Had a great day in Samarkand yesterday—wandered the hillside where the ancient city used to be (ancient meaning 700 BC - 1300 AD, as opposed to the monuments of the less ancient city (1360-1500, capital of the Timurid empire, grand mosques and medressas and tombs, much blue tile, much geometric cleverness)), saw particularly fine mosques, medressas, and tombs, three different shades of blue tile, and some really freakin’ clever geometric cleverness, and had dinner at my guesthouse with the Italian Egyptologist and a French urban planner. We talked about global warming and Al Gore. I made everyone’s day by saying I was optimistic about Obama. Today I spent mostly in transit, and saying a rapid hello and tentative goodbye to Stomach Ailment #3. (Collect the whole set!) I’m in Tashkent for the night and leave for Istanbul at 3:30 in the morning.
I’m in Samarkand. It’s a bigger city than Bukhara, and additionally the grand monuments are spread throughout the city instead of being concentrated in one heavily restored and sanitized Old Town, so it feels a bit like I’ve returned to the real world from a theme park. Although putting it that way isn’t fair to Bukhara’s old town—as I was eating dinner last night, some kids were playing soccer in the square between two grand 17th century medressas with turquoise domes—and it’s also a little over-charitable to the tourist scene in Samarkand. Finding contemplative, atmospheric spots takes some doing, because if you sit in one spot for any length of time in the Registan, the square with not two but three grand 17th century medressas on it—either someone comes over to ask you “Which country you from? France?”, which is always about twenty seconds from “Mister, you come in my shop, you like, you buy,” or alternatively a policeman plops down, starts asking typical policeman questions (how long in Samarkand, what other cities are you going to, what hotel are you in, etc etc) and then segues into an invitation to climb a minaret that he can unlock for a small fee. Very entrepreneurial culture. The one who plopped down next to me today wanted to look through my Lonely Planet guide, and found the part where it says, “In the Registan police will eagerly offer to unlock minarets for you—don’t pay more than 2000S.” He pointed at it and said “Look, that is me!” Yes, yes, you are an eager policeman, yes, and this mode of tourism is getting kind of self-referential. Have I mentioned that I have not met _any_ tourist here from any country (tour groups notwithstanding) who did not have the 2007 Lonely Planet Central Asia guide? None of them have met any who didn’t have it either—I’ve been asking. But I’ll see if I can keep the connection alive long enough to post a couple of photos to show you what is making it all worthwhile.
* I can access my blog again, so the paragraph breaks are back!
* Yesterday I took a taxi across the Kyzylkum Desert from Nukus to Bukhara The car broke down on a rise overlooking the Amu Darya River, with Turkmenistan stretching out on the opposite bank. A pretty romantic place to break down, really. Daewoo Nexias apparently have a little thinger in a special hatch under the back seat that periodically need to be banged on with a pair of pliers, but no amount of pliers-banging made it go this time. But the driver’s brother showed up after an hour, we piled into his car, and left him there in the desert with the abandoned truck stop and stray dogs working on the thinger.
* Toward sunset, there were CAMELS. Not tourist camels either like in China, honest-to-god camels with brands on their butts grazing in the shrublands. They have emotive lips. They don’t think blowing trash tastes good but they will give it a try.
* Most restaurants here don’t have menus. There’s only about five kinds of food you might reasonably ask for in a restaurant, so they just say, “no menu, what you like? soup?”
* Bukhara is full of Islamic splendor and—in most but not all places detracting a bit from what Naomi calls the devotional juju—craft shops. Many a craft shop. But just as many an ancient mosque with a towering front gate with intricate sky-blue tile designs and mystifying swirls and geometry, and a huge inner courtyard lined with demure, blue-tiled archways. Which contain, mainly, craft shops.
* It is probably about 100 degrees. The Uzbeks don’t think it’s so hot. A week ago, I’m told, it was 110-120 in the shade. Meanwhile, I’m struggling not to drip onto the keyboard.
I’m at an unstable dialup connection in northern Uzbekistan (isn’t that just the king of catch-all excuses?) so no long reflections, but here I am. In Uzbekistan. I like it. Cheese exists here, which makes me very happy, and people have a huge variety of faces. People have been mingling here from so far away for so long that there is one hell of a gene pool. The history museum in Tashkent had artifacts of Zoroastrianism, early Buddhism, Hindu dieties, a Roman-ish sun god, and of course Islam, all found here within a fairly short time; and accordingly, as you walk down the street you see faces that seem to say Turkish, old Eastern European, gaunt Chinese, dark Asian faces that make me think of Malaysia or Polynesia, faces that make me think of North Africa, and some that I have no associations with at all: they’re from here, is all. Tomorrow I spend in transit and then onward to the Timurid splendor of Bukhara and Samarkand. I’m skipping some steps—maybe I’ll come back to them with a better internet connection in a day or two.
Wow. The Buddhist caves at Mogao, near Dunhuang (where I still am, contentedly eating melons) are—wow. They were all built between 300 and 1300 AD, way out in the desert. Unlike the ones I saw last week these caves aren’t niches in the cliff wall but _caves_, with entryways and floors and vaulted ceilings, every inch of them covered with murals surrounding the main images. The colors are amazing, ochre and vivid blues, althoug the flesh tones have all oxidized to a mysterious dark gray, so everyone looks like Krishna. Most of the caves are off limits completely, and even the ones they give tours of you aren’t allowed to stay in very long, because the CO2 and humidity in your breath—or something—are damaging. I took a few photos in the exhibition hall nearby, which had re-creations of several (you can’t even say the word “camera” in the caves themselves) but the download cable is in the wrong bag. Oh well, I’ll try to post something once I find an internet cafe in Uzbekistan, where I’m headed tonight. In the meantime, you can get the spirit of the place a bit from Wikipedia: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Mural_in_273th_Cave_of_Mogao_Caves.png
I just saw the Milky Way above the sand dunes behind my guesthouse here in Dunhuang. I like Dunhuang. But that is not the number 1 astronomical wonder of the last couple of days. You can read all about number 1 astronomical wonder by going to reuters.com, searching for “eclipse” and clicking the article by Lucy Hornby: I watched it with Lucy, her fellow reporters, and her astronomer friends from the fort in Jiayuguan. There are some good photos of it there too. I’m getting bitten by too many mosquitoes to say any more about it right now. But, wow. I can see why people become eclipse chasers. Next July on the coast east of Shanghai, anyone?
I’m in Jiayuguan. I have 1) fried fava beans to eat (which actually is something I eat in Seattle too—I get ‘em at Uwajimaya), 2) an internet cafe with machines that can talk to my camera, 3) a good lead on a location to watch the eclipse from, and I went to the freakin’ Great Wall of China today, so things are pretty peachy. I just uploaded some scenes from Lanzhou. And I updated my one-a-day flickr set too. Jiayuguan, by the way, is the end of the Great Wall, the site of an enormous fort from the 1500s traditionally considered the end of China, the end of civilization: if you fell out of favor with court and were banished into the wilderness, Jiayuguan is the place you would have been cast out from. The fort now has about six gift shops in it, along with tours groups from all over (including one consisting entirely of solar physicists: their annual meeting is here this week, to coincide with the eclipse). The desert and mountains go for a long way in the wilderness direction. And a featureless dry plain goes for a long way in the “civilization” direction too.
