Nomads and Narcissists

After ten months on the ground in Asia, we thought we'd seen it all. After bizarre Hindu festivals, soaring Tibetan monasteries, steaming Laotian jungles and Chinese breakfast buffets, we were surely ready for anything. We hadn't counted on Turkmenistan.

Sure, we knew a few things about the country. From 1991 until 2006, Turkmenistan was ruled by one of the world's truly great lunatics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lackluster communist functionary named Saparmurat Niyazov seized his chance for immortal glory by declaring himself the Great Turkmenbashi, Leader of All Turkmen, and President for Life of the newly independent nation. After the mandatory 'all dissidents mysteriously vanish' phase of the power grab, Great Turkmenbashi got down to the serious business of erecting golden statues of himself all over the country, officially re-naming the month of April after his mother, and copyrighting the Turkmen alphabet. After the Turkmenbashi's death in 2006, the country is now in the capable hands of a guy rumored to be the great leader's illegitimate son. We'd been warned that the banks didn't function, there was no internet access, most of the country was a scorched desert wasteland, and government agents would follow us everywhere we went. Naturally, we decided to check the place out.

Although we've come to love independent travel, a guide is required at all times for foreigners in Turkmenistan. Fortunately, ours proved to be outstanding. Dima (short for Dimitri) met us as we cleared the border, a hulking Russian in a gleaming golden jeep. Within minutes, he and Mike were howling with laughter in the front seat, trading dry Soviet-style jokes about the government road system (in Turkmenistan, the road drives YOU...). Happily, Susannah was too busy swooning over the jeep's air conditioning to reflect on her husband's idiocy.

Our first stop was the ruins of Konye-Urgench, a former silk road Khanate now largely buried beneath the dunes. In modern times, it has become a holy place where the people of the vast Karakum Desert come to make offering and seek answers. The local religion is a unique and timeless mix of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Animism and Islam. Women build intricate cradles of wood and yarn, then leave them on holy sites to petition Allah and their ancestors for a child. While we were there, a young man climbed an ancient burial mound, where bleached white skulls and bones still protrude from the earth, and then rolled down the slope past a lone stick in the ground covered in prayer offerings. In his case, rolling to the right of the 'sacred tree' meant Allah wanted him to go to college - left was for early marriage and taking over his father's goat herd. He went right, and witnesses seemed sure he'd given himself a discreet push in that direction.

The Sacred Tree of Konye-Urgench

As our golden jeep pulled away from the ruined city, Dima gleefully informed us we were headed south, into the vastness of the Karakum Desert, to camp at a place he called 'the crater.' He refused to tell us more, only that it was a 'volcano in the desert,' and we could not leave the country without seeing it. We drove for hours on a bad road through the desert, passing only camels and the occasional shack, before we stopped for mutton pancakes at a lonely desert cafe with a few old tables and a golden bust of the Turkmenbashi. Finally, hours later, we veered off the road and across the dunes in the dwindling light. As our golden jeep climbed the final rise, Dima triumphantly exclaimed "... and now... the crater!"

The landscape before us was lit in a fiery glow. At its center was a huge, flaming hole in the ground. The blazing pits of hell... A horrific inferno... We ran down for a closer look.

What was a flaming crater doing in the middle of the desert? All Dima could tell us, and all anyone seems to know, is that the Soviets were here looking for natural gas in the sixties, there's nobody at all here now, and the crater the Ruskies left is still on fire forty years later. Chalk another one up for Lenin and his Worker's Paradise. After dinner and the requisite shots of vodka (Russians in the desert are still Russians, after all), Dima tucked us in with a warning about the local fauna. "We have the cobra here, and also we have many spider, but no worry. Spider just paralyze you, only death for maybe six percent of time. If cobra bite, you must drink much of the vodka, very fast, then no problem. Have good sleeping."

Thanks, big guy...

Our government-approved itinerary had us going to the capitol, Ashkabat, the next morning. When we woke up, though, Dima told us he was willing to change it. He offered to take us to a nomad village deep in the Karakum, a full day's off-road drive away, where he said we could catch a glimpse of Turkmen life as it had been a hundred years ago, and for centuries before that. The village was called 'Dan-La,' meaning 'Last Drop of Water,' but Dima simply called it the Capitol of the Desert. As he sun rose, we set off across the dunes.

