Khiva

Apr 11-13

The last major stop on the Silk Road in Uzbekistan and another prominent city in the historical struggle between Russia and Britain as they vied for control over Central Asia, Khiva sits in western Uzbekistan near the border with Turkmenistan. We’ve been reading The Great Game that talks about the history of this region from about 1750-1900 from a British perspective, which provided interesting context to think about the adventures and misadventures of the spies, merchants, desert raiders, and slavers of centuries past. The landscape certainly did not look hospitable in the five-hour train ride in from Bukhara (desert desert desert), although there was pasture and some agricultural land immediately surrounding the city which helped make the city an important stop on the Silk Road.

Khiva is an “open-air museum” as one young local informed us after a very brief interview she requested while we wandered through old town. The fortress walls are maintained around the old city with a number of mosques, madrasas, minarets, and the old palace serving to house museums and other historical artifacts. We were excited as we walked into the city in the evening, which felt mostly deserted by 6:00 pm. The next morning I woke up early to try for sunrise photos and the streets were still quite empty, with a few merchants setting up along the main roads. By 10:00 am the old city was packed with tourists and merchants targeting the tourists with kitsch and handmade local handicrafts. Our excitement dimmed a little at the cost of the tickets, $12 for general entry and another $6 to climb a watchtower and minaret having seen the quality of other museums with tickets for significantly less, but we were a captive audience and paid up. We spent a day wandering through all that Khiva had to offer, which was the perfect amount of time. Climbing the minarets was actually pretty cool. Super steep and windy staircase inside with no handrails. I’m not scared of heights but it still made my mouth dry thinking about slipping and tumbling the whole way down.

Some highlights included a mosque with dozens of intricately wooden support pillars, some dating back hundreds of years while others were recreated. The palace and its harem had spectacular tile and ceiling decor, and we could see the raised circular dais where the Kahn would have received British and Russian agents in his royal yurt in the 1800s. In one story a British agent managed to convince the Khan to free hundreds of Russian slaves to deny the Russian Tsar a pretext for invasion. The agent, named Shakespear, led the slaves in a caravan hundreds of miles to a Russian outpost on the Caspian Sea, helping temporarily prevent further Russian advances, although the entire region would fall to the Russian empire some decades later.

Our historical curiosity slaked we bought a few tiles that we were assured weren’t old and enjoyed some delicious kebabs and mediocre wine and beer before heading out to Urgench the following morning to catch a flight back to Tashkent.

You have enough, Uzbekistan. Just let me have one!

Sentyab - Off roading in a Camry

Heading home from school

Apr 7-9

While planning our itinerary we had to decide between a trip to (what’s left of) the Aral Sea or a village homestay and hiking in the mountains of central Uzbekistan. The Aral Sea problem dates back to the development of intensive agriculture under the Soviets in the 1980s when widespread irrigation of cotton in the desert stopped the flow of water regenerating the sea. Where there was once a prosperous fishing town, now only rusted hulls remain, hundreds of kilometers from the current sea shore. Or so I read, because we chose hiking.

It was possible to book an arranged tour but it didn’t seem too hard to do it ourselves. I booked two nights at a guest house and train tickets for the first leg, and early one morning we hopped on a train to Navoi en route to Sentyab, a small rural village. We now know that shared taxis are probably cheaper than the train (which left at 5:00 am, uhg), although the taxis are a bit slower. It also would have been easier to leave out of Samarkand, but it wasn’t too bad out of Bukhara. Booking everything and arranging our transportation ended up costing about $220, saving us about $80 over the cost of the cheapest arranged tours we could find.

From Navoi we caught a shared taxi to Nurata for only 20K som each, fairly cheap. Nurata is known for the ruins of a fortress built by Alexander the Great but otherwise there didn’t seem to be much there. At one point in the drive Tim noticed we seemed to pass a concrete barrier with a no entry sign, which explained why the taxi ended up doing some serious off road maneuvers in his Chevy sedan over/around/through the ditches and dirt piles of a construction site. It did seem to save us about an hour so it made up for the fear for our lives. When we weren’t off roading the driver was burning up the straights. I was sitting middle in the back and there were no seat belts, so not liking my odds if something went wrong. Tim wisely chose to close his eyes and pretend to sleep.

All the land we could see near Sentyab was mountain or pasture, and the village itself was spread along a river valley in the foothills. The river was churning whitewater this time of year, and the weather was a drizzly 60 degrees. Our room at the guest house was a bit damp, but they served us hot tea and we took a nap to recover from our early morning. We were served traditional food (the village was all Tajik but the food was similar to Uzbek food), then we shared a shot of vodka with the homestay owner and his brother and cousin who happened to be visiting. We headed to bed while they stayed up later cooking pork kebabs and presumably drinking.

