Category: The Stans 2024

We crossed from Uzbekistan to Turkmenistan a couple of days ago, and the fifth and final Stan is different again from the others. Each has its own vibe — different languages, social norms, customs, and food. We have wound up in Ashgabat, the capital, and from here fly home via Istanbul, ending our Central Asian adventure.

It took 2 1/2 hours to cross the land border, as Turkmenistan requires form-filling, fee-paying, Covid testing, picture-taking, luggage scanning, passport checking, visa-issuing, and general lining-up.  A blast from the past!

First stop, Konye-Urgench, a UNESCO World Heritage site dating to 500-400 BC.  Several tall structures have undergone restoration and preservation work, but the 25-hectare site contains an entire buried city. The government wants to excavate, but in Soviet times the site was made into a cemetery, and grave cairns and headstones dot the landscape.  Muslim religious rules forbid moving graves, and archaeological excavations can’t happen in a modern graveyard.  So it’s a stalemate for now —

Ashgabat is unusual. The country is wealthy from gas and oil, and its capital has broad avenues of huge and imposing white buildings, massive fountains and monuments, vast plazas, and acres of groomed parks. But you rarely see any people anywhere, except in indoor shopping malls. Our local guide — who has to be politically correct, as it’s a somewhat repressive society — said it’s because the distances are so big in the city that people drive not walk, but we Googled and apparently it’s an unwritten but well-understood convention that the government does not want random groups of people messing up the streetscapes. On a related note, only white and silver cars are allowed in Ashgabat, again to achieve the look they want. And in keeping with this theme, no smoking is allowed outdoors in public places. So the hotels, stores, and restaurants all smell smoky.  So strange to us!

But my stories are out of order– let’s jump back to the destination right before Ashgabat: The Gates of Hell. Quite a drive to get there, 5+ hours on a mixture of rough road and desert tracks, and btw another camping experience (I’ve had enough yurting to last me for a while), but it was worth it to see the site. It’s in the Karakum Desert, an area of natural-gas reserves. The main crater was formed when a drilling site collapsed in 1971, and gas began to leak out. The leak didn’t stop so they set it on fire; that’s apparently the standard industry process, and the engineers calculated it would burn out in 3 weeks. But it is still aflame 53 years later. I will post a picture of the main fire crater, plus a daytime view of a secondary crater filled with water, you can see the bubbles indicating gas is still coming out of that one too. And in an amazing feat of blog technology 😂 , I believe I have managed to insert a short video to show the size of the burning crater. 🤞🏻

On our sand track travels, by the way, we saw warning signs similar to “deer crossing” in Canada, but these ones are for camels, which wander everywhere there.

And to end the blog, why not a fashion shoot? All the Stans have elaborate men’s winter headgear, although the shapes, sizes, and thickness of the wool pile vary from place to place. These are the Khiva version, aren’t they cool…?

Thanks for following along! We have had a great time, although, as always, it’s really nice to be soon heading home… ✈️

Spent two nights in Khiva, our final stop in Uzbekistan. It’s conveniently near the Turkmenistan border for our onward travel, and we stayed inside the old walled city.  Great for strolling and general sightseeing; I’ll post a little gallery here to give a flavour.

In Soviet times, Uzbekistan was the major cotton producer for the USSR, and many miles of fields remain. I had never seen cotton growing, so our guide made a special stop. The fields are a little past their best in October, but still lots of cotton on view. A fellow traveller grew up in Texas, and said her mother picked cotton in her youth. Apparently it’s a hard and painful job, because the puffy heads contain little spikes.

And to really change the subject, how about bread? Bread is served at all meals, and sold in every kind of store plus from roadside vendors.  The typical Central Asian loaf is a round flattish (and very good) white bread.  Bread is culturally significant, and we were told not to throw bread in the garbage, as this is disrespectful, and upsets local people if they see tourists doing this. We asked how people get rid of stale or unwanted bread, and learned it is used in cooking if possible (like crumbs and croutons and soups), or is fed to cattle or goats, but it’s never thrown away.  In kitchens, the crumbs from  cutting or tearing bread are swept into a big container kept for the purpose, and when full it gets emptied outside to feed birds.  It’s also rude to tear bread one-handed, you must use two hands, as that is considered more respectful of the bread. Who knew??

We stopped in a remote area a couple of days ago, to see a hill where Alexander the Great built a citadel, and when we got there were asked to help a stranded French tourist.  She started from Paris a couple of months ago and is making her way (solo) to India via hiking and public transport. She wasn’t talkative so I don’t know her exact route, but she crossed Western Europe, then went through Russia and Georgia, and is now crossing Central Asia. She made it to Alexander’s hill, then found that a bus she needed was not running that day. She hitched a lift with us to Aydarkul Lake, as we were heading there too.  Here she is (orange backpack, left side of frame), setting off to find a place to camp for the night.  As you see, it’s just her and her backpack, which must contain her tent and food as well as all her trip clothing.  Sometimes people say Geoff and I are adventurous but I couldn’t even imagine doing a trip like this.

