Monthly Archives: October 2012

In Sickness & In Health (Or: Qantas Pyjama Power!!)

Posted on by

Here’s a strange thing: pretty much ever since James and I got engaged, we’ve both been ill. Not anything life threatening of course, just a string of various low level traveler maladies that have had us both (a) feeling distinctly under the weather and (b) being about as far from glamorous as it’s possible for a newly engaged couple to be. Frankly I’m rather relieved the question has already been popped and cannot be un-popped….

Being sick on the road, particularly in relatively underdeveloped countries, leads to some deep, philosophical thoughts allowing us, after much debate, to come up with the following exhaustive definition.

“Luxury” is:

  • A room warm enough to take off at least one of your five layers in. Failing that, plenty of bedclothes
  • With a double bed large enough for both of us, with a real mattress
  • Sheets on said bed. If you’re feeling particularly kind, make them clean sheets
  • A toilet. Which flushes. In a bathroom which is all our very own
  • Toilet paper. Of the non Soviet variety (it’s definitely eco-friendly, put it that way)
  • And last but not least (did I mention we weren’t well), the ability to dispose of said toilet paper in the toilet without inadvertently flooding half of Central Asia’s sewage systems (no, we haven’t….yet…)

Suffice to say that, for the moment at least, we are not living in luxury. That’s ok though, because we have a secret weapon (you thought I was going to say “each other”, didn’t you?).

We have our Qantas pyjamas.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. When times get tough, the tough get into their Qantas pyjamas. These are a rather nice cotton jersey affair in a muted mud brown colour – VERY tasteful – which started out life as rather high class numbers, provided solely to Qantas’ first class passengers for their extra snuggly comfort. They have subsequently suffered something of a fall from grace: nowadays, we use them basically as shields against all unpleasantness. To expound:

  • Bed has no sheets? No problem – Qantas pyjamas will shield you from contact with stray foreign body hair
  • Bed has sheets but of questionable provenance and cleanliness? Qantas pyjamas will protect you from venereal disease
  • Room is glacial, bed has one thin coverlet? Qantas pyjamas are guaranteed to prevent hypothermia
  • Frequent visitor to the shared toilet? Qantas pyjamas ensure you make that repeated trip in style
  • Fiance starting to look somewhat askance at your pale, tired face? Qantas pyjamas make you look both cute and (I’m quietly confident in this) pretty darn SEXY

Thank God we’ve got them. You see the whole “sickness and health” lark doesn’t actually kick in until the wedding bells have rung. We’re not worried though.

We’ve got Qantas Pyjama Power!

Yagshemash!

Posted on by

Kazakhstan is Best Country in the World!
Well, we are in Kazakhstan at last. For avid students of our route, we have left Uzbekistan, are avoiding risky Tajikistan, are heading to Turkistan (a town in Kazakhstan – keep up) and are then off to Kyrgyzstan, skirting Pakistan and Afghanistan. Phew!

We crossed the Uzbek / Kazakh border in our usual post-engagement style – symbolically walking hand in hand into no mans’ land and the future. Incidentally, the first time we did this we made it about ten yards before we were told that walking was banned in no mans’ land and we were shoved into a minibus, both of us jammed into the honorific front seat with all our luggage. We were then driven off at speed with our faces squashed into the backboard by our huge rucksacks. I’m not sure what this signifies but I’m sure it’s very romantic, right?

So, Kazakhstan eh? It’s an odd place. Not Borat odd, but…

A simple borderland misunderstanding over a bus fare and a $5 bill led to us being rescued by a deeply helpful Kazakh mother and son duo. They changed our dollars into Tenge, paid our bus fare, invited us to stay in their home and, when we politely refused a bed for the night from perfect strangers, tried to give us money for our travels. One life story later “I was once married to a Kyrgyz girl; the Krygyz are all very ugly people” they arranged for a tiny babushka with few teeth and less English to guide us on the next stage of our journey. We were headed to the town of Turkistan (two hours bus ride away), and after ten minutes of wandering back and forth she safely delivered us to the Turkistan Guest House, gave us a gold toothed grin and ambled on.

Finally arriving in Turkistan we headed to the local fort / mausoleum complex to be set upon by … a teenage bride and groom, a videographer with two cameras and about forty shouting men in armour with spears. The language barrier is a wonderfully permeable thing, but it took us some time to work out that (i) the couple were shooting their wedding video separate from the date of their wedding (ii) their mate with the video camera thought it would be hilarious if Lucy and I were to pretend to be foreign news correspondents reporting on the wedding of the century and (iii) the men with spears were separately rehearsing for a feature film and of course we were welcome – what was it about the weapons and shouting that made us think otherwise?

