Some pictures I omitted from earlier Uzbekistan posts.
Da Svidanya, Samarkand
Today is my last full day in Samarkand. I have already seen the sights I wanted to see, so i am taking it a bit easy today. I walked for miles to find this lone internet cafe and I might head out of town to see this one rather ancient mausoleum, but other than that, I think I’ll just lay around.
I did not sleep at all last night, as i was quite ill. I am feeling better today, just weak. All I have been able to eat is tea and melons.
So, tomorrow, Friday, i catch the 12:00 noon train for Bukhara, which is supposed to be about a 3 hour journey.
I will check in when i can, internet access permitting.
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The Old Town
One thing that is odd about Samarkand is that because of their vast tourism, apparently, they have really cleaned up the areas around the Registan. It doesn’t feel western, but it definitely feel new and tidy and organized. But I had heard that there was an old town worth exploring…if you can find it. What the city officials have done is built walls around the old parts of the city where the people actually live, so that tourists can be spared seeing the poverty.
I walked up and down this one street for quite a while, watching. I finally saw kids with modified prams stacked high with non (bread) coming out of a door in the wall. I stepped through and it was a different world.
Unpaved, uneven streets tangled together and lined with broken and haphazard dwellings. Kids walking around with non on their heads or carrying buckets of water. Corner stores guarded by odd looking chickens, broken windows, watermelon rinds and once beautiful mosques that have fallen into disrepair.
It is really wonderful. All of the kids were very friendly and wanted me to take their picture. As i was walking past one house, i was beckoned inside to watch how they make the round, golden non by sticking it to the ceiling of a wood burning oven.
It all felt quite authentic and was preferable to the more sanitized Samarkand that the city has put on display.
A note about the bread. I had last said that I didn’t care for it, but I must issue a retraction. There are various versions and, while i didn’t like the first one i tried, i have found another which is magnificent. It has the consistency of dinner rolls fresh from the oven, but with a slightly chewier texture. It’s very good indeed.
And they must bake thousands of them everyday. All day long, kids are schlepping the bread from the old town to the market, by pram, wheel barrow, and bicycle. The entire old city smells of baking bread.
I don’t how they can possibly consume them all (although this may help to explain the hearty girth of most of the women here).
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Registan
Samarkand is amazing. It is a bit like Luxor, in the sense that it is just bursting with impossibly large, old and jaw droppingly beautiful monuments and mausoleums.
Obviously, the first place I had to go was the Registan. This is really the whole reason i am here, to see this collection of mosques and medrassas. It did not disappoint.
It is really hot here. It feels much hotter than Tashkent. The landscape is very deserty. On the train ride here, I watched as the land went from green and fertile to dusty and brown, with the odd, irrigated plot of land growing corn or green…something. It is definitely much more rural out here. People riding donkeys and tending to flocks of goats.
On my first evening here, I spent it handing out with Furkat at the hotel. We drank tea and ate bread and tomatos and cucumbers. I smoked a cigar. He told me does not smoke or drink, but then, minutes later he offered me cognac from a black bottle with cyrillic writing. “It is from Moldova,” he told me with what seemed like pride. We each had a glass of the vile liquor and i went to bed.
I have only met a couple of other travelers here. I met a couple from Colorado who have been on the road for one year. Staying at my hotel are two Japanese girls, each traveling solo, with whom I shared breakfast and as many stories as were possible given their limited English and my non-existent Japanese. It is nice to see other, solo female travelers.
It is so hot here that during the late afternoon, i retire to my room to enjoy the AC and have a nap, leaving me free for night time wanderings.
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Samarkand Express
Forgive the absence, but internet is very difficult to find in Samarkand. I have been here 3 days so far and today was the first day I found an internet cafe – and it took me over an hour to get here. Anyway, on to updates.
I left Tashkent on the Sharq Express train which left early in the morning. I was running a bit late, so I decided to take a taxi to the train station. They have a really good system for taxis here; there are the proper, marked taxis that you can call or hail and will cost a small fortune (they wanted the equivalent of $5US to take me to the station). Then there are the regular guys in regular cars (almost always Ladas). You just stand on the side of the road and they stop and you offer them money to take you where you want to go. It’s actually very sensible and they took me to the train stn for about $1.
The train ride was supposed to take 3.5 hours, but due to work being done on the tracks, it took over 6hrs. I was in first class, which is very comfortable and had little tvs at every seat. Unfortunately the little tvs only played on type of movie: Gangster movies in russian where russians with cold blue eyes and black leather car coats shot each other with silenced pistols….Then again, maybe it was the news. A few guys had their tvs cranked way up. The ride would have been fine, except that the slow speed of the train meant that they didn’t have enough power to run the AC, so it was very very hot. Despite that, and the odd cockroach, I found the ride very relaxing.
I arrived at the train station in Samarkand and immediately I could tell that it would be very different from Tashkent. Gone were the women in western dress; here all the women are wearing long, patterned, shapeless dresses with headscarves. The men wore the traditional square beanie hats. (I don’t know what they are called.)
I hired a taxi and headed to my hotel/B&B. Just driving through the city and catching glimpses of the monuments I had traveled so far to see made me giddy with elation, until I finally blurted out, “This is so fucking cool!”
Hotel Furkat is in one of the Old Town enclaves and from the outside is nothing more than a door in a wall on a dusty, unpaved road. But behind the door there is a beautiful courtyard and an enormous tree around which the 3 story hotel wraps itself. The tree pokes its branches on to each of the balconies, making the whole thing feel like a tree house. When I arrived, I tried to explain that I had a reservation, but the owner, Furkat, said “tea first” and ushered me towards one of the delightful chaikhanas that line the perimeter of the courtyard.
After some tea and apricots, I checked in to my room, which is sort of a tacky collection of odd furniture, shiny wallpaper and jeweled curtains. I then went out to wander.
Impressions of Samarkand to follow.
