surkhandarya

For me, one part of Uzbekistan’s appeal is this: it’s undeniably, and inescapably, a land of weirdness. Stuff happens here that genuinely surprises you, and people regularly say or do things that catch you off-guard. And since I'm a firm believer in the idea that life should include regular moments of "Huh?" if you're doing it right, I find this quality irresistible.

A few random examples: first, Uzbekistan is the only place I’ve been where you quietly tell hotel staff that their 'traditional' tea room is heavily infested with flying ants, and they respond proudly, as if you've just discovered one of the hotel's selling points. “Oh yes", they reply. "Some of our guests eat those. They say they’re very good for health.”

That's what I've started to think of as the 'Uzbek Response' – shorthand for "the last thing you expected to hear". 

Uzbekistan is also the only country I've visited where you walk into a restaurant to find a huge, almost empty floor space with only a few tables clustered around the walls, and as you stroll around wondering where the patrons are supposed to sit, you narrowly avoid being knocked to the ground by the very thing you need: i.e., by a huge wooden table. As your brain recovers from the shock of so much oncoming furniture, you realise that two staff have members actually been chasing you with the damn table ... and, in their enthusiasm to serve, have almost caused you an injury that no-one will believe when you try to explain it.

Another simple way of bringing out the weirdness here is to complain about your seat on an overnight train. This, we've recently discovered, can lead to bitter competition between conductors, as each attempts to find you a better place for a better price – to the point where one offers you his own compartment, and you sleep in the conductors’ quarters while he stays awake all night. (Of course this is all done for an 'unofficial fee' ... which kind of adds to the fun.) And if you're looking for the next extreme sport to take the world by storm, Uzbekistan has your answer. So far at least, it's the only place I've been where cows are put out to pasture in a field also used for football practice, leading to the inception of an entirely new, fast-paced and ferociously competitive team sport: “cowball”.

But if you come here partly in the spirit of Louis Theroux (i.e. in search of the bizarre), my foremost piece of advice to you would probably be this: try to spend some time down in the country's far south, heading away from the Silk Road cities and into the relative unknown. Life down there is … well, quite a bit different to what you and I would call ‘normal’.

Our own mini-adventure in the Uzbek Deep South began late one overcast morning, when we arrived at a shiny new railway station with a platform not long enough to accommodate our train. The station was about 40 minutes out of Boysun, a town that nestles up against the Tajik and Afghan borders.

The journey to these parts had been rather picturesque. Boarding the train in Samarkand at 2am, we’d slept until about seven and then spent most of the next three hours staring out the window at mist-shrouded hills covered in mossy grass. Said hills occasionally grew in stature to become mountains, including the dramatic, almost vertical granite cliffs of the Hissar range, which form one of Uzbekistan's natural borders. (The cliffs were completely blanketed by thick fog when we passed them, so none of the photos turned out.)

Strewn all over this wild terrain were shards of shale-like rock, sometimes assembled into winding, rustic-looking fences (one of which you can see in the pic). Streams wound their way down the gentle slopes, flowing through shallow rocky clefts. Farmhouses frequently sprang up, as did the occasional village, and the damp soil ranged in colour from deep red to rich greys and military greens. (Don’t know if you’ve ever seen green soil, but I can tell you that it's rather odd-looking.)

Much of the territory we saw through our window is off-limits to travellers because of border issues, so we were getting privileged glimpses of areas that remain almost completely unexplored by foreigners. Which, as you can imagine, was pretty cool.

We’d chosen Surkhandarya for its scenery – and, I suspect, because the name sounded a bit wistfully exotic – so thus far all seemed to be going according to plan. Cue the weirdness …

As we stepped off the train we felt a damp chill, resulting from the thick mist which hung everywhere. And then ... mud. LOTS of mud. It immediately started caking around our shoes and splashing across the legs of our trousers – and this clearly brought it considerable satisfaction, because it continued doing the caking-and-splashing thing for the whole day.

Striding through the happily-coagulating brown goo came a tall, slim, elderly man wearing a skull cap and something like a velvet bathrobe. He sauntered over to us and offered a lift into town for $2. He then threw our suitcases into the boot of his beaten-up old Lada, but as they were too big for the available space, he left the boot open.

The ensuing ride was shared with a demure-looking Uzbek woman in the typically bright-coloured dress-and-headscarf ensemble, and with three other guys. As four of us squeezed into the narrow back seat, sitting almost on top of each other, I looked over and noticed that the woman was also clutching a leather handbag. Stamped onto one side of the bag was a bronze plaque, on which were written (in English) the words “World Peace”. The message seemed utterly strange and incongruous here, in the region through which most of Central Asia's Islamic extremists are funnelled southwards into the Afghan fray. I wondered if she even understood it.

