Wanderings: A Travel Journal

I’m not quite sure how to begin an entry on the quirks and unorthodox beauty of Valparaíso, but here goes anyway: it’s somehow fitting that such an unusually shaped country like Chile should contain within it an equally unusually shaped city, and it is the geography of the city more than anything else that defines most of its significant charm and character. Valpo, as it’s known locally, is a coastal port city on the Pacific, but the land at sea level is only a few blocks wide, with forty-two different hills, or cerros, rising steeply from it.

Thus you have the geographic uniqueness of Valparaíso: a flat, narrow commercial centre at the city’s heart, with hilly residential districts climbing up from it in three directions, offering sweeping views of the port and the ocean beyond. And the character and economic division of the city is also thus formed: in the working-class lower city (called ‘Plan’), there’s a rough, gritty charm similar to that of Naples or Palermo, where you don’t have to search too far to find trash strewn everywhere on street corners, homeless people sleeping in the bus station etc, and when we wandered around the port area one morning three different local people came up to us within five minutes to tell us how dangerous it was and that we should be extremely careful. But there’s something about the realness of the city – in the street markets, in the graffiti, in the way you see the locals interacting with each other – that is inherently attractive despite the dirtiness and the stray dogs and everything else.

And then, when you’re on the cerros, the atmosphere is completely different. Here the pace of life is slow and peaceful compared with the bustle of the lower city, the old houses are virtually falling down but still beautiful in their bright colours, a ‘museum’ consists of a series of murals on adjacent streets, and a cemetery of ‘dissidents’ in fact houses tombs of Protestants. If ‘Plan’ is not to everybody’s liking, then the cerros should be. There are endless hours – no, days, or even weeks? – of exploration to do on the cerros, and we must admit that we only scratched the surface, focusing mainly on a handful of them. But every street is a delight to walk on and around every corner, you don’t know if you’ll find a gorgeous purple house, or a street-long mural, or a lookout to the other cerros and below to the city and the bay, or art students with pen and sketchbook in hand drawing their city, or who knows what else – and that’s one of the most exciting things about the city. But even though the cerros are Valpo at its prettiest, they don’t in any way project a Singapore-style artificial version of the city. There are abandoned buildings everywhere, crazy amounts of haphazardly installed power lines on every street, and teenagers drinking on steps and street corners. And, around the same time we were heeding the advice of locals and getting out of the port area, two French tourists we met at our hotel the night before had their camera stolen from out of their very hands while on the Cerro Alegre in a popular tourist area. So while the cerros might represent an idealistic Valparaíso, it’s still Valparaíso, after all.

Between these two cities within a city are the 15 ascensores (usually translated as elevators, but that’s misleading in this case; they’re more like funicular railways), built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ferry the porteños (citizens of Valparaíso) from port and city centre to their houses on the hills. These creaking ascensores still run today (or at least they do when the operators are not on strike) and form one of the most unusual modes of public transportation within a major city I can ever recall taking; for about US$0.50 you hop onto a small wooden carriage with about 10 others and, after a few groans and rumbles you slowly climb above the city on tracks which can be as steep as 70 degrees. The trip is over as quickly as it began: a minute later, you’re off the carriage and it’s as though you have been transported to another world.

The common thread in both parts of Valpo is the street art and graffiti, which tells you more about Valparaíso’s character and story than any written description could. A couple of my favourite pieces were:

> Two 1970s television sets placed on top of each other on somebody’s front porch, with these words painted on the two screens: Apaga la tele and Vives tu vida (“Turn off the tele, live your life”). Later, in Santiago I saw someone wearing a T-shirt which had on its front a drawing of this exact scene.

> One mural on the side of a house which merely depicted a bunch of pieces of old furniture and other junk piled on top of each other as though it had been left for a council collection – such an uninspiring theme that yet manages to somehow so perfectly describe the character of Valparaíso.

I knew before I arrived that I would like Valparaíso but I didn’t imagine I would like it that much. Among large cities in Latin America (with Rio de Janeiro being the only obvious one I haven’t been to yet), the only one that rivals Valpo for me is Havana, which also offers its fair share of ‘rustic’ charm. Valparaíso doesn’t show itself off, or clean itself up, or promise you anything, but if you have the right mindset it’s really fabulous. Having glorious weather every day we were there helped, and staying one night in the lower city and two nights on Cerro Concepcíon gave us some insight into both sides of the city.

So with some regret, we took a bus yesterday to the Chilean capital Santiago, knowing that it could not come close to matching Valparaíso. Santiago doesn’t have much to offer the tourist – I was pretty convinced during our walk around the main sights this morning that you can experience more in five minutes in Valparaíso than in a whole day in the capital – but it’s certainly a well-developed city with solid infrastructure and a pleasant atmosphere. This normally wouldn’t count for much, but since it’s one of the five cities that Wendy can be posted to for her UN position in the coming months (years?), we have been examining Santiago a little differently than we usually would. The best part so far? It’s only 101km from Valparaíso! (And since my project of taking sepia photos of all the ascensores is only 2/15 complete, I need to return.)

With that, the first part of our Chilean journey comes to an end, and tomorrow we cross back to Argentina.

