Emails from the Edge (6 page)
Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
TAJIKISTAN: 3â8 JULY
DAY 65 (4 JULY): KHOJAND
Once the easternmost outpost of Alexander the Great's military empire, nowadays this city of 160 000 publicly venerates Lenin (a huge bronze statue still commands the approach to the Syr-Darya River).
Tonight a restaurateur repeatedly refuses payment for a thoroughly satisfying meal. There must be a first time for everything.
DAY 66 (5 JULY): KHOJAND TO DUSHANBE
I travel from north to south, 350 kilometres across 3000-metre-high mountain passes in a shared taxi, a sturdy Volga limousine. This is the type of perfect day travellers will go thousands of kilometres for. At a morning roadside stop we buy fresh bread and honey, enjoyed in the shade of huge upside-down umbrellas.
One hundred kilometres from Dushanbe, a Kalashnikov-toting fifteen-year-old stops the taxi. After a few nervous moments, he lets us go for the price of a watermelon. Fifty kilometres on, entrepreneurs have turned a gushing rock waterfall into a profitable car wash.
DAY 67 (6 JULY): DUSHANBE
Broad leafy boulevards make this capital an unexpected joy. There's one fall from grace: as I co-opt a young Tajik to help my chair down from a high kerb, he distractedly asks, âAre you American?' At the same moment he lets go of the back rest and leaves me sprawled on the asphalt, unhurt, but angry and disinclined to discuss my nationality. He runs off: a passer-by helps me back into the chair.
UZBEKISTAN REVISITED: 8 JULYâ4 AUGUST
DAY 72 (11 JULY): TASHKENT
Two months before a date no one in the West will easily forget, I meet a brutalised man whose anger could in time turn him into a terrorist. So far as I can tell, he is not one yet, more's the wonder.
In whispers they call Karimov, ex-Communist and founding president, âthe Pharaoh'. Nine days ago, plainclothes members of the SNB, the Uzbek security police, broke up a peaceful protest by a hundred women in Amir Timur Square, the symbolic heart of this Central Asian capital. A witness says that SNB operatives used truncheons on the women, many of them with babes in arms, before herding them into buses and driving them away.
The women had gathered to make a terribly revolutionary demand: the opening of more mosques in Tashkent. The Western media portray a goodies-versus-baddies vision of Islam. But the Pharaoh will have no God before him, not even Allah. Mosques here are prohibited from broadcasting the call to prayer. Faith-based political parties are banned.
I meet Juma Bahadur (not his real name), a 20-year-old working at a Tashkent Internet club, when I go there to send an email from the edge. He introduces himself simply as âa Muslim' and asks if we can take a walk. Wheels and heels, we amble around the block. What can be so important that he prefers half an hour in the blistering summer sun to the fan-cooled interior of a cybershop?
Bahadur doesn't keep me in suspense for long. The story he tells dates back to last January. An SNB officer approached him and asked why he had just spoken to a woman on the pavement. When he replied that she had stopped him to ask directions, the officer in plain clothes told him to come along quietly. As Bahadur tells it, he was taken to a police cellâa wooden stool its only furnitureâhandcuffed and left alone for several hours. After an indefinite period, four policemen entered the cell, covered his chest with a pillow, and pummelled him incessantly on the torso and limbs until he lost consciousness.
He was kept in detention along with 50 other men for four days, until the agent who had stopped him on the street âcalled my parents, and my brother came and took me home'.
When Bahadur asked why the police had treated him like this, they told him âbecause I went to the mosque'.
Every minute or so, Bahadur looks furtively round, as if the trees have ears. He is convinced he understands what motivates Karimov's police state: âIslam, our religion, teaches every person to own his property. When a person knows his powerâthat I am a manâand everyone wants to own his property, control is difficult. When people are (treated) like pigs, control is easy.'
Only the day before the SNB suppressed the Muslim women's protest, the Uzbeks suddenly announced they were closing the Kyrgyzstan border to all road traffic between Osh and Andijan, the border I crossed in peace a month beforehand.
I make a wry mental note: at the end of next month, Uzbekistan will officially celebrate ten years as a post-communist state. Ah, but old habits die hard.
