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

Baku, Azerbaijan

There’s a cheap back door into Azerbaijan unlocked by Wizz Air. Flights are via Budapest where I stopped off to bathe at the Gellert & rode the Children’s Railway through the Buda hills in rain which never relented.

My time in Baku started with a grilling in passport control.
“I see you were in Armenia. Why?”
"Tourism,” I answered, which was met with a raised eyebrow before I was reluctantly waved through. At least it prepared me for the verbal barrage from the waiting taxi drivers who shamelessly lied about bus connections.

My first impression of the city was cats. They were everywhere; strolling through the airport arrivals hall or sleeping in the metro. The old town even had a cat sculpture embedded in a honey-stoned alcove



Caspian Sea

Baku is an ancient & isolated city, ringed once by walls, then by desert and partially moated by the oil-rich Caspian Sea. The old town sits in the shadow of an architectural playground funded by the oil that once lapped against the walls. Zaha Hadid’s cultural centre is the most beautiful, sculptured angles draped in a silk throw. Elsewhere are gigantic towers, a Freudian flagpole & Eurovision glitter. And you can’t miss the Carpet Museum, a vast carpet rolled tightly on the promenade. Baku may not be the prettiest place to visit but it was certainly the windiest. Walking along the Caspian shore, my glasses were blown from my face. I hastily employed two boys walking past to find them as I staggered around in a blurred frenzy. They turned up further down the boardwalk, sheltering under a bench & nursing a slight lens chip.



Baku Flame Towers

The suburbs are dustier with oil derricks crammed into back yards; each tiny plot a potential money-pot. The near horizon is a constant blur of nodding donkeys soundtracked by the putting of home-made generators. I spent a day on buses and subway trains, mopping up sites outside the centre; A mountain on fire, a Zorastrian temple and inbetween, car repairs and roadside markets, all the untidy businesses of suburbia.

Zaha Hadid's architecture

Soviet Baku has been mostly swept away with oil money but nestling in the new town is a beautiful old USSR football stadium built from tufa stone & formerly named after Lenin. Lenin, of course, is long gone and the statue outside now honours a local; Tofiq Bahramov, fondly remembered in England as “the Russian Linesman” after his assist to Geoff Hurst during the 1966 World Cup final. Baku had many faces; conservative Islam & boomtown economics, cobbled old town & Soviet drab, but at its heart was the romantic city of Ali & Nino, still just identifiable amidst the glass & steel of oil wealth.

Romania & Moldova

Bucovina Monastery

The Bucovina Monasteries are a cluster of churches in the Eastern Carpathians, decorated inside & out with bright frescos. Overhanging roofs shelter the pigment against the Romanian weather. In the medieval era when literacy wasn’t widespread, the frescos acted as stark pictorial warnings for those who wavered from orthodoxy. I hired Gigi, a local guide, and we visited Humor, Voronet, Moldovita & Sucevita; each with its own biblical themes, & all beautiful.

I asked Gigi, about the Communist era. He was a teenager in the late eighties and the Ceaucescus were executed days before his enforced conscription. Widespread resentment was already in the air & he told me he would have been lining up against his friends, rifle in hand. He described his mother queuing endlessly for bread while he flicked between the two state televisions channels, hopping between propaganda, praying for an end to the old order.

Chisinau, Moldova

From Suceava in Romanian Bucovina, I headed to Chisinau in Moldova. The only bus of the week left Suceava at 6am. I walked through the dark to the small bus station only to find the minibus full-up. “But I’ve come all the way from England!” I said. Some shrugging was the only response. Hiding at the back of the bus station was another bus which went part of the way, leaving at 7. At 7.45 it broke down in a forest. At 8.30 another bus picked us up from the forest and drove to the next town. A further bus took me to Iasi near the border and from there I could connect to Chisinau.

As soon as we entered Moldova, everyone began bouncing up & down. We had now left the EU with its infrastructure grants & road maintenance. Moldova’s highways are domestically funded, bumpy & unsealed. As we approached Chisinau, the fertile fields were planted with rows of grapes, wrapping the capital in vines. We juddered into the bus station in late afternoon sunshine. One simple journey had become four and yet we arrived an hour ahead of the rammed 6am bus from Suceava!

Coffee & cake in Moldova

I checked into a Junior Suite at the Hotel Tourist, a centrally-planned slab of downtown accommodation. After the colour-rush of the Bucovina monasteries, it was a return to communist brown; all the shades from beige to taupe. On the surface, Chisinau was crumbling; all rain-stained estates & wrecked pavements. Anti-fascist memorials rose proudly from intersections. The familiar clenched fists & red stars of Eastern Bloc progress. There was a cheek-by-jowl clash of post-war brutalism and neon-strip casinos; a complete absence of architectural harmony. But secreted inside was a brighter story. Bleak facades hid cosy cafes, modern enotecas & amusingly, Malldova. Here lived the capital’s young, flash with iphones & tablets, served by waitresses in traditional dress, everyone fluent in Russian & English.


