On a dusty loess terrace just outside modern Panjakent, a few low mud ridges and pits are all that remain of one of the richest cities on the Silk Road. Fourteen centuries ago this was a Sogdian town of merchants, with two-storey houses, temples and walls covered in paintings of feasts, heroes and gods. The best frescoes went to the Hermitage in St Petersburg and to the Rudaki museum in town, so bring some imagination with you, but standing among the excavated streets with the Zeravshan glittering below, the scale of the place still lands.
The story ends badly, as Silk Road stories often do. When the Arab armies pushed into Sogdiana in the early eighth century, the ruler Devashtich fled up the valley to a fortress on Mount Mugh. Soviet archaeologists later found a cache of documents there, letters in Sogdian that gave historians a rare voice from inside a vanished culture. The poet Rudaki, often called the father of Persian poetry, is buried in a village a short ride up the hills, and locals will point you there with real pride.
The riding into Panjakent is the reason most travellers remember it. From Dushanbe you climb over the Fan range, through the long and notoriously grim Anzob tunnel, then follow the Zeravshan west through a gorge of grey and ochre cliffs, with apricot orchards wherever the valley widens. The surface varies from new Chinese-built asphalt to patches that will test your suspension, and lorries own the road on the climbs. To the west the border with Uzbekistan sits within a short hop, with Samarkand barely an hour beyond it, which makes this a natural start or finish for a loop between the two countries.
Panjakent itself is a proper market town of some thirty-five thousand people, so fuel, bread, melons and plov are easy to find, though octane quality can be uneven and many riders top up with care. The bazaar is the place for dried apricots, walnuts and green tea in a shady chaikhana. Mornings are cool even in summer; by afternoon the terrace bakes, so walk the ruins early, then ride up towards the Fan lakes for evening air and a cold glass of water from a mountain spring.