Reflections on Turkmenistan

I'm staying in Uzbekistan at a place called Khiva which is a perfectly preserved mud coloured old city with exquisite blue tiled decoration everywhere you look. It looks like the film set for an Indiana Jones movie. Khiva has a pretty goulish history too. When under the control of the Khivan Khans and during the period of The Great Game in Central Asia, it was a place you were unlikely to get out of alive should you have been mad enough to try to visit it in the first place. Our guide lovingly described the favourite forms of execution as being public impalement on a spike, being thrown off the top of a minaret, and, this one exclusivly for women, being tied up in a sack with wild cats. Fortunately times changed after the Russians took control and these days Khiva is a much more welcoming place, though a little devoid of life in its ancient heart as the local authorities appear to have moved the majority of the inhabitants out of the centre as part of the restoration programme. Khiva has more of a touristy feel (though still pretty light touch) than anywhere we've been since Turkey, but there are no tourists to be seen. I'm unclear whether this is due to seasonal factors (it's about 45 C here at the moment) or whether tourists are staying away from the country presently.

Another bewilderingly empty city at its centre is Ashgabad in Turkmenistan, which I neglected to describe in my last post. Turkmenistan has been described as the North Korea of Central Asia and we had to be careful what we wrote and said when in the country as communications are monitored and the bugging of buildings is reputedly widespread. Turkmenistan is run by an eccentric President known universally by his self-appointed title of Turkmenbashi (Great Leader of Turkmen). He is particularly enamoured of putting giant busts and medallian portraits of himself just about everywhere they can conceivably go in the country, along with statutes of his personally penned history and culture of the Turkmen people called the 'Rukhama', which is apparantly set text reading in every school. However the real focus of his endeavours is Ashgabad which has been extensively rebuilt over the past dozen years with a whole load of utterly bonkers buildings and public monuments, many of them water guzzling fountains in a land that is three-quarters desert. The centrepiece is the monstrous Arch of Neutrality which looks like a giant 50 m high ray gun with a golden statute of the President on top which revolves through the course of the day so as always to face the sun. When I visited the Arch the golden leader was gazing in the direction of the rather Orwellian named Ministry of Fairness building.

Yet, if the architecture in Ashgabad is an overblown crime against asthetics, it can't be denied that it's also a fascinating sight to see. The Turkmen people are also the loveliest and friendliest we've met along the way and surprisingly at ease with Western tourists given how few people actually visit the country. We really got to see them close up at the famous Sunday market outside of the city where among other things I bought a traditional Turkman hat that looks like a giant 1970s black afro haircut and is made from sheep wool.

Leaving Turmenistan required a two day drive across the Karakam Desert, our first desert of the trip and a pretty bleak place it was too. All insect life seemed miraculously to treble in size which was a bit daunting at night.

Still enjoying the food on this trip though there has been a noticeable shift towards lamb kebabs in the Central Asian section - they're everywere. I did have the opportunity to have an 'Under Fur Salad' when in Baku but decided to save that for another visit. The 'Bolted Fish' was delicious however.

Bugs Everywhere

Tumbling blearly eyed off the slowest ferry in the World to set foot in Turkmenistan, I felt I had finally arrived in Central Asia. The heat here is extreme and the landscape between the coast and Ashgabad unrelentingly arid, though not without a certain charm. The people look noticeably more Turkic than hitherto, and in fact the women in particular are very beautiful as the blokes on the trip were not slow to spot. They tend to be tall and slender in build and wear brightly patterned full length dresses and almost African style headscarves. The people are immensely friendly at every turn.

Ashgadad is a highly interesting experience for unusual reasons and I shall perhaps return to it again at a later date. However I shall reserve judgement for the time until the air is a little clearer for making comments if you know what I mean.

We are joined here by six new travellers, two Danish girls, an English/Kiwi couple, and two further English and Kiwi blokes. Not really had a chance to get to know them yet, but we're all hoping they fit in well to what has been a really close knit group so far. In many ways and despite the amazing sights en route, the highlight of this first leg has been the bush camping and cameraderie around the campfire and over a few beers. As we pull off the road, the truck turns into a hive of activity as tents are pulled off the roof and thrown up, cooking equipment and food crates come out of their lockers, wood is chopped for the fire and chairs set up. We cook in groups having taken responsibility for buying supplies ourselves in the local markets, so it's a busy time for the cooks while everyone else raids the fridge for beers. Riki doubles as a guitar man as well as a driver so there've been a few late nights of singing down the track, though usually everyone is on the local vodka by that stage. Increasingly with the heat I've been opting to sleep outside under the stars which is a real privilege.