DAY 74 (13 JULY): TASHKENT TO SAMARKAND
Have developed a good technique for boarding minibuses. I offer to buy two ticketsâone for me, one for the chair. This way it doesn't get squashed under a mountain of luggage (or chicken shit on rural routes) and the drivers, who leave only when their vehicles are full, manage an early departure. Not only does this tactic transform initial scepticism, even hostility, towards the idea of someone in a wheelchair coming along for the ride, I invariably get to sit up front. Call me elitist but I do like the unhindered views. After all, there is a practical angle to consider: these people will probably pass this way again; I almost certainly never will.
DAY 76 (15 JULY): SAMARKAND
Some place names make you want to drop everything and rush off at once. Zanzibar is one, Samarkand another. Here, in what was once his fabulous desert capital, lies the tomb of Timurlane, that all-conquering warrior-king who stopped the Ottoman Turks in their camel tracks. Having found a welcoming guesthouse in the town's backblocks, and partaken of a generous breakfast under a trellis covered in purple grapes, I (st)roll down the lane past curious urchins, and there on the leftâtowering over meâis the great man's mausoleum.
A nondescript official tells an English-speaker to inform me I cannot go inside with a wheelchair. I adopt a suitably noble mien and inform him that, as I rely on the goodness of helpers (miraculously two step forward from the growing throng at this very moment to offer strong arms) and, more important, as Timurlane was short for âTimur the Lame', nothing is going to stop me paying my respects.
The gamble pays off; I enter the dark hall. Later, my little triumph loses some of its savour when a local resident tells me that the tomb everyone takes for Timur's is actually a replica: the original lies directly beneath it in a crypt (discovered, intriguingly enough, only in 1959 when a girl playing ball fell downstairs).
Perhaps, I reflect, the official was only telling the simple truth.
DAY 80 (19 JULY): BUKHARA
If Samarkand has been tarted up for tourist groups, Bukhara is the first place I have ever been where people live comfortably in the 15th century. You feel absolutely certain looking around you at bazaars, caravanserais, towering minarets and crumbling medieval mosques that others must have seen and absorbed this same reality more than 500 years ago.
The daytime maximum temperature now regularly exceeds 40°C, giving new meaning to the city's proudest boast, âElsewhere light radiates from Heaven onto the land; in holy Bukhara, it radiates upward to illuminate Heaven.'
But the brighter the light, the darker the shadowsâand nowhere are they more tenebrous than in the Bug Pit
(karakhona
to the Uzbeks), into which I peer today. Dating from the days when Bukhara was a feudal state ruled by its own emir from the Arkâan awesome citadel with ramparts that still dominate today's cityâthe Bug Pit is the fourth cell you come to in Zindon jail. It is a black hole, 6.5 metres deep and covered by an iron grille. Lowered in by rope, the prisonersâfive or six in a space no bigger than a wellâshared their lives with lice, scorpions and other vermin. Here two English emissaries, Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly, spent their last years before being executed in June 1842. The story goes that they were marched out before a huge crowd just in front of the Ark, forced to dig their own graves âand, to the sound of drums and reed pipes from atop the fortress walls, beheaded'.
Through an interpreter, the ticket-seller tells me that in Victorian times the pit was twice as deep as it is now. I believe her implicitly: a grim-faced crone, her voice conveys the authority of someone speaking from personal recollection.
DAY 81 (20 JULY): BUKHARA
Deep in the Old City lies a minor miracle, and a lesson for the 21st century. Here, for thirteen turbulent centuries, ever since the Arab conquest, a Jewish community has survived. How is it done in Central Asia, I wonder, when in far-west Asia enmity has blasted the so-called peace process apart? The first difference I note, listening to Rabbi Gavriel Matatov, 65, is that, unlike the dogmatism spewing out of the Holy Land, the predominant tone is
not
one of absolute certainty that the promised land won't be taken over or taken back from time to time.
Ask Matatov about the future of Bukhara's Jews, and he replies, âOnly God knows.' Would that Sharon or Arafatâand all of their successorsâhad such humility.
DAY 65 (4 JULY): KHOJAND
Once the easternmost outpost of Alexander the Great's military empire, nowadays this city of 160 000 publicly venerates Lenin (a huge bronze statue still commands the approach to the Syr-Darya River).
Tonight a restaurateur repeatedly refuses payment for a thoroughly satisfying meal. There must be a first time for everything.
DAY 66 (5 JULY): KHOJAND TO DUSHANBE
I travel from north to south, 350 kilometres across 3000-metre-high mountain passes in a shared taxi, a sturdy Volga limousine. This is the type of perfect day travellers will go thousands of kilometres for. At a morning roadside stop we buy fresh bread and honey, enjoyed in the shade of huge upside-down umbrellas.
