As we were leaving the outskirts of Samarkand, Volodya asked me if I wanted to listen to some music on his car’s cassette player, and I offered him one of my tapes that had some African pop music on it. Both he and Yelena seemed to enjoy it, and when it finished, I asked them if they wanted to hear some rock music that I had recorded on another tape. Both responded enthusiastically, though neither of them had ever heard of the Who, the first selection on my tape. But Volodya cranked up the volume and we rocked across Uzbekistan, flying past the cotton fields lining the road. Later, U2 came on, who Yelena recognized, and she asked me if they were an American group. When I told her that they were Irish, she looked at me skeptically, as if the idea of an Irish rock group was somehow a bit of a stretch for her to believe.
They were clearly enjoying the music, though, and I had high hopes that they’d also like the Neil Young selections I had included on the B-side of my tape. They made it through Cortez the Killer and Powderfinger just fine, but when old Neil launched into a prolonged train wreck guitar explosion at the end of Like a Hurricane, they seemed to have had enough. Mr. Young is an acquired taste, it seems.
Fortunately, about that time we were pulling into the town of Navoi, where Yelena’s parents live, and we exited the car and climbed up to their apartment, where they treated us to a fine lunch. We sat in their air-conditioned living room; sampling stuffed peppers, eggplant and cucumber salads, and Volodya regaled them with stories about my misadventures with vodka the preceding evening. My stomach was still recovering, and though I laughed too, I ate gingerly.
At one-thirty we were back on the road for the last 100 kilometers into Bukhara. The landscape was now plain steppe, all the irrigated agricultural land having fallen behind us. I checked my thermometer; it had risen to 112 degrees. My water bottle was now filled with hot water, which did little to quench the dryness in my throat.
Entering Bukhara, we headed toward the center of town, but our progress was suddenly blocked by a flat-bed trailer across our side of the road, and some of the ubiquitous Uzbek militsia indicating to us that we should turn off onto another road. Volodya tried several side streets in an effort to get us headed back in the right direction toward our B&B, but Uzbek cops, who waved us back, blocked all of them. Finally Volodya questioned one of goons about all the detours, and it turned out that Islam Karimov, the Uzbek president, was in town cutting the ribbon at some oil refinery, and the center of town was under some sort of curfew.
So we pulled over under a line of trees and waited. And waited. For two and a half hours, until suddenly life returned to the city center and we drove on to the B&B. I guess old Islam had split by then.
Uzbekistan’s president, Karimov, is perhaps the last remaining Soviet-style strongman in Central Asia. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Uzbekistan was the last of the republics to declare independence, waiting about nine months after all the others had jumped ship. Karimov, who was then head of the Uzbek Supreme Soviet, and First Secretary of the Communist Party, officially declared independence, and the Communists reemerged as the Popular Democratic Party of Uzbekistan. As the Who say in Won’t Get Fooled Again: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Since then, dissent has been suppressed or exiled, and the lone remaining opposition party, the National Progress Party, is little more than a puppet party set up by Karimov in a transparent attempt at legitimacy. The police state is evident everywhere, from the thousands of cops on the streets, who pull over drivers and hassle pedestrians, often “fining” them on imagined infractions, to travel, speech and press restrictions which effectively keep any divergence from the party line muffled.
Of course, all this makes Uzbekistan one of the safest places to travel in the world, when tourists aren’t cooling their heels waiting for the president to get out of town.
Anyway, the B&B we were staying at is an old Jewish merchant’s house (Bukhara for centuries had a thriving Jewish population) right smack in the middle of the old town, and within a stone’s throw of the major attractions in Bukhara. I’m told that Volodya will have the morning off, because we’ll be walking through the old town until after lunch. Herb and Barbara are staying here as well, so I guess I get to spend another evening listening to Herb. Ah well, it could be worse. I could be listening to one of Karimov’s speeches, extolling the glories of the worker’s paradise of Uzbekistan.
Bukhara
The Mynah bird, which lives under the eaves of this old B&B, screeched me awake this morning, just before the call to prayer echoed out across the old town from the nearby minaret. It was just before six o’clock, but it already promised to be another hot day, so I took an early shower, hoping to keep fresh until, oh say, seven-thirty or so.
Updating my Journal at the Bukhara B&B
We breakfasted in the courtyard, Barb complaining with every course the owner’s daughters delivered to our table. “Oh, don’t they have anything else? I don’t want tomatoes for breakfast.” And, “Green tea again? Can’t they get us any black tea?” And Herb asked for a cup of coffee at least ten times from everyone who walked by. I wanted to scream at them: “Can’t you two just realize that you’re not in Cincinnati and try to relax?” But I frowned into my green tea instead.
Luckily, the tour of ancient Bukhara began at eight thirty, and we were met by our guide, Noila, near the entrance of the B&B. We started by walking, heading toward a large stone pool nearby, shaded by ancient mulberry trees. It is one of three remaining pools of its kind, called hauz in the old town, which used to have some 200 of them. This one was named Labi Hauz, and was (and still is) the biggest in the city. Around it on tree-shaded plaza are raised pedestals where old men sit and drink tea and talk all day.