No Cricket in Baku

Posted in Ashgabad

Azerbaijan has proved to be a country of real contrasts. Crossing the border from Georgia you pass through a landscape of lush rolling hills with the soaring Caucausus mountains as a backdrop to enter into a flat, treeless moonscape of parched badlands alleviated only by the odd wrecked concrete building, before finally being confronted with the acquamarine expanse of the Caspian Sea. We did the journey in a couple of days, camping one night (illegally it transpired) at a spot surrounded by the most striking prehistoric petroglyph rock carvings, and close to an area of bubbling mud volcanoes, one of which our American friend Jason managed to fall into. The onwards drive to Baku confronts you with the powerful presence of the oil industry in this country, the source of Azerbaijan's wealth as well as its environmental problems. Nonetheless, the poisened hinterland of the city couldn't contrast more with the unexpected elegance of the city itself. Baku has a markedly Western feel to it and is full of ex-pat Brits out here working on the rigs, ably provided for by a plethora of English pubs, restaurants and shops in the new part of the city, as well as a healthy trade in prostitution by the look of things.

Despite these promising signs of links with Blighty, Ron, Graeme and I discovered as we traipsed from bar to bar that the game of cricket hasn't yet penetrated the country. Eventually at about the tenth attempt our search for a place showing the first England vs Australia one-dayer on the satellite tele was rewarded, only for us to sit there gobsmacked as the channel opted to switch its coverage to women's athletics just as Freddie Flintoft came in to bat. Ultimately we had to rely on text message updates from the UK, though it was good having Ron as a captive Aussie to bait when the good news finally got through to us.

Spending time in Baku waiting for our old tub of a ferry to take us across the Caspian to Turkmenistan was a lot of fun. The old town is really quite atmospheric and contains the loveliest 15th C palace of the local ruling Khans, which reminded me a little in its concept and scale of the Alhambra in Granada, though it's carvings are less intricate and exquisite.

Since my last post I've acquired a rather severe US naval marine style haircut (not entirely intentionally) and an Icelandic girlfriend with an unpronounceable name. These two developments are not directly connected I hasten to add. I'm having a blast!

Cheese Grater Bottle Openers

Georgia is just the funkiest country. The cheese-grater bottle opener is one of its more interesting homegrown inventions and perfectly captures the mood of the place - good food and lots of alcohol are the twin heartbeats of the Georgian people, and the hospitality is legendary. Of course, everybody is shaped liked a barrel after the age of 30, unless they're very poor, and there is a lot of poverty to be seen here amongst all the abundance it must be said.

The country seems much more European than I had envisaged in terms of its look and feel, and it is markedly devout. Everywhere there are simple and very ancient churches which seem akin to romanesque in style. When you visit a church it is always a hive of activity, with little crowds largely made up of women gathered around bearded priests, and everywhere votive candles flickering. I lied about the medieval frescoes in my previous post by the way, they have them in spades here and I've checked out a fair few. The whole country is an early medieval architectural historian's wet dream.

After Batumi we travelled to a mountainous area in the south to stay in Bojomi, a fading spa town that is the source of the former Soviet Union's most famous mineral water. It's a touch salty but quite enjoyable. The homestay was a bit of a reality check in terms of facilities, but the cuisine was out of this world. I'm curently addicted to aubergines served in a walnut sauce, and I'm still just about managing to stay enthusiastic about the ubiquitous khachaeuri, a sort of cheesebread a bit like a pizza which turns up everywhere. They're pretty keen on cherries here too, and in fact the trips to the markets to buy fruit and veg are a whole lot of fun. Bojomi also witnessed my first major run-in with the local Georgian wine. The tradition is to drink it out of a ram's horn and to make a toast. Needless to say the wine must be downed in one and there is no set number of toasts. Our convivial host, egged on by us, soon had us introduced to the second local drinking tradition which involves downing horns while in a locked arm position with a fellow drinker, who you're supposed to kiss on either cheek afterwards (assuming you internal navigation system is still up to finding their cheek).

This message finds me in Tbilisi, which is a bit of a big grimy city, though with some hidden delights. En route we visited Stalin's birthplace museum at Gori. It was a bit unsettling to be honest, not least because they seemed to have left out all the bits about the gulags and mass purges. I had a sneaky lie down on his bed in his railway carriage and took some small satisfaction from that.

The nightclubbing tour of the Silk Route also continues apace. Tbilisi's offering was the Beatles Bar, a cheesy cellar place mocked up to be the Cavern Club in Liverpool. It had a particularly amusing food menu where you could order anything from a 'firm sandwich' though to 'frizzled chicken cooked in a clay pen'. We watched a blues band who's singer appeared to be wearing pyjamas, and who ended their set by playing the opening riff of 'Smoke on the Water' and then walking off without bothering to finish the song. It was priceless.