A couple of minutes later we suddenly swerved right, left the highway and went completely off-road, descending one side of a rock-strewn valley towards a fast-flowing, muddy stream. Before I had time to spot a bridge or any other way across, the driver had steered us straight into the water.

Showing no hesitation whatsoever, he pointed the Lada directly at the deepest part of the stream, then turned right and actually drove upstream for about five mad seconds. Finally he pulled out onto the left bank, which was extremely steep and bumpy. The car lurched and bounced around in a violent act of protest, and Yuliya asked “Do we still have everything?” Our driver laughed gently, and jumped out to check that our suitcases weren’t currently tumbling downstream towards Afghanistan.

“Vsyo normal’no” (everything’s ok), he said as he climbed back into the car to resume the journey.

Once in the town, we left our luggage in the hotel (a word which I'm tempted to put inside rabbit ears here) and took in a bit of the townscape. In doing so, we accomplished the next task on our list: find a driver to take us to some local sights. In Surkhandarya this is ridiculously easy: you just walk along the main street looking foreign, and almost immediately someone will offer you their services. So it took us less than five minutes to find our ride, but before asking him to take us exploring, we needed to go back to the railway station, 'cause we’d decided to buy onward tickets. (The original plan was to stay overnight, but for complex reasons, that had changed.)

I know this all sounds fairly straightfoward – to the point where you might be thinking “Why all the unnecessary minute detail, Anthony?” – but in fact, when we arrived at the station all the ticket-selling guys were having lunch in the staff dining room … located, naturally, on a local farm almost a mile away.

When contacted by phone, one of the ticketing guys agreed to meet us outside the dining room, which looked like the abandoned safehouse of a rebel guerilla army, and was separated from the main road by a shepherds’ track. Our driver Abid steered us around the sheep, and Mr Tickets appeared in front of the house. He took our money, then told us that, since lunch was still in progress, he was unable to issue us with any tickets at the moment. We’d have to come back later to pick them up.

Without a guarantee, without a receipt, and without any other options, we just had to go away and hope that the guy was as good as his word. But the incredibly affable and helpful Abid* re-assured us: “Don’t worry”, he said. “Down here we like honest people. A man must be honest – if he isn’t, we punish him.”

I figured it'd be better not to visualise what this punishment might entail, so I did my best to just put the thought out of my head.

Abid’s car was yet another decrepit Lada with threadbare seats and a loudly complaining gear box, which occasionally needed some firm physical encouragement to keep it going. Needless to say, I pretty soon found myself in love with this machine, and envied its owner a little bit. But during the course of the day we would share the Lada with some odd characters … starting with a member of the Uzbek militsia.

The militsia man was standing alone on the roadside, more or less exactly in the middle of nowhere. Uzbek militsia used to have a dreadful reputation among tourists (though I personally haven't seen them do anything to justify this), so when our driver voluntarily pulled over, it crossed our minds that some kind of extortion may follow. But no … the guy got in, said Assalam-u-Alaykum ("May the blessings of Allah descend upon you") to everyone in the car, and chatted amiably about village affairs until we dropped him off 15 minutes later, a bit closer to the nowhere/somewhere border than where we’d found him.

Then we headed off on our main excursion for the day: a long drive along remote, high-altitude dirt roads to a place called Oman Hona, which is a mosque in a cave on a mountain – or at least, so we’d read.

The fact that we saw neither a mosque nor a cave at Oman Hona seemed to fit perfectly with the kind of day we'd been having up to that point. Instead, there was a kind of rock shelf overhanging a mineral stream, around which had been erected a few rather hideous buildings.

As so often seems to be the case, locals here believe that the water has special curative properties, useful for treating or preventing all kinds of ailments. So there were guys collecting it in huge 20-litre plastic bottles, for sale in Tashkent and elsewhere. Meanwhile, a solitary old woman sat on a randomly positioned plastic chair beneath the rock overhang, deep in thought and utterly inscrutable, not even glancing up as we passed. She was striking in that she was doing – and seemed as though she'd spent the whole day doing – absolutely nothing. And I mean nothing at all ... she wasn't reading, knitting, waiting for friend, waiting for a ride, clutching goods which planned to sell, or acting as a curator. She was just there, and that was all. 

Abid, meanwhile, was keen to have us know that people flock to this spot in summer to enjoy the pure spring water and the warm weather. We pulled our coats around us tighter, as the wind and the damp mist tried to creep beneath our various layers of clothing.

He then took us to the 'lookout' from where we could 'view' the Mosque, but ... well, if a Mosque could talk, this one would probably have begun by saying something like "I'm stuck behind so much damn fog here, it's like being stuffed inside a frikkin' pillow case! Can someone let me OUT, please?!?".) It was, in a word, invisible.

