Kazakhstan

 

Almaty

We live in an era where the former Soviet countries are regenerating their cityscapes. The Wedding Palaces & brutalist tower blocks are being purged in favour of a modern look. Uniformity is no longer desirable & a scatter-gun colour palette has taken its place. The monochrome USSR dress-code is out of date.

Except, Almaty has other ideas.

The city is well-dressed in its Soviet clothes. Mosaics sparkle & murals shine, restored. Statues of the old leaders are still on show in town. They’re just no longer in the centre. Now, clumped together in an outlying micro-district, Uncle Joe & Lenin look like a tribute band of gesticulating socialists.

Architects were noted on plaques in Almaty & the metro was a 15 kilometre artwork in itself. Why aren’t all subway systems lit by chandeliers?

Communication could be problematic. Kazakh & Russian the staple languages. Some English among the young & also the Chelsea fans in town for an away game. Borat jokes, mostly.

Almaty is walkable, with a canopy of maple trees & a string of mini-parks. Blue December skies & crunching snow underfoot added a pretty border to the overall picture.

It’s only when I ventured up into the surrounding mountains in search of a Beatles statue that the city lost its lustre. Looking down, chimneys smoked & cars crawled through the streets. Almaty blurred a little from above.

In the Green Bazaar, trading since the height of the silk road I bought round golden bread, fresh from a clay oven. Apples are from Kazakhstan but wine certainly isn’t, yet I was amazed at the quality in a country with such dramatic extremes between the seasons. Back in town, a small coffee scene has emerged, with aloof baristas & cosy rooms, individual in character & a respite against the cold outside. A lovely city.

Astana

Astana wasn’t like Almaty in any obvious way. No nature peeking behind the manmade. The city walker was a lesser citizen than the car driver. Squashed verges, metro-rail construction across town & a simmering aggressiveness among the drivers. Hiking the city was a challenge.

Diffuse architecture defined Astrana. Gimmick constructions with prosaic names; dog bowls & eyeballs. Elsewhere blue mirror oil HQs & Rubik pyramids sat amid an older city, already showing its age.

But away from the silliness were some gems; white-marble mosques & timber hotels hiding low-lit restaurants & wine markets.

At the centre sits the Bayterek Tower; elegant & rather pointless. This is what happens to a country when the president gets 97% of the vote. He designs his own city.

Lebanon Autumn 2018

Lebanon was a trip I had some reservations about. The country had recently become more accessible & only the Hezbollah-held areas were now off-limits, but still, think Lebanon & the mind's eye plays images of civil war & car bomb assassinations. Personally, I always thought of the Human League. I was an eighties child.

Beirut typified the Middle East mash of cultures, with mosques & churches side by side among bullet-dotted concrete wrecks. Religion & history were in your face or under your feet. Below ground lay exposed Roman ruins, blasted into view by civil-war bombing & on the surface, the traffic roared through the streets. I was constantly on the verge of being run-over or falling into an amphitheater.

Architecturally, the city was playing catch up. The evolution of labyrinth souks into Zaha Hadid designed malls epitomised the new order. The civil war put everything on hold for a generation & only recently had much of the antebellum Beirut been razed to the ground.

 

In Gemmayzeh & Achrafieh, you could buy fresh falafal & decent expressos. Everywhere there was music; hip hop blasting from open windows or folk melodies being picked from acoustic guitars on roof terraces. In the evening, graffiti-decorated bars served Almaza beer & wine from the Bekaa Valley. It was young & loud & covered in classy graffiti. How cities ought to be.

 

But of course, this is just a superficial skim & clearly beneath the surface the economy was on a knife-edge despite the new faces in government. Corruption was ingrained. Two years on, in a world thrown upside down by Covid-19, Lebanon is falling apart. Rapid inflation has made basic goods unattainable & savings worthless. The police are firing rubber bullets into crowds of protestors & unbelievably, an explosion at the port killed over 200 people. Those bars & cafes I loved in Gemmayzeh faced the blast & lie glass-shattered & empty. 