Greetings from Georgia

Arrived here yesterday from Turkey and am staying in a coastal city on the Black Sea coast named Batumi, which oddly has the feel of a faded banana republic - wide tree lined streets with palms and lots of colonial style buildings that have seen somewhat better days, in amongst a fair number of soviet tower blocks. Stalin lived here for a while apparently, and they still haven't got around to removing his busts. Perhaps they're rather proud of him as a local lad? The town is very atmospheric and the countryside we have seen so far simply breathtaking, with snow-capped mountains tumbling down to a colbalt blue sea. The land is green and abundant, far more so than anywhere we saw in Turkey. Everywhere brown cows wander around and onto the roads which I suspect must impact on mortality rates in this country given the amount of vodka drinking that goes on here.

Last night night we did a little training on the vodka in preparation for a homestay later in the week where the vodka toasting is liable to get a bit scary. We had a meal at a fabulous old restaurant with wooden booths and a violinist playing mournful tunes before heading out for another comedy clubbing experience. Ordering drinks was very peculiar as the club barman didn't actually appear to have any beer behind the bar. Whenever one was ordered he left the building only to reappear a few minutes later clutching the bottles.

Tales from Anatolia

Taking a couple of days in a weird and wonderful area of Anatolia called Cappadocia, where the wind has eroded a dusty landscape of volcanic spikes and pinnacles in the rock, and people in past times resorted to living in elaborate rock cut caves and even whole underground cities. I don't know whether this strange landscape does anything to encourage odd behaviour in the local people at all, but I'd certainly never encountered anyone out walking their pigeons in the early hours of the morning until arriving here. Today I got up at some god forsaken hour in order to go up in a balloon to look at the dawn landscape, and consequently found myself drinking champagne at 7am in the morning having successfully completed an exhilarating ride.

Friends will be relieved to learn that I've now bagged my requisite quota of medieval churches with frescoes for the trip having dragged my fellow travellers around a whole host of them in Cappadocia. This leaves more time to concentrate on some of the lighter sides of life. Fortunately, we have a good and lively crowd on Tonka, comprising three Kiwis, three Icelandic girls, a Norwegian chap, a couple of Americans, two other Brits and an Aussie.

In Istanbul I was enticed into a slightly surreal evening of Turkish night clubbing with the lure of a bellydancing show. The dancer, who doubled as the barmaid and thus created a bit of a backlog at the bar during her act, seemed to be very proficient at swinging her hips to the music, but wasn't exactly giving it much in the belly department given she lacked one to wobble. The local lads meanwhile seemed mostly enamoured of boy band style synchronised dancing to a techno beat. It was all rather odd. Shopping in the Bizarre is a lot of fun however, and the requirement to get fully involved with the cooking and other elements of the running of the trip create plenty of opportunities to get in lots of practice at the old bartering. My favourite purchase so far is a shocking pink mosque alarm clock which gives off a muezzin alarm call at high volume. Having a lot of fun planting it in other people's tents at the moment.

Istanbul or Constantinople?

Istanbul is one of those rare and exciting cities that seem forever destined to generate more history than they can possibly hope to consume on their own. Sited at the intersection of both continents and cultures, it was the capital city of two successive empires that have both left their mark on its landscape, and it's been fought over by just about every wannabe Atilla the Hun of the last two thousand years, mostly without much success. It's also the place I get to pick up the trail of Ibn Battutah, who came here in 1332. In those days Istanbul was still Constantinople, the increasingly untenable capital of an empire hardly worthy of the name that was clinging on for dear life in the face on an unstoppable tide of Turkish expansion from Asia. Ibn Battutah travelled here from the Ukraine accompanying an Imperial Princess who'd been married off to the ruling Moslem Khan. She was making a home visit to mum and dad (and when she got to Constantinople refused to go back), and so our traveller got special dispensation as a moslem to accompany her into the city. It's the only time in the Travels when he describes visiting a Christian city. Unfortunately, as a moslem he wasn't allowed into the interior of the great church of the Hagia Sophia, which is a great shame as it remains spectacular even to this day. But he has struck by the great number of monsteries he encountered in the city, and rather shocked at the dirtiness of the bazaars and churches in the part of the city that belonged to the Italian merchants.

I've been meaning to visit Istanbul for years so arrival here yesterday was really exciting. After a memorable evening on the Croatian schnapps (it's very good) in Zagreb which left me a little green around the gills the following morning, the remainder of the journey was pleasant and relatively uneventful. Spent today visiting lots of the key sites in the city, and as you will gather, the Hagia Sophia was simply stunning among them. Hoping to get out on the Bosphorus tommorrow to see the city by water. I've also discovered a bit of a taste for a Turkish beer named Eefes, and today I enjoyed my first proper donner kabab. This is nothing if not a holistic introduction to Turkey.

Tomorrow we become a full team with the addition of the remaining nine people for the trip leg on to Ashgabat.