One hundred kilometres from Dushanbe, a Kalashnikov-toting fifteen-year-old stops the taxi. After a few nervous moments, he lets us go for the price of a watermelon. Fifty kilometres on, entrepreneurs have turned a gushing rock waterfall into a profitable car wash.
DAY 67 (6 JULY): DUSHANBE
Broad leafy boulevards make this capital an unexpected joy. There's one fall from grace: as I co-opt a young Tajik to help my chair down from a high kerb, he distractedly asks, âAre you American?' At the same moment he lets go of the back rest and leaves me sprawled on the asphalt, unhurt, but angry and disinclined to discuss my nationality. He runs off: a passer-by helps me back into the chair.
UZBEKISTAN REVISITED: 8 JULYâ4 AUGUST
DAY 72 (11 JULY): TASHKENT
Two months before a date no one in the West will easily forget, I meet a brutalised man whose anger could in time turn him into a terrorist. So far as I can tell, he is not one yet, more's the wonder.
In whispers they call Karimov, ex-Communist and founding president, âthe Pharaoh'. Nine days ago, plainclothes members of the SNB, the Uzbek security police, broke up a peaceful protest by a hundred women in Amir Timur Square, the symbolic heart of this Central Asian capital. A witness says that SNB operatives used truncheons on the women, many of them with babes in arms, before herding them into buses and driving them away.
The women had gathered to make a terribly revolutionary demand: the opening of more mosques in Tashkent. The Western media portray a goodies-versus-baddies vision of Islam. But the Pharaoh will have no God before him, not even Allah. Mosques here are prohibited from broadcasting the call to prayer. Faith-based political parties are banned.
I meet Juma Bahadur (not his real name), a 20-year-old working at a Tashkent Internet club, when I go there to send an email from the edge. He introduces himself simply as âa Muslim' and asks if we can take a walk. Wheels and heels, we amble around the block. What can be so important that he prefers half an hour in the blistering summer sun to the fan-cooled interior of a cybershop?
Bahadur doesn't keep me in suspense for long. The story he tells dates back to last January. An SNB officer approached him and asked why he had just spoken to a woman on the pavement. When he replied that she had stopped him to ask directions, the officer in plain clothes told him to come along quietly. As Bahadur tells it, he was taken to a police cellâa wooden stool its only furnitureâhandcuffed and left alone for several hours. After an indefinite period, four policemen entered the cell, covered his chest with a pillow, and pummelled him incessantly on the torso and limbs until he lost consciousness.
He was kept in detention along with 50 other men for four days, until the agent who had stopped him on the street âcalled my parents, and my brother came and took me home'.
When Bahadur asked why the police had treated him like this, they told him âbecause I went to the mosque'.
Every minute or so, Bahadur looks furtively round, as if the trees have ears. He is convinced he understands what motivates Karimov's police state: âIslam, our religion, teaches every person to own his property. When a person knows his powerâthat I am a manâand everyone wants to own his property, control is difficult. When people are (treated) like pigs, control is easy.'
Only the day before the SNB suppressed the Muslim women's protest, the Uzbeks suddenly announced they were closing the Kyrgyzstan border to all road traffic between Osh and Andijan, the border I crossed in peace a month beforehand.
I make a wry mental note: at the end of next month, Uzbekistan will officially celebrate ten years as a post-communist state. Ah, but old habits die hard.
DAY 74 (13 JULY): TASHKENT TO SAMARKAND
Have developed a good technique for boarding minibuses. I offer to buy two ticketsâone for me, one for the chair. This way it doesn't get squashed under a mountain of luggage (or chicken shit on rural routes) and the drivers, who leave only when their vehicles are full, manage an early departure. Not only does this tactic transform initial scepticism, even hostility, towards the idea of someone in a wheelchair coming along for the ride, I invariably get to sit up front. Call me elitist but I do like the unhindered views. After all, there is a practical angle to consider: these people will probably pass this way again; I almost certainly never will.
DAY 76 (15 JULY): SAMARKAND
Some place names make you want to drop everything and rush off at once. Zanzibar is one, Samarkand another. Here, in what was once his fabulous desert capital, lies the tomb of Timurlane, that all-conquering warrior-king who stopped the Ottoman Turks in their camel tracks. Having found a welcoming guesthouse in the town's backblocks, and partaken of a generous breakfast under a trellis covered in purple grapes, I (st)roll down the lane past curious urchins, and there on the leftâtowering over meâis the great man's mausoleum.