Master of the Desert

We drove all day over an inland sea of sand and rock, crossing mountainous dunes and dry lake beds smoother than the best asphalt. The desert seemed utterly empty, with only the occasional hawk, lizard or camel dotting the landscape. We went almost all day without seeing another vehicle, until we crested a steep rise in the dunes late in the afternoon. A motorcycle filled the windshield, and before anyone could react its rider was flying over the jeep. Fortunately, he landed in the soft sand without a scratch. As Murphy's Law predicts, the only two vehicles for a hundred miles had managed to drive straight into each other. The poor nomad's bike was in pretty bad shape, but after about an hour we managed to get it started, and he headed on his way.

Dima and the nomad discuss motorcycle maintenance

About an hour later, Dima pulled to a halt at the crest of a large hill. Below us in the golden afternoon light, we beheld Dan-La, Capitol of the Desert.

Dima is one of the few outsiders who ventures here, and his jeep is well-known. As a crowd of children gathered to greet us, we made our way down the slope and into the village.

Even after our months of travel, what we saw amazed us. Dan-La was a true time capsule, a forgotten world in the middle of a vast roadless expanse. Camels and donkeys wandered between the mud houses and nomad yurts. Women were busy weaving textiles by hand, while men sheared sheep with long knives in pens made of thorny branches. Children scurried about, waving their arms and shouting as they herded swarms of goats into their enclosures. An aging soviet truck and a few motorcycles were the only modern technology we saw.

Our host was the patriarch of the village's largest family, and welcomed us in his yurt with tea, bread and dried mutton. It was a dry year, and his two oldest sons had taken most of his goats and gone over a hundred miles to the north in search of better water and grazing. The life of the desert nomads, Dima explained, had been that way for centuries.

When our host heard about our crash with the motorcycle, he immediately declared that thanks must be given to Allah for the lack of injury or death. We chose a lamb from his pens, brought it to a special sacrificial post at the center of the village, and slit its throat. As the blood pooled in the sand, he lit a small fire on top of the blood, faced Mecca, and prayed in thanks to Allah. Like the pilgrims at Konye-Urgench, his offering was a blend of Islamic practice with ancient Animist and Zoroastrian traditions. As we would continue to see, Turkmenistan's Islamic religious identity is skin-deep, obscuring a much more complex and fascinating reality.

As the sun set, we gathered in the yurt for a feast of lamb, bread, tea and vodka. We discussed the price of goats in the Ashkabat markets and the likelihood of rain, told stories and bad jokes, and finally curled up under our blankets and drifted off to the bizarre howling of the camels tethered outside.

We woke just after dawn, to discover that the camels were somehow still howling. After a hearty breakfast of bread, tea and dried mutton, we joined the local women and children as they watered the camel herds at the village well.

Then, reluctantly, we began the long day's drive from the Capitol of the Desert across the Karakum to Ashgabat, where we discovered a capitol of a very different sort.

We emerged from the desert into a theme-park world of wide, empty avenues and gleaming marble buildings. Everywhere we looked the brilliant desert sunlight radiated from the golden face of the Great Turkmenbashi. High above the city, perched atop the "Arch of Neutrality," the Turkmenbashi's largest likeness rotates to always face the sun. Nearby stands his memorial to the great earthquake of 1948 which killed thousands and claimed the life of the infant despot's mother. The memorial is a massive statue of a great bull uprooting the earth with his horns while men and women scream grotesquely. Alone amid the chaos, the young Turkmenbashi is depicted as a golden infant unworldly in his serenity. He doesn't even need a diaper!

Among the Turkmenbashi's many gifts to his people, the Ruhnama is surely the greatest and most lasting. Known in English as The Book of the Soul, the tome is a rambling and often incoherent vision of the Turkmen people's history, ethos and place in the universe. Study of the book is required at all levels of Turkmen education and it is even part of the driver's license exam (the driving part, as any visitor will tell you, is much less important). After having his magnum opus translated into virtually every language on earth, the Turkmenbashi surpassed even himself by launching a copy into space. Since the Turkmenbashi's works are the only books available for purchase in Turkmenistan, we bought two copies.

