Before I start, a brief bit of background history (this blog is attempting to live up to the Reithian ideal of 'educate, inform and entertain'. Well, in the words of another great, Mr Meat Loaf, two out of three ain't bad). Effectively, the history of Uzbekistan is a microcosm of the history of all of Central Asia, a piece of land caught between and taken over by great empires, from the Persians in the 6th century B.C., through Alexander the Great, the Arabs, the Turks (from the North), Genghiz Khan, their own homegrown Timur, the Russians and finally the Soviets, with various independent small states/khanates appearing and disappearing in the vacuums left by the decline of each empire. The concept of Uzbekistan as it is now didn't really exist until the Soviets (apparently Stalin was key) drew the boundaries for each of the states, deliberately including various ethnic minorities in each one, splitting existing groups of people between two of the states, in order to ensure that there was nothing to unite the citizens of a particular state against the Soviet system. This ethnic gerrymandering has had profound effects on all the Stans since independence, with large numbers of groupings who feel they should be part of another Stan stuck in a different one.
Ok, educate bit over, on to the inform bit.
So crossed over from Turkmenistan, and straight up to Bukhara. Only spent a night here, since I was coming back with my mum, and then got a shared taxi a few hundred km across the desert to the western part - shared taxis are a common way to get around in Central Asia, whereby you turn up at the shared taxi lot, usually by the bus station, and get a car with three other people to your destination, often hundreds of kilometres away. It's a lot quicker, and far more frequent than the bus services, although it does mean you have to haggle with a taxi driver to try and get a reasonable price (particularly I guess as an obvious non-local) - I'm a cynic when it comes to taxi drivers the world over, I think they're all the same, I'm convinced they're all out to try and overcharge when they can. Obviously overcharging is all relative, the six hour, 500 km journey cost around 30U$ as I recall (about £20).
First stop then was Khiva, the capital of an independent khanate during the 18th and 19th century, notorious for its slave trade and the somewhat capricious nature of its rulers - lots of public executions, of foreigners as well as locals. The ancient city is very well preserved (or well renovated, it's difficult to tell at times what is actually ancient and what was renovated during Soviet times), with the city walls pretty much intact, and the various mosques, madrassas and palaces within in excellent condition. Spent a day just wandering around the city streets, popping into the various buildings, and admiring the tiling in particular, which is really impressive, both on the madrassa walls, and on the towers and minarets.
Next day was a trip out to the 'Fifty Forts' region, a region just north of Khiva containing the remnants of a variety of mud walled forts, some dating back over two thousand years, but most dating fromthe middle of the first millennium. I only had time to visit five of them on a taxi tour, including Toprak Qala, a temple/fort complex from the third/fourth centuries, where you could clearly see the layout of the various buildings, Qyzyl Qala, a fort from around the same period, and Guldursun Qala, an absolutely massive complex of which only the walls remains.
From Khiva I headed even further west, into the region of Karakalpakstan, which really is the back end of beyond, a fact that explains the existence of the Savitsky art museum in the capital, Nukus. Back in the early part of the twentieth century, Russian artists were being influenced by the styles being developed in Europe and painting pictures that were reflecting this, the Russian avant garde. However, when Stalin came into power, all artists were ordered to only paint in the Soviet Realist style, and so those artists who were unable to emigrate (unlike people like Chagall and Kandinsky) were forced to either give up the avant garde style altogether, or only do it privately while painting Soviet Realist for income. An artist and ethnographer, Igor Savitsky, who had ended up in Nukus studying the culture of the local Karalkapaks, realised that Nukus was so far away from Moscow that he could open up a museum without much in the way of official interference( he also had very good relations with the local government due to his ethnography work), and so collected the avant garde works that were being painted privately by his artist colleagues, and displayed them here. Incredibly, he got away with it for decades, and now the museum, in this small city in the middle of nowhere, has the second best collection of Russian avant garde art in the world. So I had a guided tour around the museum, which was pretty good, but I'm not really an art expert so I probably didn't appreciate it as much as I could have (the guide actually said to me after an hour or so 'You're not a very big art fan are you?') - the actual story of how it happened was of more interest to me.
