Silk & Marble

We waved goodbye to Kyrgyzstan and embarked on a fun and games Central Asian border crossing, which actually turned out to be far less painful than expected. There was the usual bags, off, scan bags, stand quietly, no laughing, talking, joking, showing the guards pictures on your phone (they mostly seemed to be interested in how much everyone’s houses cost) and then trooping back on to Penelope a few hours later to head through the gate and officially enter Uzbekistan!

We met up with our local guide, Rustam, and headed out in to the populated stream of villages and towns that make up the Fergana Valley. We stopped, briefly and rather bizarrely at someone’s house to try and arrange truck insurance where a lady in a nightgown had to be brought back from her mother’s house to fill in a form for us. Meanwhile we decided that the little bit of Fergana pavement outside would do for a truck lunch and we proceeded to become the most exciting thing that the local kids piling out of school had ever seen! 

After swapping the usual ‘what is your name’ ‘where are you from’ stories and comparing which football teams we supported and being given a large bag of grapes by the kids (definitely not at home anymore - not only do kids here happily speak to strangers they offer them gifts!) we headed off to something reasonably significant for a silk road trip - a silk factory! The beautiful factory uses traditional methods of silk production from boiling the cocoons in copper pots to hand weaving, it was fascinating to watch a tradition that went back for millennia and have the opportunity to go shopping afterwards!

Heating the silk cocoons

Invisible silk

Dying room

Natural dyes

Weaving room

Pedal operated

Silk carpet weaving

Knotting and cutting

Everyone was dropped off at a hotel that night whilst Simon, Emma and Penelope headed off alone to Tashkent. The reason for this is complicated: passenger carrying vehicles are banned from crossing the Kamchik Pass which links the Fergana Valley to the capital, so the crew embarked on a long overnight drive with an empty truck while the group slept soundly in their beds! The next day everyone headed off in a stream of taxis visiting the Khan’s Palace at Kokhand en route, a taste of the silk road cities to come, before heading to Tashkent.

Kokand Palace

Traditional clothes

Local boys in Kokand

Lunch en route

The Kamchik Pass

Traffic on the pass

Tashkent is a modern city that feels very Russian and was a very important outpost when it was part of Russia and the USSR. Everyone had the chance to explore the beautiful markets, see the impressive mosque and its copy of one of the oldest Korans in the world and try out some international cuisine, plov and noodles can get a little repetitive as you travel through Central Asia!

Tashkent market

Peter stocks up on snacks

Pauline & Barry

Immaculate bakery

Tashkent mosque

Then it was time to hit the Golden Road to Samarkand, the first of our three Silk Road cities. Modern Uzbekistan was the powerhouse of a huge swathe of the world back in the time of Timur and his dynasty, conquering a ruling an area from Turkey to China, before that came Ghengis Khan and his Maurading Mongolians, oh and Marco Polo, some Persians, Chinese and many many merchants trading their silks, spices, camels, knives, clothes etc as it was a very important stop on the silk road. With blue tiles in every direction and domes and minarets on the horizon Samarkand and its sister cities of Bukhara and Khiva are exactly what you picture when someone says ‘Silk Road.’ 

Registan Square

Gur-E-Emir Timur's mausoleum 

Rustam doing the city tour

Timur - conqueror of Central Asia

Timur's grave, the black one

Mausoleum ceiling

School outing to Registan

Mosque at Registan madrassa

Calligraphy artist

Peter, Helen & Diane admiring the textiles

Bibi Khynym Mosque

Koran stand

Richard, Rutger, Helen & Keith shelter in the shade

Ulugbek's observatory

Registan Square by night

The funny signs have returned!

Buses lined up to take students cotton-picking

Students off cotton picking

It's cotton season

It was also a chance for a few of us to spend an unlikely evening wine tasting! Whilst not world famous Uzbekistan produces a lot of wine, mostly its rather sweet owing to the fierce sun but they do also make some lovely cognac and dessert wines which we took full advantage of.

Wine tasting

Our wine host's words were "let the degustation begin" which sounded more like devastation, which was fairly apt

Emma

Next stop was Bukhara, smaller and less grand than Samarkand but equally as beautiful and often people’s favourite silk road city due to its winding old streets and hidden market stalls. Our hotel was tucked behind the old Jewish quarter which meant negotiating the labyrinth of tiny ancient streets, something that is steadily being erased in favour of grand monuments in Samarkand and Khiva.

Rustam took us on another city tour to the Madrassahs, Mosques and Minarets and also for a visit to the ‘Ark’ the ancient fortress that pre-dates Ghenghis Khan (he didn’t leave much standing so that’s quite an achievement!) We also had an interesting visit to Bukhara prison, famous for being home to Stoddard and Connelly, two British diplomats during Victorian times when the rich countries of the world were fighting over Central Asia in what has become known as “The Great Game.” These two rather upset the local Khan (his nickname was the butcher king - which should have been a clue really) and were imprisioned in ‘The Bug Pit’ which is much as it sounds and hasn’t really changed much since then, before being killed on the main square of the city.

