“Tajik-ah-what?” “Why? “Where is that?” These are the responses I received when I told my friends I was traveling to Tajikistan for vacation. To be fair, I couldn’t blame them. When most people hear a country end in “Stan,” they immediately begin to associate that place with war, terror, and lawlessness. Of course, that isn’t the case with every country ending in Stan, and I set out to show my friends the opposite, and check off one of my bucket list goals – backpack the Pamir Highway. The Pamir Highway is a road traversing the Pamir Mountains through Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with a length of over 1,200 km. It…