranian tunnel named Anzob. I found out the hard way, why when I looked it up in Bishkek, its nickname was the ‘Tunnel of Death’.
The tunnel is not ventilated, it doesn’t lack the necessary equipment to ventilate it, it just lacks the electricity to power the ventilation fans as well as any lights. These fans are enormous and are spread out every 500 metres or so, but for some reason, they’ve not yet been mounted to the wall, but instead left on the floor and pushed to one side. Effectively rendering the tunnel at certain points a single lane tunnel. With traffic, which consists of lorries, vans, cars and motorbikes as well as maintenance staff having to watch out for sudden on-coming traffic. If this wasn’t challenging enough, there were parts of the tunnel floor that had given way and were just enormous pot holes that you couldn’t see the bottom of. This I had to navigate, whilst having to dodge traffic and in the dark, as my torch did absolutely nothing to illuminate anything sufficiently enough for me to see, especially when the car lights were blinding me and the noise echoing off the concrete walls piercing my ears. Without a doubt it was the longest hardest, slowest 5kms I have ever done on borderwalk.
