Chapter 6
ONE STEPPE AT A TIME
[Thomas Carlyle] said he loved God but really worshipped Timurlane
.
R
EBECCA
W
EST
B
LACK
L
AMB AND
G
REY
F
ALCON
MAY-AUGUST 2001
In the West these days a wheelchair does not make you conspicuous, it's practically become part of the social furniture. New buildings are accommodating, and so for the most part are people on the street. No longer are you likely to attract unwanted attention of either the hostile or patronising kind. Not so once you find yourself in Central Asia, where the only âwheelies' to be seen in public tend to sell cigarettes or play mouth organs. Begging is the price my fellow movers and shakers have to pay just to be allowed out of doors.
In time I came to see that the free-wheeler cruising down the streets of Almaty, Osh or Tashkent faced two types of problem in his interaction with the locals: one perceptual, the other conceptual. Put simply, the perceptual difficulty was that people unused to sharing the pavement with wheelchairs actually failed to see me bearing down. It being not only bad manners but counterproductive to barge through, the intuitive charioteer finds himself adapting to the city's pedestrian rhythmsâin some societies pavement users tend to go in straight lines, in others they weave all over the placeâand glides or slaloms along accordingly.
The conceptual difficulty is more intractable: the beholder sees you, all right, but thinks you must conform to his only previous experience of people in rolling chairs. (Think dogs: a society that had only ever known silky terriers would do a double take on seeing its first Dobermann.) The odd taxidriver would refuse the fare until I hopped into the passenger seat and showed my bemused chauffeur how the wheelchair dismantled.
Both disregard and false regard have their amusing side. It was on 30 May thatâfor the first of many times during my crossing of Central Asiaâsomeone approached me on the street and offered me money. Shocked, I handed it back. Every few days the same thing happened. Didn't these people know that I, a Western tourist, was hundreds of times richer than they? Apparently not. One time I was so annoyed at being mistaken for a beggar while minding my own business that I snapped in fractured Russian
âNyet invalidâtourist!'
It took a kindly Kazakh to explain: âYou are in the Muslim world now. These people are practising
zakat.'
One of the five sacred obligations of every good Muslim is to extend charity to those in need, and obviously someone who cannot walk is an object of abject dependence. But how blessed can it be to receive charity under false pretences?
From Bukhara in July I emailed a New Zealand friend for advice. Back came these truly wise words: âTake the money and distribute it to the really needy.'
âExotic' sums up Central Asia to a T. Even before I left Australia, the friend of a friend gave me a commission: send back a T-shirt, or any other article, with the word âUzbekistan' on it. There is something mysterious, perhaps other-worldly, in the very word. There is no vast tract of Planet Earth, I suppose, about which we in the lands of plenty know less. Even rural China or South America seems more familiar. Yet a mere 700 years ago the most far-reaching conquerors since Alexander the Great swept through in the fourth century BCâGenghis Khan and Timurlane, ancestor of India's Mogul dynastyâpassed this way and put the very idea of Asia as we think of it today on the world map.
History brought Central Asia to world prominence on the hooves of vengeance, with a decisive loss by the Chinese to the Arabs in AD 751. The name of that battle, Talas, ought to be as familiar to us as Gettysburg or Stalingrad. But the past is another country to most of us now, so how can we go there except on the wings of imagination?
Certain things that everyone ought to know about Central Asia are buried under the sands of time. For everyone who has heard of Homer and the
Iliad
, how many know thatâat 14 580 linesâthe longest epic in world literature, the national epic of a nomadic people,
Manas
, comes from Kyrgyzstan?
At Merv, now in south-eastern Turkmenistan, up to 1.3 million civilians were massacred in a single week when Tuluy, a son of Genghis Khan, invaded in AD 1221. The sword was his chosen weapon of mass destruction. War on terror? Defence of civilisation? Excuse me. But the blade of creation, not just destruction, had plunged into the heart of the world's biggest continent 500 years before then, at Talas, when the defeated Chinese taught the victorious Arabs how to make paper and manufacture silk long before Marco Polo. Civilisationâin the form of those numerals the whole world uses today, algebra, medicine and civil orderâwas at its height here in the early centuries of the second Christian millennium and, while Europe groped its way through the Dark Ages, the triumph of Asian commerceâalong the Silk Roadâwas its crowning glory. A sure token of advanced culture, the necessities of life coexisted alongside little luxuries. I have never forgotten once reading that Timurlane's capital, Samarkand, boasted lemonade fountains.
