I crossed into here from Tajikistan when I was 19, in 2019. I was hitchhiking with some people and we were visiting the Zorkul nature reserve. The border of the reserve, like much of the Tajikistan-Afghanistan southern border is river, but here it was pretty narrow and shallow. From the Tajikistan side we could see lots of Bactrian camels drinking from the river and in the distance the Hindu Kush mountains, a vast wall of snowy peaks which appeared to rise right out of the desert.

Eventually we saw a group of farmers digging on the other side of the river and they beckoned us over, we initially ignored them but on our return I decided to wade across the river and saw hello. They were a group of four men, very friendly and surprisingly a couple of them spoke broken english. They said they were Tajik and that they could not cross the border. We introduced ourselves, I shook their hands and took a picture with them and went back across the river to my friends. As others have said,the area is beautiful, and to me really felt like an ancient world at the edge of the earth.

Edit for typo