Machar Hot Spring

Machar Hot Spring is a natural sulfurous thermal spring in the Wakhan Corridor of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region in Tajikistan, one of the world's most remote and geographically extreme inhabited valleys — a narrow finger of territory running between Afghanistan and Pakistan along the upper Panj River toward the Pamir plateau, historically part of the ancient Silk Road trade and pilgrimage routes connecting China and Central Asia. The springs emerge in a high-altitude landscape of glaciated Pamir peaks above 6,000 metres, used by the small Wakhi and Pamiri communities of the Wakhan for therapeutic bathing in a region where access to any medical infrastructure is severely limited by extreme remoteness and altitude. The Wakhan Corridor's extraordinary conjunction of Pamiri, Afghan, Pakistani, and Chinese border zones, Marco Polo sheep grazing on the high-altitude pastures, and the Silk Road heritage of the ancient route of the Venetian traveller himself — who passed through this same corridor in the 13th century — makes Machar's springs one of the most atmospherically extraordinary geothermal sites on Earth.