KILLING IT IN KHIVA

If image is everything, what to make of Uzbekistan? The name draws a blank, for many, Central Asia is an amorphous hole in the middle of Asia, Uzbekistan just another of the stans; totalitarianistic, fanatical, unstable and dangerous. Paradoxically, for a country only 20 years old (it was part of the USSR until it declared independence in 1991) with a youthful population (30% of its people are under 15 years old), the future for Uzbekistan is still the past. It is the spiritual heart of the legendary Silk Road, that trade super highway that connected East to West, Rome to China. This is the place that disproves Kipling’s “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”. It’s a place that has seen great conquerors; Alexander, Genghis Khan and Timur and great struggles between competing religions and ideologies. Uzbekistan is not truly Asia, not is it Europe or Middle Eastern but an amalgamation of all three. This can be attributed to the mixing of people, culture, goods and ideas for the past 5,000 years, the raw material for change usually coming along the Silk Road. 

Diagram showing the route(s) of the "Silk Road"

To talk of a single Silk Road is a huge oversimplification; rather than a single road, it was more like a braided river flowing out of China, branching off to go around deserts, mountains or social obstructions. It has several tributaries feeding into it; from other parts of China, India, Russia and the Levant. All lines tended to merge together into one more coherent road in modern day Uzbekistan, meaning that cities like Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva benefited greatly from its trade. China exported silk, porcelain, paper, tea, ginger, lacquer ware and spices. In return, China received gold, silver, ivory, precious stones and coloured glass (apparently the manufacture of coloured glass bemused the Chinese as much as silk production amazed Europe). The Uzbek cities got the benefit in goods and taxes. The Silk Road spread more than just goods. Religion spread along it; first Buddhism then Greek ideas bought by traders and Alexander’s armies spread along it, shown by Hercules motifs found in temples and on statues in Central Asia, India, China and even in Korea. Buddhist statues became more Hellenized. Later, Islam spread along it, replacing Buddhism and Zoroastrianism in Central Asia as the pre-dominant religion.

The Silk Road centres; Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva now form the spine of many travelers visit to Uzbekistan. We started in Khiva with a nervy two hour flight from Tashkent. Flying in a small prop plane in a former Soviet republic would be enough to terrify the poor flier, especially given as we flew only a few days after the plane crash in Russia that killed many members of a Russian ice Hockey team. But we survived and landed in Urgench, a dusty, stock-standard Soviet town. The city was founded by residents of Konye-Urgench, now in Turkmenistan, after that city, once one of the Silk Road’s premier trading posts, found itself short of water after the Amu-Darya River changed course. Now, Urgench’s primary function is as the gateway to Khiva with a side-occupation as seemingly being the only town with a functioning ATM in a 200 mile radius.

As we speed through the countryside in our Daewoo (all cars in Uzbekistan seemed to be either Russian-made or a Daewoo), we saw donkeys pulling carts, women selling melons at roadside stalls, canals and leaking pipelines and cotton fields. The canals, pipelines and cotton are linked. Uzbekistan is the fifth largest producer of cotton, or white gold, even though much of its land was unsuitable for cotton production. The Soviet government changed this situation through the use of extensive pipelines and canals that diverted water from the Aral Sea, once one of the four largest lakes in the world. Since the 1960s, it has been steadily shrinking, to the point where it is now only 10% of its original size. What remains has an extremely high salinity, a saline cesspool too toxic for most freshwater fish to live in. While the waters allowed the growth of cotton, the fishing industry has been destroyed, bringing further hardship to an already poor part of the country. The fate of the lake was no surprise to the Soviets; its demise noted as early as 1964. The waters managed to irrigate land once unusable, although they are highly ineffective (initially, up to 75% of the water went to waste). The loss of the Aral Sea is one of the world’s greatest man-made natural disasters. The scale of devastation is hard to quantify. It’s perhaps best demonstrated by the fishing boats that sit high and dry on the lake bed, former fishing towns that now lie 180 kilometres from the lakeshore.

The cotton industry is kept sustainable today through the use of cheap (and sometimes) forced labour. Children are forced from the classroom and into cotton fields. “If they can walk, they can pick” seems to be the slogan of the Uzbekistan government. Schools are closed every fall and workers are given a daily quota (80 kg) of cotton to pick. Students reported being whipped if quotas were not met, farmers and principals placed under pressure to work quickly. Workers, if paid, received the sum total of $2-3 a day. The Uzbekistan government receives 60% of its export revenue from cotton, so is disinclined to stop the use of child labour or to promote the growing of other crops. International pressure has led to child labour being reduced, especially around tourist areas. We saw cotton-pickers in the fields around Khiva but none of them looked school child aged. The picked cotton was accumulated in piles around the fields, looking like mounds of shaved ice. The next day, we stopped at a field to look at cotton. I was amazed by how soft it was in its unprocessed, raw state, already cotton-bud like on the plant.