A nondescript official tells an English-speaker to inform me I cannot go inside with a wheelchair. I adopt a suitably noble mien and inform him that, as I rely on the goodness of helpers (miraculously two step forward from the growing throng at this very moment to offer strong arms) and, more important, as Timurlane was short for âTimur the Lame', nothing is going to stop me paying my respects.
The gamble pays off; I enter the dark hall. Later, my little triumph loses some of its savour when a local resident tells me that the tomb everyone takes for Timur's is actually a replica: the original lies directly beneath it in a crypt (discovered, intriguingly enough, only in 1959 when a girl playing ball fell downstairs).
Perhaps, I reflect, the official was only telling the simple truth.
DAY 80 (19 JULY): BUKHARA
If Samarkand has been tarted up for tourist groups, Bukhara is the first place I have ever been where people live comfortably in the 15th century. You feel absolutely certain looking around you at bazaars, caravanserais, towering minarets and crumbling medieval mosques that others must have seen and absorbed this same reality more than 500 years ago.
The daytime maximum temperature now regularly exceeds 40°C, giving new meaning to the city's proudest boast, âElsewhere light radiates from Heaven onto the land; in holy Bukhara, it radiates upward to illuminate Heaven.'
But the brighter the light, the darker the shadowsâand nowhere are they more tenebrous than in the Bug Pit
(karakhona
to the Uzbeks), into which I peer today. Dating from the days when Bukhara was a feudal state ruled by its own emir from the Arkâan awesome citadel with ramparts that still dominate today's cityâthe Bug Pit is the fourth cell you come to in Zindon jail. It is a black hole, 6.5 metres deep and covered by an iron grille. Lowered in by rope, the prisonersâfive or six in a space no bigger than a wellâshared their lives with lice, scorpions and other vermin. Here two English emissaries, Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly, spent their last years before being executed in June 1842. The story goes that they were marched out before a huge crowd just in front of the Ark, forced to dig their own graves âand, to the sound of drums and reed pipes from atop the fortress walls, beheaded'.
Through an interpreter, the ticket-seller tells me that in Victorian times the pit was twice as deep as it is now. I believe her implicitly: a grim-faced crone, her voice conveys the authority of someone speaking from personal recollection.
DAY 81 (20 JULY): BUKHARA
Deep in the Old City lies a minor miracle, and a lesson for the 21st century. Here, for thirteen turbulent centuries, ever since the Arab conquest, a Jewish community has survived. How is it done in Central Asia, I wonder, when in far-west Asia enmity has blasted the so-called peace process apart? The first difference I note, listening to Rabbi Gavriel Matatov, 65, is that, unlike the dogmatism spewing out of the Holy Land, the predominant tone is
not
one of absolute certainty that the promised land won't be taken over or taken back from time to time.
Ask Matatov about the future of Bukhara's Jews, and he replies, âOnly God knows.' Would that Sharon or Arafatâand all of their successorsâhad such humility.
Chapter 7
TURKMANIA
A
LI
&
N
INO
AUGUST 2001
TURKMENISTAN: 4â20 AUGUST
DAY 96 (4 AUGUST): TURKMENABAT TO BAIRAM ALI
My guidebook had given me fair warning â âTurkmenistan is no fun in the summer.'âand this was the hottest time of year. However, if I could survive a Central Asian summer I could look forward to the bliss of an Arabian winter. Swings and roundabouts. But right now I was not feeling so philosophical: I'd travelled in Africa and never experienced such a hot day. Searingly, suffocatingly hot. From what those who live here told me, it had to be between 50° and 52°C. In the shade? You must be joking: there's no such thing in the Kara Kum Desert. Even camels were hot-footing it across the dunes.
DAY 97 (5 AUGUST): MERV
We are in the homeland of the biggest megalomaniac of our time. Suparmurat Niyazov, better known as Turkmenbashi (Head of All Turkmen), makes North Korea's Kim Jong Il look like a shrinking violet. So let us give thanks that Turkmenbashi doesn't have Mao's or Hitler's tens of millions at his command. Today an embarrassed- looking Turkmen recites for me in English the vow of fidelity every Turkmen schoolchild must learn by heart:
At the slightest evil against you,
May my hand be lost.