 

Before I left Lebanon, I took a bus to Byblos, as pretty a town as any I’ve seen. Steep streets twisted down to the bay & the heat was less of a force than Beirut.  From a pebbly beach, I swam in the Autumn sea. I stayed at the Fishing Club in a colourful cabin hacked into the rock face. After the chaos of Beirut, Byblos was gentler & quieter at night. The very stones felt ancient. I bought fossils that were 100 million years old from a time when Lebanon itself was beneath the waves. Byblos was a magical place & framed against current media footage of riots & destruction, almost feels like a dream.

 

Travels in the Holy Lands

I had been thinking of a Holy Lands trip for some time. A friend thought I was looking for God & everyone else just said, please be careful. It’s certainly the first time I’ve used a Lonely Planet guidebook with a section on how to survive a missile attack. Israel will never be entirely safe because of what it is & who its neighbours are. However, there had been a sustained period of relative calm, so I seized the moment.

Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem

I was awake early on my first morning in Jerusalem; before the heat, ahead of the crowds. I circled the Dome of the Rock & photographed the concentric turquoise rings of the Dome of the Chain. Below me, the Jews lamented the loss of the temple at the Wailing Wall.

The city was waking up as I followed the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jerusalem is the only place in the world where you have to dodge both soldiers shouldering rifles & pilgrims carrying crosses. I bore no cross but was cornered at every station by the brash tourism of the bazaar. Everyone was my friend & I was, very welcome, sir. Except for one man.

“Where you from?” asked a craggy old shopkeeper as I picked out some tat.
“London.”
“BRITISH ARE POISON.”
At first I thought he said “British are Boyzone” & I was going to point out that actually they were Irish. Weirdly, despite his growing anger, we were in the middle of a transaction.
“Twenty Shekels, please. THE BRITISH ARE POISON!”
I gave him Fifty.
“I HATE ALL BRITISH & AMERICANS!! Oh, have you got anything smaller?”
“No.”
“I’ll just get some change from the back.”
“OK.”
From the back: “ONE DAY THE BRITISH & AMERICANS WILL BE DEFEATED!!”
He reappeared…“There you go, thirty Shekels.”
“Thanks.”
“Thanks. THE BRITISH ARE POISON!”

The Via Dolorosa is a trying walk, even now.

From the site of the crucifixion, I travelled by bus from Jerusalem to the West Bank (“Bethlehem please!”), out of Israel & into the Palestinian Territories, paging back through the Gospels to the site of the Nativity. The iconography of the Nativity is stamped on Bethlehem. Star Street led down to Manger Square & Shepherds Street ran away to the countryside. I stayed among ancient walls in a traditional pilgrim hostel full of interlocking courtyards & sun terraces. Medieval arches dissolved into stonework & my room was four centuries old.

Global Corporate franchise

In Star Bucks, a bespoke local coffee house with a familiar look, I met Seif, who worked for the new Bethlehem Banksy Hotel. Over Nescafe served in a plastic beaker we agreed a fee & he drove me around town on a graffiti tour. Banksy has stencilled his imprint across the Territories, turning the awful grey wall dividing Israel & the West Bank into a concrete canvas. In turns inspiring some fine original & much copycat artwork. I showed Seif several London Banksys among my phone photos & he asked me, if perhaps, maybe, I was Banksy himself.

I said, “Do you really think Banksy would go on an incognito tour of his own artwork purely to check the guides are on-message?”

Seif laughed, nervously.

Dividing wall

In the evening, I drank Palestinian beer at a bar in Manger Square as the call to prayer swept over the city. I'd seen the beautiful Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the gorgeous city of Bethlehem & the awful wall that divides the territories. I added today into the top 20 days of my life.

Back in Jerusalem, in the room where historians have concluded the Last Supper took place; a spontaneous chorus of hallelujah broke out. Impromptu singing was a recurring & highly pleasant feature of Jerusalem but religious intensity was often quite rudely quelled by both guards & priests as it created bottlenecks among the tourist flow.