South America - what a continent! (Please excuse me while I gush like a child for a paragraph.) In many debates over the years with Wendy or other travellers, I have tended to choose Asia as my preferred continent for overland travel (especially if I get to include so-called ‘West Asia’- the Middle East – as part of Asia), given the extraordinary diversity of people, cultures and religions, unmatched by any other continent and, indeed, it would still be unmatched even if you could combine all the other continents together. But what South America lacks in diversity of peoples it more than makes up for in diversity of landscape. And it’s not just that it ticks all the landscape variety boxes – jungles, deserts, beaches, mountains etc – but it seems that everywhere you look on this continent there are natural phenomena that you just don’t see anywhere else: here, pink-purple-and-orange rock hills; there, geysers rising to the surface from rivers running underneath the world’s driest desert; over there, miles and miles of crystal salt flats; now look, dinosaur fossils, etc etc.

And so it has been for us over the past few days. Travelling over the Andes from the magical Quebrada de Humahuaca in Argentina on Thursday, we saw llamas, vicuñas and flamingos from the bus windows and drove past active volcanoes, through blinding white salt plains and alongside bright yellow mountains. We crossed the Chilean border in the afternoon and promptly arrived in hot, dusty and infrastructure-lacking San Pedro de Atacama, a small oasis town in the Atacama desert and an unusual introduction to the most politically stable and economically prosperous country in the Western Hemisphere south of the United States. I didn’t think much of San Pedro, which virtually only exists for tourists, and was a bit cynical at first of joining the hordes in taking minivan tours throughout the surrounding countryside, the type of travel that we normally eschew if possible. But I need not have worried at all – the desertscape was spectacular and the three tours we did (even the one that departed at 4am) were all very worthwhile.

Our first trip was the sunset tour to the Valle de la Luna, which I feared might be like sunrise at Poon Hill in Nepal or Mt. Bromo on Java – nice, but with too many other tourists around to really allow you to enjoy the nature. But fortunately it wasn’t like this at all; the view from the sunset lookout of jagged hills, deep grey sand, and little canyons was truly spectacular, and there weren’t nearly as many people as I thought there would be, and since those who were there were spread out along a ridge, I barely even noticed anyone else. Considering only the views, this was the highlight of the region.

The next morning, we rose at 3:45am for our trip to see a field of geysers two hours drive from San Pedro; the geysers are only active in the early morning when it is still cold. It was, as I hinted at above, pretty extraordinary to see these bubbling geysers and the mist that rose from them in this otherwise completely barren desert. The geysers reach about 85 degrees Celsius, and as such our guide boiled eggs in one of them and heated up chocolate milk to make hot chocolate while we walked around the place. One geyser in particular violently erupts every 10 minutes or so, then completely calms down and stops bubbling entirely – then repeats the process over and over again.

On our final afternoon in San Pedro, we went to the Salar de Atacama, the world’s third-largest salt flats and home to flamingos and other bird life. The salt flats were rockier than both the ones we passed on the bus a few days before and the more famous Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia, but it was still pretty extraordinary to see them stretch out before us at sunset to the foot of the nearby Andes, with a full moon rising behind the mountains. I was a bit disappointed that we weren’t allowed near the biggest concentration of flamingos, but I still managed to get a few good shots anyway.

After three days of happy touring in the northern desert, we hopped on a 24-hour bus and headed south to the centre of the country, where we’ll spend the next few days in the cities of Valparaíso and the capital Santiago.

Fortunately, our travels in northwest Argentina in the past week have proved more successful than our previous foray into the northeast. The northwest is a charming, indigenous land a world away from the pace of Buenos Aires; to me it feels like a mixture of the Mexican Bajío (the colonial towns, the local music) and the Bolivian Altiplano (the llamas, the indigenous people, and some of the landscape), with some Midwestern United States thrown in for good measure (in the red rock canyons). Our regional travels have been in Salta and Jujuy provinces, the latter being quite close to both the Bolivian and Chilean borders.

We began in the city of Salta, which is no match for some of the gorgeous colonial towns of Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, etc, but is enjoyable enough, with a couple of pretty churches and a decent central plaza (called Plaza 9 de Julio, like so many others in Argentina; in my experience elsewhere in Latin America they’re usually called the Plaza Mayor or the Plaza de Armas). The colonial ambience aside, the other highlight of Salta was the ‘High Mountain Archaeological Museum’, which contains three child mummies aged six, seven and 15 who were put in a rock enclosure and left to die 500 years ago near the peak of a sacred 6700m+ volcano as a sacrifice, and only discovered during an expedition in 1999. Only one is displayed at a time (they are rotated every few months), and we saw the seven-year-old girl, extraordinarily well preserved because of the low temperatures, with a deliberately deformed skull and features like hair and teeth still as visible as if she had died yesterday.

We used Salta as our base for further exploration into the eponymous province, which included the Valles Calchaquiés and the Quebrada de Cafayate. The former is a plateau 2000m above sea level, about four hours from Salta on a road that was scenic but not close to being “one of the most spectacular you are ever likely to undertake” as the hyperbole of Lonely Planet had promised. (For what it’s worth, I’d say there are several more beautiful road journeys in northwest Argentina alone.) In the valley we visited two small towns, Cachi and Molinos, enjoying the colonial chic-boutique atmosphere of the former and the off-the-beaten-track nature of the latter. Both were noteworthy for their adobe architecture, pretty churches and cactus-wood decorations and ceilings, and for their diminutive size - Cachi has about 2000 inhabitants and Molinos about 900, so this was really small-town Argentina, and we were glad to have experienced it.

