I was dressed and out in the courtyard beginning breakfast, when I saw Volodya lurch from his room on the south side of the courtyard, and head for the bathroom on the north side with his hand over his mouth. He made it only about halfway across when a spray of vomit spewed out from between his fingers, and he stumbled into the bathroom, from whence came prolonged and loud retching sounds. Oh my, I thought, it seems Volodya has caught a bug. The continuous moans and gasps made it difficult to swallow my egg and tomatoes, but I continued on gamely, as Volodya emptied the contents of his stomach in the bathroom nearby.
Fortunately, Barb and Herb weren’t down yet, or I’m sure I would have been subjected to their endless complaints about my driver. And when he emerged from the bathroom, I asked him, through Yelena, if he could use any of my Pepto-Bismol to soothe his stomach. He declined and said that, now that he had rid himself of whatever he had needed to eject, he felt just fine again. He sure didn’t look fine to me, though.
In any case, when I had finished my breakfast, we loaded the car, and after saying a quick good-bye to Herb and Barb, headed west out of Bukhara toward Khiva. The first part of the trip was through the ubiquitous cotton fields, but within an hour the irrigated fields disappeared, and were replaced by terra cotta colored dunes, dotted with tamarisk bushes. The road was narrow and rough, and rode up and down over the hard-packed dunes as if over ocean swells. The only other vehicles we met were the massive KAMAZ long-distance trucks coming from Iran, and the occasional lonely car—usually another Lada—heading back from Khiva.
At about ten, a visibly pale Volodya turned to Yelena, and asked her to inquire of me if I had any aspirin. I said I did, but needed to get it out of my pack in the trunk. Volodya pulled over, and as I handed him the pills, his hand was shaking. Oh great, I said to myself, here we are, way out in the middle of the Karakul desert with a driver who’s about to pass out. I asked Yelena how he was doing, and she said he claimed to just have a little fever. So we piled back in the car, and drove on.
Soon we saw what looked to be a couple of parked cars at the top of a distant rise, but upon approaching, were greeted with the sight of what was apparently the aftermath of a head-on collision between two Ladas. Both were total wrecks, and though there were still a couple of cops at the scene, we saw no one else there. But it seemed impossible that anyone had survived. I had yet to see anyone use a seatbelt in Uzbekistan, and even with seatbelts on, the occupants of those two cars must have been crushed.
Volodya slowed a little after that, but soon was back to his usual driving style; pushing his little red Lada to the brink of disintegration. I had been troubled since the beginning of the trip in Tashkent by an unsettling habit of his. Whenever a car approached from the opposite direction, he drifted toward the left side of the road, and then at the last second, would swerve suddenly back into his own lane. It was as if this was a deliberate tactic to force the oncoming driver to give him plenty of room. And now that he was ill, and, I assumed, less able to quickly react, his habit of drifting toward oncoming traffic was starting to fray my nerves. I was secretly happy that I would be flying back to Tashkent instead of driving.
Nevertheless, we continued barreling toward Khiva, with the unmerciful sun baking us inside the car. We only cracked the windows slightly to keep the air just moving just a bit. Because if we opened them fully, the swirling wind made it seem like we were being roasted in a rolling convection oven.
Suddenly, as we were traveling along a high bluff, a wide swath of green and blue appeared on our left side. There, about a mile to our south, was the Amu Darya River. Judging by the size of the river channel, the now depleted river was a shadow of its former self, here, about a hundred miles from its delta at the southern end of the Aral Sea. But the sudden appearance of the lush green river banks was an awesome sight, and I imagined what it must have been like for caravan traders, who had traveled for days across the blinding desert, to be greeted by this once mighty river.
We descended from the high bluff and skirted its banks for about twenty miles, and then took a left turn toward the river. Within a few minutes we approached a floating bridge; a long series of metal barges lashed together, which spanned the river where it was about a half a mile wide. Volodya paid the toll at the gate and drove up onto the severely washboarded metal surface of the bridge. We bounced across, slowing to a crawl at each joint in between the barges, so that Volodya could gingerly inch across the unstable gaps. Once he even had to back up, when he didn’t like the feel of the track he was following. Finally, we reached the other side, and traversing the now lush delta farm country, sped into Khiva.
We were greeted at the family run hotel just outside the old city with a lunch of tomato salad, soup, and plov, followed by a heap of sliced melons. Then Volodya rose to say good-bye. He was driving back all the way to Tashkent that afternoon, and wanted to hit the road as soon as he could. I shook his hand, slipped him a fat tip, and thanked him for delivering me safely to my destination. Then he was gone.
The B&B was a family run affair, in a warren of a house directly outside the walls of the old city. I was shown my room, and as soon as I had dropped my bags, hustled off for a shower. The temperature was definitely cooler here in the Amu Darya delta, but I still wanted to wash off the grime of the desert crossing. Unfortunately, the water pressure upstairs in the hotel was a trickle, and at times stopped altogether, so it took about a half hour in there before I felt properly clean.
The rest of the afternoon I spent out on the verandah, updating my journal, and enjoying the breeze. It was the first time I hadn’t felt hot in days.
At seven we were called down for dinner—more tomato and onion salad, soup, plov and melons. I shared a table with a couple from England, traveling in the opposite direction, and a Frenchman named Alain. The British couple peppered me with questions about what they could expect in Bukhara and Samarkand, and I filled them in with what I knew. Alain was a medical publisher, and it turned out that our businesses overlapped in many areas. I showed him my little palmtop, and told him of my plans to try to log on later in the evening. He laughed, but when I told him that I had had success in Tashkent, he said he wanted to see if I could make it work.