I walked amid afternoon heat up the Mount of Olives. I could smell the olive trees & sneakily picked petals from the Garden of Gethsemane. The slopes of the valley were covered by graves. Come the day of judgement, this is the front of the queue.

Dead Sea mud

In the evening, the unrelenting sun & wilting street food combined in a pincer movement to attack my constitution. I rose on the third day teeth chattering in 30 degree heat but having no space in my itinerary for sickness, I pushed on, forcing myself out to see the Dead Sea Scrolls & biblical archaeology at the Israel Museum. In the afternoon I joined an organised tour & rode through the barren hills of Judea, passing the Inn of the Good Samaritan & down, down to the Dead Sea. Coated in thick mineral-rich mud, I lay in the sun until it dried, then floated on the filmy surface of the sea, drifting towards Jordan as the mud peeled away. I felt alive again.

I left Jerusalem & took the bus to Tel Aviv. My neighbour was in the military & slung his rifle on his lap, barrel pointing at my thigh. It’s amazing how quickly things like this become the norm. As he slept, I nudged it away.

Bauhaus architecture, Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is a coastal town; all gargantuan high-rise & beach promenades. However, step back a block & it changes for the better. Jewish students at the Bauhaus in Dessau saw the writing on the wall in the 1930s & fled Nazism in search of a new life amid the sand dunes of the Palestine seaboard. This area grew into Tel Aviv & the city revels in its Bauhaus legacy. Curved balconies wrap around apartment blocks, glass bricks create lightwells & the wrinkled brows of blistered paint expose the true age of the buildings. The relentless hammering sun wasn’t a lesson taught back in East Germany. On the whole, this isn’t museum showcase architecture; people live here, d-locking bikes in the lightwells & hanging washing across balconies.

The modernity of Tel Aviv has a counterpart in Jaffa, its southern neighbour. Jaffa is both the port city of Jonah, swallowed by a whale & the Greek myth city of Andromeda, chained to a rock. Its well-scrubbed honey coloured stones set among steep hills felt ancient & warm. In a port-side café, I drank freshly squeezed orange juice & looked back up the beach to the glass towers & Germanic order of the new city.




Jonah & the Whale

On my final morning, I headed to the sea, crashing around in the waves of the Mediterranean; refreshing myself ahead of endless airport security & a five hour flight home. Israel was a different travel experience; the summer heat was relentless, it was expensive, and everywhere stood groups of teenage recruits brandishing weaponry. Clearly, the centre-point for three major religions is always going to be a tense place, although the only altercation I had was with a craggy shopkeeper & even that was closer to comedy then acrimony.

I’d seen the very spot where Jesus was born & the rock upon which he died, but best of all was the Dead Sea; unique, surreal & a great way to revitalise. It’s always great to return home after a solo trip away, but it’s even more rewarding to come home when the guidebook has a missile attack section & I didn’t need to use it.

Transnistria - The Other Side of Moldova

When Moldova split during the fall of the Soviet Union, its eyes flicked west. Lurching through independence, linguistically & geographically, Romania was its closest neighbour & Russia represented the bad old days; authoritarian rule & queues for food.

But not everyone agreed.

A slither of industrial land & communities dissected by the Dniester River still felt the comfort of the Motherland & resisted the westward pull. A short & bloody war secured a breakaway; creating a country within a country. With its own borders & local currency, Transnistria has the tools of a nation, just without international recognition. Only those in the same boat have formal relations; Abkhazia, Kosovo, Palestine, all pseudo-nations screaming for identity.

Until recently, access for those of us in the decadent west was difficult; all impenetrable bureaucracy & bribes at the border. But in the last couple of years, a kind of tolerated tourism has developed. Now there’s an anti-corruption phone line at the border. If an old-school guard starts thumbing your passport, suggesting registration issues you get your mobile out.

Angry Lenin

With its Soviet iconography & tank-wide boulevards, the capital, Tiraspol, is a freeze-frame of the old Soviet Union. Lenin hasn’t been toppled from his plinths & the war memorial features both an onion-topped spire & a tank. It begs to be photographed in sepia.