After a couple of nights in the Valles Calchaquiés, we returned to Salta and headed south through the Quebrada de Cafayate (now that was a spectacular ride) and disembarked mid-canyon to see two famous gashes in the rock that produce small canyons-within-a-canyon: the Garganta del Diablo (the Devil’s Throat; I’m beginning to realise that every other province in Argentina contains something with this name) and the Anfiteatro (Amphitheatre), the more impressive of the two. We brought our tent with the intention to camp nearby for the night and return to Salta in the morning. With only rocky ground near the road and sandy ground near the river that runs through the canyon to choose from, we picked the latter but found that the pegs wouldn’t hold and, as such, we couldn’t pitch the tent. Instead, we laid it out on the ground and put our sleeping mats and sleeping bags on top, and enjoyed a lovely and fortunately balmy evening sleeping under the Southern Hemisphere stars, which confused my Northern Hemisphere wife quite considerably.

Returning once more to Salta, we picked up the rest of our stuff from the hostel and took a bus further north to Jujuy province, bypassing the eponymous capital and heading straight for the Quebrada de Humahuaca, which was recommended to us many years ago and for good reason: the extraordinary colours of the rocks here have made the canyon the highlight of northwest Argentina for us. From the window of our hospedaje in Purmamarca we can see the Cerro de los Siete Colores (the Hill of the Seven Colours), and though I’m having a bit of trouble tracking down all seven, I can at least see brilliant oranges intertwined with whites, deep purples and ochre reds – all combining to make a pretty spectacular scene. We walked a 3km circuit around the hill yesterday morning on a glorious day and the contrast of the colours was really fabulous, so much so that we walked it again in the afternoon (but there were some clouds about and the light was not as good).

Finally, I’d better explain the title of this post. We saw a sign in the central plaza of a small town we passed on the bus en route to the Valles Calchaquiés that said: ‘Prohibido atar caballos alrededor de la plaza’ (‘Tying up horses in the plaza is prohibited’) – which we thought was an apt summary of the timelessness of the region. Now, having seen and done everything we wanted to do in this area, we’re taking a bus to San Pedro de Atacama tomorrow for our first exploration of Chile, and then we’ll cross back and forth between the two countries over the coming weeks as we head south and eventually arrive in Patagonia.

The upheaval of the week after my last post seems distant now, but it was pretty chaotic at the time and I didn’t have a chance to post about it while it was happening. To cut a long story short, two weeks ago we tried and failed on a Monday to postpone our Friday flight to Buenos Aires; flew from Riga to Rome on Tuesday; Wendy changed airports straight away and flew to Geneva for a meeting on Wednesday, returning to Rome that night; and in the end we took the Argentina flight anyway and by Friday night we found ourselves in the welcoming apartment of our friends Seb and Diana, not exactly sure how we had gotten there or what lay ahead of us in our attempt to ‘complete’ the South American continent that we abandoned midway through Bolivia four years ago to take jobs in Doha.

We spent five days in Buenos Aires, but we had quite a few things to buy, we wanted to spend time with our friends and relax a bit, so we didn’t spend as much time exploring the city for pleasure as we would have liked. We spent half a day in San Telmo for its Sunday market, enjoying the street tango, puppet shows etc, and visited the Plaza de Mayo and around. Beyond that we didn’t see that much of the city, but we know we’ll be back in due time anyway as it’s sort of the crux of this South America trip – I have a flight to Vancouver from B.A. at the end of January, and if we’re able to return after that and last until the middle of next year we still have our return flight to Rome from Buenos Aires in June.

From the capital we took an overnight bus to Puerto Iguazu, and even though we bought the cheapest tickets (for class semi cama, or semi-bed), it was the most luxurious bus I’ve been on in 70+ countries. You get served food on board (while DVDs of 1980s music, a throwback to our time in the Philippines, are shown on the numerous televisions), there’s an exceptionally clean bathroom, and the seats recline a fair way – it’s basically the equivalent of business class on a plane.

The Iguazu Falls that straddle the Argentine-Brazilian border are generally considered the most impressive waterfalls in the world, but unfortunately our visit was a pretty massive disappointment. It rained and hailed (yet again) on the day we went to the Brazilian side of the falls and had been raining the previous several days, leaving us with poor visibility (sometimes we would look out from a viewpoint and literally not be able to see the falls at all), and the water completely brown (think of the waterfall at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory). We went to the Argentine side the next day, but the Garganta del Diabo (Devil’s Throat) lookout point – the biggest highlight of both sides of the falls – was closed because of high water levels. The boat trip on the river below the falls to a small island was also cancelled for the same reason, so in the end we didn’t even bother entering since there was not much else left to see and we knew we would be bitterly disappointed again.

We left Iguazu on Monday, stopping briefly at San Ignacio to see the ruins of a Jesuit mission in the jungle. These centuries-old missions are scattered throughout the region in modern-day Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and while the best ones are said to be in Paraguay, we both need visas to enter and figured it wouldn’t be worth the $90. San Ignacio is considered the best of the four missions in Argentina, and we thought it was quite interesting and well worth the stopover.