But despite all this, the journey to Oman Hona definitely didn't leave us feeling disappointed. The scenery rising around us was stark, mysterious and at times little foreboding, as well as being completely different to anything we'd seen elsewhere in this marvellous 'stan. On the way down, we noticed a distinct 'fogline' – an altitude above which nothing could be seen but fog – and this gave us the feeling of being completely cut off from the world in these high, almost-deserted valleys.

Odd though it may seem, the landscape vaguely brought to mind images I've seen of some out-of-the-way places in the British Isles. There was definitely a bit of Balkans thrown in there too, though, along with incongruous-looking white blossom trees and an atmosphere of intense poverty. The farmhouses were barely standing, the watchdogs were huge and fierce (one of them ran beside our car, barking at us in a white-fanged fury, until Abid beat it away by opening the driver’s door and swinging it forcefully at the dog’s head), and life in the mountains outside Boysun was clearly pretty tough.

I was stirred from these thoughts when Abid suddenly stopped our car, jumped out and started talking to a guy who was standing near a gate on the opposite side of the road. They evidently knew each other, and Abid’s friend was having some kind of problem. He pointed a few times at a goat that was on the far side of the gate, for reasons we didn't quite comprehend. The two of them then went through the gate, picked up the goat by its legs, brought it over to the car (which, remember, we’d hired for the day as our taxi) … and put it in the boot.

Abid’s friend jumped into the front passenger seat, and we headed down the mountain, the sound of the goat's bell periodically audible over the engine.

And so there we were: two travellers massively out-sized by our situation, one clutching a digital camera worth several times more than the car we were sitting in and frequently thrusting it out the window to take photos of intimidatingly huge rock formations, while a live goat aimed the occasional kick at the back of our seat, its owner tried to joke with us in regional Uzbek (or possibly Tajik – neither of us would've been able to tell the difference), and our driver ploughed recklessly over enormous road obstacles, any one of which could've spelled death for us if the car had struck it at the wrong angle and consequently left the road, ending up in the valley below. And of course, my brain went where it always does on these occasions ... which is to say that I was thinking "Yep, definitely adding this to my list of 'Central Asia Moments'."

So anyway, we made it back to town (obviously, given that you're reading this an' all), and Abid parked near a restaurant he’d selected for us. He then went off momentarily with his friend and the goat, returning a few minutes later. Shash’lik (BBQ’d meat on skewers), tea and vodka were being served in the restaurant, along with some tomatoes that looked as if they'd been accidentally machine-washed along with the owner's shirts and handkerchiefs. We ordered a skewer each, being very careful to specify that we wanted lamb, since the idea of eating the stately horned fellow we’d just shared a taxi with kinda repulsed us. Then I excused myself to go to the toilet, which was out the back of the restaurant.

A quick word about Uzbek toilets: in big city hotels many of them are the Western ‘sitting down’ kind, but elsewhere you’re in squat territory. I’m pretty much ok about squat toilets if they’re clean. In Boysun, I was not ok about them at all.

Regarding the specific toilet in question, let me just put a quick question to you: what’s the one thing you want to know more than anything else when you’re suspended over a giant pit of human waste? There are undoubtedly a wide range of possible valid answers to this question (which you're more than welcome to post here). My own answer, though, is simply this: you want to know that the structure supporting you is reliable.

In this particular case, the WC featured two wooden platforms, one original and one a later addition. The original had collapsed into … er, how can I put this politely? [prolonged pause] Nope, I can’t. It had collapsed into the shit.

Inspecting it more closely (as one does when entering a toilet which is the subject of some trepidation), I saw that the original platform was half-submerged in gooey excrement, the top half sticking up into the air at a ridiculous angle, like a cartoon picture of a sinking ocean liner. But the most disturbing thing I learned from my inspection of the two structures – on the left, the cartoon Titanic**, and on the right, the platform which suspended me above a septic bog deeper than a Japanese bathtub and about as wide as three average-sized household fridges lined up side-by-side – was that they were exactly the same. No design improvements whatsoever had been made after the first toilet had sunk into a lake of poo: no extra bolts, no supportive beams, no tweaking the set-up to forestall future mishaps. The management had simply put another, absolutely identical piece of wood next to the first one, inviting its clientele to take part in a bizarre scatological variation on Russian roulette every time they felt the need to reduce their green-tea-to-overall-bodyweight-ratio by making a brief visit to the Little Room out the back.

And so, thinks the Word Nerd, taking all of this in:
“Just how unlucky can I be today?”

Fortunately, not as unlucky as some vodka-addled customer probably will be in the near-ish future. I pity that diner ... though, in a way, I guess it serves them right for frequenting such a dreadful establishment.

Anyway, having escaped the restaurant toilet, I furiously washed my hands with antibacterial gel and finished my (pretty appalling) lunch. After a brief stop at the market and another to collect our luggage from the "hotel"***, we then exited Boysun by Lada, for the third and undoubtedly final time.