At the slightest word against you,
May my tongue be lost.
At the slightest betrayal to the Superior Turkmen â¦
⦠and so on,
ad
-solutely
nauseam
.
Turkmenbashi is everywhere. His larger-than-life photoâthat of a pudgy-faced tinpot dictator going to seedâhangs on walls from one renamed extremity of this vast flat land (Turkmenabad, city of the Turkmen) to the other (modestly titled Turkmenbashi).
Here, a half hour's drive from Mary and Bairam Ali, we are in another seat of power, known to the Persians as Margush, the Greeks as Margiana and the Arabs as Merv.
From Alexander to the Mongol hordes of the fearsome Khans, this placeâin what was known variously as Turkestan or Turkmeniaâhas been overrun by world conquerors, lords of terror who would have argued to a man that they were on a mission to bring civilisation to the barbarians.
Eight centuries ago, with Europe still in the Dark Ages, the mighty city that stood here was Baghdad's only rival as the centre of the civilised world. Like a candle flaring brightest just before it is snuffed out, Merv was known far and wide as Queen of the World until Genghis Khan's envoys arrived demanding a tributeâin grain and sex slavesâthat the local Seljuks were unwilling to pay. In AD 1221, the Mongols returned, slaying upwards of one million citizens in a single week. However, even a massacre on that scale did not put paid to Merv's days of greatness: a Timurid dynasty (yes, our old friend Timur the Lame) would revive some of that.
But, today, all you can do is wander among the crumbled ruins of mosques and citadels, pick up the odd shard of 2000-year-old pottery, and marvel at the vanity of Man's pretensions to power.
DAY 101 (9 AUGUST): ASHGABAT
Ever on the lookout for lodgings with a difference, I had marked it down in my diary to check out a guesthouse in the suburbs that the Lonely Planet author said was actually an asylum. That should be an interesting experience for one night, I thought. On arriving at the place in question I was greeted by an hospitable couple whose only eccentricity was the husband's total obsession with pigeons. Dovecotes abounded and he spent half the day banding his beloved birds. As I accepted a mug of tea and tried to make small talk, a tall ponytailed Englishman in his late twenties sat down opposite me. Introducing himself as Richard, a guest at this out-of-the-way guesthouse, he looked like just another adventurous soul until he mentioned that he had just come back from Afghanistanâone of the few places I had excluded from my itinerary. This hadn't been his first visit there, he said, and although it was true about the hard line the Taliban rulers took on many issues he had got to know and respect them, and they did some good things too (eliminating opium crops, for one). And then he said the most curious thing: âI got to know them really well and we got to trust each other ⦠Watch out, something big is going to happen soon.' Naturally, I asked him what, but he kept changing the subject, as if he had said too much. My curiosity was so piqued that I returned the next day, but Richard had gone. A month later, when the news came in from New York and Washington, I couldn't help wondering how much he had known.
DAY 103 (11 AUGUST): ASHGABAT
As Oriental despots go (and they eventually do), Niyazov/Turkmenbashi is nothing out of the ordinary; but long-time observers collect his wackier ideas like precious stones. His Edifice Complex has already given the nation a solid smattering of distinctive landmarks. This capital of his is a postmodern tribute to the sheen of marble, not to mention the glint of gold. Centre stage is occupied by the Arch of Neutrality, colloquially known as the Tower of Power, a skyscraping tripod topped by a scintillating statue of guess who, pointing towards the rising sun at dawn and rotating all day until his all-powerful finger commands it to set in the evening. This being Turkmenistan, the sun does what it's told.
A more poignant monument lies out of town: the Palace of Orphans. Like vast swaths of his mint-fresh capital, the Palace reflects Turkmenbashi's love of shiny surfaces, andâso the tourist guide is heard to sayâhis love of children (which I suppose is just as well for the children's sake). The chief of the five great Turkmen clans claims his father was killed in World War II and his mother died in the 1948 earthquake catastrophe that killed 160 000 Ashgabat residents in ten seconds flat.
That memory spurred him to father the Palace, which is actually a prestige school financed by a US$20 million donation from the UAE. Credit where it's due: 250 orphans receive an education fit for a future elite (the world's only orphanocracy?) in the impressively equipped rooms and playgrounds of this Eton in the desert.