So what is it like today, more than a decade after the last (Soviet) empire ebbed away? Impressions, and odd encounters, are all the fleeting visitor has to relate, adding up, if he is lucky, to a sketch rather than a detailed panorama. Here is mine.
KAZAKHSTAN: 28 MAYâ17 JUNE
DAY 34 (3 JUNE): ALMATY
My 47th birthday is spent in the well-shaded old capital of the world's ninth biggest country, whose mountainous backdrop is every bit as spectacular as Denver's or Tehran's. Spruced-up and reopened, Zenkov Cathedral sits in the centre of Panfilov Park, surrounded by balloon sellers, pony rides and refreshment stalls.
DAY 41 (10 JUNE): ASTANA
Today is the third birthday of the world's youngest capital. Formerly Akmola, this unprepossessing city of the steppes was chosen by President Nursultan Nazarbayev who rechristened it with his customary inspiration. (Astana means âCapital'.) At noon in the postmodern city square, a brass band strikes up something slightly non-Kazakhâa medley by Abba. A massed dance troupe in virginal white, accompanied by men dressed as harlequins, sways to those exotic Nordic rhythms.
Mamma mia!
Nearby, a more authentically Kazakh spectacle is gearing up. Outside a yurt full of dignified elders in colourful costumes, highlighted by aquamarine caps and sky-blue vests, actors clad in the raiment of a medieval khan's courtâwarriors in chain mail, maidens in gold-studded jerkinsâstrut their stuff.
That night, in the stadium just 200 metres from my hotel, I sit among 60 000 citizens to sample fireworks, songs and humour from Russia's most famous entertainers, flown in from Moscow. Anita Su, a Korean singer, is the toast of the Federation while Efim Shefrin is a clown (in the complimentary sense). As they are staying in the same hotel as me I am honoured to meet them both, but the evening is spoilt by snivelling paeans of praise for Nazarbayev the demigod-president. After an hour of this, I turn to the stony-faced woman on my right and whisper in a sort of Franco-Russian,
âStalinisme!'
She blanches.
DAY 46 (15 JUNE): HOURS SPENT IN A VAN FROM LAKE BALKASH TO THE BISHKEK TURN-OFF
Hitchhiking on Kazakhstan's outback roads reminds me of what private motorists hereabouts have to endure. Our van is pulled over at five roadside police checkpoints. At three of them, the coppers steal money from the driver before letting him pass: the most daring drives his police wagon onto the road and siphons off his petrol.
KYRGYZSTAN: 17â26 JUNE
DAY 48 (17 JUNE): BISHKEK
Unanswered emails have me wondering whether to visit Tajikistan (civil war ended in 1997; advisories say it's unsafe; I await local advice). A BBC news bulletin says 15 German aid workers, an American and a Tajik driver kidnapped in a remote corner of the country have all been released unharmed after pleas by the Tajik President and his â get this â Minister for Emergency Situations.
DAYS 49â52 (18â21 JUNE): BISHKEK
I stay with a Kyrgyz family whose ground-floor room was adapted for a wheelchair-bound grandmother who has since, um, moved on. They're a friendly family but we have almost no language in common. The wife is a raspberry addict: the fridge is full of raspberry juice, desserts are made of raspberries or crimson jellies.
DAY 53 (22 JUNE): CHOLPON-ATA, LAKE ISSYK-KUL
My guidebook said that here, on the second highest lake in the world, an old Soviet Navy cutter regularly sailed up and down the waterway. Now that was rich: a naval vessel in a landlocked country. How were the enemy ships going to launch their attack? By being wheeled over the mountains from China?
My idea was to enjoy a pleasant lake cruise. Captain Victor let drop that a Chinese delegation was expected later in the day. Was this a war party, and could anyone gatecrash? Six hours' patience was rewarded with an invitation to join in.
I turned out to be in the midst of a high-powered meeting between Li Yenming, the Security Minister from China's troubled Xinjiang province, and the Speaker of the Kyrgyz Parliament, Esen Ismailov. Not for the first time, I had the distinct feeling my wheelchair got me into places where others would fear to tread.