To our intense relief, the guy we'd met at the guerilla safehouse / railway station dining room did indeed have our tickets, and as we approached he waved them at us proudly. But we had about 45 minutes to wait for the train, so the driver decided – in one last gesture of Surkhandaryan weirdness – to try and get us a seat inside the brand new, incongruously shiny medical clinic which stood on one side of the station's main entrance hall.

Heading inside, we found ourselves in probably the cleanest, newest-looking medical centre I've encountered in my entire life, and almost certainly the best one in this or any neighbouring postcode. Exactly why they stuck it at the railway station (as opposed to, say, in the 35km-distant town centre, where 98% of the folks 'round here live) eludes me. But whatever the logic of this, it seemed the receptionist agreed to let us recline on her furniture because we were foreigners.

After a whole day of slurping around in the giant mud smoothie of Surkhandarya, it felt fantastic to sit on a soft, clean chair in a softly-coloured, clean surgery. Or at least it did until the farm boy with the broken leg came in. His parents laid him down on the sofa opposite ours, a protruding bone bulging grotesquely beneath his trouser leg, and his quiet, agonised sobbing took at least 75% of the fun out of my comfy chair. I suddenly felt kinda guilty for getting the red carpet treatment ... but not guilty enough to separate my ass from the leather-upholstery! Evil, spoiled Westerner ;-)

When the train came, we ran the length of about 15 carriages – once again off the end of the inadequate platform and into the mud – climbed the almost-vertical stairs, and waved goodbye to what is possibly the strangest, most alien part of this altogether odd country.

And that was our whirlwind visit to the Uzbek Deep South – one which part of me never wants to repeat, while another part secretly hopes I'll find myself back there again one day in the not-too-distant future. I'm developing a weird love/hate relationship with these backward, undeveloped corners of Central Asia where you can meet people at their rawest, weirdest and best, and see things which few Westerners ever lay eyes on. But while I relish that chance, I simultaneously struggle with a few things like hygeine issues. (Watching the market guy in Boysun pile honey into a jar for us by hand, licking his fingers as he went, made me want to throw up.) I'm sure this will continue to paly itself out over the months and years to come. And I'm equally sure you'll hear about it :-)

Until then ... take care!

Anthony.


* It seems against the law to be anything other than incredibly affable and helpful in Uzbekistan, unless you happen to a) live in Tashkent, b) work as a taxi driver near a major railway station or airport, or c) have a hand in running the country.

** I actually wanted to write RMS Lusitania rather than Titanic, but I figured that might be too obscure. Not sure ... is it?

*** There, I did it.

**** A "coupe" is a sleeping compartment with four bunks, so if you're travelling with one companion, you share the compartment with two strangers. It might sound icky, but it's generally a pretty stress-free arrangement ... plus, with Central Asian hospitality being what it is, it very often involves scoring some home-made food that your cabin-buddies insist on sharing with you. They even bring seasonings for you to sprinkle over your food – most commonly, salt packed inside a matchbox.

cryptids, yurts and wedding mobs

(Karakalpakistan Part 2)

The road to Ayaz-Qala fortress is quite unusual, in that it's both a highway and a dead end. The asphalt suddenly gives way to sand at the crest of a hill, and that's it: you've arrived at civilisation's outer limits. It's cool :-)

At this point, if you look right you'll see the fortress in all its lonesome splendour. If you look left, you'll see a little cluster of camel-brown yurta squatting in the desert, with a few assorted out-buildings gathered around them. This is the Ayaz-Qala yurta camp.

In case you're wondering, a yurta (anglicised as "yurt" for some reason) is one of those portable, tent-like dwellings made from wood and felt, most often associated with Mongolia* but also native to the traditional 'steppe folk' of Central Asia. Although very few people actually live in them nowadays, yurta occupy a significant place in the national psyche of Kazakh and Kyrgyz people. They also seem to be swimming around like bell-shaped croutons in the cultural soup of western Uzbekistan. Which was lucky for us, 'cause it meant there was somewhere for us to have lunch out here in the Kyzylkum.

The plan was basically to remain here for an hour or so, just long enough to eat and have coffee. But the woman who runs the yurt camp invited us to stay overnight and enjoy a whole evening (and morning) in the desert. Given the incredible location, the great price (a 70% off-season discount) and the fact that the owner was rumoured to make fantastic plov**, this was an offer to good to refuse.

So now that I've spent a night in a yurta (something I had to do at some point in Central Asia), here's what I can tell you about them:

First, inside they're incredibly plush, elegant and cosy. The interior is lined with traditional carpets and decorative cloths, with a stove in the middle, all topped by the impressive shangyrak (the centrepiece at the top, which often tends to have the status of a treasured family heirloom). They feel at once luxurious and homey ... great places to relax and chat, or read a book, or just shelter from the glare outside.