DAY 107 (15 AUGUST): TURKMENBASHI
After an orange sunrise afforded me a glimpse of the Caspian Sea from my second-class Turkmenistan Railways carriage, I thought I had arrived in Turkmenbashi, on the Caspian shore, just after 9 am on a torrid summer's morning. The conductor must have been so glad to reach the end of the line that he simply forgot me. Anyway, it took some vociferous shouting to get anyone to come and help me and the chair down from the carriage, and then the total folly of having bought a ticket in Wagon 21 set in.
I was at the back of the train, about 800 metres from the station, stuck fast in a sea of sharp stones of the type mysteriously beloved of railway station designers the world over. After half an hour sweating it out, a couple of Turkmen motorists appeared out of nowhere, drove their car the length of the train, and gave me a lift into town. Now I had arrived.
DAY 111 (19 AUGUST): ON THE CASPIAN SEA
Ships are not made for wheelchairs. High cabin thresholds and cramped bathrooms are well-known foes but, ultimately, conquerable.
A smooth ride to Transcaucasia: that was the theory. But post-Soviet reality had a lesson in store for me. The Thursday before sailing, Sirdar the ticket-seller was roused from his pallet in the bedroom-cum-office he occupied down by the wharf and sold me a US$45 ticket for deck space on the passenger ship
Dagestan
, due out on Saturday evening.
Following his directions to be there hours early, I was wheeling along the esplanade at 10 am on Saturday when my heart sank at the sight of a large vessel heading out to sea. Surely that couldn't be the
Dagestan?
It was, Sirdar sighed. But I was in luck: another ship would be leaving port that night. It was already 40°C, and I was in no position to argue. I bought a second ticket, ignored the demand for a new âservice fee', and returned to the Customs Hall for a long day's wait. (Much too late I learnt that to obtain a space on a cargo vesselâmy replacement shipâthe going rate was U$$15.)
Officially âstamped out' of Turkmenistan at 11 pm on Saturday, the ensuing hours of stifling heat in a poky cabin (kindly vacated by a Russian-literate Azeri crewman who on scanning my ticket told me âThose Turkmen no good, they lie to you') were spent dozing listlessly and waiting for the barren cliffs that dominated my porthole view to move.
When I found that the cabin ensuite was accessible and therefore depriving myself of food and drink during the journey would be unnecessary, there was no food to be had. At long last a crew member who must have remembered the presence of this unusual human cargo turned up with a plate of pancakes which I wolfed down.
Afloat with uncertainty I might be, but sailing blithely into the unknown is what all of us do every day of our lives. The troika of waiting, the heat and the stillness steered my thoughts round to other times. Perhaps it was because my journey was now closing in on West Asia, which once closed in on me.
The outward impression that the world can be relied on, as witnessed in a clear sky and a low tide, would never deceive the boy who had learnt his lesson, still my scroll map lay on the cabin table unfurled and duly weighted.
I spent those hours of enforced idleness reviewing my plans for September 2001, little thinking that others might have others. Bahrain had taught me the folly of believing that, even when everything you can think of is charted, you can be certain what lies over the horizon. Even yet, I'm enthralled by maps.
The clock was creeping towards four on the Sunday afternoon when those eternal cliffs finally exited porthole right. As evening drew in, I left hardships, imaginary ships and the baked terrain of Central Asia astern. Hoisted up on deck with the help of grimy but willing hands, I felt the time was ripe for a spot of self-congratulation. It had taken me almost four months, at the hottest time of year, to cross one of the most enticing yet challenging and unfamiliar regions of the globe. As a tangerine sun bobbled over the waves before losing its balance and slipping under, a beaming captain slipped a cold can of beer into my unsuspecting hands. Silently I toasted Sirdar.
TURKMANIA
âBahrain Khan,' I said, âsuppose you get what you want. When you have built your asphalt roads and forts, and when you have sent the worst servants to the most modern schoolsâwhat will become of the soul of Asia?'
KURBAN SAIDA
LI
&
N
INO
AUGUST 2001
TURKMENISTAN: 4â20 AUGUST
DAY 96 (4 AUGUST): TURKMENABAT TO BAIRAM ALI
My guidebook had given me fair warning â âTurkmenistan is no fun in the summer.'âand this was the hottest time of year. However, if I could survive a Central Asian summer I could look forward to the bliss of an Arabian winter. Swings and roundabouts. But right now I was not feeling so philosophical: I'd travelled in Africa and never experienced such a hot day. Searingly, suffocatingly hot. From what those who live here told me, it had to be between 50° and 52°C. In the shade? You must be joking: there's no such thing in the Kara Kum Desert. Even camels were hot-footing it across the dunes.