Getting back on another insane luxury bus in the afternoon, we journeyed out of the northeast of Argentina to the completely different landscapes of the northwest, and 19 hours later found ourselves in our current location, the colonial town of Salta, which will be our base for exploring the colourful rock formations and indigenous villages of the region over the next few days. Though, since some New Zealanders we became friends with at the hostel last night got robbed this morning by an Argentine staying in their dorm, it hasn’t been an auspicious start…

Vilnius is harder to characterise than the two other Baltic capitals. It doesn’t have a medieval core – it’s instead a baroque city with the occasional medieval building or, more frequently, newer buildings with a few medieval bricks from the original foundation displayed - and it’s certainly not as beautiful as either Tallinn or Riga. It’s rougher around the edges than both of them as well; graffiti and beggars are commonplace in the old town (the latter so much so that the tourist office hands out pamphlets to tourists that the tourists then give to the beggars; the pamphlets give information on how homeless people can get help). But Vilnius is also a more pious city, with Catholic pilgrims streaming in from nearby Poland to visit the Mary shrine inside the Gates of Dawn and other sites frequented by the late Pope John Paul II, and the resulting rise in the number of stores selling religious paraphernalia. And when you walk down Gedimino prospektas, a classy tree-lined avenue with designer stores inside baroque palaces, you can squint a little and you’re almost in Paris. Yet in contrast to this baroque vibe is that Vilnius has Eastern Europe’s oldest university, historic and beautiful enough that its 13 courtyards are now a tourist attraction. So in the end, you look out over the city from the medieval brick tower on the Gedimino Hill and are left viewing a mixture of different eras, styles and futures.

While in Vilnius we made two day-trips to nearby attractions. The first was to Trakai, with its gorgeously located medieval castle on a tiny island reached by two footbridges from the mainland. As a defensive castle it’s not much good, since attackers by land would not even pass it and attackers by sea could easily bypass it, but as a fortified palace it’s quite charming.

The more interesting trip, however, was to the controversial neo-Soviet ‘theme park’ known officially as Grutas Park and unofficially as Stalin World. In the fiercely anti-Soviet Baltic states (where there are ‘occupation’ museums in all three capitals), the opening of a park for the display of Soviet sculptures so soon (within 10 years) after the fall of the Soviet Union was met with some resistance. But in fact the purpose of the park is not to glorify the Soviet era and it is actually very anti-Soviet, detailing the terror the regime inspired in Lithuania, and is very well presented. Walking in the cold around the forest past the sculptures – which included about a dozen Lenins and two prized and (I imagine) rare Stalins (one bust and one full-body sculpture) – with Soviet music playing from nearby speakers was an eerie feeling, and the reflection that it inspires makes it, I think, a place that Lithuanians should visit to help them contemplate their recent history.

From Vilnius we headed back north to Riga, and celebrated seven years of being together last night at Rozengrals, a fabulous medieval restaurant in the old town, which I highly recommend for the ambience and experience of dining underground in a building first mentioned in 1293. As I write now, we are at Riga airport awaiting our flight to Rome, and while I’m excited as usual to be going to the Eternal City, Wendy is only staying long enough to dump her bag before turning around, switching airports, and flying to Geneva for a meeting tomorrow. To compensate for her absence, I have promised friends that I will drink twice as much at Campo de Fiori tonight…

The old city of Riga was certainly nice enough, but had it not marked our first steps in Europe for over a year, we probably wouldn’t have been greatly impressed – there were no city walls or gates, and only one tower, and it was the type of old city that you can spend two hours in and be done with. But as it was, we were thankful to be back among churches and cobblestones after a year travelling in Asia, and we headed north from Riga expecting a similar experience in the Estonian capital Tallinn. And even as we approached the old city of Tallinn on foot from the north, past the Swedish-built pentagonal bastion, we had yet no idea what awaited us inside: surely one of the most picturesque medieval cities anywhere in Europe, one with a timeless atmosphere more like that of Carcasonne or Siena than of a European Union capital.

Every street in old Tallinn is an adventure, and the city is made for unplanned exploration. As you walk on the cobblestones for the first time, around every corner there could be a new find: a stone tower topped by an orange tiled roof, or a tunnel passageway through to an open plaza, or a church spire climbing high into the sky. This was the Tallinn experience for us – four days of discovery upon discovery in one of the most enjoyable walking cities I can ever remember visiting. We climbed up towers, walked through tunnels under the bastions, explored 13th century Dominican monasteries, looked out over the old city from numerous viewpoints and ate at medieval restaurants. We liked it so much that we abandoned our planned visit to Kuressaare and spent all our time in Estonia in the capital instead, and it was worth every minute. The city is extremely well preserved and (with the sole exception of the token and tacky ‘torture museum’), the ‘Ye Olde Medieval Tallinn’ aspect has been authentically and tastefully done, most notably at the Olde Hansa restaurant and shop (or is that shoppe?).

From Estonia, the northern-most of the three Baltic states, we travelled by bus for nine hours yesterday back through Latvia to Lithuania, the southern-most of the three. About an hour outside the capital Vilnius, we saw the most amazing rainbow I’ve ever seen out the window to the east – the entire arc of it was lit up by the late afternoon sun. With such a spectacular sight as an introduction, we arrived in Vilnius at dusk and woke up this morning prepared to explore our last city in the region before heading back to a more familiar European capital - Rome.