The other tourist sight, if that's the right way to describe it, in Karakalpakstan, is the dying town of Moynaq, a couple of hundred kilometres north of Nukus. Getting there was an experience in itself - the bus I was expecting to get didn't turn up, but a local lady and her daughter gestured at me to follow them, and after wandering through the market for a while we eventually found a bus marked Moynaq. It was obviously the market bus, because it didn't leave for another couple of hours, by which point it was absolutely jammed to the rafters with people and produce, ranging from bags of rice and potatoes to alarm clocks and sugar cubes, with people perched precariously on top. It reminded me of bus journeys in Laos all those years ago, a real Asian experience.
Moynaq used to be a thriving fishing port on the shores of the Aral Sea, a massive inland sea/lake, fed by two huge rivers - however the Soviets decided to use the waters of these rivers to irrigate (very inefficiently) cotton fields, so the inflow dropped dramatically, and since then the sea has gradually shrunk to around ten per cent of its original size, with catastrophic consequences for the local environment. The weather has changed dramatically, pollution has risen, and the local populace's health is deteriorating badly. It's probably the world's greatest man-made environmental disaster, and it's pretty sobering and depressing to see. Particularly poignant is the sight of the remainder of Moynaq's fishing fleet lying rusting on the sands, hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest shore. You can see it for yourself on Google Earth apparently, if you fancy a look.
Ended up having to stay the night in Moynaq due to the bus problems (I was only planning on a day trip, so only had my day bag), went to bed around 7pm since there was nothing else to do, woke up next morning and there was snow on the ground! Up till then, since the rainy day in Georgia, the weather had been great, clear blue skies every day, and it had been fine the previous day (as you can see from the photos above), so it was a bit of a surprise. Given that I only had a thin shirt and a jumper (all my stuff was in Nukus), it was also incredibly cold, I was literally shivering while I was out taking some more photos. It was worth it though, the sight of the ships in the desert, covered in snow, was pretty surreal.
From Nukus it was a bus back to Urgench and a supposed overnight bus to Samarkand, except the driver decided it wasn't full enough and we weren't leaving until the next day. I wouldn't have understood any of this, but luckily there was a very nice English speaking local on the bus who explained to me what was going on, and offered to let me stay with her family overnight before getting the bus the next day. So that was a good experience, although occasionally a bit of a struggle as her English wasn't that good (although obviously a sight better than either my Uzbek or Russian), and we got on the bus the following day without any problems, arriving in Samarkand late that night.
Samarkand was only supposed to be a brief stop since I was coming back that way with my mum, but after getting online for the first time in a few days I found out that my mum's flight had been cancelled and that Iags and Steff were trying to get her another one, so there was no rush to get to Tashkent after all. Since I had to wait at least a day until I found out what was going on, I figured I'd do something that I knew I wouldn't have time to do with my mum, so I headed out to the town of Shakhrisabz a couple of hours, the birthplace of Timur, Uzbekistan's very own all-conquering empire builder. Timur's conquests took place in the 14th century, after the Mongol empire had begun to fade away, and stretched as far as Syria in the West, the Volga in the North and into India (his descendants in India became the Mughal Empire, famed for building the Taj Mahal). In the West his reputation is pretty bloody, but the Uzbeks are very proud of him, his statues are everywhere (he may have been a bloodthirsty tyrant, but at least he was their bloodthirsty tyrant). To be fair, other conquerors of the period killed as many if not more, but their reputations aren't quite as bad for some reason.
Shakhrisabhz itself contains a fair few buildings from Timur's time, in particular various family mausoleums, including the one meant for Timur himself (surprisingly understated, a very simple underground chamber), although he was eventually buried in Samarkand. The highlight though is the remnant of his summer palace - all that actually remains are the entrance gateposts, but they are huge, forty metres high, and it makes you think how impressive the palace must have at the time. Also, it's about the only monument in Uzbekistan that hasn't been heavily restored, which made a nice change - it's obviously amazing to see these buildings as they were meant to have been seen, but sometimes you do feel they've been over-restored, that patching them up without fixing them fully would be a better option.Back then to Samarkand, a check of my email to find out that Steff had got Mum a flight, and that she was due to land the morning after next, so the following day it was a bus up to the capital, Tashkent, a check in to a reasonable hotel (even I wouldn't make my mum stay in a backpackers hostel), and to the airport at 4.30am to meet my mum's flight.
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