We have spent the past two days in Bukhara, a really nice small city.  Again, many mosques and minarets and madrasas, and some really ancient sites, including the alleged tomb of the Biblical character Job.  I’m not sure if this is how things would be done in the West, but it seems that rather than display archeological sites as they are, they rebuild facsimiles in the location to show what they used to look like.  So I guess we *are* seeing the past but not exactly.  Not sure how I feel about that, hmmm.

We were introduced in Bukhara to the highly-unusual Central Asian cradle. Can’t decide if it’s a piece of brilliant engineering or just overly-constricting bedding for the baby.  Or both.  Our guide says that, although most families still use these, younger parents are starting to question the wisdom of keeping the baby tightly swaddled at night — but she also said the babies sleep very well.  🤷🏼‍♀️ Check out the first picture — the baby is swaddled into the cradle, there’s a hole in the bottom of the cradle, and if you look closely you will see a little chamber pot below that hole, strategically located below the baby’s hind end. To ensure maximum efficiency, they also position a little stick to direct pee into the chamber pot. Here is our giggling tour guide demonstrating the girl version and the boy version. Just when you think you’ve seen everything….

Visited the Puppet Museum, an interesting place with many cool puppets, but my favourite thing was a big wall of photos showing museum visitors who looked like museum puppets.  So many that it seemed uncanny — but hilarious!

And finally, a random photo — our Bukhara hotel’s very pretty courtyard!

We are really aware of being on the Silk Road now, having left Tashkent and travelled to Samarkand.

We ate an interesting thing before leaving Tashkent although, as it turned out, we ate it wrong. In a Georgian restaurant, and Georgian food is amazing by the way if you haven’t tried it, we ordered an appetizer of 3 dumplings called khinkali. Took one each, put it on our plates, cut into it, and — soup spilled out! We ate the dumpling wrappers, with meat and vegetables inside, and scooped up the broth. Then noticed other diners were lifting each khinkali by the doughy topknot, carefully biting in to drink the soup, then neatly eating the remainder. We will know next time!

I must admit we are seeing a lot of mosques and mausoleums here in Samarkand, it seems to be an important hub, and much associated with Timur aka Tamerlane, a 13th-century Turco-Mongol conqueror who founded a dynasty in what is now Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. A few pics of Timur’s mausoleum are below:

The earliest settlements in this area were established around 1,500 BC, and the city itself was a key stop on the Silk Road — the network of trade routes connecting Europe and Asia — for hundreds of years. Marco Polo described it in the 1300s as a beautiful city of gardens and fruit trees.

I would not have known Registan Square before I came here, but recognized it from pictures.

Attended a performance last night, traditional Uzbek dances. The costumes were colourful, and by the way, we do see women in the streets wearing outfits that would be considered rather glitzy for daytime wear in Toronto. Even our young tour guide broke out a very elegant shimmery trouser suit for our walking tour this morning. We tourists looked dowdy in comparison, with our jeans-and-sweatshirt variations!

And to close things off, we’re on the second floor of our hotel in Samarkand, it’s a charming small inn, and these are the light fixtures, snapped from our door. I could use a few of these at home… if I could find any room for them… 😉

Made our way yesterday from our little mountain guesthouse in Tajikistan to the big city of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. We were lucky crossing the border, our guide said it’s generally a 2-hour procedure, including about 0.5 km of walking through No-Man’s-Land between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, but the gods smiled on us, and it was just 40 minutes end to end. Whew!

Stopped en route in Khujand to see the gigantic market there. The group split up, and I went to the upper level for a bird’s-eye view. If you look right in the centre of this photograph, you will see a lady in a striped blue and white top, she is a fellow traveller, Amanda from Australia. I saw her there, but it wasn’t until I saw the picture that I realized it looks like “Where’s Waldo?” And Amanda agreed, because she asked for the picture for her Instagram. 🤓

There was also an outdoor market, and I will post a picture, plus one of brooms for sale. The ones on the left were very hard and are used for sweeping outdoor steps, sidewalks, and roads; the ones on the right are softer, and intended for indoor use.

Also in Khujand was an unusually modern citadel, which I decided to bypass. I needed a break from touring, plus it was getting late in the day for good light, but luckily My Lovely Assistant Geoff was up to the task and has provided a couple of photos. The first one is the citadel itself, and the second a beautiful floor in the building, made entirely of Canadian wood!

We toured Tashkent metro stations this morning. The Soviet regime seemed very big on creating beautiful stations, and we picked half a dozen or so to visit. Very inexpensive tour, just the price of a subway ticket. I will post a few pictures; the most interesting to me was Cosmonaut station, which commemorated Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space, prominent Russian and Uzbek astronomers of the past, the first woman in space, and several others.

Quick overnight stay in Dushanbe, a large modern city, and we would have liked to stay an extra day there.  The National Museum was super-interesting, though I was sorry to learn how many Tajik archaeological treasures unearthed in the last century have ended up in foreign museums.