I walked the main street, named after the 1917 Russian Revolution, from the towering statue of Lenin at one end to the angry bust of Lenin at the other. On the way, I passed Gagarin, Frunze & other Soviet icons. I chanced a croissant at a bakery, but found a frankfurter inside. Luckily, the tiramisu was sausage-free. It may thumb its nose at the decadent west, but Transnistria loves English football, with several channels dedicated to the Premier League. The reason for this is Sheriff; a private company that has stamped its brand across the republic; a huge hypermarket sits next to the FC Sheriff stadium & sponsored billboards are commonplace. Setup by ex-KGB & heavily involved in national politics, Sheriff is the corporate face of Transnistria.

In truth, Transmistria is no different to many other former Soviet republics in dealing with 70 years of Communist legacy. Some, The Baltics for instance, have smashed Lenin & Marx to pieces. The Central Asian Stans have quietly relocated them to less prominent positions (in case the wind changes), whereas Transnistria, like Belarus, seems to dismiss the whole fall of Soviet Russia as western propaganda.

I Love Tiraspol

On the day I returned home, the UK press carried an article about Moldovan politics. A new President with pro-Russian sympathies was promising to review the status of Transnistria, bring it back into the national fold perhaps? A reminder that politics, territory & nationhood are ever-changing. I took three things away with me back to the west; how eerily quiet it was at night, a bottle of local Kvint brandy (now in a million pieces thanks to my drunken butter-fingered sister) & a clever hotel toothbrush which could separate in two & slide into a protective case.

Odessa

I first travelled to Ukraine in 2008. The Orange Revolution had just rebooted national identity towards Europe & it felt like a new path had been forged. Eight years on, Maidan power had forced another Government overthrow, brutal & monochrome this time with snipers on the roof & thousands dead. I returned to a trimmer country, its Eastern border still blurred by violence & the exotic southern peninsula of Crimea cut & pasted onto Russia.


Odessa port

It took me two days & three flights to get to Odessa; the city of Battleship Potemkin, the wild-haired Eisenstein & a pram bouncing down the stairs. Odessa is a Slavic Trieste with the thrust & polyglot babble of a port city. Even the gypsies were multilingual, pleading “money mister,” flashing silver teeth & flirty smiles. Creamy 19^th century architecture stood among right-angled Soviet blocs & onion domes but the staircase was a crushing disappointment, under renovation; Cossack troops replaced by hard hats, guns with drills.


Potemkin Steps

Odessa was a city of small parks & bronze statues, surrounded by swaying wheat fields & flanked by the Black Sea. A strong Jewish heritage had been reduced to plaques & grim memorials. I stamped the streets & peered into courtyards, plaster peeling under taut lines of drying clothes, looking for vegetarian cafes & Turkish coffee. I stayed at the Londonskaya Hotel, a Victorian-era classic still living on the radiance of glamour from a century ago.

From Odessa I travelled by minibus, fuzzily hungover from Odessa Champanska, through fields of vines to Chisinau in Moldova. I sat at the back, a seat with a view, plugged into music & the stories of Isaac Babel. It was a beautiful journey across rural Bessarabia, sharply lit by winter sunshine & the trace of village wood smoke in the air.

Kyrgyzstan June 2016

Bishkek

My journey to Uzbekistan the previous spring was perhaps my best ever solo trip; I was captivated by the overlaying Soviet & Islamic worlds, the context of the Great Game & the sheer depth of Central Asian history. The research alone required a new bookshelf. The Uzbek cities formed the backbone of the Silk Road as the caravans of trade followed the paths of least resistance & left Kyrgyzstan isolated. Local Kyrgyz travel literature is scarce & the country is even difficult to pronounce, let alone spell. Kyrgyzstan is a Silk Road bypass; a country of yurts rather than caravanserai. Mountainous & mysterious. Yet, visas were free & flights were cheap. They just landed at ungodly hours.