We retired hurt with our brains melting to a hotel room complete with soothing bottles of beer and Game of Thrones on iTunes. Next stop, the vowel-challenged republic of Kyrgyzstan!

Background Frenzy!

Posted on by

In all the excitement recently, I have completely forgotten to post up the various background pictures that have been adorning the top of our website over the last few weeks. The purpose of sticking these up was to serve as a high level / retrospective summary of our route (as well as the usual ooh-pretty-pictures reasons) so here you are.

I have also rediscovered the “random header” function on the blog, which I will turn on for the next few days. This should allow you to see a different header image from some point along the road every time you refresh your browser (and hopefully won’t crash our server). Enjoy!

Flying Visit to Beijing

The Forbidden City. Unsurprisingly, the huge and surprising Tibetan Stupa in the middle of it is “closed for refurbishment”

Start of the Silk Road in Turkmenistan

“Never buy the first carpet you see”. Unfortunately, this was one of the first – and one of the finest – we ever saw, and we didn’t buy it.

Think “The London Eye” but huge, gold, and in the desert. Bingo!

As Lucy so succinctly put it: “UUUUUUUUUURGHHH”

Artistique! (actually the outside of a camel pen, and it smells less good than it looks)

The first sight of the Darvaza gas crater, now my new favourite place

“Push me in! Come on, I dare you!”

After the event, contemplating the future. This picture is SO going up on our wall at home

Architectural Overload in Uzbekistan

Is it a carpet? Is it a ferris wheel? No, it’s a (stunningly beautiful) tiled roof

HUGE writing across the top of a similarly huge building. No funny comments here, in case of Fatwa

“You seek the grail, you say? Well, don’t come bothering us – we have already got one!”

And as a special treat, a few that we haven’t (technically) got to yet…

It’s amazing what you can do with photoshop these days…

Winter is coming!

Think Lake Tahoe, but without all those pesky people…

Soviet Samarkand

Posted on by

Next stop on our Silk Road extravaganza: Samarkand. Yep, that’s right, the big daddy of the Silk Road cities, home of the famous Registan amongst a bunch of other pretty cool monument-y type stuff. More Silk Road-y than you can shake a stick at.

Or so you’d think. In reality, the city of Samarkand is very, very Soviet, with just a few scattered monuments (albeit large, fabulous and highly significant monuments) here and there to remind you of the glorious past. The vast majority of the old city has been destroyed over the years – partially by earthquake to be fair, but mostly due to the fact that the Soviets really didn’t like it (having been to a few parts of the old town, you can half see their point – no drainage to speak of so the old town really does stink). Hence the old winding alleys full of mosques, mangy dogs and charm have been replaced by glorious wide avenues, plenty of concrete, and a bewildering array of non functioning fountains.

Oh, and those monuments. They were amazing, particularly the interiors, although to James’ and my by now jaded eyes, they compared somewhat unfavourably to the sites in Bukhara – not for any lack of splendour, but due to their rather antiseptic nature. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, time for my regular and learned discourse on restoration – and Samarkand has had the romance restored right out of it. You can’t really blame the Soviets given that the buildings were all clearly only holding themselves up through some feat of minor miracle when the restoration work started, but the end result is magnificent, but soul-less.

Fortunately for us, we were able to locate Samarkand’s alternative soul, in the rather unexpected guise of a carpet workshop of all things. There we spent a happy couple of hours listening to the carpets being made (the sound of each strand being knotted is oddly like a harp being plucked) and listening to our guide give a heartfelt description of the tradition of hand carpet making throughout the Central Asia region. We left several hours later with a severe hankering for a truly beautiful carpet, a much greater knowledge than before of the various gradings of carpets in the world, and a strong sense of disgust at those pesky Chinese and their modern, machine made, synthetic carpets. All I need to do now is to develop a true love of overcooked fatty mutton and I’ll be good and ready to be assimilated into the Central Asian world.

Dodgy Dealings

Posted on by

Some of you may remember a previous post about the corporate lawyer we met in Cuzco, choking down pizza with one hand in one of the best restaurants in town while frantically blackberrying his holiday away trying to keep tabs on a live transaction. It made us both desperately sad, and rather glad – sad that we had ruined so many of our own holidays doing exactly that, and glad that we didn’t have to let deals interrupt our dinners, at least not on this trip.