The hauz were sources of water for the residents, as well as meeting and bathing places. Unfortunately, they also made Bukhara one of the most plague-ridden cities in the world, until the Bolsheviks filled them in and drained the canals which fed them.
Labi Hauz is smack in the center of town, and is surrounded by many mosques and medressas, some dating back to the tenth century. We ducked in and out of most of these, and I was able to climb up inside one of the minarets to get a view of the city’s flat rooftops.
Nearby were the old bazaar and several gates from the old city walls. The archway inside of each of these had been used as a market for different craft guilds. There was the jeweler’s gate, the tailor’s gate, etc., though now they’re mostly filled with stalls selling tourist junk.
Kalan Minaret
I declined all the fabulous offers of “special price,” and we made our way over to the Kalan mosque, with its massive 150-foot high Kalan minaret. The khans who used to govern Bukhara liked to toss people they had no more use for off of its top. Sometimes, just for kicks, they varied the routine by wrapping them in a carpet first, which, I suppose, made the messy cleanup a little easier. You know how hard it is to get bloodstains out of marble.
Our last stop before lunch was the Ark, or the massive crumbling fortress on the west side of the old city. Aside from its size, its main claim to fame is its dungeons, one of which is the “Bug Pit of Bukhara.” This 20-foot wide pit became infamous in the English speaking world as a result of the experiences of a couple of unfortunate Brits, who stumbled into the khan Nasrullah’s clutches in the 1840s.
Colonel Stoddard actually arrived in 1839, as an emissary from the governor-general of India. But because he made the mistake of riding, rather than walking into the Ark, and bore no gifts from Queen Victoria, whom the khan considered his equal, he had him thrown into the “bug pit,” a forty foot deep stone pit filled with the prisoner’s own filth and an assortment of rodents and insects. He languished there for two years before the equally dense Captain Connolly came riding up looking for him, and was promptly tossed in there too. The khan kept them both there for another year, trying to figure out what to do with them, and then had their throats slit on the Registan Square in front of the Ark.
The British government, despite widespread sensational coverage of their fate in the newspapers, decided to let the matter drop. But outraged relatives sent an oddball English/German cleric named Joseph Wolff to get to the truth of the story. The khan evidently found the priest so hilarious that he decided to let him go unscathed to report back to England.
Of course, the bug pit wasn’t the only part of the citadel dedicated to khan’s favorite hobby. Other dungeons were built underneath the horse stables, where the effluent from the horses was washed down on them. And naturally, the torture chambers were right next door, so the victim’s screams would be sure to reach the men languishing nearby. That khan, he sure knew how to have a good time.
But that jolly chapter came to and end in 1920, when the Bolsheviks chased khan Nasrullah’s grandson Alim across the border into Afghanistan. Since Uzbek independence in 1991, his descendants have offered to come back, but there seems to be little enthusiasm for their return. Strange.
Bukhara Skyline
We left the Ark and strolled across the Registan to a large outdoor restaurant, where I got my first taste of another Central Asian specialty, shashlik. It’s basically meat on a spit, but they serve it heavily salted and accompanied by tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and big loaves of flat round bread called patir in Uzbek. I had four of the spits, washed down with warm Coke. A filling meal, but I sure hope they figure out refrigeration in this country soon.
In the afternoon we drove out of town to the khan’s summer palace, which he had built after visiting St. Petersburg. The palace is a mishmash of Russian and Uzbek architecture, and though it housed a kidney hospital after the revolution, today it is slowly being restored to its former glory. It is an odd sort of glory; the khan installed massive ceramic stoves, that were never lit (it was a summer palace, duh), and had ornate parquet floors put down, and then covered them up with carpets and cushions. The overall effect is one of someone with too much money and not enough sense. Perhaps he was spending too much time throwing people off the Kalan minaret to pay much attention to the palace’s design.
The wind was blowing hard out at the summer palace, kicking up the fine, sandy dust, and the dry hot air made my eyes water. It felt like being in a blast furnace, even in the shade of the palace’s small garden. Outside the gate we stopped at a small store and bought, for a change, warm Fantas. Yum.
Ismail Samani Mausoleum
Our last stop for the day was a small mausoleum, built in the 8th century, and called the Ismail Samani mausoleum. It’s a delightful little domed structure, made entirely of delicate terra-cotta brick arranged in various patterns. Unfortunately, the water table has been rising in Bukhara since they filled in the hauz, and its foundation is being undermined.
My stamina was also being undermined by this time, and after thanking Noila, we headed back to the B&B for a long shower. Then I drank a liter and a half of water, and one more at dinner. The hot wind had shriveled me up like a raisin.
I asked the B&B proprietor if I might try to use her phone line to check my e-mail, and after dinner I got out all my telecommunications gear, and with her four kids hovering around me in wonderment, tried to log on. I had to make a long-distance call to Tashkent, and though several times I actually managed to get connected to the Equant network there, when I tried to type in the keystrokes needed to navigate over to CompuServe, I kept losing the connection. For over an hour, long after the kids had lost interest, I tried to get through, but came up empty. I wish I knew if there were options, which I could try to overcome the noise on the line, but I’m not modem-savvy enough to know what to do. Sigh.