Meanwhile I’m having some trouble embedding photos into this post for reasons unknown, but there are plenty of shots of beautiful Tallinn here.

It’s always pretty extraordinary to fly directly from the Third World to the First World, but it was especially so on our flight from Uzbekistan to Latvia, considering how massively different the two places seem while remembering that, less than two decades ago, they were both part of the Soviet Union and, as such, the now-defunct Second World. (The original division of the globe into three ‘worlds’ was political, not economic, in nature: the First World represented the United States and its allies, the Second World contained the Soviet Union and its allies, and the Third World consisted of the remaining, non-aligned countries.) It’s hard to imagine that these two countries were once both ruled by distant Moscow, given the extreme differences in development, culture, religion, geography and just about everything else.

And since the fall of European communism another important difference has arisen between Central Asia and the Baltics that I’ve noticed over the past few days: the attitude of both regions to the Soviet period. In a 10-minute stroll in the centre of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, for example, you can see at least three statues or plaques dedicated to Lenin, a statue of Marx and Engels, numerous Soviet-era buildings still adorned with the hammer-and-sickle, and a Lenin shrine at the State Historical Museum, with yet more statues of the revolutionary leader amid much pro-Soviet and anti-American propaganda – all of which almost gives you the feeling that the USSR is still alive and well in 2009. In the Latvian capital Riga, however, a poignant inscription at the former KGB headquarters describes torture and humiliation, an old city museum is dedicated to the 1940-1991 ‘occupation’ of the country, and only one government building in the whole city – the so-called ‘Stalin’s Birthday Cake’ tower - still has the hammer-and-sickle insignia on it (and not everyone’s happy about it). Even in the small town of Cēsis, a symbolic tombstone speaks of the ‘communist horror’. And as for Lenin statues, the only one we’ve seen so far was lying on his back inside an open box in the grounds of the old castle at Cēsis being pelted with hailstones, abandoned and forgotten by all but a few curious tourists. Arguably the most significant figure of the 20th century is now out of Latvian sight, and out of the Latvian mind.

Since I’ve spent the past three days posting on Facebook about how awesome it is to be in Europe after spending almost all of the last two years in Asia, I won’t beat that drum anymore here, but needless to say, it’s been very enjoyable so far. Riga is a pleasant capital, with an historic old town typical of Northern Europe with its cobblestone streets, pastel coloured houses and imposing brick churches. But the best part of our stay in the capital was probably when we took a free tour into some of the less postcard-worthy areas of Riga – past old warehouses, through produce markets and flea markets and 24-hour open-air markets, into the decaying, fire-prone ‘Little Moscow’ neighbourhood and past the aforementioned former KGB headquarters and controversial hammer-and-sickles on the Stalin-era tower. Our guide spoke of the Latvian disdain for the Russians who make up 43 per cent of the city’s population but refuse to learn the Latvian language, of the horror of the Soviet period, and many other interesting things. All in all, it was a memorable if completely different introduction to an EU capital from anything we’ve experienced before.

After a day-and-a-half in Riga (we will return at the end of our Baltic trip for another day before flying out), we’ve spent the past two days in two small towns in the Latvian countryside, Sigulda and Cēsis. Sigulda, where we’ve based ourselves, is a nice, leafy town (especially now in autumn) with a relaxed atmosphere and a few ruined castles in its vicinity. Yet what I’ll remember most about Sigulda are the many wild apple trees all over town; whenever we walk past one, we pluck a couple of apples from it, take a bite, and walk on. Underneath some of the trees there are dozens of applies lying on the ground; in fact there’s such an abundance of apples that on one sidewalk a box full of them lay with a note asking passers-by to take one if they pleased.

We spent most of today in nearby Cēsis. The town itself wasn’t nearly as good as hyperbole-prone Lonely Planet made it out to be, but its AD 1209 medieval castle was pretty fantastic. When you buy your entrance ticket, the staff hand you a candle-lit lantern so you can negotiate three levels of dark, spiral staircases in the western tower, admiring the vaulted roof on the second floor and the views of the castle grounds and beyond from the top. We also climbed down a staircase into a chilling dungeon, and both of these experiences helped us imagine what the castle would have been like in its day. While we were at the castle the Latvian weather did its best to freak everyone out: the sky turned incredibly dark grey while we were at the top of the tower, it then began pouring on us (and Lenin in his box) once we got out, then came the hail (not so different from Kyrgyzstan after all), and finally some sunshine. Once we were back in Sigulda, it was mostly a lovely afternoon – and then tonight it rained some more.

After an enjoyable few days in Latvia, tomorrow we travel to Estonia, the northernmost of the three Baltic states. Our plan there is similar to what it was here: to spend two or three days in the capital, Tallinn, and two more days in a smaller town or two.

Within five minutes of our arrival in Bukhara, we were drinking vodka with the jovial, large-bellied owner of our guesthouse – straight, and in a bowel, as is the custom here. Even in the most Muslim and least Russian of the three Central Asian Republics we have visited so far, this most famous Russian export is alive and well.