White Gold: Cotton

Khiva itself is a well preserved town, called museum under the stars in one sign. Its historic heart, located around the Ichon-Qala, a walled city with imposing mud-brick, mono-chromatic walls. In here are medressas, mosques and minarets, many dating from several hundred years ago, from the time when Khiva was the capital of the Khorezom empire. In the 18th and 19th Century, it became a slave market (slaves another of the major Silk Road commodities), unfortunate people captured by Turkmen, Kazahks and later the Russians sold off in the biggest auction of its type in Central Asia. In the East Gate, you can still see the niches where slaves were kept before auction. Nowadays, no-one is in danger of being sold off. Tourists are too important with the local economy to be harmed. Men with golden grills, teeth covered in gold sheen like a villain from a James Bond movie, were a common sight here. The popularity of such dentalwear dates back to Soviet times, where gold teeth were so popular that healthy teeth were often covered. Gold, as well as being bling, also has the advantage of being cheaper than ceramic. Women with cultivated mono- brows man expectant tourist traps laden with hats, woven items, bags and kitsch. Both sexes often wore hats, skull caps for the men and sequinny hats with strings flowing off them for the women. In Khiva, they are waiting for the day when a flood of tourists hits. At the moment, it’s more a trickle of tourists, most rocking a blue rinse. Old aged Europeans, Germans and French, descended from tour buses like locusts on a cotton field. Many carried a walking stick, ambling slowly through the town. Their appearance was unexpected as I had a preconceived idea that Uzbekistan would be the home of backpackers, not package travelers.

Khiva: a living museum.

The walled city of Ichon-Qala is impressive. The most prominent building is the ark (or citadel), guarded by the high mud brick walls that have crenellations on top and rounded guard towers. It must have been an impressive and awe-inspiring site for attackers back in Khiva’s heyday. From the main watchtower, you can look at over Khiva, towering minarets, small alleyways, the mosques and the houses of the locals. 

View from the watchtower

My favourite building was the squat turquoise-tiled Kalta Minor minaret. It stands out for both its colour, vibrant against the pre-dominant mud-brick colours of the other buildings, and its shape. Left unfinished, it was commissioned by a khan in 1851 who reputably wanted to build a tower high enough to see Bukhara, 300 kilometres away across the flat Kyzylkum desert. There was the Juma Masjid, an interesting mosque laced with 218 wooden, carved columns that give it more of a Buddhist temple rather than a mosque feel (although it’s apparently inspired by ancient Arabian mosques). I enjoyed the Pahlaven Mahmud Mausoleum which stands out with its intricately tiled roof and unadorned tombs and Tosh-Hovli Palace that opens out into a gorgeous courtyard full of ceramic tiles and delicately, carved wooden columns. 

City walls

The stall holders sit waiting in all these places but it was a quiet day, so not much stock has moved. We did a little shopping but a lot of eating. The food and good and cheap and many of the restaurants had big divans, where you can stretch out and enjoy the sights as well as your food- like the people, dishes are a combination of influences- one meal we shared was borsch (Russian beetroot soup), lagman (Chinese noodles), spicy Korean style salad and the ever-present shaslik, skewered tender lamb with chunks of fat between them. Kids played soccer, one team in Barcelona jerseys, as we walked home one night. One boundary of their ‘field’ was the old city wall, one goal formed by the back of a palace. Life continues here in this outside museum, kids playing at night, their parents brushing the streets in front of their house and collecting water at dawn. Khiva is a living monument, where people both live and create their own history.

Gate to the ark and Kalon Minor Minaret

We hired a taxi (again, it was a Daewoo) to take us out to some old forts in the desert the next day. They lie old and ruined, 2 hours from Khiva, once part of a thriving community centred on oases in the old Amu-Darya delta that contrasts sharply with the desert it is now (you might recall that the Amu-Darya changed its course relatively recently). Some date to more than 2000 years ago, back to a time when under the Khorezm dynasty, the area had considerable power and prosperity. Now, the area, in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous province of Uzbekistan, is neither powerful or prosperous. This is a land that would seem to be stuck in a permanent depression. Climate change caused by the Amu-Darya changing course, the destruction of the Aral Sea and its accompanying salt storms that are poisoning the land, have led to the area being called apocalyptic. Summer temperatures have risen by 10 degrees, winter temperatures fallen by a similar number. People are suffering from increased rates of anemia and respiratory diseases. In a rude twist, cotton, the indirect cause of much of this hardship is now the major crop grown here (lucrative gas and oil-fields have been discovered in the dried up bed of the Aral Sea but most of these money goes to Chinese companies and their Tashkent cronies).

