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.

Goodbye Mao, Hello Borat

Mike: It turns out that China is a lot harder to leave than it is to get into. When we applied for our Chinese visas in Bangkok, filling out forms in triplicate and then waiting around for days before forking over a hundred dollars each to have our passports adorned with the official stamp, we thought we were getting the hard part out of the way. Little did we know.

After exploring China's little known (but REALLY big) Xinjiang Province, we decided to take the train from Urumqi accross the border to Almaty, Kazakhstan. It sounded simple enough, but booking cross-border train tickets in China ain't easy for us foreign imperialist types. Rejected at the train station ticket window and several travel agencies, we eventually found ourselves in a hotel suite on the outskirts of town negotiating for tickets with a hulking Russian guy and his beanpole Uigur sidekick. After a frenzy of cacaphonic tri-lingual communication, we finally managed a breakthrough: they couldn't sell us tickets, either.

Finally, it was a small counter in the lobby of yet another hotel that saw us through. Tickets in hand, we triumphantly boarded an old Russian railcar for the two-day journey to Almaty. The other two berths in our compartment were taken by a Mongolian woman and a Chinese guy. We passed the miles in good spirits, exchanging stories (Tower of Babel, take two) and the food we'd packed. All was right with the world. Then, like that famous piece of refuse colliding with that famous fan, we trundled up to the Chinese border post.

We didn't expect trouble - we were leaving the country, after all, not trying to get in. Still, we should have known better. As the train ground to a halt, Chinese soldiers immediately climbed aboard, collected passports, and herded every European and North American aboard off the train and into a seperate building. There weren't many, just your faithful correspondents, three New Zealanders and a Norweigan. Good thing, because the soldiers brought each of us into a small room individually, with our luggage, and interviewed us for a minimum of 15 minutes each while they rifled through our bags.

Mike had an especially good time, since the Chinese were somehow aware of his checkered past as an imperialist military officer. It took over an hour for him to clear. He passed the time evading bizarre questions about his military service and watching a squad of the People's Liberation Army's finest look for secret documents sewn into his boxer shorts. If there's a transcript out there, part of it reads like this:

Chinese Officer: "You in army before, we know this. Yes?"

Mike: "Yes."

China: "Where in army you fight?"

Mike: "I fought with my sister sometimes, when I was a kid, but we get along great now."

(faint but audible rustle as socks are held up to the light by a teenage soldier, breathing loudly through his mouth)

China (after long silence): "You in army, yes? We know you in army."

After such hospitality, the Kazakh border was a glorious sight. We were also questioned by Kazakh officers - but all they wanted to know was why their Chinese counterparts kept giving westerners so much trouble, and they stopped by our compartment to ask their questions instead of confining us. Finally, after engineers changed the wheel guage on our train to accomodate the old Soviet-laid track to the north, we were on our way into Kazakhstan.




If Sasha Cohen's character Borat is your image of modern Kazakhstan, think again. Almaty's wide and leafy avenues, mountain vistas and European sensibilities felt cleansing after China's industrial, desert interior. As we arranged visas and plotted our onward journey to the Caspian Sea, and Istanbul beyond, we strolled through parks with locals decked out in western fashions bought with new petro-dollars and visited resplendant Russian Orthodox Churches.



At the famous Green Bazaar, we gawked at mountains of fresh meat and produce and indulged in heaping portions of laghman, the national dish of pulled noodles, vegetable sauce and meat.



Kazakhstan's largest city was the most vibrant place we'd visited since Shanghai. Still, despite the Italian fashions and French restaurants, we couldn't help singing a few lines from Borat's ficticious national anthem, written to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner:

"Kazakhstan is the Number One

Exporter of Potassium,

All other countries

Export inferior potassium!"