The Road to Samarkand

Khiva, Uzbekistan

After checking our passports, the Uzbek border guards checked our football preferences. Though we were unable to agree on the superiority of Manchester United we were waved cheerfully through. Before long we were hurtling away in an old Lada that seemed to be held together with parquet lino and gaffer tape.

As cracked roads and Soviet factories swept by in the dust, I asked whether life had been better under the USSR. 'Life good now!' replied our driver 'in USSR I was teacher, now I'm taxi driver!' I didn't entirely follow his logic. We spluttered to a stop at the old city of Khiva, one of a line of Uzbek oasis towns that serviced the old Silk Road. The city was a warren of honeycomb houses, mosques and azure tiled minarets. It isn’t really a living city, it is partly a theme park for overweight French and German tour groups. They roll out of coaches in a mass of overstretched pastel travel-wear and telephoto lenses, gawping like dying fish. We haven't seen any such tourism since Western Turkey and it was a bit of a shock. Still, as theme parks go, it was truly beautiful and seeing a silver moon over the silhouetted skyline removed the tacky modernity and allowed us to step back to those romantic Silk Road days. The good old days when they did romantic things like trading slaves and throwing criminals from minarets.

We changed money on the black market (you get nearly 30% more than in a bank) and were given thick, gangster bundles of notes. We have to carry it around in a bag.

Less than 100 pounds in Uzbek Som
On the way to Bukhara there were two roads, one half-destroyed by sand and potholes, the other only half built and strewn with huge barriers of concrete. Our taxi had to weave between the two over little beaten earth ramps. None of this stopped our driver from driving at 140kph whenever possible, or from deciding to moisturize his face with a little cotton pad in one hand and a bottle of cream in the other. It was up to his knees alone to steer round the potholes and through the narrow concrete gaps. Near-death flew by the window very five minutes. Seatbelts are slung over one shoulder for police checks but otherwise its considered weak to wear one ‘It’s against my soul!’ said one Uzbek.

Somehow we survived and made it to Bukhara. By this point in our journey we had seen enough mosques and madrassas to last a pious mullah's lifetime and possibly didn't fully appreciate the beauty of the architecture. It was fascinating though to see the bleeding of cultures traced in the stone. Persian tiling clashing with Tibetan woodwork, true Silk Road architecture. It was also lovely to see friends we had met in Iran and Uzbekistan, other Silk Roaders following the dream east, discussing roads to China while the domes turned from azure to gold in the dying sun.
Samarkand is largely a fairly drab Soviet city but it is also home to some pretty monumental architecture. It was the imperial capital of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame). Tamerlane controlled an empire that stretched from Pakistan (or thereabouts) to the Mediterranean. We've been hearing tales about him since arriving in Turkey. One described a foolish Anatolian ruler who said something along the lines of 'That Tamerlane's a pussy, I could slap him up no problem.' Hearing of this, Tamerlane had the ruler and his entire city slaughtered and beheaded, then demanded that a mountain be made of the heads. Unsatisfied with the height of the mountain, he had his men rebuild it with a bloody mud mortar until it satisfied his crazed desire. In short, he was a bit of a twat. He did, however, commission some amazing buildings, huge constructions of glorious blue and green tile work, gold ceilings and towering minarets. Even to our mosque-numbed minds, it was quite stunning.

A Samarkand interior

Another train took us to the Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital. It was almost a relief to find there were no historical monuments to see, just Soviet boulevards cooled by chlorophyll-green trees and a few monumental, yet tacky, buildings of white marble. Though there’s nothing much to truly inspire here, we’ve enjoyed walking around the spray of the sprinklers and the smoke of the street side shaslyk. The main reason we came to Tashkent was to see Nic’s ex-student Maruf. Maruf smothered us with the full power of Uzbek hospitality. He paid for our hotel and our food and drove us everywhere. We ate with his family, devout Muslims in a country where secularism often overrides (it is more common to see women in tight-fitting skirts and fishnets than in headscarves). The family plied us with food and gifts and I am now the proud owner of a rather fetching purple wedding gown. I even ended up wowing Maruf’s PVC firm at their weekly football match. My giraffe-like finesse had them revising their high regard for English football.