The second thing: as a focal point for Central Asian hospitality, the yurta fulfils its function admirably. When you're a guest in one, you're offered the best of everything ... from the blankets to the vodka!

And thirdly ... to wake up in the middle of the desert in a camel-skin tent, with the fire long since burned out and only a few inches of mattress between you and the ground, is to wake up cold. I don't care how often anyone repeats the phrase "warm in winter, cool in summer"; my stiff limbs and frozen toes remain unconvinced.

Still, I have to admit it was much chillier outside. Don't quite know how the camels survived out there without a comfy blanky to warm them up!

Anyway, when not luxuriating in the interior of our yurta, Yuliya and I spent most of our time getting to know our surrounds a little better. There are lots of things I could say in praise of the Kyzylkum, but I'll try to limit myself so as not to bore you all to death. I love the huge skies out here, for one thing, and when you get to a place of elevation (like the one in the pic below), they seem even more expansive. They also change colour constantly. The last time I felt so positively affected by the sky above my head was in Finland. Here, there's a similar sense of spaciousness, which brings a certain mental calm with it.

Meanwhile on the ground, it seems that the desert is completely ... well, y'know, deserted. Even the few birds living there have extremely quiet calls, almost inaudible while you're moving.

(Not that I imagine you're dying to know this, but the reason for their quietness is that they've evolved in an environment where there are almost no obstructions to the passage of sound waves. Generally speaking, you find the loudest birds in the thickest forests, 'cause they have to be heard through all those damn trees! And of course vice versa. So there you go ... another glimpse of the ridiculously irrelevant stuff I've managed to fill my brain with over the years.)

So where was I? Oh yeah: desert = quiet. Not exactly a revelation, but still quite striking when you're in it.

However, growing up in Australia trained me to examine the ground I walk on very closely, in case there's something nasty and poisonous down there that wants to bite you. So we hadn't been walking for long when I noticed that, in fact, we weren't alone out here after all. Far from it. The desert was pot-holed with burrows, and quite sizeable ones too.

A little while later, we got to meet one of the inhabitants of these burrows. We were heading to the salt lake when this little guy suddenly broke cover and bounced across the sand right next to us. He'd clearly emerged from one of the holes, and he stood around sniffing the air and checking us out for quite a while before carefully choosing another hole to disappear into.

The interesting thing about this furry little wanderer (apart from his general cuteness) is that all attempts to discover what species he is have so far failed. I've cross-referenced his pic with lots of sites about mustelids (the family of mammals that includes everyone from meerkats and otters to badgers) and peered hopefully at all manner of susliks (Eastern European/Asian ground squirrels), but without making a successful ID. And while pages that profile desert wildlife in Uzbekistan wax eloquent about gerbils and jerboas (both little hoppy mouse things with comically long hind legs), and tell you that you might be lucky enough to spot a polecat (sort of a cross between a ferret and a mongoose) in the Kyzylkum, nowhere can I find a reference to a kind of slender ratty squirrelly marmoty thing on any of them.

And so, what I seem to have here is kind of a mystery critter***. At least, he is so far, and to me. His face looks awfully familiar, and I keep thinking that I'll suddenly go "Hang on, wait a sec. Of course! He's a -------! Why did it take me so long to realise that?" But so far it hasn't happened.

Help me out if you can – I'm not planning to switch to my new career in cryptozoology**** for at least another four or five years ;-)

Leaving this little mystery behind us, we left the yurta camp some time around late morning, heading back in the direction of Khiva. Our driver suggested that we stop off along the way and take a look at one more fortress that we hadn't squeezed into the previous day's itinerary, to which we agreed. To get there, we had to drive down the main street of a dusty, poor village where some kind of commotion appeared to be going on.

We got to the entrance and found the fortress walled up and barred to visitors (possibly for some archaeological or restoration work ... though we never managed to find out). As we prepared to jump back in the car and go, inhabitants of the town – specifically, grubby little boys and a couple of men in tattered suits and forward-facing caps – came to meet our car, and told us that the fortress had recently been closed. They didn't say why.

What they did say was that they'd really like us to stick around for a while, because today was a big occasion: there was a wedding in the village. At the very least, they said, we should come and have a look at their kazani (enormous, round-bottomed metal pots, placed inside the rim of an outdoor tandyr***** oven), where the plov was being prepared.

We chewed over this proposition for a while and decided to accept. I'm glad we did – and not only because of the impressive size of their kazani.

First, of course, we inspected the plov ... but it was no great surprise when our sudden hosts insisted that we try some, and heaped three mammoth servings onto plates (one for me, one for Yuliya, and one for the driver).

We were next shown into a low-ceilinged, gun-barrel shaped house, where we removed our shoes and were led down a hallway jammed with people and noise, until we reached the final room. In this large space, decked out with cloths and carpets, we dined with an ever-expanding circle of men and teenaged boys, seemingly delighted at their new Ukrainian and Australian guests. The plov was accompanied by three separate toasts in a matter of ten minutes, and at each toast we were encouraged to swallow a rather manly amount of Karakalpak vodka, poured into Asian-style teacups.