Timisoara

From Chisinau, I flew to Timisoara in Romania, where the revolution to overthrow the Ceaucescus begun. The light was fading as I arrived, but the city appeared tidy & prosperous and proud of its role in igniting the revolution. From Timisoara the dissent spread to Bucharest and gained enough momentum to topple one of the worst of the Soviet-endorsed regimes. Way up in Bucovina in the remote north, a teenager called Gigi, with a love of the local monasteries, was just relieved it all happened before he was called up to shoot his mates.

Minsk - Soviet Timewarp

Hotel Planeta

Belarus was a difficult country to visit. I was on nodding terms with the Embassy in London before they finally granted me a visa. Direct flights are expensive but there’s a cheap backdoor entrance via budget airlines & a bus trip over the border from Lithuania. Minsk was the grey city at Belarus’s heart, frozen in a Soviet timewarp & a fascinating experience. I stayed at the Hotel Planeta, a town-edge monolith. Prowling the lobby were ladies in short skirts & heavy make-up, eager for eye contact. I slalomed through, head-down and ran for the lift. Later my room-phone rang and a female voice whispered unknown Russian. “Sorry?” I said, at which point she switched to English and suggested a “private relaxing massage”. She was one of the few people in Minsk who spoke good English. I declined her offer.

Belarus was almost completely destroyed in the second-world war, the whole country transformed into a vast battlefield. Minsk’s large Jewish population was squeezed into ghettos and then annihilated. City monuments reflect the horror and sadness; a straggling Auschwitz-bound line clinging to small suitcases & maternal tears for those who fell later in Afghanistan.

Trinity Suburb

The post-war city was rebuilt from scratch on Stalin’s watch, with wide boulevards & blockend murals of muscle-honed patriots. Everywhere there is concrete, grey & stained. Functional architecture drains the place of colour & I never saw a blue sky in Minsk. Only Trinity Suburb was different, a 1980s rebuild of the medieval old town where pastel shutters and decorated brickwork added an organic respite to the monochrome of Soviet Minsk. The tight string of streets looked more like the Belarus of Marc Chagall with gabled roofs and uneven cobbles and Trinity looked across the river to ribbons of green parkland.

I found Minsk oppressive at first, but then began to notice the welcome intrusion of human nature; traditional dancers harmonising folk ballads by the theatre, quirky sculptures decked with flowers and a wedding party spilling onto the streets drinking straight from bottles of Champanska.

Metro artwork

Belarus is one of the last dictatorships in Europe; ruled by a president elected with improbable majorities. Lenin still stood proudly outside Parliament and the KGB HQ was on the main shopping street. Even Lee Harvey Oswald made Minsk his home. The KGB bugged his apartment but couldn’t work out his motives & were as surprised as anyone when he changed the course of history. Belarus still leans towards Russia and turns subsidized gas imports into lucrative export capital. Iconic skyline vanity projects litter the suburbs creating construction jobs. No real freedom, no dissent, but work & a monthly paycheque. By day I walked the city until my calves ached but in the evenings, I rode the rattling metro lines in & out of Minsk with their spacerace tiling and starlit stations, picking up bread, cheese & fruit from local supermarkets at the end of the line. Wine was cheap & I stocked up on chewy reds from Georgia and crispy whites from Moldova.

New Library

Re-entering Lithuania, itself a former Soviet republic, was like discovering a new world of colour; Baroque churches; golden spires and the return of blue skies. The border crossing was a test of patience. Long waits in no-mans-land are common along the EU frontier but decontamination channels are solely the legacy of Chernobyl. The Soviet reactor was just inside the Ukrainian republic but Minsk lay directly upwind. Another legacy of Belarus’s unfortunate geography; stomped over by fighting armies and then poisoned by radiation from within.

Wine, Stalin & Tbilisi



Tbilisi

I headed to Tbilisi from Armenia, folded into the back of a bumpy minibus. My seat was a crate of watermelons & a toddler napped on my rucksack. I took a battered taxi to the old town, but walked the final stretch after the fuel warning light blinked on the dashboard & it spluttered to a halt. Tbilisi’s old town was both dustily atmospheric and falling to bits. I cleansed myself in one of the city’s communal baths, pummeled by an old man with giant soapy hands and headed to Gori to confront Georgia’s elephant in the room.

Gori is Stalin’s hometown, an hour’s shared-taxi journey in a brand new BMW from Tbilisi, the road skimming close to the Ossetian border. Rigid lines of rusty-red shacks studded the slopes; A refugee camp thrown together following Georgia’s latest skirmish with Mother Russia.



Man of Steel

Stalin’s boyhood home has been incongruously preserved in the centre of town, enclosed by classical columns and shielding a museum that told a story but never the whole truth. There was a sharp focus on WW2 [USSR’s Great Patriotic War] and Stalin’s achievements. After that it presented a web of spin & doctored photographs. Five year plans and collectivizations without the famines and Siberian labour camps. I bought a chapbook of Stalin’s boyhood poetry & a bottle of undrinkable sweet red wine. From Gori I headed to the Eastern town of Sighnaghi, the new epicentre of Georgian victiculture. The whole industry is undergoing a reboot after a Russian export blockcade had derailed it following Geogia’s succession. Stalin’s sweet-tooth influence has been supplemented by international recognition, particularly among the reds. Each label is transcribed by the gorgeously curly Georgian alphabet. However, in some lines naiviety triumphs & I couldn’t resist a bottle of Sparking Wine.
 