Nic shows Maruf's family our wedding photos

The main stress during trip has been obtaining visas. In order to follow our journey we have had to acquire letters of invitation, flight details, hotel bookings and employer references. Naturally we have had none of these so have become rather expert in forging such documents. Amazingly, in the last couple of days, we have acquired all the visas we need to complete our Silk Road journey and are now free to pass through Kyrgyzstan (I don’t think even the Kyrgyz know where that is) to China. With the hot Spring sun now warming our backs we travel onwards to the mountains with the distant scents of the Far East just beginning to tingle our noses.

Outside Tashkent

Slow-dancing in Central Asia

We left Iran via a range of craggy mountains littered here and there with the rusting carcasses of crashed lorries. As we descended onto the flat desert scrub of Turkmenistan, we caught our first glimpse of one of the most extraordinary cities in the world, a cluster of white towers shimmering in the dust. As we approached the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat we saw women, beautiful women with flowing hair and tight-fitting dresses. After Iran, this was most shocking, the brazen hussies! Nic let her headscarf drop and we gawped at the dresses and head wraps in a clash of gaudy colours and were so relieved to see women being allowed to be women again (albeit women who made their clothes from 70s curtain fabric). But the women could not keep our gaze for long, Ashgabat was upon us.

Turkmenistan has been described as Central Asia's North Korea, a totalitarian system has been in place since independence from the USSR and tourists are only allowed to visit if accompanied by government minder. We were given a three day transit visa and were not really meant to see anything on the way. Amazingly, those three days turned into one of the highlights of the trip.

Turkmenbashi was the president of Turkmenistan from independence to 2006 when he died. Modern Ashgabat was his own little vanity project and his portrait still hangs in squares and on government buildings. Unlike sour-faced dictators like Mao or Lenin, Turkmenbashi is pictured in smiling catalogue poses, running through the mountains in a tracksuit or admiring an unseen view. Sadly, the gold statue that used to rotate with the sun has now been removed. What remains is a pristine city of gleaming white marble, vast municipal buildings and two-storey high TV screens showing the glories of Turkmenistan. An army of workers prune the manicured gardens, polish the gleaming chrome traffic lights and sweep the unsightly dust from the vast empty squares. It is illegal to have a dirty car so every vehicle, like every building, sparkles in the sun, reflecting the thousand bubbling fountains. Despite being a madman's theme park, the city somehow worked and we walked around with grins of disbelief on our faces.

The first three hotels we tried would not accept foreign tourists so we ended up in an ex-Soviet block governed by bulldog-faced babushkas. It was all peeling 1950s wallpaper, scuffed carpets and infinite faux laminate corridors. The people reacted to us shyly, it was clearly not normal to have a pair of unwashed outsiders dirtying the place up. The people in Central Asian sometimes look Mongol, sometimes Russian, often a mix of the myriad peoples that have swept across these lands.

The next day we managed to charter a taxi to the northern town of Konye Urgench. We had been physically pulled five different ways by eager taxi drivers and ended up with the one who pulled hardest. Our man was a member of that universal tribe, the Boy Racer. We tore out of town to ear-rupturing hip hop and the false modernity of Ashgabat soon gave way to scrubby desert. Yurts and camels appeared among the dunes as the road grew worse and the tunes got cranked up further.  At times we were driving at a near 30 degree angle. Next the road were the broken bodies of rolled cars that had spotted the potholes too late. This was one of three major roads in the country and its destitution highlighted the absurdity of Ashgabat's 'perfection'. Bizarrely, in the middle of the desert, stood one solitary section of a modern flyover complete with lampposts and tarmac, going nowhere.

We finally arrived in Konye Urgench, a city once sacked by both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane but now is just a few ruins amongst dusty lanes and humble concrete houses. A 60m minaret built in the 14th century still survives, looking out toward the horizon for the ghosts of the Mongol horde.

After such a long and eventful day we retired to our 'hotel' 'bar' amongst golden swags and pink lacy alcoves . We were just enjoying a nice cold beer (after 7 weeks, even Berk tastes good) when the door burst open and a wedding party danced in trailing a glum looking bride in a cloud of white nylon. Before long we had downed a glass of port and found ourselves slow-dancing to some dreadful Turkmen pop. As the Euro-house blared on and the men got increasingly sweaty, Nic pointed out that we hadn't even managed to slow dance at our own wedding and now here we were, in a cheap roadside motel in Central Asia, drunk on port and Berk, dancing in a mass of vodka-crazed Turkmen.

It was quite some transit.