We saw glimpes into Uzbek life during our drive. We drove through busy farmers markets, women fighting over the freshest products, all decked out in a cacophony of colourful, mismatched clothes. Vans and cars were filled to the brink, with melons, either going to or returning from the market. One car we passed had a pig and a sheep jammed in the back seat. There were more cotton-fields, more road-side melon stalls (this must have been melon season, they was a perfusion of melons all over the country). Dogs chased us and we passed cyclists on small, country roads. Mosques were noticeable by their absence, a contrast to our recent trip to Turkey were every small village seemed to have a substantial mosque, its minarets dwarfing the other buildings. Islam was hit hard under Soviet rule. In Central Asia, during anti-religion campaign “Movement of the Godless”, most mosques were destroyed (by 1940, only 1000 of Central Asia’s 3000 mosques still stood. All of the 14,500 Islamic schools had been closed down). Only 2,000 mullahs were left alive, 45,000 had been executed as enemies of the state. Even since independence, Islam has not had it easy. Karimov, Uzbekistan’s dictator has used anti-terrorism laws to keep Islam in check. Mullahs and other religious leaders are hand-picked by the government, the call to prayers has been banned in many regions. The first time we heard it was in Samarkand five days after arriving in this country where supposedly 90% of people are Muslim. It was just another of the things that surprised me.

45 minutes after leaving Khiva, we came to the Amu-Darya river, a wide impressive, fast moving river that seems out of place in the dry land we had passed through. We crossed it by driving over a succession of barges, lashed together to make a makeshift bridge.The river marks the border between Uzbekistan proper and Karakalpakstan and the land seemed to almost instantly change, getting drier and less populated. The desert, of course, was desolate and the day was hot. The first fort we approached was perched on the only high ground for what seemed 100 miles, a perfect spot to observe approaching enemies. The fort, Ayaz Qola, is actually a complex of three forts. Its heyday was in the 6th and 7th Century AD, when it may have served as both a fort and a retreat/temple for Zoroastrians. We made our own track up to it, a walk of about 10 minutes. We spied a ground squirrel burrowing into the hand sand, checking us occasionally with a weary eye. We saw marks that could have been left by snakes and several lizards, the probable prey of our assumed snakes. We eventually hit an actual trail that heads right into the middle of the fort. Its old mud-brick walls are partially, or in many places, completely fallen down. It’s a more impressive sight from the road, where it looks almost intact. Enough remains to allow you to imagine what was here, gain some sort of insight into the life people might have had here. The views across the desert were great, across to a fast-disappearing lake fringed with salt, down to the yurt village across the road where you could stay, sleeping in the yurt and taking a camel safari.

The second fort at Ayaz Qala

Given our time in Uzbekistan, it came as no surprise that we appeared to be the only three people here so it was a little disconcerting to round a corner and come across a group of tourists (of course, older people) looking around the fort. It turns out that their group is led by an Australian archeologist, who has been working on this and other forts in the area. I had a conversation with two gentlemen, who turn out to be archeologists from Uzbekistan. I asked one about the lack of tourists. He said Uzbekistan wanted more but the numbers never really grew. Had it taken a turn for the worse since the global financial crisis hit (one of the hotel guys had told me that the number of Japanese tourists had dipped sharply). The archeologist replied that he and his friends often chuckled about the crisis, given that this area had been in a financial crisis for twenty years with no sign of a recovery. I questioned him about Karakalpakstan and whether its people wanted full independence. His reply was incisive-when people had to worry about surviving, they weren’t so worried about who was their president. It reminded me of a passage in Game of Thrones where Jorah says to Daenerys Targaryen ‘the common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends. It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are.” Radio Free Europe broadcast a report describing the beginnings of an independence movement in Karakalpakstan, although residents and local politicians deny the existence or desire for a genuine independence movement.

The second fort at Ayaz-Qala was a place where the lord of the area would retreat to from his palace (which was the third ‘fort’ 50 metres further down the hill). A ramp or tunnel would have initially connected the two forts. The archeologist pointed out the canals that run close to the area and said that 1000 years ago that this land would have been fertile and green. The people believed to be Zoroastarians would have had grapes growing here and wine would have been made. This tradition stopped with the change in climate and the arrival of Islam into the region.