Historically, Kyrgyzstan is still looking over its shoulder. This is the post-Soviet world which isn’t sure where to turn next. The traditionally nomadic Kyrgyz along with streams of forcibly displaced ethnic minorities created a new Central Asian society which after years of struggle & hunger bore fruit in the Brezhnev era as the Soviets turned the region’s isolation to their advantage. They built armament factories & secret submarine bases, all away from prying western eyes. Benefit for the locals? Full employment. In the capital, Bishkek, Lenin & Marx still stand tall on park-side plinths, pointing to the future, to a scrapped world.

MiG, Bishkek

My hotel was a concrete beauty with all the trappings of the Soviet era; smoked glass, a vast marble reception area & juddering lifts. High up on my balcony, I looked across to the Circus & the Palace of Sports. Still standing & still open.

Bishkek felt provincial, particularly around the suburban fringes, but in the centre it was pure Soviet. Tank-sized boulevards that took an age to cross, huge squares with piped music & dancing fountains & parked downtown among the marshrutkas & battered taxis; a MiG.


A squashed three hour shared-taxi ride from Bishkek took me to Lake Issyk Kul. The lake is the heart of Kyrgyzstan, an alpine bowl, a mile above sea level with sandy beaches ringed by mountains. I stayed in a quiet village at a newly built hotel. Only, Igor, the owner, spoke some scattered English & the sole thing I could transliterate from the Cyrillic menu was an omelette, which I ate three nights in a row. Every time I needed something (Wifi password, another omelette); the staff summoned Igor by radio.

Lake Issyk Kul

The lake has a mirco-climate & the weather changed quickly & dramatically. In the mornings, blue skies backdropped snow-tipped mountains & the lake glittered. Then dark clouds rolled over the mountains & marched to the lake’s edge, surrounding the water but unable to push further. You could swim in the lake & feel the warmth of the sun & then return to the beach to find your clothes rainsoaked & the air full of static.

Burana tower

I trekked to a petroglyph site up in the hills above Cholpon Ata. Rainclouds were closing in & I was unsure of the way, even after a kind local drew a map in the mud with a lolly stick. In the end I retraced my steps & took a taxi, only to find I had walked to within thirty metres of the entrance. Sigh. A pound wasted. The stones depict deer & goats, dating back to the 5th century BC. Despite their longevity, modern chemical restoration could erode images which have survived 2,500 years of battering Kyrgyz weather. The effect is akin to a photoshopped image, the colours saturated & the contrast sharpened. I trekked back to town along an old runway & joined holidaying Russians on the beach, eating Samarkand non bread the size of dinner plates, & apples from Kazakhstan.

In the post-Soviet world, every car is a taxi & I caught a lift with a family to the Silk Road city of Balsagun & the Burana Tower. The city is long-gone, just grassy mounds, grave markers & a single minaret which in a country with few Silk Road survivors creates a visual brand for Kyrgyz tourism. Samarkand this isn’t, but the tower’s setting in a summer meadow full of flowers, backlit by sun filtering onto green hills was an accurate microcosm of Kyrgyzstan.



Aral Sea

Flying home, I lucked an emergency row & window seat. From 40,000 feet the view was sharp & cloud-free.

Through Kazakhstan, over the smudged outline of the Aral Sea, where Soviet irrigation has shrivelled the coast & then across the Caspian before the view changed from blue sea to white caps as we followed the Northern Caucasus to the Black Sea.

In transit at Ataturk, I was four days ahead of a terrorist attack that killed 42 in the arrivals hall. Two weeks later there was an attempted military coup. A sobering return to reality.

Along the Silk Road in Uzbekistan

Asia at last! On the overnight flight from London my luck was in; a full row to relax and watch sleepily as we flew through dawn skies over sea & desert to Uzbekistan. I spent my first morning in Tashkent but the capital didn’t have the sights & experiences I’d come for and the airport taxi I took crashed into another car. An earthquake in the 60’s gave Soviet planners carte blanche to carve out marble-lined boulevards and create towerblocked suburbia. Only the metro gave respite; beautifully tiled, slightly kitsch and out of the sun.

