Off Piste in Uzbekistan

Cabin fever or curiosity? Perhaps a little of both. Anyway, after an interesting night staying in a yurt tent emcampment near Lake Aydarkol close to the Kazakstan border, I shook off an Uzbek vodka hangover and signed off the trip for a day or so. The purpose was to to make a flying visit with a couple of others to the town of Shakrisabz (not on our itinerary), a small place nestling on a plain beneath the snowcapped Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan, which was the birthplace of Tamerlane.

Tamerlane was perhaps the most successful warrier king of the later middle ages and was a premier league player when it came to a bit of mass murder along the way. His calling card in the countless cities of Asia he conquered was building a pyramid of skulls of his defeated enemies, and his victims have been estimated by some to have been in the tens of millions. Yet every meglomaniac has a few good qualities, and in Tamerlane's case he and his immediate successors (particulary his cultured grandson Uleg Beg) used the vast wealth they accumulated to endow the cities of Uzbekistan with some of the most breathtaking architecture on Earth. If you like a bit of blue tile work you're pretty much in Heaven in this neck of the woods.

Shakrisabz was intended to be the jewel in the crown, though it was quickly surpassed by Samarkand as the Timurid capital. Still it has it's share of lovely buildings that are less restored than the spectacles that greet the tourists in Samarkand. Interestingly, Tamerlane has been reinvented as the great hero of modern Uzbekistan and his bithplace is now adorned with a giant statue of the great man which appears somewhat bizarrely to be a Mecca for Uzbek wedding parties getting their photos done. I'm not sure I've mentioned before that it is highly fashionable in this country and also in Turkmenistan for women to get their teeth fixed with gold fronts - a sort of Turkic bling if you like. So my memory of Shakrisabz will forever be the golden smiles of the newly-weds cosying up to the image of a genocidal meglomaniac in front of his beautiful ruined palace.

I rejoined the group in Samarkand which is such an astonishing sight to behold that it needs a whole new entry of its own...