Emerging a few minutes later, somewhat less sober than before, we were ... let's see, how to explain: something happened to us that wasn't exactly like being mobbed, but wasn't too far short of it, either. The wedding guests appeared to be growing in number by the minute, and a sizeable portion of them were right here in the house with us, lining every inch of wallspace and filling the air with raucous cheerful noise. (It later transpired that, in a Karakalpak village, there are no such things as "wedding invitations" – you just make the date known, and anyone in the village who wants to come just turns up. Which means basically the entire local population.)

Part of the reason for this attention was our inherent novelty value, I guess, accompanied by the general exuberance which characterised the occasion. But there was also another factor: the camera. It was a magnet for these people, and everyone wanted to be in at least one photo. As luck would have it, Yuliya had the photo-making apparatus around her neck at that point, so she basically became the unofficial wedding photographer.

Whisked out of the building, past more enormous kazani, we were taken around the village to other houses of a similar style, and in every house the story was the same: large rooms with carpets in the centre and people (mostly women) sitting around the walls chatting, generous amounts of food being offered, curious kids and big welcoming smiles all round. We must have seen at least four or five hundred guests, and Yuliya took pictures of most of them! (We have almost 100 wedding photos, which we've promised to make prints of and send ... and of which I've reproduced just a few favourites here.)

Then it was outside, where a band was playing over a PA system. I asked if I could sit and record them for a while (I've recently bought some sound equipment to do field recordings, and I'm taking it everywhere with me). Not only did they allow me to do this, but one of our hosts (a guy who bore an eerie resemblance to Robert de Niro when he had his hat on) managed to go one further by getting me on the stage. Which was great, except that I had no idea what I was supposed to do there! Did they want me to sing, or was I just supposed to point the microphone? I really couldn't tell. Still, it was cool to see the dutar (metal-stringed Uzbek guitar, with a body shaped oddly like a marmot) being played up close.

Finally, having ingested as much plov and as much vodka as we could possibly handle without exploding, we took our leave and went to the car, feeling shell-shocked but kinda privileged to have had this – albeit rather brief and superficial – glimpse into Karakalpak village life. While drifting off to sleep in the back seat, I thought of all the times I'd heard people talk about the 'legendary hospitality' of Central Asian peoples. If we'd been seeking to confirm or debunk the claim, this morning would've been absolute, resounding confirmation. The welcome we got in the village was huge, it was overwhelming and it was extended without reservation. In other words, we'd been lucky little campers )))

About two hours later we arrived back in Khiva, stumbled into our hotel room, crawled into bed and slept for the rest of the afternoon. Meanwhile, if we'd had a webcam set up back in the village, we would no doubt have seen the wedding party continuing unabated ... in fact, it was barely half-way through Day One, which meant that the part we'd participated in had been mere preamble. There were more than two days of celebration still to come!

Exhausted, stuffed with rice and carrots, and experiencing something not entirely unlike a hangover, I could only wonder how it was possible for anyone to have so much stamina. As I was thinking about this and other Karakalpakistan-related stuff, my eyes gave up and my brain shut down ... which, at that point, was exactly how I wanted this little adventure to end )))

Good night!

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...

* In the Mongol tongue, they're called ger, gyr, or one of several other alternate spellings.

** The national dish of Uzbekistan. It's basically pilaf: a big plate of spiced rice with meat, carrots, onion and sometimes other stuff like chickpeas or golden raisins. I love it!

** American slang for "animal". I'm guessing, but I think it probably originated as a tender form of the word  "creature".

**** Cryptozoology is one of my all-time favourite words. It means "the search for creatures whose existence is unproved". The Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti are two famous cryptids (unproven animals), but there are loads of others. I like the word so much that I've even taught it to students, so that we can pretend to be cryptozoologists together and interview some weird creatures. I think my current teen class are probably the only group of 16-year-olds in Kazakhstan who know what kind of beast 'El Chupa Cabra' is, and where he comes from )))

***** One more irrrelevant fact for you: I think a lot of people reading this will be familiar with tandoor ovens, commonly used in preparing Indian cuisine, or at least with the adjective "tandoori" (as in "tandoori chicken"). But what I didn't know until this week was that these ovens actually originated in Central Asia, where they're called "tandyr". Likewise, the wonderful round loaves called "non" became "naan" in India, while the triangular-shaped pastries known as "samsa" or "somsa" here were adopted (and, it must be said, vastly improved) by the Indians to give the world the much-more-famous "samosa". Just another random example of how Central Asian influences have permeated out into the world over the centuries :-)

The Inconsistent Traveller

(Karakalpakistan Part 1)

About four months ago, I ranted at length on this site about my rather vehement dislike (some might say ‘pathological hatred’) of beaches. And although I got a few interesting replies/rebuttals – which I enjoyed and appreciated – nothing much has changed in the relationship between me and beaches. Which is to say that I still loathe them every bit as much as I always have.

however …

I do have to go back on one aspect of my rant, and it has to do with sand. I remember writing that it’s basically dirt made of silicon (which is true), and that it’s extremely annoying when it transfers itself from the beach to your shoes, your underpants etc. (also true), and that I can’t quite work out why people pay such ridiculous sums of money to go and lie on it, surrounded by thousands of others doing the same (super-true with sparkles).

