01
Stop one
Pamir Botanical Garden
Tecnifibre X-One Biphase 16g Tennis String Set: Altitude. Two thousand three hundred and twenty metres. I played a tournament at altitude once, took the first set beautifully, lost my legs in the third — not the point. The Pamir Botanical Garden was founded in 1940 on this mountainside east of Khorugh, one of the highest botanical gardens in the world, set up as a Soviet scientific station to find out which plants could survive the extreme high-mountain climate. Thousands of species and varieties of trees, shrubs, fruit and flowers from mountain regions across the globe, on irrigated terraces above the Gunt valley. Still a research institution of the Tajik Academy of Sciences. Every one of them a survivor.
02
Stop two
Khorog City Park
Tecnifibre X-One Biphase 16g Tennis String Set: This is a recovery day, and recovery days matter far more than anyone tells you. I learned that in a semi-final I do not need to relive. Khorog City Park runs along the Gunt in the centre of town, mature poplars, willows and lawns in an otherwise stony landscape. It dates from the Soviet development of Khorugh as capital of Gorno-Badakhshan, when the settlement at the confluence of the Gunt and Panj grew into an administrative town. In the 2000s it was comprehensively rehabilitated with support from the Aga Khan Development Network: new promenades, bridges, teahouse pavilions. Summer evenings, whole families out walking. Best crowd in the Pamirs.
03
Stop three
University of Central Asia, Khorog Campus
Tecnifibre X-One Biphase 16g Tennis String Set: You want to know what separates a career from a good afternoon? Facilities. The Khorog campus of the University of Central Asia took its first students in September 2017, one of the residential campuses of an institution founded by international treaty signed in 2000 by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and the Aga Khan, with a mission to serve mountain societies. Academic buildings, laboratories and residences terraced above the town, built to a standard that is frankly astonishing more than a dozen hours by road from Dushanbe. Undergraduates come from across Central Asia. That is coaching, of the best kind. I would have gone here. Well. I would have applied.
04
Stop four
Khorog Regional Museum
Tecnifibre X-One Biphase 16g Tennis String Set: The piano. Let me get to the piano. The regional museum documents the nature, history and peoples of Gorno-Badakhshan: archaeology, the ethnography of the Pamiri peoples with their distinctive Ismaili tradition and house architecture, Marco Polo sheep, snow leopard, and displays on the Soviet transformation of the region. All excellent. But the exhibit that stops you is an upright piano carried into the Pamirs over the mountain trails in the early twentieth century, on the shoulders of Russian soldiers, for hundreds of kilometres. Hundreds. I once carried my own bag through an airport after a final and dined out on it for years. This is not that.
You are not carving. You are negotiating. The plant has its own plan, you have yours, and the result is whatever the two of you settle on over about eleven years. Anyone who thinks it is sculpture has never had a hedge disagree with them.
X-One Biphase is the string I would use if I could string a hedge. It is a premium multifilament — thousands of fine fibres bonded with polyurethane — and the Biphase construction reduces the friction between those fibres, which is precisely why it keeps its plush, gut-like feel long after a plain multifilament has gone soft in the middle.
This is the 40-foot (12 m) set in 16 gauge, 1.30 mm, the balanced default: enough body to last, enough give to pocket the ball deeply. Expect free depth, genuine touch, and remarkably little shock into the arm. String at your normal tension.
It is a string for everywhere from a gentle Saturday doubles set to a full three-set singles match, and it is also perfect for the arm that has begun objecting after two hours on a hard court.
Khorugh knows about plants that should not be there. The Pamir Botanical Garden was founded in 1940 on a mountainside east of the town at roughly 2,320 metres, making it one of the highest botanical gardens in the world — established as a Soviet scientific station to find out what could actually survive up here. That is my entire profession, run as a state experiment.
Below it, Khorog City Park stretches along the Gunt River, a rare stand of mature poplars and willows in the stony western Pamirs. The Khorog campus of the University of Central Asia opened to students in September 2017, part of an institution founded by treaty in 2000. And the Khorog Regional Museum documents the nature, history and peoples of Gorno-Badakhshan.
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