The long road to Khiva
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.)
Tags: Asia, Central Asia, Khiva, Uzbekistan
Nick