Then today, as I was walking up a deserted hillside towards an abandoned 3,000-plus-year-old fortress in the Kyzylkum desert of Karakalpakistan (as one so often does), I had the following thought:

“You know, I really love the sand here.”

Let me preface my explanatory ramble with some detail about what I was doing in Karakalpakistan and, incidentally, where the hell Karakalpakistan actually is.

Yuliya and I are on holiday in Uzbekistan at the moment, staying in fabulous Khiva – the beautifully preserved Silk Road oasis town hidden in the desert beyond the Amu-Darya river basin, whose mud-brick city walls and sumptuous majolica-tiled madrassas transported me far from reality on my first visit here in 2009*.

Khiva is the capital of Khorezm, one of two main regions in far western Uzbekistan. The other region – separated by the one of Central Asia's two largest rivers, the Amu-Darya – is Karakalpakistan. The name comes from its inhabitants the Karakalpaks, who are (more or less) a sub-group of the Uzbek people.

In travel guides and on Central Asia-related websites, the word "Karakalpakistan" tends to crop up most often in proximity to phrases like “ecological disaster”, “blighted landscape” and “respiratory disease”. It lies adjacent to what is now the Southern Aral Sea, which was created not long ago when the level of the original Aral Sea dropped something like 70 metres and the whole thing split into two separate halves. The northern Aral, in Kazakhstan, is being slowly restored to its former level via a series of dam projects, while the southern part, in Uzbekistan, is expected to disappear completely some time in the not-too-distant. Its legacy will be … well, nasty.

Geographically, large parts of Karakalpakistan are basically uninhabited desert, and walking around in these expanses, you see evidence of the Aral disaster everywhere. A fine powder of sea salt covers the ground almost entirely in some areas, blown here from the dehydrated seabed. Periodically, desert windstorms whip this white invader into stinging airborne clouds that can find their way into your lungs and do some pretty horrible damage there (hence all the reports of respiratory problems).

Elsewhere the sodium beast has attacked lakes like the formerly pretty Ayaz Kol, which has now fragmented into a series of pools with bone-white, boggy shorelines. Walking around the edges of these is a really weird experience; there is no wildlife of any

kind, the area is completely silent, the white powder has mixed with greenish mud to create something not entirely unlike quicksand, and bushes growing in the shallows are so thickly covered with waterlogged salt that they’ve taken on the appearance of dead coral.

Seen on the horizon from a few kilometres away, the entire lake appears to be either a hazy mirage, or a deserted beach (there’s that word again) with white-crested waves breaking on its shores. But of course, there are no waves in Ayaz Kol. The water barely moves at all, and neither does anything else.

Like I said … weird.

Actually, though, I didn’t start this rant with the intention of recounting the tragedy of the Aral Sea disaster; that's been done elsewhere. It's just my inability to resist a good tangent, getting in the way as usual. Let's get back to the sand.

Another, less foreboding word that you'll often see printed in close proximity to "Karakalpakistan" is "fortress". That's because the desert which I mentioned before – called Kyzylkum, meaning "red sands" – is home to an impressively large collection of ancient forts ... and when I say "large" and "ancient", I really mean "LARGE" and "aaaaancient".

First to deal with the LARGEness factor: one commonly visited area of the Kyzylkum is called Eliq-Qala, which means "fifty fortresses", and you can see them dotted around the map in clusters. But in actual fact, the name is a misnomer – archaeologists believe that there may be as many as two thousand of them yet to be discovered. Which basically makes this area one huge archaeologists' paradise.

About "ancientness" ... well, Yuliya and I hired a driver to tour four or five of these fortresses, and we started with Toprak-Qala and Qyzyl-Qala. The first of these was a mere babe, having been the main HQ for the Kings of Khorezm in the 3rd and 4th Centuries AD, while its neighbour was a tad more mature at roughly 1,800 years old. Later, though, we came to Ayaz-Qala, a complex of three fortresses which some sources say has been in use for – get this – about five thousand years**.