Official buildings and parks in the capital are rather opulent, and offer a striking contrast with the simpler levels of shelter and possessions we see elsewhere in the country. Not the only country where such inequity can be seen, however — including Canada, I suppose.

Something we didn’t know until we got here — Tajikistan is culturally and ethnically more similar to Iran than the other countries visited in this trip, and the Tajik language is in the same language family as Persian. We can also see the Persian influence in food, dress styles, and decorative work.

Had a major drive across the Fan Mountains yesterday — spectacular views, although I must admit I kept my eyes firmly on my book for long stretches, as high mountain roads with no guardrails make me really nervous.  Tajikistan is the third most mountainous country in the world, after Nepal and Bhutan. I will post two photos from a rest stop we made; we were there longer than planned as the other minibus for our tour blew its radiator coming up.  When our fellow travellers caught up, they shared the story that passing truckers slowed down and threw bottles of water out to them, and at a certain point they had enough to fill the radiator and continue the journey.  This region is sparsely populated and rather isolated, so I guess you help who you can when you can.  The trucks, by the way, are hauling coal from mines high in the  mountains;  they go up empty at a brisk pace, but come down at a glacial pace — and we can see why, given the heavy loads, dramatic slopes, and sharp curves.

Next stop at Lake Iskandar — Iskandar being the local name for Alexander [the Great], although they do not call him “the Great” here because… well, he was a conqueror and killed a lot of people here in his day.

We are staying in a pretty guest house high in the mountains, but it was quite the ride to get here — after we left the main mountain highway we had another 2+ hours on a very rough road, a real bone-shaker, but my kidneys and my teeth all seem to have stayed intact, thank God.

Morning stop in the village of Voru, even higher in the mountains than our guest house. We were shown around by the village schoolteacher, he teaches French as a second language rather than English as that was what he studied at university (we think that must be rare here), and we stopped in to the smithy before having tea at the teacher’s. The “tea table” was the cloth rectangle in the middle of the seating platform, and our guide asked us to be VERY careful not to let our feet or toes stray from the seating section onto the table section. Major Faux Pas!

Later enjoyed the national dish Plov, related to similar rice/pilaf dishes in Iran and India, followed by local fruits — grapes, plums, apples, and pomegranates. The cuisine in the three countries so far has been interesting. Kyrgyzstan (like China) was heavy on noodles, Kazakhstan (like Russia) more kasha/buckwheat, and Tajikistan (like Iran) more rice.

And today we saw something that even our Tajik guide and driver had never seen before. Livestock is everywhere here — horses, cattle, sheep and goats can be seen in fields and along roadways and streets everywhere. But we couldn’t believe our eyes when we passed this very little car on the highway today. And the cow looked amazingly complacent. What the heck???

Crossed into Kazakhstan yesterday and began our local tours by hiking to Kaindy Lake, Kaindy being the local word for birch.  A stand of trees was submerged there when the lake was formed by an earthquake in 1910.  The treetops have died, but oddly enough the trees continue to live underwater, and have not died or rotted in the lake.

We spent some time learning from our guide about Kazakh marriage customs, which are historically horrifying, but currently rather interesting.  Until Kazakhstan became part of the Soviet Union, brides were generally acquired by kidnapping, with quite-young girls being grabbed from school by the prospective groom and his friends.  Once they were kidnapped, the girls’ families would not take them back, and sad stories abound, not only of unhappy marriages but also rejections, destitution, and suicides.  Bride-kidnapping has been outlawed for decades and would now mean serious jail time;  all brides must be of legal age and must fully consent to their marriage.  But because of its cultural significance, betrothed couples who are in love and engaged still go through the motions.  The groom and his friends will “kidnap” the bride, without warning her of the exact day, she will be taken to his parents’ house, his parents will go negotiate the bride-price with her parents (no long haggling sessions any more, though, as there were historically), then they hold the wedding and they all party together.  The bride — and remember, she is now happily marrying her freely-chosen husband — is still expected to cry a lot after being kidnapped, because that shows she’s a modest lady who will miss her birth family.  Our tour guide said her sister did a great job when she was kidnapped by her fiancé for their wedding as she managed to “cry like hell all day”.  All a bit odd to Western sensibilities!

Archery ranges are common here at roadside stops, and many archers we have seen (including our tour guide) are proficient.  This was at Sharyn Canyon, but by the time I hiked down into the canyon, and then puffed my way back up again, I doubt I could have pulled the bow without falling over.

Tonight we sleep in the city of Almaty, which comes as a welcome change from the mountains and steppes.  Our mini-bus stopped in a village today for picnic lunch supplies;  being always a bit suspicious of street food, I opted for supermarket yogurt with a bit of bread and cheese, but brave Geoff enjoyed a mixed beef-and-lamb kebab with raw onions and the local bread, from this very smoky street grill.

So, with not much sightseeing today (we are heading for the Kazakhstan border soon) I will just post a few quick pics that I liked but that didn’t make it to the blog yet.