Bukhara city tour

Mosque in Lyabihaus

Carpet museum

Diane resists buying the whole town

Ken & Elizabeth and the carpet salesman

Sarah & Wendy - it was surprisingly cold in Bukhara

Shiny things for sale

Like a scene out of Indiana Jones

Spices

Bride in Bukhara

Stork scissors

Beautiful Bukhara

Ladies in the gold market

A working Madrassa (traditional university)

Bukhara main square - the minaret pre-dates Ghenghis Khan's sacking of the city, he was said to be so impressed by it he spared it

Bukhara's old mosque

Diane & Barry

Peaceful mosque

At the prison - the 'bug pit'

Home sweet home for the losers of the 'Great Game'

Back alleyways in Bukhara

The Jewish Quarter

The Ark Fortress

Sunset in Bukhara

Bukhara by night

Stars over Bukhara's skyline

Our final stop in Uzbekistan was Khiva, the smallest and least well-known of the silk road cities trilogy, but a pretty little place nonetheless. It’s been heavily restored and the old town is now more of a museum than a living city, but has a wonderful feel of walking through the past.

Khiva, much like Bukhara is also home to lots of beautiful market stalls and handicrafts, there are been a big resurgence of support and investment in traditional artisan methods in Uzbekistan since independence and we have taken advantage of the fantastic souvenirs available to us!

The road to Khiva

Khiva

Rutger tries on a traditional Khiva hat

Helen & Diane

Keith, Pauline & blue tiles

City walls

Drawing water from a working well

Traditional Koran stands made out of a single piece of wood

The Wrestlers Mausoleum - the green dome is the resting place of a local wrestler who was a hero of Khiva

The pillar mosque

Puppets

The King's bedroom

So after being thoroughly doused in history and having made rather more than a few purchases of beautiful material, wood, metal and spice it was time to leave incredible Uzbekistan behind, wave goodbye to Rustam our local guide and head for another exciting border crossing to a very different country, Turkmenistan!

Our border this time was a more drawn out version of the border before, only with grumpier guards and a very long lunch break before we were finally allowed in the country.

Turkmenistan shares a similar history to Uzbekistan and the other ex-soviet countries however it is a very different place, it is essentially a desert surrounded by pockets of population, rich in natural gas, so rich in fact that its citizens don’t pay for either gas or electricity, it is covered in pictures of its President and it is currently under-going a massive building project to replace all the old ramshakle buildings from Russian times and before with giant marble edifices bought with the proceeds of gas and oil. Add to that camels wandering the roads, police checks, blistering desert temperatures and you might get some idea of Turkmenistan! It is a fascinating place!

What would seem to be on the surface a country that carefully controls its tourism (you have to have a local guide here for instance - ours was the lovely Kurban) unlike Uzbekistan we are able to camp here and bushcamping is a joy, no fences, no restrictions, just beautiful rolling sand dunes and little tracks disappearing off into the hills. After crossing the border we headed to a camp by a salty lake for a tasty meal and a bit of tent-time under the desert stars after our hotel-fest in Uzbekistan.

Driving through Turkmenistan

Camel meets Penelope

All very 'silk road'

Back in yurt-land

It was dead before we drove over it - honest!

Bushcamp sunset

The next day we headed in to the Karakum desert, with rolling sand dunes and strings of camels wandering in single file it was rather evocative of the past when traders would cross this desert on the silk road. Our destination was much more modern, possibly one of the weirdest sights on Earth. We set up for another glorious Turkmen bushcamp tucked in behind the rocks and sand and then a couple of shepherds turned up in their jeep to take us over the soft sandy hills beyond to see this:

This is the Davaza gas crater, it is essentially a big hole in the ground which is leaking natural gas which has been set on fire. It dates back to the 1970s when the Soviets were digging for gas and then a massive explosion created the crater and at some point around the same time it was set on fire. It can’t be put out that easily as it would bubble up elsewhere and could be dangerous so it just keeps burning.

It’s spectacular, it’s very very hot, it’s a massive waste of gas and shows just how much is sitting beneath the ground, it’s basically the world’s biggest bonfire and it was a truly impressive, unique thing to witness as the sun set and the the flames grew brighter.