So I went up to the room to get my cables and Yelena asked the proprietor if I could give it a try. He had no idea what I was attempting, but gave me permission. Well, it was even worse than in Bukhara. Not only could I not get a connection, I couldn’t even get a modem to answer the line in Tashkent. Even when I just dialed the number using the handset; all I got was line noise, and then some strange “busy” signal. I wondered how this hotel managed to get reservations, if it couldn’t even dial the capital.
Anyway, I gave up, and Alain gave me a “told ya so” look. The proprietor wasn’t surprised either. According to Yelena, he said, “Hah, these phones haven’t worked since Tsar Nicholas’ time.” Somehow, I don’t think he was exaggerating.
Back to Tashkent
The bed—if it can be called that—in my room made it impossible to get comfortable, so I spent the night contorting myself into more pretzel-like positions as the night wore on. The mattress sagged deeply on either side of a center ridge, but neither “gulch” was wide enough, and my arm fell over the side of the bed no matter which side I chose. And the pillows here in Uzbekistan are so huge that if you try to rest only your head on them, your legs reach to the footboard at about calf level. I haven’t yet quite figured out how these sleeping contraptions are supposed to work.
But I rose at seven and packed in preparation for our afternoon flight, and made my way downstairs for breakfast at eight. Since my fat intake here is about 800% of recommended daily allowance, I decided to skip the french fries which seem to be traditional breakfast fare here, and ate only my egg and tomatoes. An interesting new addition today was a cool glass of kefir, a yogurt based drink. Delicious.
At nine Yelena and I met our guide Gola at the west gate of the old city of Khiva, and our tour began. Khiva is something of an anomaly in Uzbekistan. It is more restored than preserved, and because few people still live inside the old walls, it has a “Disneyland” sort of feel to it, as if it’s more of a set than a real city. But real it was, in fact for about 200 years it was the capital of the Khorezm khanate, and the center of the slave trade in Central Asia.
Khiva
In 1873, when the tsar’s armies finally managed to overrun the place, after two previous disastrous attempts, they put an end to the slave trade, and freed some 30,000 slaves from the city. But before this, the slave trade had been brisk, with Kazak, Turkoman, Persian and Russian slaves being bartered here. The Registan square, where the slave market was, and where executions were performed, is nicely preserved, including a small circular opening in the stone pavement, where some of the khan’s victims were buried alive, headfirst.
Other fanciful execution methods included the old favorite, being tossed from a minaret, plus some truly inventive ones which ranged from being impaled on a sharpened wooden pole, being rolled in a carpet with a maggot infested sheep carcass, and being tied in a bag with wild cats, and then having the cats maddened by beating the bag with sticks. No quick deaths here, the khan wanted you to suffer a long time first.
In contrast to the brutality of life here, the buildings and artwork are majestic. The khan’s throne room, the many mosques, medressas and mausoleums are the work of accomplished craftsmen. The tile and majolica, in a turquoise blue and green here, as opposed to the deeper blues of Samarkand and Bukhara, mirror the sky. And the Friday mosque has 113 pillars of intricately worked black elm, each column carved with its own individual design.
And the sciences flourished here as well. Mahmud al-Horazmi, the 9th century mathematician who invented algebra (and whose name became twisted into “algorithm” somewhere along the way) lived and worked in Khiva.
Juma Minaret
I climbed the Juma (Friday) minaret to catch a glimpse of the city, and was rewarded with a panorama which stretched from the green Amu Darya delta on the north, to the Karakul desert on the other three sides. And the 181 twelve-inch steps rising to the top give me a workout which would put any Stairmaster to shame.
But the lasting impression I took away from Khiva is the utter ruthlessness of its rulers. Totally isolated by hundreds of miles of baking desert, hapless travelers hoping for refuge and rest here were at the mercy of brutal and arbitrary khans, who seemed to relish the opportunity to cause intense and prolonged pain. Not a nice place to visit back then.
Then my visit was over. After a quick lunch back at the hotel, a taxi drove us to the airport, where, after the usual hassles from the militsia, we boarded a modern Uzbek Air jet for the flight back to Tashkent.
We landed and were greeted by Michael and Victor, who was accompanied again by his blonde sidekick. As we waited for our bags on the tarmac, I asked Yelena about her. She told me, with a wink, that she was Victor’s “second wife.”
Victor drove us back to his apartment, after dropping off wife number 2, and upon arrival I asked wife number 1 if I might make use of her clothes washer to try to clean some stains off the front of my pants, stains which I had somehow acquired while climbing in the Friday minaret in Khiva. She pulled an old-style, open-top washing machine out from a corner of the bathroom, and began filling it with water and soap. Then, after giving my clothes and short wash, rinsed them in a tub in the bathroom, and spun them in another centrifuge-like device before hanging them to dry on the balcony. Had I known what was involved, I doubt I would have asked her to do it. But I had a new set of clean clothes at the end, and since I probably won’t get another chance to clean them until at least China, I was glad to get them done.
We sat down for another huge meal of plov, washed down with some very sweet Uzbek wine. I wondered what these Russians would make of a good Cabernet or even a Chardonnay. Probably think it was vinegar.
Then I made another attempt to connect to the net. More frustration. It took almost two hours of redialing again and again before I finally managed to send my e-mail, and get a big batch from Vilma and some others to whom I had been sending mail. I read it all with great interest, but later, when I tried to send some replies, I failed miserably. So I decided to try again in the morning, and went to bed.