Journey to the Centre of the World – 7
Crossing the Karakorums to see a
Wench in Urgench
FOR CENTURIES – including most of the 20th Century - Western travellers trying to reach Tashkent and the road to Samarkand had no option but to go via Afghanistan. One way, which didn't often work and which I have already described, was to dash through Afghanistan with a massive army. But there was an alternative, if equally risky way: travel alone and in disguise, as several mad British and European spies tried to do in the Nineteenth Century. The craziest of these was Joseph Wolff. [See Introduction]
In the mid-1800s Wolff - a Boheminan Jew, turned Roman monk, turned Anglican priest - digressed from a trip to Africa’s Timbucktoo in order to go to Asia’s Samarkand "to convert the Jews of the desert to the Anglican faith.” The Afghans stared at him in disbelief, then let him through after taking all his possessions, including his clothes. Wolff walked naked, for six weeks, through the snow-covered passes of the Hindu Kush before reaching the hot desert.
It is not the recommended way.
The recommended way today is to fly to Tashkent by Pakistan or Uzbekistan Airways. On a clear day you will glimpse part of what is perhaps the most spectacular sight this planet has to offer - a panoramic view of the meeting place of the world's mightiest mountains. Some call this tumultuous, untrammelled rock-and-snow chaos "the Roof of the World". Others say it is "the Earth's navel."
Majestic peaks
The mountain ranges, in rank of aloofness, remoteness and majesty, are:
- the partly explored Pamirs,
- the Karakorams, with the second highest peaks on Earth [K2] and five more of the giants around the Concorida Glacier
- then the Himalayas, with Everest, nnapurna and many more.
- the Kun Lun in China
- and the Hindu Kush.
Supporting mountain ranges in this tumultuous cluster - some higher than the Swiss Alps - go unnoticed.
Tashkent is a comedown. The 2 000-year-old town has been razed many times - and was virtually destroyed in an earthquake in 1966. When we arrived there in the early 1990s it was already transformed into a modern, Russian communist-style city, the fourth biggest of the former Soviet Union. President Karimov, ex-member of the Politburo, was running independent Uzbekistan as autocratically as he used to do before the Kremlin collapsed. But he could not control increasing organised crime, inflation, unemployment, or other changes in society and the economy. At least 60 or 70 percent of the people of central Asia hankered after the security of the communism they grew up under. They would have reverted to the old regime - if only the State had not bankrupt itself under communism.
Despite its major aeronautics industry, its marbled and chandeliered underground metro system, its flourishing ballet, television, arts and parks -Tashkent still seemed a long way from the modern world. When we were there in those early post-Soviet years, Tashkent’s five-star hotels boasted some of the filthiest non-operating toilets this side of inland China.
In Soviet style, one can never tell whether a building is about to be completed, or about to be demolished. No structure used by individuals (as against those used by the State) seemed capable of normal maintenance. Lights didn’t work, doors could not lock, toilets would not flush.
Strange meeting
But the people were refreshing. Many had never seen Westerners before we were there, back in 1995. Even well educated citizens appeared never to have heard of South Africa, for instance. You might say "Mandela", confident they would recognise the most famous contemporary name on Earth. You were met with blank faces.
"But you're white like us - how can you be from Africa?" they’d ask through an interpreter. One felt as if one had stepped back a century in time... until one saw the military tanks and mobile rockets being trundled out for the World War II victory anniversary.
The dominant feeling in Central Asia, even in the Uzbekistan capital, was an awareness of its remoteness; its isolation. Yet a most extraordinary thing happened to me on the way to Samarkand. I had been in Uzbekistan not five minutes after stepping off an airport bus, when a voice in the crowd called out my name. I looked round to see an old colleague, a former British-born journalist who told me he was now working with an international agency in central Asia. The astonishing thing about this extraordinary chance meeting at the back of beyond, is this: Neither he, nor I, nor anyone who witnessed the one-in-a-million encounter, remarked "Isn't this a small world!"
Can you believe that?
Mind you, once you have seen some of Asia's mountains and deserts you know the world - even its ancient centre-piece - isn't small.
A wench in Urgench
At the other end of Uzbekistan is the modern socialist settlement of Urgench, described by some foreign visitors as the most soulless city anywhere. I recorded the scene during our visit a few years after independence, thus:
"Urgench’s huge two-way highways - with parallel side-roads, pavements, cycle-tracks and a tree-shaded canal at the centre - are lined with endless blocks of four-storey flats, all appearing to be crumbling in the salty desert air. The corner ‘pub’, a sort of vodka-and-chaser service station, consists of a caravan containing spirits and a mobile water-tanker filled with beer!
“The city does seem soulless - and boring beyond description. And yet... Laughing children are leaping into the canals. Well-dressed women are parading with the peasant wenches on the pavements. There are no beggars. There appear to be no homeless. Socialism and its blanket security seem, at this moment, still to be working in a way that is not happening elsewhere.”
A modern communist-built settlement in the midst of ancient Persian-Eurasian-Mongolian fortresses can only appear "soulless". But judging by their demeanour, their behaviour and their smiles, perhaps the women of post-Soviet Urgench were happier - certainly more secure - than the almost invisible ladies in the neighbouring towns. Urgench, however, is not the kind of place you want to spend a whole day in finding these things out.
NEXT: The tales of Samarkand become a reality. But the mysteries of the ancient Silk Route oasis of Bukhara begin to sound unreal. |