Fortunately, there is another side to the Turkmen capitol. Ashgabat's Tolkuchka Bazaar is one of the greatest markets in Central Asia, and therefore the world. It stretches for miles, offering everything from camels and carburetors to German cars and Japanese plasma TVs.

With the battle-cry of a true market hound, Susannah twice led us into the chaos, camera poised and ready for some bare-knuckle bargaining.

After hours of admiring hand-woven carpets and antique silver earrings, Mike was loopy enough to don a traditional sheepskin hat.

Finally, our Central Asian adventures with deserts and dictators seemed to be at an end. We met Dima for our last ride together, west across the desert to the port city of Turkmenbashi, where we planned to take ship for Baku. We looked forward to a twelve hour sail across the Caspian and the comparative comforts of the Caucasus.

We were fools...

The Golden Road

We travel not for trafficking alone,
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned.
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

--James Elroy Flecker


Probably as a result of our brief and expansive history, pioneering national spirit, and geographic fortune ensconced behind the battlements of two vast oceans, we Americans tend to see history as the story of continual human progress. Perhaps no country on earth disabuses this notion like Uzbekistan. Formerly the home of fiercely independent desert khanates and glittering centers of global learning and culture, Uzbekistan today struggles to escape the crippling legacy of its Soviet past under the uncertain helmsmanship of a repressive dictator. Still, despite current realities, Uzbekistan offers the traveler an almost unmatched experience of enchantment, history, and sheer eye candy.


The Registan, Samarkand

We entered the country via the market town of Osh, in reality the commercial center of Uzbekistan's fertile Fergana Valley but deposited by a whim of Stalin just across the border in Kyrgyzstan. After clearing customs, we made our way toward the capital city of Tashkent through the Fergana's heavily irrigated cropland. As the hotbed of Islamist resistance to President Karimov's regime, the Fergana exports more than just vegetables to the rest of the country. The region made the news in 2005 when Uzbek soldiers reportedly massacred up to 1,000 peaceful protesters in the city of Andijon. It was quiet when we passed through, however, and we navigated through the maze of heavily armed military checkpoints to the capital without incident. We spent a few days in Tashkent waiting for visas and gawked at young nouveau riche Russian girls dancing on the tables in a neon-lit yurt-cum-bar. Finally, after taking in Karimov's version of the past at the propaganda-packed History Museum of the People of Uzbekistan, we headed south to Samarkand to see it for ourselves.



Samarkand's very name is synonymous with the Silk Road and the romance of the Orient. Even today, the remnants of its former glory took our breath away. We lost ourselves for days in sunlit courtyards and soaring chambers resplendent with blue tile and gold leaf.









Next, we made our way to Bukhara, the last of the Central Asian khanates to lose its independence. After fending off desert raiders and voracious czars and emperors for centuries, the proud city state even managed to hold off the Red Army for a few years before finally falling to the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. Today, Bukhara is a mecca for French tourists, full of tempting bazaars, atmospheric streets and charmingly dilapidated bed and breakfasts. We splurged on a room above the courtyard of a 19th century mansion and set out to explore the city.


The breakfast room at our digs


Bukhara from the ramparts of the Ark





Finally, our Uzbek odyssey took us to Khiva, another former city state once renowned for its barbarism and for holding Central Asia's largest slave market. When the Russians sent an expedition to free their slaves in the 18th century, the cunning khan invited the czar's soldiers to relax in comfort in local homes before having them all murdered in their sleep. We decided to lock our door at night.


The fierce warriors of Khiva


The Kalta Minor Minaret, Khiva


An Uzbek folk singer before her performance

Khiva was to be our last stop before striking out into the formidable physical and political wasteland of Turkmenistan, one of the world's least understood and most bizarre nations. We sent final emails, stocked up on cash and made our way to the border hoping for the best.