As the evening wore on, Li became drunker and drunkerânot, I noticed, on fiery Chinese
mao-tai
, but on vodkaâand led us all in increasingly discordant attempts at compulsory group singing. Through his English-conversant translator, I coyly asked the minister while the combined effects of the vodka, his disco arrhythmia and the sea-swaying of the boat had him off guard, âHow does your government propose to deal in future with anti-Beijing dissent from the Uighur Muslims?' âPeacefully!' he barked.
Diplomacy followed: âChina has fifty-six minorities and we are all members of one big family. One of the members cannot leave the family. We will not allow this.'
DAY 54 (23 JUNE): BISHKEK TO OSH BY AIR
At US$33, this flight is one worth breaking the surface-travel rule for. A 38-seater Yak-40 less than half full should make for a perfect trip. Certainly these small planes are a lot easier to board. I just position the chair next to the swing-out door ⦠and swing myself in.
But service standards are not world-class: this is the only flight I've ever been on where the stewardess keeps to her seat, spending most of the time munching her dinner. Asked in sign language when the passengers will be served, she makes it clear with a smug shake of the head that food on Kyrgyzstan Airlines is strictly for the crew.
DAY 55 (24 JUNE): OSH
I tour Jayma Bazaar. There's a twinge of referred pain when my guide, Zahid, explains that strange pipeline objects in the market are wooden catheters attached to a boy's penis before he goes to bed, to provide an effective antidote to bed-wetting. Great, I muse, so long as he doesn't turn in his sleep. Ouch!
There are red pepper, fennel and root remedies like those in a Chinese herbal-medicine shop. A table full of âlucky charms'âthe most popular line keeps evil spirits from harming babiesâis a timely reminder that superstition lives happily enough alongside established religion here, as elsewhere.
DAY 56 (25 JUNE): OSH
Kickboxing at the
palvankhana
(hippodrome). The wheelchair gains me admittance inside the stadium perimeter just 15 metres from the âring', a steel octagon in which the fightersâcombining kickboxing with Central Asian freestyle wrestling and gentlemanly fistfightingâpummel each other until one submits or is dragged out by white-coated medicos. I ask a fellow spectator why there are so many soldiers around the stadium. He says calmly, âTheir big fear is a bomb going off.' Great. Instead they find their hands full putting down violence â not in the octagon but in the grandstands, between overenthusiastic fans.
UZBEKISTAN: 26 JUNEâ3 JULY
DAY 58 (27 JUNE): ANDIJAN
From my taxi I see a building with the âSydney 2000' logo and ask the driver to make a detour. It turns out this is the national Olympic squad's training camp and not only are the Olympians all present, but oneâa Sydney boxing gold medallistâagrees to be photographed with me. Mindful that Uzbek President Islom Karimov had promised a U$$100 000 prize to any gold-garnering compatriot, I ask Mohammad Kodir Abdullaev whether he is looking forward to Athens. âNo,' he says in halting English, âI am gone professional. Las Vegas.'
DAY 60 (29 JUNE): TASHKENT
Hotel Torun wins the prize for world's worst hotel hands down. Why should it take 45 minutes to descend nine floors in the lift? Why should a request for mineral water, made to the Russian-style âfloor lady' parked in the foyer, be turned down? Why should the same
babushka
, when eventually given money to make the purchase, just pocket it after pretending to fetch the supposedly non-existent bottle? Why doesn't reception care about any of this? Why am I dying from dehydration and diarrhoea? At least the last question has an answer: because I trusted the Uzbek barbecue skills of the
shashlik
vendors outside the Torun. A meaty obituary headline floats through my delirium: âUnderdone to Death'. By morning, the food poisoning has passed through me, so to speak, and I move to a friendly private hotel in the suburbs.
DAY 63 (2 JULY): TASHKENT
Before September 11 there were three types of tourist destination in the world: countries any holidaymaker would visit without a second thought; countries whose main interest was their âedge'; and no-go areas. Officially, Tajikistan was in the third category but, from what people in neighbouring Uzbekistan told me, I thought it probably qualified for an upgrade. Today my residual doubts are dispelled by a most reassuring document: a personal security guarantee faxed to me from the Tourism Minister. This year the country is getting about two tourists a day. I feel privileged. After this, how could I not go?