The Pamir Highway, at twenty kilometres an hour

The Pamir Highway is one of the highest roads in the world and one of the great drives on earth, and the first thing it teaches you is patience. It took us 29 hours to cover 730 kilometers. If you nap for half an hour, you miss almost nothing, because the car has moved ten kilometers.

You climb to passes above four and a half thousand metres, higher than Mont Blanc, and the car suffers, and so do your heads. The landscapes turn lunar: dry, vast, empty plains rimmed with mountains, occasionally a lake, almost never another vehicle.

For hundreds of kilometers the road runs along a river, and the far bank is Afghanistan. You drive all day looking across at villages, green oases and mountains in a country that, back home, exists only in headlines. It is close enough to throw a stone at, and we tried, and the river won.

We slept where we stopped. One night, in the dark, we turned off the road and camped by that river, and only afterwards worked out that the lights on the other side were Afghan. Nobody slept especially well. We woke to a sunrise over Afghanistan, which is worth every uneasy hour.

The road broke our car repeatedly and it will break yours. But there is a strange gift in being forced to move slowly through a landscape this big, watching it change by inches instead of skimming past it.

Two days later we crossed into Kyrgyzstan at a border post above four thousand metres, where the officer had to get dressed before he could stamp us through.

Go slow. There is no other option.