Ramparts of Khiva at sunset

Asia's Wild West

Susannah: A tiny, mountainous country, isolated Kyrgyzstan is a unique and charming mix of traditional Сentral Asian and Russian culture. It was here that I saw my first babushkas, with wizened faces smiling under colorful scarves, and enjoyed my first authentic bowl of Russian borscht with flat, delicious bread (a miracle after weeks of Chinese steamed buns). The scenery is spectacular, and the lives of the people who make their living off the land are fascinating.
We actually saw more of Kyrgystan's ugly post-soviet capital, Bishkek, than the lovely countryside, since we were forced to wait for a week there for our Uzbek visa. Arriving from Almaty late in the day, we discovered that the cheap hotel we were looking for had closed. Exhausted and nearing despair, we spotted two guys ambling toward us who were definitely not Krygyz. Mike sidled up to them and asked if they knew a good place to stay. "No," the older guy replied in a thick Australian twang, "but I have a friend who would. Are you hungry? We're having dinner down the street."

So began our fortunate and pleasureable friendship with three oil company guys posted in Bishkek. Over several nights of pizza and beer with John, a thirty-something Canadian, I came to appreciate his surprisingly nuanced (to me) views on environmentalism, development and his own role in the world. It didn't hurt, either, that his Kyrgyz right-hand-man found us a luxurious apartment for less than the price of a cheap hotel.

Our next stop was the turquoise waters of Lake Issykol, ringed by mountains, and the tiny city of Karakol. Here, our improbable companions were a young Peace Corps volunteer, Kay, and her Kyrgyz boyfriend Arabek. His mother gave us a taste of Kyrgyz hospitality, over steaming bowls of black tea sweetened with homemade fruit preserves and honey. We met a beekeeper the next day on the road, who pulled us into his house and insisted on filling a plastic bag bag with creamy honey for us straight out of the honey-churn.

On Saturday we got up at dawn to see Karakol's teeming animal market. We had just set out on our long walk when a horse cart appeared, headed to the market, and the driver motioned for us to take a seat next to his trussed-up sheep in the back. We lumbered along through the city streets and showed up at the market in style, already smelling ripe.

The market was full of real cowboys and farmers checking out each others' livestock, getting their horses shod, and buying their feed.

These guys, who at 8 in the morning had just completed a tipsy deal on this cow, insisted we take their photo to commemorate the happy event and their new friendship. You can see how proud the Russian guy is of his new bovine companion.

The next day, we headed with our Peace Corps friends up to a high mountain plateau to see an eagle hunt. At first we had thought there was some linguistic miscommunication, and that the Kyrgyz meant falcon hunt. But when we pulled up in the van to pick up the hunter and his bird, we discovered there was no mistake. If you've never shared a minivan with an uncaged eagle, you'll have to take our word for it that it was disconcerting. Struggling to keep its balance, it continually smacked the back of our heads with its wings. At one point it actually fell headfirst into the trunk, then proudly pretended it had never happened.

We had brought along a sweet grey bunny, scuffling nervously in a cardboard box in the front seat. When we reached the plateau, the hunter hooded the eagle and Anabek set the bunny down five hundred yards away. When the hood was removed, the eagle took off like a streak. The bunny never saw it coming.

In a real hunt this would all have happened on horseback, and the hunter would only have allowed the eagle a slice of the meat. But it was sobering to see the food chain before us so vividly. Apparently, the eagles often take down fox and even wolves!

On the way back to Bishkek to pick up our Uzbek visas, we stopped in a mountain town west of Lake Issykol and headed up into the hills to see the "real nomad life." We couldn't help laughing when our host family's yurt came into view:

Tourism aside, they really did graze a huge herd of sheep, goats, and cows, and even a couple yaks. While they cooked a sheep they'd just slaughtered, we headed out for a ride. I had never been on horseback aside from trail-riding on ponies, and was continually kicking the horse in a vain effort to get it to at least trot. Not until the yurt again came into view did it break into a gallop, and I let out a wild yell as we hurtled down the hill. Mike had slightly less trouble controlling his noble beast.

Back at the trailer/yurt, dinner was ready: boiled sheep, flat bread, and bowls of hot fat. A vegetarian before the trip began, I was a little disturbed by the sight of the sheep's head in the middle of the table, but gamely began to gnaw on the leg tossed on my plate. As the bones piled up on the table, I turned to Mike and whispered, "At first I thought nomad life was quaint--but it's actually barbaric!" (Mike, with most of a leg bone in his mouth and a sharp knife in his hand, could only grunt in reply.)

Raised on legends of cowboys living free and wild in an American west that has largely faded into myth, we had found the real thing alive and well in Asia.