Exactly who built and used these incredible structures varies from fort to fort. A number of them belonged to the ancient Zoroastrians (or "fire worshippers", as they're called in these parts), including one where bodies used to be hung out in the open air to be picked by vultures (a Zoroastrian tradition for millennia). The aforementioned Khorezmian kings were also rather keen on fortress-building and -dwelling, and they contributed quite a few to the collection, while other forts were inhabited by early Christians. And there are probably some which had different owners and uses ... it isn't entirely clear in every case.

Our guide's commentary as we walked around the first two fortresses was rather minimal, and he didn't even bother to join us at the others, so we got no information at all. I found this a little disappointing at the time, but I later realised that his sparse explanations arose from a simple fact: namely, that this area is only now opening up to the enquiries of archaeologists, and many secrets of the little-known cultures who lived here are ... well, little-known. Therefore, there wasn't much that our guide could really say! We were looking at the pieces of a vast historical mystery.

Cool, huh?

Anyway, it was while walking up the hill towards the outer walls of Ayaz-Qala that I had the thought about sand. It was about a 20-minute walk through terrain that had looked fairly unremarkable when seen through a car window, but when I got up and close and personal with the desert here, I found myself in awe of it. Aside from the broad, horizon-to-horizon skies and the twisted, spiny vegetation, there was the sand itself. A rich pinkish-yellow colour for the most part, it rippled slighty on the ground, and at the crest of each ripple seemed to be a little sprinkling of gold dust. It was truly beautiful sand.

(Also, it was soft and comfy to walk on.)

So yeah ... hence my need to go back on what I said about sand. It really wasn't fair, and I realise that now.

When we crested the hill and entered the main compound of Ayaz-Qala (which was being guarded by an eagle, soaring overhead), we had the entire fortress to ourselves.

Like so many of Uzbekistan's amazing sights, I found myself amazed not only at the place, but also at the lack of tourist throngs. "Why the Hell isn't this more famous?", I asked myself – for about the eight-millionth time since first visiting this country two years ago. But y'know, although a bit more tourism would undoubtedly benefit the Uzbek people, from a selfish p.o.v. it's a wonderful privilege to come here and check out the great secrets hidden in Uzbekistan's deserts and oases ... which may be one reason why I'm already thinking about the possibility of coming back for a third bite of the cherry )))

Our last fortress for the day was the impressive Qirq Qyz-Qala, which translates as "Fortress of The Forty Girls". These groups of girls are one of several recurring motifs in Uzbek legend – so much so that there's another Fortress of Forty Girls in Termez, near the southern Tajik border. Both that one in Termez and this one in Karakalpakistan are claimed as the home of a 16-year-old warrioress called Gu'layim. The story goes that she built the fortress herself, then trained forty virgins to become a formidable combat squad who would (and did) defend it against all comers.

Of course, the wisdom of choosing young virgins as your defending force – as opposed to, say, experienced and well-armed professional soldiers – could be questioned, but on the other hand, "Fortress of The Forty Big Dumb Guys with Spears" doesn't strike quite the same poetic note. So each to her own, I guess.

As it turns out, this legend has even migrated internationally over the years, and popular etymology attributes the country name "Kyrgyzstan" (which neighbours Uzbekistan to the east) to the same story – only in that version, a dog somehow gets involved with the forty girls. There used to be a brand of dog food in Australia called "Lucky Dog" ... wonder if that's where they got the inspiration for the brand name ;-) 

Btw, now that I'm on the 'popular Uzbek legends' theme, let me throw in an even more irrelevant tangent.

Here it is: the other big recurring plotline in this corne of the world revolves around an architect commissioned by a powerful ruler to build a spectacular structure – a mosque, say, or a minaret. The ruler orders the project to begin, then goes off to battle, and while he's absent his master architect falls in love with his beautiful wife. After committing a mild romantic indiscretion, such as asking the ruler's wife for a kiss, the architect starts fearing for his life, and so sets about making a pair of wings for himself and jumping off the top of his own building, flying away to Persia to avoid the wrath of the returning Khan or Emir. It seems like every Uzbek city has one of these naughty flying builder guys somewhere in its 'history'. Must've been the thing to do back then.

Anyway, about the fortress: its size is just immense, but it's in a far more advanced state of ruin than Ayaz Qala, to the point where every structure except sections of the outer wall have melted back into the desert. So now you basically walk on a wide raised plateau, with dissolving fortifications adding slightly surrealistic contours to the horizon. It's, er ... pretty damn cool )))

Believe it or not, though, what I've told you so far is only about half of our little Karakalpak adventure. For the sake of giving you (and my fingers) a break, I'll tell you the rest a bit later. Until then ... Khaer!!

(That's "bye" in central Uzbek.)

  

* Btw, if you want to read my original rant about the wonderful city of Khiva, it's here:

   http://rantingmanor2.blogspot.com/2009/07/khan-you-believe-it.html

(** Of course, like a lot of stuff around here, the figures change depending on who you talk to.)