After being pleasantly surprised with how much we liked Khiva, we were a little disappointed with Bukhara. The monuments themselves were, as always in Uzbekistan, magnificent, but chronic over-restoration on many of them, combined with a touristy atmosphere, brought down our opinion, and somehow despite the extraordinary sights on offer, Bukhara the city in the end was not the sum of those parts. Unlike Khiva, the monuments are spread out within the city, and the areas between them are modern and/or given over to tourist bazaars (which, given our no-souvenir policy while we remain homeless, are of no interest to us). So yes, Bukhara is a real city, and people really live there, but there’s nothing really interesting about the city in itself aside from the monuments. I had expected an old city full of interesting alleys, with a Central Asian feel in the style of Kashgar, but it was nothing like that at all. Don’t get me wrong – it’s still a pretty amazing place, but our high expectations were not quite met.

Among Bukhara’s monuments, for the most part we found the smaller, less imposing ones to be the most interesting, including the four-domed Char Minar, and the city’s oldest mosque and mausoleum. These tend to be unrestored and free of large French tour groups, resulting in an ambience not often felt on the Uzbek tourist circuit. Of the more major sights, the soaring Kalon Minaret is extremely impressive, so much so that it was spared by Genghis Khan, who destroyed everything else in his path between Mongolia and Europe. For a fantastic view of the minaret and surrounding monuments, we climbed to the rooftop of a nearby medressa, for which of course we not only paid, but had to bargain the price - as you do for everything in Uzbekistan, including entrance fees to sights, service charges at restaurants and currency exchange rates.

Samarkand, the greatest and most famous of Silk Road cities and Uzbek tourist sites, was our next stop. It was already a magnificent city when Alexander marched by in the fourth century B.C., and though it was razed to the ground by Genghis Khan, it was subsequently rebuilt on an even grander scale by Timur the Lame (so called because he walked with a limp; he was in fact a conqueror of the highest order, and his 14th century Timurid empire, with Samarkand as its showpiece capital, stretched from Kashgar to the Mediterranean).

Even more so than Bukhara, Samarkand is a modern city, with wide boulevards and cultivated gardens, and as such not at all what I had expected. But where it trumps Bukhara is that it somehow feels much less touristy and, most importantly, the Timurid monuments are staggering in their size and ambition. The Registan, consisting of three grand edifices facing a central courtyard, must be one of the top 20, or perhaps even one of the top 10, historic places in the world, despite its over-restoration; one of our travelling companions said he found it more impressive than the Taj Mahal. If the corrupt uniformed police guards weren’t trying to extort money from you every two minutes, it would have been even better.

Aside from the Registan, Samarkand has many other significant monuments, including the Avenue of Mausoleums, and the tomb of Timur himself, a simple but beautiful dark jade tomb. As the story goes (according to Lonely Planet anyway), a Soviet archaeologist opened up the tomb on June 21, 1941, and not only confirmed that the body was indeed ‘lame’ in the right leg, but found an inscription saying: ‘whoever opens this will be defeated by an enemy more fearsome than I.’ Of course, at about 4am the following morning, the largest army in history – 4 million soldiers – crossed the Soviet border as part of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. (Though, since the USSR ultimately defeated Nazi Germany despite 25-30 million lives lost, the anecdote doesn’t hold up that well in the full light of history.)

Since we stayed a day less in Bukhara than we had originally planned, we managed to arrive in Tashkent last night ahead of our 2:35am flight tonight. So, after an entire year backpacking across all corners of Asia – 3.5 months on the subcontinent, 3 months in Southeast Asia, 3 months in China, and 2.5 months in Central Asia – it’s now at an end, and we think we’ve earned ourselves a ‘holiday’ in Europe. We fly to Riga tonight and will spend two weeks in the three Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia & Lithuania), where we’ve never been, before heading to Rome for our annual visit.

Almost eight years ago, in a hostel in Rome, I met the best-travelled person I have ever come across, still as true today as it was in 2001. He had been to 164 countries, a number that boggles me even more now than it did then, given that after all the travel I’ve done since, I am still almost 100 countries behind and know that I will never come close to catching up. When I asked him what his top three were, the first was his adopted home country of Ireland and his second was South Africa, “the reward for travelling through Africa.” The third was a country that I don’t think I had heard of at that time: Uzbekistan. He described it as a magical ancient Silk Road land of extraordinary historic and monumental architecture, and his photos of dazzling tiled domes confirmed it. Since then I have always wanted to visit Uzbekistan, and even as I began to travel all over the globe and see the world’s most impressive historic buildings (some examples: the Pyramids and many monuments in Egypt, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Borobudur in Indonesia, Bagan in Burma, the Taj Mahal in India, the Alhambra in Spain, the Angkor temples in Cambodia, Tikal in Guatemala, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Great Wall of China etc), the great mosques and medressas of the Timurid Empire in Uzbekistan still always seemed like part of a fabulously exotic land that, with Iran and Turkmenistan off-limits for independent travel for us (considering, in Iran’s case, Wendy’s American passport), would be our only gateway, perhaps forever, to the great ancient civilizations of Central Asia.