    Hotel Uzbekistan, Tashkent

I reached Samarkand an hour before sunset and settled into a guesthouse run by a lovely lady who mothered me a little. I spent the evenings sat around a quiet courtyard with local beers & china bowls of tempura. Amid the one-upmanship conversations of Dutch backpackers & Latvian journalists, “When I was mountain trekking in Bhutan…” I tried my usual trick of hinting that I was a spy, spinning intrigues in my own personal update of the Great Game. As ever, no-one bought it.

The Registan is the tourist-friendly face of Samarkand, both rich in detail and more dazzling now than at any point in history. A viewing platform even frames the scene; making it almost impossible to take a bad photo. The issue of architectural restoration is a contentious topic in all the Uzbek Silk Road cities & it gives a homogenous shine which is both camera-friendly & historically distorted. 

I spent two days in Samarkand, in & out of mosques & mausoleums, all glittering with rainbows of mosaics and honeycomb recesses. In the Gur-i-Emir, Tamerlane’s tomb was represented by a single jet-black slate in a chamber of high arches overhung by waves of lilac tiles. I changed currency in a dim antechamber, counting out notes on a tomb & spent my cash on the same thick rings of bread that traders on the medieval Silk Road ate, tearing off chunks and sweetening with soft cheese. 

    Tomb of Tamerlane, Samarkand

From Samarkand to Bukhara; two fabled cities connected by a slow & stifling afternoon train. Where Samarkand’s impact was visual, Bukhara’s is historical. In the 19th century the Great Game kicked off in earnest when two British spies were dragged from a tick-ridden prison pit & beheaded in the town’s square. After posing on a Bactrian camel so I could send a selfie to my parents [who had no idea I was in Uzbekistan], I walked round the sun-baked mud walls to the prison, peering down into the pit where the spies, Connoly & Stoddart, spent their final days. The Ark fortress, where the evil Emirs ruled, was now stripped of character & had none of the stunning impact of the town’s other Maidan where a turquoise-domed madrasah & imposing mosque offset a slender brick minaret.

I bought a dusky-red Bukhara carpet from Sabina who was familiar from an old edition of Globe Trekker. She made me tea & asked my budget. “$200.” She looked offended and pointed to a stack of tiny rugs in the corner. The wily Sabina had the only working ATM in the country in her shop & my ineffectual haggling was no match for her business acumen.

    Bukhara

I flew from Bukhara to Khiva and, swerving the taxi drivers, took a trolley-bus into the ancient walled city. A mother dropped her swaddled baby as I sat down, astonished at the sight of a foreigner on the bus. The crying child rolled down the aisle. My hotel was the Orient Star, a restored Madrasah; student cells made over with modern plumbing and set around a courtyard. Under cobalt-noon skies, birds swooped & dived, relieved at sunset by bats, lapping in the thickening dusk. Fronting the hotel a stumpy green-tiled minaret gave Khiva its postcard image, as if a giant copper burrowing machine was stuck fast and had rusted in the earth.

    Orient Star Hotel, Khiva

All the Silk Road cities had been restored but Kihva’s was the most meticulous and it felt as if real life had been neatly brushed away at times. On Sunday, it was heaving with local tourists. Throughout this trip I was approached by Uzbeks from all walks of life who wanted to practice their English & take photos. Some barely spoke hello, while others were more fluent than I was. In Khiva, it reached its zenith and I became a tourist attraction for teenagers, schoolteachers, businessmen, and weirdly, grandmothers; all clicking camera phones at my middle-aged ruggedness. There are hundreds of photos of me in Khiva, but I didn’t take any of them.

Uzbekistan felt like old-school backpacking at times; no atms [unless you want to buy a carpet], Wi-Fi that floated on the breeze and a plug socket in Samarkand that almost blew my arm off. Worries about bureaucracy were unfounded. My only brush with authority was a single shrill whistle as I photographed a memorial to Soviet astronauts in Tashkent, followed by a wagging finger. The very names of these Silk Road cities are evocative; Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva. Standing in their perfect squares and gazing at the madrasahs & minarets & mosques, it was often impossible to see where original decoration ended & restoration began and although that detracts from authenticity, it looks absolutely stunning.

    Registan, Samarkand