Steve travels #24: South to Samarkand
[currently somewhere with terrible internet so no photos for the moment.]
The day of the Great Minimalist Travelling Experiment couldn’t begin much better: breakfast is ready 15 minutes early, and it’s a magnificent spread. I bid farewell to my hefty backpack, abandoned on the edge of dining room, where hopefully it will sit unmolested for a week.
My taxi driver is the first of the whole trip who does not hold his phone to his ear while driving. But he lets himself down a bit by offering me a cigarette and then lighting up himself. Tashkent station comes into sight and it’s extraordinarily grand, unfaded in its glory.
I’m at the station early, which is handy as I get confused and end up in the VIP room. My train is incredibly long, modern, comfortable, and well fitted with power points and tray tables. The journey is smooth, and scenery aside, is everything you’d want from a train experience.
Samarkand’s station somehow puts Tashkent to shame, with an almost Jetsonian flair. There’s a throng of touts for taxis and tours and in a petty fit I take my business to…the tourist tram. It’s a bone-shaking, if extremely economical, ride, and it doesn’t really get me that close to the centre of town. But the weather is having a milder day and it’s quite pleasant walking in the shade, free of the burden of an overloaded hiking pack.
Lunch begins with a long wait as none of the staff from my chosen restaurant are willing to engage with me. Eventually the designated specialist for monolingual tourists arrives, and shortly after, a delivery of freshly baked bread. It is an absolute treat with my beef and vegetable soup, but the true hero of the meal is the lamb shashlik which is simply incredible. Fatty, salty, smokey, tender, moist, I’m in heaven. I rarely get excited about eating meat, but this experience is phenomenal. My whole meal, with a large pot of what I think is seabuckthorn tea, comes to $8 but also wipes me out for a few hours.
Post-coma, I saunter out to investigate the Registon, the historical heart of Samarkand, a collection of gorgeous and very photogenic buildings next to where I’m staying. For the fourth time in a week, I discover that the road I just walked in on has in my absence been blocked off.
This time, not by rising waters, landslides, traffic management, but by…a music festival. For my visit apparently coincides with Sharq Taronalari, a biennial festival in Samarkand where participants perform traditional music and dance from a variety of cultures in a televised event. The whole Registan area is completely blocked off in the evenings while it’s on. It’s not all bad: the roads are shut, meaning that walking around is quiet and pleasant. It’s just a shame that the local residents are so cut off from it: it would be so easy to set up a giant screen in one of the many nearby public squares, but they haven’t. From the hostel, late in the evening I see performers (in sweaty, elaborate costumes) and audience (in suits and sometimes traditional Arab garb) traipsing up and down the street.
I’m a bit annoyed by the whole thing, and as they say, “don’t get mad, get a haircut”. Then they say, “shave and a haircut, one hundred and fifty thousand som”. It’s an invigorating experience, especially the forward-facing post-cut hair-wash and complimentary face massage.
In any case, instead of visiting the Registan, I find myself instead at the mausoleum of Timur, a 14th century conqueror who built an empire across Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. It’s a beautiful building of tan brick, a giant turquoise dome, an image I’m sure I have seen many times over the years without ever going to the effort of wondering where or what it was. The inside is beautifully restored, every surface a rich tapestry of carvings and gilt and decoration. There’s an absence of explanatory plaques, which is a relief, and I get to just wander around and gawk and enjoy without feigning interest in a myriad details.
The town seems to do “touristy” with a lot of charm. There are tons of hotels and restaurants whose design apes the theme, but somehow it seems fun and playful rather than simply tacky.
Deep in my wander, I reflect on my current understanding of “the Stans”. Before this trip, most of them were just names that I was happy if I could spell, and stood no chance of locating on a map.
The famous ones:
- Afghhanistan: mountainous and desolate, repeatedly invaded more for its location than anything else, went from a progressive intellectual hotspot in the 70s to a regressive, repressive and extremely dangerous backwater today.
- Pakistan: not considered part of central Asia, with a huge population of a 240 million, and fraught geopolitics.
The emerging ones:
- Kazakhstan: huge country (probably similar to the rest of the Stans put together) filled with empty steppes, oil and some minerals, it is the home of Russia’s only spaceport at Baikonur, and was the last holdout in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Disgraced itself overreacting to the first Borat movie and did better the second time around. Decent mountains, nomad culture and Soviet relics for tourists, but half the visitors come because there are more flights to Almaty than the other cities.
- Kyrgyzstan: kind of like a more socially progressive Kazakhstan without the natural resources, it’s all mountains, lakes and horses, until you get to the bits I didn’t get to, which I can’t tell you about. A pretty wonderful place to do some open-ended hiking, it’s just a shame about the capital city.
- Uzbekistan: a big country with by far the largest city in central Asia, Tashkent. A history of silk road trade and a home grown conqueror, a much more developed country than the other two with decent roads, a decent train system, and basically a very functional modern economy. It’s an agricultural powerhouse, exporting significant portions of the world’s carrots, wheat, cotton and watermelon, despite being chronically short of water. As a result it turned one of the world’s largest inland seas, the Aral Sea, into a desert over just a few decades.
The dark horses:
- Tajikistan: like Kyrgyzstan, but much harder work. Very mountainous, more conservative, and lacking even basic infrastructure like public transport and proper roads. Getting around requires a lot of four wheel driving, to visit villages where the food is even more dull. People who have done it rave about how great it was, but is that just the Stockholm Syndrome talking? It’s a good starter for afficionados of authoritarian regimes.
- Turkmenistan: the one that no-one wants to visit, it’s all repressive regimes, expensive visas, desert and frankly you’d better be pretty damn excited about visiting ruins in the sand, and honestly why not just go to Egypt? You can’t even visit independently, you need a tour, costing hundreds of dollars a day.
Tomorrow, I plan to make some plans. We’ll see.