DAY 97 (5 AUGUST): MERV
We are in the homeland of the biggest megalomaniac of our time. Suparmurat Niyazov, better known as Turkmenbashi (Head of All Turkmen), makes North Korea's Kim Jong Il look like a shrinking violet. So let us give thanks that Turkmenbashi doesn't have Mao's or Hitler's tens of millions at his command. Today an embarrassed- looking Turkmen recites for me in English the vow of fidelity every Turkmen schoolchild must learn by heart:
At the slightest evil against you,
May my hand be lost.
At the slightest word against you,
May my tongue be lost.
At the slightest betrayal to the Superior Turkmen â¦
⦠and so on,
ad
-solutely
nauseam
.
Turkmenbashi is everywhere. His larger-than-life photoâthat of a pudgy-faced tinpot dictator going to seedâhangs on walls from one renamed extremity of this vast flat land (Turkmenabad, city of the Turkmen) to the other (modestly titled Turkmenbashi).
Here, a half hour's drive from Mary and Bairam Ali, we are in another seat of power, known to the Persians as Margush, the Greeks as Margiana and the Arabs as Merv.
From Alexander to the Mongol hordes of the fearsome Khans, this placeâin what was known variously as Turkestan or Turkmeniaâhas been overrun by world conquerors, lords of terror who would have argued to a man that they were on a mission to bring civilisation to the barbarians.
Eight centuries ago, with Europe still in the Dark Ages, the mighty city that stood here was Baghdad's only rival as the centre of the civilised world. Like a candle flaring brightest just before it is snuffed out, Merv was known far and wide as Queen of the World until Genghis Khan's envoys arrived demanding a tributeâin grain and sex slavesâthat the local Seljuks were unwilling to pay. In AD 1221, the Mongols returned, slaying upwards of one million citizens in a single week. However, even a massacre on that scale did not put paid to Merv's days of greatness: a Timurid dynasty (yes, our old friend Timur the Lame) would revive some of that.
But, today, all you can do is wander among the crumbled ruins of mosques and citadels, pick up the odd shard of 2000-year-old pottery, and marvel at the vanity of Man's pretensions to power.
DAY 101 (9 AUGUST): ASHGABAT
Ever on the lookout for lodgings with a difference, I had marked it down in my diary to check out a guesthouse in the suburbs that the Lonely Planet author said was actually an asylum. That should be an interesting experience for one night, I thought. On arriving at the place in question I was greeted by an hospitable couple whose only eccentricity was the husband's total obsession with pigeons. Dovecotes abounded and he spent half the day banding his beloved birds. As I accepted a mug of tea and tried to make small talk, a tall ponytailed Englishman in his late twenties sat down opposite me. Introducing himself as Richard, a guest at this out-of-the-way guesthouse, he looked like just another adventurous soul until he mentioned that he had just come back from Afghanistanâone of the few places I had excluded from my itinerary. This hadn't been his first visit there, he said, and although it was true about the hard line the Taliban rulers took on many issues he had got to know and respect them, and they did some good things too (eliminating opium crops, for one). And then he said the most curious thing: âI got to know them really well and we got to trust each other ⦠Watch out, something big is going to happen soon.' Naturally, I asked him what, but he kept changing the subject, as if he had said too much. My curiosity was so piqued that I returned the next day, but Richard had gone. A month later, when the news came in from New York and Washington, I couldn't help wondering how much he had known.
DAY 103 (11 AUGUST): ASHGABAT
As Oriental despots go (and they eventually do), Niyazov/Turkmenbashi is nothing out of the ordinary; but long-time observers collect his wackier ideas like precious stones. His Edifice Complex has already given the nation a solid smattering of distinctive landmarks. This capital of his is a postmodern tribute to the sheen of marble, not to mention the glint of gold. Centre stage is occupied by the Arch of Neutrality, colloquially known as the Tower of Power, a skyscraping tripod topped by a scintillating statue of guess who, pointing towards the rising sun at dawn and rotating all day until his all-powerful finger commands it to set in the evening. This being Turkmenistan, the sun does what it's told.