But as we entered Uzbekistan, we barely thought of any of this and just wanted to sleep. To cut a long story short, to apply for an Uzbekistan visa you must first obtain a Letter of Invitation, stipulating the one-month period in which you want to visit. The timing of Wendy’s UN interview and the rejection of her Tajikistan visa application caused us to rework our plans, and this, combined with our inability to change our Air Baltic flight for a second time, meant that we had a flight out of Uzbekistan on the 22nd of September but could not enter the country before the 12th. This would give us only 10 days to explore the three great historic cities (Khiva, Bukara and Samarkand) and their surroundings, and get to the capital Tashkent on the 21st for our 2:25am flight on the 22nd. So, despite our previous four nights in Kazakhstan consisting of the first two on a train, the third in a hotel in Zhanaozen with a pre-dawn alarm clock set, and the fourth on the floor at Beket-Ata with a 3:15am wakeup call, we didn’t want to miss out on any time in Uzbekistan and as such did not actually stay even one night in Aktau and instead took another overnight train from Aktau to Beyneu (arriving at 5:30am), then took an all-day train across the border on the 12th to Kungrad and then a minibus to Nukus, arriving after 9pm. We slept like babies for 10 hours through the night and woke up refreshed and ready to continue to Khiva, a two-and-a-half hour journey that seemed like barely more than a five-minute drive down the street after our recent travels across the vast expanses of Kazakhstan.

Khiva, the ‘newest’ of the great Uzbek cities, dates mostly in its current incarnation from the 17th-19th centuries. The last of the great monuments was put in place in 1910, only seven years before revolution in Russia swept the Bolsheviks to power, signalling the end of the Khiva Khanate with the creation, in 1924, of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Every account I have read of Khiva – in guidebooks, in travel literature, and by travellers on the web – describes it in a way that indicates disappointment, with one going so far as to call it ‘underwhelming’. But as we entered the old city, Ichon-Qala, from the north gate, walking past the mud-brick houses to the approaching monuments, the feeling of anticipation grew with every step. And when the great mosques and medressas revealed themselves one after another – monumental arched brick structures with blue-tiled decoration set against an equally deep blue sky – it was the opposite of the above description: I was, in fact, rather overwhelmed. The size of all the structures and the sheer volume of them contained within the walls of the old city (16 medressas, five imposing minarets and numerous mosques) is extremely impressive, and it’s hard for me to see how anyone could really think otherwise. And while it’s true that we haven’t seen Bukhara and Samarkand yet, and that once we do we might revise our thoughts on Khiva, at least for now we’ve been able to judge Khiva on its own merits, and we thought it was fantastic.

The main problem people have with Khiva is that it’s a ‘museum-city’ and seems like a ghost town, without any real people living in it. As to the latter, the explanation for a lack of a real city vibe around the monuments seemed pretty obvious to me: the area is not, and never has been, a residential one. In the northern part of the old city, away from the monuments, there are plenty of old houses and people going about their daily lives – you just need to wander around a bit to find it. As to the former, there is undoubtedly some loss of ambience in the fact that all the old mosques are now museums and not active places of worship. But from an architectural standpoint, that doesn’t change anything; to use one of the buildings I mentioned earlier as a comparable, the Hagia Sophia – which was the biggest and most splendid church in all of Christendom for over 900 years, and was then immediately converted into a mosque after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Mehmet II said his Friday prayers underneath Justinian’s dome – is also now a museum, but that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t one of the most extraordinary structures ever built by man. And so it is for Khiva and its fabulous concentration of centuries-old Islamic architecture; you could even say that its ghost-city-ness is somehow part of its appeal.

On our second day in Khiva, we hired a car and driver to take us to the region of Elliq-Qala (Fifty Fortresses), where there are in fact about 20 ancient Khorezm fortresses dotted about the countryside. We visited three forts built between the third and sixth centuries AD, and had the mud-brick ruins completely to ourselves. We scrambled around them for a while, looked out from their watchtowers over the surrounding desert-scape and then returned to Khiva, ready for the onward journey to Bukhara.

Meanwhile, some other observations of Uzbekistan in our brief time here so far:

> Having a worthless currency is one thing (and at 1890 to the dollar, the Uzbek sum certainly is worthless), but what’s ridiculous is that the highest denomination note in circulation is 1000 sum, weighing it at less than US$0.53. When we changed money for the first time, we handed over a single note (a US$100 bill), and received 278 notes in return.

> We saw some cotton, sunflower, and other crops, a fair bit of greenery, and three rivers within our first 24 hours in Uzbekistan. In three weeks in desolate Kazakhstan I cannot recall seeing a single river.

> The weather here, and indeed throughout all of Central Asia save for one rainy week in Kyrgyzstan, has been pretty much perfect. Coming to Central Asia in mid-summer, we were expecting scorching heat, having read other travellers’ blogs describing 47-degree days and the like. Instead most days are about 30 degrees with few if any clouds – just right for a blue-sky obsessed photographer.

> In Kazakhstan, we passed one person with a Lonely Planet guide on the street in Almaty, chatted briefly with two backpackers in Aktau, and passed one tour group at Sauran – and saw no other (non-Russian) foreigners in three weeks, not even at the mausoleum in Turkistan. Already, we can see that we are not the first to discover the treasures of Uzbekistan, which is packed with European tour groups, including many Italians, who bizarrely only appear to travel to Yemen, Uzbekistan, Mexico, and nowhere else. The local vendors are having trouble keeping up with all the languages; one conversation we overhead in the old city of Khiva went:Vendor: ‘You want bag? Good price.’Obviously French Tourist: ‘No, merci. No, merci.’Vendor: ‘Cinque euro.’