Sighnaghi

Sighnaghi has been heavily restored and felt slightly staged, as if it had been scrubbed too hard. Close to the town was a stone chapel dedicated to the fourth century St Nino, where I submerged into the healing waters of a natural spring.

This incongruous mix of the ancient & the modern formed my overriding impression of Georgia; Early saints & modern bodegas; new BMWs & petrol-scrimping cabbies. Georgia is a beautiful & ancient country, shoving away from Soviet rule, but tearing away fragments as it does so. The overriding issue for Georgia is this; what can you do when your most famous son is Joseph Stalin?

Thrace & the Rhodopes

On the Eastern Thracian plain in modern day Bulgaria lies Plovdiv, a many-layered city spread across several hills & atop capricious plates. I stayed in the steep, cobbled old town which crumbles over the Soviet-designed modern centre. Visible underneath is a Roman city whose contours still define the modern street plan. A 1970s earthquake exposed a large amphitheatre and looking south from the top row of seats, the jagged Rhodope Mountains line the horizon, creating a natural border with Greece.

Deep within the Rhodope Mountains lies the Devil’s Throat, a cave complex where Orpheus descended into the underworld to rescue Eurydice only to look back and lose her forever. The mountain roads crawl up to modern ski resorts and dip down to dense wood-lined valleys. Scattered in the mountains are low-walled foundations and white stone burial chambers; remnants of the ancient land of the Thracians.

Plovdiv

I crisscrossed the valleys in a series of minibuses, bought Mursalski, an aphrodisiac tea & in the evenings, drank wine grown from Thracian vines. I stayed a night in Eliza’s Guesthouse in Trigrad, a village close to a roaring gorge and followed Orpheus’ footsteps into the underworld. Eliza cooked Rhodope Pie for me, a Bulgarian version of Tortilla Espanola, puffed with local potatoes and mountain herbs. She was in her fifties, a teacher, and her wrists were strung with red & white Martenitsa, awaiting the spring. We spoke about the Soviet era and her attitude was even-handed. Everyone had jobs & pensions but little freedom and the atmosphere was one of suspicion even in small villages. You had to constantly look over your shoulder.

Heading back to Plovdiv, I stopped off in the Rhodope foothills at the Monastery of Bachkovo. The monastic buildings are coloured with frescos & thick with incense, shielded by a perimeter of stone walls. My guidebook suggested an overnight stay was possible & I was intrigued. I’ve slept in caves & luxury Paradores, in castles and even a tent in my back garden in London, but never in a monastery.

“Do you speak English?” I asked a group of monks. No, they didn’t. “German?” they asked. I didn’t. “French?” Umm. I was given an interview with one of the Fathers in an oak-lined study. His French was far superior to mine but we found common ground and I left with a large iron key and a warning to be back by dusk when the monastery closes its doors to the outside world. I took the bus back to Plovdiv, buying bread and cheese & wine, hiding the bottle in my rucksack, unsure of Eastern Orthodox protocol regarding alcohol. It was red wine, at least.

The room was square & plain with polished wooden floors and a southern window onto the Rhodopes. I read Kapka Kassabova’s memoir of growing up in Soviet Bulgaria and ate a simple meal. The plumbing clunked a little but then settled down and quickly became noiseless. By late-evening the monastery was in complete darkness & the silence was total. There was nothing to do but go to bed. I was awoken by a cliché; a cockerel crowing from the monastery’s in-house menagerie. The best night’s sleep I’ve had since the children were born.

Rock in Vaduz

Vaduz is a neat village masquerading as a capital city and I stayed a night while hopping between Austria & Switzerland. Pricey business hotels lined the main street but cheaper accommodation lay just outside the centre and I was drawn in by a tall brick B&B sporting a wall of blinking flashbulbs. The manager of the pension was a little unwelcoming; “Rock band” he said glumly, and pointed to the floor.

Steps led down from the lobby to a door marked “DISCO BAR”. I asked for a top floor bedroom but still the percussion rattled my shutters. I couldn’t beat the noise so I joined it. Who knew Liechtenstein had an alternative rock scene? Well here it was, squashed loud & sweaty into the basement of my pension. Pierced Goths, tattooed metalheads and, incongruously, a smartly dressed 50 something couple were all shoehorned into this tight space.

A band, sounding like a Germanic Black Sabbath played forever. The singer wrapped himself around the microphone as the band ran through the usual rock clichés. They even had a stage-diver although there’s little danger in leaping from a foot high stage onto an empty dancefloor. After four unearned encores the band shuffled off. “Goodnight, Vaduz!” shouted the singer swaggering off in leather trousers and sunglasses. He headed directly over to the 50 somethings and gave them both a kiss, blowing his cool somewhat as they turned out to be his parents.