Gecko in a old room

The next fort we visited was the Toprak Qala, a massive complex that was the temple complex for Khorezm rulers around 300-400 A.D. It was less impressive looking but more intact than Ayaz-Qala, with massive storerooms, streets, doorways, and rooms that were still intact. In one niche, I watched a gecko eating up a trail of ants, an expert of camoflague in this hostile environment. In another, small black bees swarmed. There was only one other group here, old Americans that we had spoken to the previous day in Khiva. The last fort was Kyzyl Qala, the most broken down up close of the three forts we visited but impressive as we looked at it over the top of cotton fields. Goats were tied up along the side of the road and the cotton was piled up, the sum of a days toil for some hard-working people.

Looking across the cotton fields

Public transport is sparse and difficult to use to get from Khiva to Bukhara, our next step on the Silk Road journey. A shared taxi seemed to be the best bet along roads that everyone, locals and travelers alike, warned us were the worst in Uzbekistan, full of potholes, one lane stretches and never-ending desert. The Lonely Planet said it should take 4-5 hours and loathe as I am to take everything that the guidebook tells me as gospel, I assumed that this would be a good estimate. Our hotel warned us it would be between 7 and 10 hours. But by bus, it could take over 12 hours. We choose to pay more and took a taxi. We started off at about eight, hopeful of arriving in Bukhara for lunch at a reasonable hour. We drove out of the old city as school children were leaving for school, the boys looking like Mormon missionaries in their black trousers, white shirt and skinny black tie. Our driver was one of the gold teeth brigade, ex-military, ex-prize fighter. He looked like he should be the lead in a Guy Ritchie movie. He said he spoke 5 languages and we spoke 3 but none were a common tongue. He had no English so communication was done almost exclusively via drawing pictures, charades or through the use of exaggerated sign language. Despite our language difficulties, we were able to have some good conversations. I gathered that he was not a hater of Karimov, the Uzbek dictator or big man as the driver said. “I driver, big man Karimov like tourists, I drive tourist, I’m happy.” It’s as about as close as we got in the whole trip to discussing politics. It’s always a bit rich to come to a totalitarian country to discuss politics, where you don’t understand all of the intricacies and are potentially placing people in danger, just for talking about it. His other questions portrayed his ignorance, like ‘can you drive from New Zealand and Canada”. Geography clearly wasn’t a strong point in his education.

The road started off well, the only hindrance when we got stuck behind a donkey, a tractor or when we had to stop at checkpoints manned by disinterested looking soldiers. We passed more fields of cotton, more roadside stalls with women selling melons and then almost simultaneously, we hit the desert and the bad road. The road was every bit as bad as it was made out to be. The abruptness of the road only amplified the harshness of the desert, extrapolating its heat, its dust, its monotony. The desert was devoid of landmarks, at least on any scale I knew. Miles after miles of sand, interspersed with scraggly scrub. It was barely there, a marginal existence, surviving but never growing higher than the car.

But at least it managed to grow here. The only other signs of life were strange looking birds who played chicken with the car, thrush sized but crested like mini roadrunners. Apart from them, the only signs of life we saw were 2 donkeys, standing idly on the side of the road. The only people we saw were the old Europeans from Khiva in rich looking tour buses and workers on the new highways being made (one was being made by a Korean company, the other by a German group). The new highways, looking finished, ran beside us for many kilometres, frustrating us, tantalizing us with its flat, straight surface as smooth as a runway. We, in contrast, bounced around our rough road as if we were on the back of a horse cart going along a jungle track, occasionally skirting over crudely made bridges and dodging piles of sand that had advanced from the desert.

There were no houses, no-one fighting to eke out an existence, no nomads with goat herds heading from oasis to oasis. People have lived in present day Uzbekistan for at least 50,000 years yet no-one has tried to conquer this barren land. It came as a shock when we came across a small lake, its brilliant blue providing a stark contrast against the almost encompassing brown coloured sand, appearing like a fabled oasis in an Arabian fairytale. This day made me realize, when we hit the nicer roads again, that the isolation of the desert wasn’t comforting. We often say that we travel to find that nothingness, an isolated spot where you can tell yourself that you are one of the few outsiders to have seen this patch of earth. While I agree and would cite this as part of my motivation to travel, I would rather travel at 80 kilometres on a good road than at 20 kilometres on a poor ride. In the desert, you might not be able to remember your name, but there is also little to remember, bar a sense of desolation and isolation and a realization that you are pleased to not be stuck out there.