The city of Tamerlane

Well, we made it!
The whole trip I’ve waited for Samarkand and everything has been a prelude and a little tease to the big grand finale and it didn’t disappoint.
When Carol was reading the Lonely Planet book about Central Asia and read the part about Samarkand and Tamerlane she experienced a reverberation of interest bringing back memories of poetry she read in her youth about “The Golden Road to Samarkand” and the life of the magnificent Tamerlane. She can’t remember if it was Tennyson or Kipling, but no matter the recollection was there and it thrilled her to finally see what her mind’s eye had always imagined.
What a wonderful place it is. It just oozes history with its own special buzz. We saw great mosques and medrassas and mausoleums in Khiva and Bukhara, but the whole Registan square is so massive and majestic that everything else pales in comparison. Our hotel is, of course, located away from the main area so walking around and exploring is not really possible. We only have one night here which is a real shame, but Carol and I plan on coming back here after we finish the tour in Tashkent, so we’re not too stressed about it.
We have a local guide, a Ukranian woman who is very knowledgeable about the city and has a lot of inside information which is interesting, but we’re really on information overload at this point, and some simple wandering on our own would be nice. But she does take us to areas that we might miss otherwise and that’s very cool. Little alleys that lead to a beautiful mosque which could be arrived at by a larger avenue make it all worthwhile.
Samarkand is one of the world’s oldest cities and yet at about half a million inhabitants has all the bells and whistles of a major city. Like Khiva and Bukhara, Samarkand is definitely a Central Asian city. Tashkent was so European that it’s easy to forget where you are, but Samarkand still has the sense of the ancient. You’re just surrounded by it in the old part of the city. Tall blue-tiled minarets and arches beckon and just sitting in front of the Registan was awe-inspiring. Naturally we all had to pose for photos with the kids, but that’s just part of the drill these days.
Samarkand was the economic and cultural center of Central Asia. Amir Temur, or Tamerlane, as he’s know in the trades, built this city to reflect his power and sense of organization. It later became the political head of the entire area as well, but because it was the intellectual center it drew the best minds from all of Central Asia. This is where it was happening. This is where you needed to be in the 13th-14th centuries. Apparently it was of near mythical status.
The Silk Road’s divergent paths all joined here. Different routes could and would converge on Samarkand like the spokes which stretch out from Place d’Etoile in Paris. Like all major cities of the empires throughout the ages, Rome, Athens, St. Petersburg, Samarkand had that type of status and drawing power. Alexander came here and set up shop long before Tamerlane, but even then it had that kind of draw and pull.
The restoration of the ancient buildings to resemble the actual structures of the 13th century is very impressive and, surprise, surprise, surprise, the Soviets restored many of them with great care and dedication to reflect the history is certainly commendable on their part, and since the breakup the Uzbeks have continued the great work. The city wasn’t totally trashed by the ravages of time and history, but when you look at photographs taken in the late 19th and early 20th century you can see how badly time treated the city after the fall of the Mongols.
I won’t dribble on and on about the city, but if you get online and look at some photos of the Registan and of Samarkand in general, you’ll see what I mean. Suffice it to say that Carol and I truly saw Samarkand as the highlight of the trip. Who knows, maybe it has some pull from a past life but I really had a sense of completion after being here.
We toured the city for about five hours and were pretty tired, but we had made arrangements to meet with a Servas host. We weren’t looking for accommodations since we already had our hotel, but some local contact and understanding about what we were seeing was certainly helpful. Anatoly and his wife Irina were affable hosts. Anatoly is wholly and totally dedicated to the cause of peace and has formed a Peace network here in Uzbekistan. He developed a peace museum which reflects the world’s conflicts and shows how they could be resolved by forward thinking people. His displays show the devastation that war brings to people’s lives, and he is one of the most admirable individuals we’ve met through
Servas. Our hosts in Namibia were of the same ilk.
We watched a presentation he had developed on the peace movement, had tea and coffee and just chatted for a while. Irina doesn’t speak English so Anatoly did the translations back and forth. They had asked us if we wanted to stay for dinner, but we declined saying that we’d had a big lunch and the tea and cakes they served were sufficient. After chatting for a time we started to make our farewells and Irina came in and announced that dinner was almost ready and did we want rice or noodles? We were really tired, it had been a very long day on a non-air-conditioned bus followed by five hours of touring, and we just wanted a shower and some time out. We felt badly, but we had said we didn’t want anything to eat. She looked very disappointed and I don’t know if it was a language thing or what, but we left a little sad about the mix-up.
We said goodbye to our little Japanese birder. She seemed disappointed that we wouldn’t run into each other again and almost knocked me over with her big hug. It just reinforces my belief that we really are all one in this world and I just don’t get this nationalism and border thing that seems to predominate in culture and society.
I think we’re all just wearing out. Alan got sick with the you-know-what and stayed back at the hotel for our final morning tour of Samarkand. We had time off in China and it was great to have an afternoon where we could rest, stroll, sit and people-watch, and just do what our minds and bodies wanted/needed. But since the day we left Kashgar, when was that 2010? We’ve been on the run. No time to relax, no time for reflection, no time to recharge the batteries, literally and figuratively, and it’s beginning to wear a little thin on us all. Lise and Saci have been hacking their way across Uzbekistan, and John’s got something for the second time on the trip. Carol continues to recover, but even she with all her strength of character and body is feeling it.
So with a mixture of “Here we go again,” and also wonderment we went back out with our local guide, and visited more spots. Everyone knows that we’ll not see the likes of this again and is game to get on with the program, but there’s a general feeling that we do not have enough time in the Stans. Most feel we had too much time in China and not enough here. It feels extremely rushed. The Silk Road starts in Xi’an and since it’s an Aussie company and this kind of a trip is not the sort of journey that people do for their first time on foreign soil, most of them had already been to Beijing. The feeling is: start the trip in Xi’an with the same amount of days scheduled for this trip, and if people want to do Beijing, do it as an add-on at the beginning. Basically that’s what Carol and I did by flying in two days early. But nobody’s happy about the rush we’ve been experiencing.
Our bus took us to the sights and guess what? The a.c. didn’t work. Now you’ve seen nothing until you get a look at overly tired travelers on too tight schedule being rushed around in 90 degree heat and no way to cool down. A mini riot was about to ensue until Dilshot told us that he had informed the company that if they couldn’t fix the bus we had to have another one. I think he worried about his personal safety at this point. He was told that they just had to get one part and it would be taken care of. Okay, everybody was saying, then why wasn’t this part taken care of before? At any rate, while we were walking from sight to sight they supposedly were fixing the bus. Well, at noon when it was time to hit the road we were told that they only needed one part to make it all right. Is this Yogi Berra time? Déjà vu all over again? We sat on the curb while they worked on the bus. We were told it would be ready in five minutes. The most prevalent mechanical method seemed to be a hammer consistently banged on a certain part of the engine. No computer read out here. After about 20 minutes, we were told that it would be ready in 3-4 minutes. Smart ass Jim said that was improvement, since we were down from five.
Eventually it was pronounced fixed and grumbling about our prospects we got on the bus and while it didn’t work well, it worked well enough and we were off to Tashkent for our last night’s dinner and our last night as a group.