> There is a far more traditional way of life here than in Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, and Khiva feels more ‘Central Asian’ than anywhere we’ve been since leaving Kashgar. Islamic headware, for both men and women, is more common, and we regularly see donkey carts laden with fruits or crops riding along the roads. After the Russianness of the two previous ‘Stans, it’s nice to feel like we’re in a traditional Muslim area again. (As for my regularly scheduled Central Asian Ramadan update: as far as I can tell, here in Khiva the Muslim holy month is still being largely unobserved.)

The main reason we travelled across the length of Kazakhstan to begin with was to join Muslim pilgrims in their journey to the tomb of Beket-Ata in the desert near Aktau. Thankfully, given the time and effort expended, it was quite extraordinary – not only the highlight of our three weeks in Kazakhstan, but one of the most spiritual experiences of my life.

At dawn opposite the bazaar in Zhanaozen, two hours from Aktau, a handful of jeeps and 4WD ‘tank’ minibuses were waiting for pilgrims wanting to make the journey through the desert to Beket-Ata. We joined a local family of seven – four men and three women, including an old lady who had only one eye and could not walk without support - in a minibus, and by eight o’clock we were on the road. Leaving Zhanaozen we passed hundreds of oil drills right along the highway, more than I’ve ever seen, even having lived in the Arabian Gulf. (And I should point out here that in their own strange way, Aktau and Zhanaozen somewhat resembled the Gulf in their town planning and architecture, though still with an unmistakable Soviet feel as well in some parts.) Soon the sealed road was no more, and we drove through the desert that was, thankfully, more interesting than any we had previously seen in Kazakhstan. Here there were rock formations and plateaus in a mix of whites and pinks and everything in between, and none of the flat shrubbery that had completely dominated the landscape ever since Almaty.

Soon we reached our first stop at Shopan-Ata. We performed ablutions with the other pilgrims and were treated to the first of our five meals of the day (all provided free of charge): a surprisingly good spread of breads, meats, fruits, vegetables and sweets, much tastier and more varied than we had expected. (And as a side note: even these Muslim pilgrims were not fasting during Ramadan.) We walked through a nearby necropolis en route to the main attraction: the tomb of Shopan-Ata, contained within an ‘underground mosque’, which could perhaps more accurately be described as a cave mosque. You enter through a small door into a surprisingly homely cave-like room with carpets covering the floors and a hole in the ceiling offering light in the style of the Roman Pantheon. There we sat with the pilgrims as they prayed and performed certain rituals which seem to derive from ancient regional beliefs rather than orthodox Islam, including whispering (praying?) to a tree branch in the middle of the room and then circling it three times. We then saw the tomb of Shopan-Ata himself in an adjacent room, for which even I needed to cover my head; the mosque’s imam gave me a Muslim mosque cap for the purpose, and when I tried to return it later he wouldn’t let me. I was very thankful for the gesture and I will keep it forever as a memento that has so much more meaning than if I had bought the exact same cap at a tourist stall (and, for what it’s worth, I do like these caps anyway and have considered buying one in the past in places like Oman). It was this generosity and willingness to include us, as clearly the only tourists there that day among over 100 pilgrims, in all activities (washing, eating, praying, sleeping) that made the whole journey so special.

After returning from the mosque we were treated to another meal, and this time men and women sat in separate circles to eat the Kazakh national dish – beshbarmak – which, as essentially a huge chunk of all-inclusive goat meat on top of a noodle or rice base, was more typically Muslim than the rituals of the mosque. We ate communally with our hands, allowing me to choose the more appealing pieces of meat and leaving the fat and innards for the Kazakhs to gobble up. But when our group was given a goat skull as, I suppose, a kind of dessert treat (since not all groups got one), and after one of my company spent much effort cutting it up to get to the brain, and then offered me some, I had nowhere to hide. It was quite mushy, but not too bad.

After leaving Shopan-Ata we continued for another two hours or so to Beket-Ata, where all the pilgrims would spend the night. Not many foreigners make this trip, so we were the talk of the group; I discovered that Kazakhs, on the whole, are quite familiar with kangaroos. We were befriended by a woman from Aktau named Baktagul who spoke English reasonably well and was staying indefinitely at Beket-Ata to pray for her son, whom she described as having a ‘psychological illness’ that could only be cured by spirits and not by a medical doctor. She told us stories about Beket-Ata (she said she knew enough to fill a book), and was delighted when we saw eight goats on our way to and from the tomb, as the holy man appears as a goat to pilgrims of good hearts, and as a snake to those with bad hearts.

The tomb of Beket-Ata, an 18th-century Islamic holy man, is closed to all visitors, but the adjacent underground mosque is open, and after a walk of about half an hour from the main pilgrim complex we entered with Baktagul, her son, and another young man who the previous day had walked through the desert from Shopan-Ata to Beket-Ata, leaving at 7am and arriving at 11pm. Inside the cave, the imam sang an Arabic prayer in a beautiful, moving voice that I will not soon forget. It was incredibly surreal to hear this prayer inside an otherwise silent cave in the middle of the desert, nowhere near anywhere.

In the evening, all the pilgrims ate together (including another meal of beshbarmak, but without the brain this time), and then we slept on mattresses on the floor. At 3:30am, for reasons not explained, we were woken for breakfast and before 4am we were in the minibus and had started the return journey. By the time the sun rose we were back in Zhanaozen, and two hours later in Aktau, tired but content, awaiting our train to Uzbekistan.