A more poignant monument lies out of town: the Palace of Orphans. Like vast swaths of his mint-fresh capital, the Palace reflects Turkmenbashi's love of shiny surfaces, andâso the tourist guide is heard to sayâhis love of children (which I suppose is just as well for the children's sake). The chief of the five great Turkmen clans claims his father was killed in World War II and his mother died in the 1948 earthquake catastrophe that killed 160 000 Ashgabat residents in ten seconds flat.
That memory spurred him to father the Palace, which is actually a prestige school financed by a US$20 million donation from the UAE. Credit where it's due: 250 orphans receive an education fit for a future elite (the world's only orphanocracy?) in the impressively equipped rooms and playgrounds of this Eton in the desert.
DAY 107 (15 AUGUST): TURKMENBASHI
After an orange sunrise afforded me a glimpse of the Caspian Sea from my second-class Turkmenistan Railways carriage, I thought I had arrived in Turkmenbashi, on the Caspian shore, just after 9 am on a torrid summer's morning. The conductor must have been so glad to reach the end of the line that he simply forgot me. Anyway, it took some vociferous shouting to get anyone to come and help me and the chair down from the carriage, and then the total folly of having bought a ticket in Wagon 21 set in.
I was at the back of the train, about 800 metres from the station, stuck fast in a sea of sharp stones of the type mysteriously beloved of railway station designers the world over. After half an hour sweating it out, a couple of Turkmen motorists appeared out of nowhere, drove their car the length of the train, and gave me a lift into town. Now I had arrived.
DAY 111 (19 AUGUST): ON THE CASPIAN SEA
Ships are not made for wheelchairs. High cabin thresholds and cramped bathrooms are well-known foes but, ultimately, conquerable.
A smooth ride to Transcaucasia: that was the theory. But post-Soviet reality had a lesson in store for me. The Thursday before sailing, Sirdar the ticket-seller was roused from his pallet in the bedroom-cum-office he occupied down by the wharf and sold me a US$45 ticket for deck space on the passenger ship
Dagestan
, due out on Saturday evening.
Following his directions to be there hours early, I was wheeling along the esplanade at 10 am on Saturday when my heart sank at the sight of a large vessel heading out to sea. Surely that couldn't be the
Dagestan?
It was, Sirdar sighed. But I was in luck: another ship would be leaving port that night. It was already 40°C, and I was in no position to argue. I bought a second ticket, ignored the demand for a new âservice fee', and returned to the Customs Hall for a long day's wait. (Much too late I learnt that to obtain a space on a cargo vesselâmy replacement shipâthe going rate was U$$15.)
Officially âstamped out' of Turkmenistan at 11 pm on Saturday, the ensuing hours of stifling heat in a poky cabin (kindly vacated by a Russian-literate Azeri crewman who on scanning my ticket told me âThose Turkmen no good, they lie to you') were spent dozing listlessly and waiting for the barren cliffs that dominated my porthole view to move.
When I found that the cabin ensuite was accessible and therefore depriving myself of food and drink during the journey would be unnecessary, there was no food to be had. At long last a crew member who must have remembered the presence of this unusual human cargo turned up with a plate of pancakes which I wolfed down.
Afloat with uncertainty I might be, but sailing blithely into the unknown is what all of us do every day of our lives. The troika of waiting, the heat and the stillness steered my thoughts round to other times. Perhaps it was because my journey was now closing in on West Asia, which once closed in on me.
The outward impression that the world can be relied on, as witnessed in a clear sky and a low tide, would never deceive the boy who had learnt his lesson, still my scroll map lay on the cabin table unfurled and duly weighted.
I spent those hours of enforced idleness reviewing my plans for September 2001, little thinking that others might have others. Bahrain had taught me the folly of believing that, even when everything you can think of is charted, you can be certain what lies over the horizon. Even yet, I'm enthralled by maps.
The clock was creeping towards four on the Sunday afternoon when those eternal cliffs finally exited porthole right. As evening drew in, I left hardships, imaginary ships and the baked terrain of Central Asia astern. Hoisted up on deck with the help of grimy but willing hands, I felt the time was ripe for a spot of self-congratulation. It had taken me almost four months, at the hottest time of year, to cross one of the most enticing yet challenging and unfamiliar regions of the globe. As a tangerine sun bobbled over the waves before losing its balance and slipping under, a beaming captain slipped a cold can of beer into my unsuspecting hands. Silently I toasted Sirdar.
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