The next day dawned beautiful and sunny and we set out on a hike that was a long 17 miles up a rocky valley to gently rolling pasture in the mountains. We headed out with our host around 9:00 am, eventually being joined by his brother and uncle and a donkey carrying our picnic. The men took turns riding the donkey whenever the terrain allowed. They offered us too, but we were pretty awkward up there and it wasn’t the most comfortable.

We stopped at noon for lunch, eating a simple but filling mix of boiled eggs and potatoes, salted cucumber and tomatoes, bread and apples. Of course there was a half liter of vodka. We had a sip and then they finished off the bottle. We reached our destination which was an alpine lake, but it wasn’t really much to write home about. The journey was fantastic, though.

About a mile into the return hikea our guide handed us the donkey’s reins and a stick and said something to the effect of “machine trail, I go check on something”. We walked by ourselves for a mile, confused, as our guide headed off on a tangent out of sight behind a ridge. We didn’t know if he wanted us to walk home or wait for him, or if he was checking on his clandestine drug fields. We paused to wait, catching a view of his red jacket some distance off before he disappeared again. We eventually decided to keep hiking toward home, but the guys caught up with us after a bit and took charge of the donkey again (thank god, they really are stubborn). Back at the ranch we finally managed to ask what the guide had split off for, and he brought out a large bowl of mushrooms. Apparently the donkey eats or steps on mushrooms and makes them hard to collect, explaining why we were given the reins and sent on alone. With about 7 shared words of language between us, it’s not surprising we missed out on that nuance up on the trail.

Our taxi showed up after breakfast and we thanked our hosts before beginning the long journey back to Bukhara.

Rahima's guesthouse

Bukhara

Posting from a borrowed laptop in Tashkent.

Covered bazaars in Bukhara - a trading haven for over a millennium.

Apr 4-7, 9-11

A ninety minute bullet train ride took us to Bukhara, another stop along the Silk Road. We made it to our B&B near Lyab-i-Hauz, a square with a pool that’s been in use for hundreds of years, and is still hopping to this day. On seeing our passports, our hotel owner mentioned he had recently returned from an eighteen month management internship in NYC with his wife and three kids. He enjoyed it but was glad to be back home, the crowded streets of New York were stressful compared with Bukhara’s more relaxed atmosphere. His family is Tajik, highlighting the fact that the borders drawn around the central Asian countries were somewhat arbitrary.

We spent a day touring the city, visiting (yet) more beautiful blue tiled madrasas. One unique feature is the Kalon minaret, built in 1127 and was once the tallest building in Central Asia (150’ tall). They would execute people who had fallen on the wrong side of the Emir by throwing them off the top. It so awed the ransacking Genghis Khan that he spared it while razing the city in the 1200s. It’d be a shame to give up a good execution method! Russian artillery later left several marks that were repaired in lighter colored stone. We stopped by the Zindon (jail) to see the infamous “bug pit” where two British envoys were imprisoned for years before being publicly beheaded by the paranoid Emir in the 1800s, when each city in the region was the headquarters of a local kingdom. The local rulers were rightfully worried about British and Russian designs on the region, but were pretty ruthless nonetheless.

A long fall.

As in Samarkand the madrasas have been mostly filled with merchants selling local wares. My favorite part of shopping in Bukhara was the omnipresent antiques! So cool! There were a ton of old copper teapots, water pitchers, and serving trays, probably hundreds of years old. I wanted to buy them all. Unfortunately, the reason there’s such a glut of them is that nothing older than 50 years old is allowed to be exported from Uzbekistan - customs detains it. I talked to the antiques certifier dude several times trying to convince him to give me a cert that the antiques I wanted were indeed not antique, but to no avail. Alas. 

We headed out for a few nights to Sentyab for some hiking, but returned to Bukhara to stay a few more nights in a converted madrasa. The hotel was a lovely mix of old decor (antiques aplenty…) and nice soft beds. Unfortunately while in Sentyab our laptop had kicked the bucket, so we spent most of the morning wandering the city in search of tools and repair shops. We managed to find a small screwdriver in an electronics shop to take it apart and unplug the battery, to no avail. We were then pointed to the shop worker’s brother nearby, so we hopped on a bus and ended up at a pc gaming cafe. Eventually an older guy with a full repair shop pulled out a multimeter and started assessing voltage and continuity across the motherboard, but again no luck. At least it’s still under warranty, so Asus helpfully offered to let us ship it to get repaired...in the US. Sigh.

Dinner in a traditional Uzbek dining room, with a $7 1990(!) vintage wine.

A shot of vodka for only $0.36! A .5L bottle was only $3.60. 

Lyab-i-hauz at night

Courtyard of Hotel Amulet - the converted madrassa