Driving to the crater

Pauline & Keith

Tiny Peter vs the crater

Flames

Reflecting on the sight 

Cognac (courtesy of Samarkand) by the fire

The glow of the crater in the night sky from camp

Penelope under the milky way

Our next stop was no less strange and wonderful, we crossed the rest of the Karakum desert and finally hills appeared in the distance, green plants began to grow around the canals and the capital of Turkmenistan appeared out of the heat haze: Ashgabat. It is a city that has grown immensely rich off the proceeds of gas and that is currently under-going a huge reconstruction turning the city in to a sea of white marble and symmetrical design. It is bizarre, whilst around our hotel it had the feel of a normal city with people getting on with their lives, as we headed out on our guide Kurban’s city tour to the new part of town the streets were deserted, row after row of white marble apartment and office blocks, universities and attractions appeared around us with no signs of life. Monuments sprouted out of the ground and the people around them were cleaners making sure every blade of grass was equal, every flagstone was shining and every bench was at perfect right angles. It is best described as a cross between Las Vegas and Sim City. No matter how much we tried we failed to understand the logic behind building such a vast new city with no one apparently living in it! We had to assume that it is a project for the future, the President’s idea of his own Washington or Dubai, a city to rival all others. It’s bizarre, it’s hugely impressive, it’s slightly worrying but as Keith put it ‘there’s definitely room in the world for this sort of craziness!’

Heading into Ashgabat

The Arch of Neutrality

Turkmenbashi - the first President of Turkmenistan

Sim city

Monument of Independence

The five-headed eagle of Turkmenistan

Kurban, our local guide

Fancy hotel with apparently no guests from what we could see

The Wedding Palace - or 'palace of happiness' is a one stop shop for getting married

Inside the wedding palace

The wedding cleaners find us pretty amusing

Getting married under the watchful eye of the President

Wedding time!

The World Trade Centre

2nd tallest flagpole in the world - annoyingly Azerbaijan made theirs taller!

Air conditioned bus stop

The world's largest (only?) enclosed ferris wheel

Ken, Simon & Kurban inside the wheel

Rutger and Elizabeth in a deserted amusement arcade

The Russian market - this is where the people live!

Ashgabat by night

So thoroughly confused and amused we set off from Ashgabat and headed West on a long drive across the desert again to the port of Turkmenbashi, a typical port town of trains, trucks, dirt, dust and industry (though steadily being turned in to another marble-town, due to be finished by 2017, based on what they’ve done with Ashgabat it could possibly be one of the most impressive ports in the world so well worth a return visit!)

Our aim in coming here was to get ourselves on a ferry to cross the Caspian Sea, imagine trying to catch a train where there is no timetable, no ticket office and certainly no flashy website telling you everything you need to know, well it’s a bit like that, only worse! We had hauled it across the desert in a day as we had got news of a ferry arriving at the port that night which would potentially take us. Most of the ferries are for cargo so you have to beg, steal and borrow your way on to them as passengers, especially with a big truck in tow.

The ferry that was supposed to leave that night turned out to be somewhat delayed so we camped up in the port carpark, not the most scenic bushcamp ever with trucks driving past our tents all night, but some sleep was had. The next day our boat was still sitting there looking very much like it wasn’t going anywhere but with a bit of wrangling with the port staff on Kurban’s part, a bit of smiling and a few minor setbacks we were finally put through customs, our passports stamped and loaded on to the boat!

It certainly wasn’t the QE2, but where’s the fun in that? It was an old Soviet boat that probably hadn’t been done up since, but our little cabins had comfy beds, we had a little room to make food in and soon enough we were setting out on the sparkling Caspian with freedom to wander around the ship wherever we liked including a trip to the bridge where Diane was even given a cup of tea by the captain! Pauline was also rather at home and told us all that we had to refer to it as ‘the cruise.’

Heading accross Turkmenistan - behind those hills lies Iran

First glimpse of the Caspian

Home for the night

Dinner time

Right, we've found a boat, now how do we get ourselves on it?!

Aboard!

Got it!

Flash new buildings in Turkmenbashi

Bye bye Turkmenistan

Sunset on the Caspian

So sailing off in to the setting sun with Azerbaijan ahead and Central Asia disappearing behind it was time to wave goodbye to the 'Stans, from pretty little Kyrgyzstan to beautiful history-packed Uzbekistan to downright bizarre and brilliant Turkmenistan. To many they’re a part of the world that they know absolutely nothing about at best they’re ‘the bit between Turkey and China.’ But their history and culture are every bit as complex and varied as anywhere on Earth, arguably more so as they’ve been invaded and influenced by pretty much everyone around and their place right at the heart of the Silk Road has given them enviable access to some of the best that the world offers. They are colourful, complex, sometimes difficult, beautiful, rich in culture, taste, smell and smiles and the best thing is they are still mostly off the tourist trail, and even where tourists have been beating a path it is not hard to take a step off of it and see the real country beneath. They’ve been an eye-opener and are truly like nowhere else on Earth. Thanks 'Stans!