Or so we thought. We are in Tashkent, and we have run out of money. Not truly run out of money, mind. We still have a little stashed away in our home bank accounts, and we had recently tracked down a bizarrely incongruous branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland which had given us a small but crisp stack of US dollars. Our money belts were happily replete: those US dollars; some Renmimbi for when we reach the ATM-free far west of China in 10 days’ time; some leftover Hong Kong dollars for our return there in October; and some randoms – a few Euro, some leftover Aussie dollars, a taxi fare’s worth of Japanese Yen and a few Solomons and Bolivianos we had been unable to exchange back when we left those countries. And of course we also carry emergency travelers cheques just in case. But we didn’t have enough Uzbek Som, and this was a problem.

The Uzbek Som is a funny beast: the official exchange rate stands at about 2,000 to the dollar but black market rates are much higher, no doubt because of the rampant inflation in the country that rapidly depletes the savings of any Uzbek patriotic enough to keep their nest egg in local currency. As a result of this gap, almost nobody takes credit cards and there are virtually no foreigner-friendly ATMs – nobody would use them, as they would be pinned to the unattractive official exchange rate. As a result, travel cash in Uzbekistan is still done the way it was when I travelled in India in 1994 – queue up once a week to withdraw dollars from a bank teller and exchange them either at the bank or through some dodgy chap in sunglasses on a street corner. Oh, and add to this the fact that the largest denomination is the 1,000 Som note (worth about 40 cents) making $100 in Som literally about an inch thick (and by “literally” I mean “literally”).

So cut back to dinner – I had reached into my painfully bulging trouser pocket (no, not like that) and counted out my stack of Som (there is a special rapid counting technique, and now I have practiced it I could pass for a used car salesman in the UK). We had enough for a vegetarian dinner or wine, but not both, and we had had a really bad day. We were on the point of rediscovering the excellence of Georgian red wine (hi Dato!) and, faced with the choice of soda water or no dinner, I asked the waitress if they accepted dollars. The answer was unfortunately no (it is, after all, illegal) but they knew a man who could…

So this was the business deal that interrupted our dinner. After a couple of quiet conversations with the doorman, he arranged for a taxi driver friend of his to come, pick up an unmarked $50 note, drive away again, change the cash and come back. Interestingly, if unsurprisingly, the nighttime black market rate is a little worse than the daytime black market rate, but $50 is still enough for a good bottle of dry Georgian red wine.

And it led to yet another great life experience – you are sitting at dinner drinking wine with your lovely fiancée when a man enters, scans the restaurant, makes eye contact and walks over. He stops by your table, subtly slips you a half-inch thick slab of bank notes, bows slightly (with his hand on his heart, in the central Asian fashion) and walks away. Tonight, I am the Godfather.

The Godfather pays for dinner – about $80 for two, with wine

The Godfather pays for dinner – about $80 for two, with wine

Short Runs in Strange Places – Samarkand

Posted on by

Names don’t get much more evocative than Samarkand. The name conjures up the very essence of the Silk Road – bustling bazaars, winding back streets, dusty ramparts looking out over the desert, weary travelers discussing the price of carpets in the streets. The Silk Road is a region of extraordinary history, with ravening hordes descending from every direction every few hundred years, carving up vast territories into huge empires before falling, either to the next onslaught or to internal decay. Lucy and I have been wandering hand in hand through the streets of Khiva and Bukhara absorbing the old world atmosphere (and eating kebabs – dozens of them) and dreaming of Samarkand, Kashgar and all the places to come in this stage of our trip.

But yet, I hear the question on everyone’s lips. The burning issue of such import, high above all other burning issues: did you manage to go running?

Well no. It turns out that beautiful pre-medieval towns are utterly rubbish for jogging. They are all far too small and far too wiggly – you would end up going round and round in loopy circles getting more and more lost. And people would stare. However, in the epic historical thread of empires in the region, the most recent to fall was, of course, the Russian empire. And Russian town planners just loved straight lines.


It’s easy for those of us who have spent most of our adult life in a post Soviet world to forget about the influence of the Russians in the ‘Stans. Such influence was, of course, utterly transformative. The old towns of Khiva and Bukhara may have escaped without too much adaptation, but that is to ignore the wider Russian impact. They dug some of the longest canals in the world to irrigate the region – the fields that you drive through for hours between cities were all historically rolling desert, with just a few oases supporting the few large towns. The Russians introduced heavy industry in ideologically acceptable places, now largely rusting in picturesque piles. They introduced cotton and in doing so generated vast revenues while encouraging some pretty epic environmental destruction. And they utterly transformed the shape of the cities: wide boulevards replaced winding streets; soviet-style concrete apartment buildings line said streets; while at ground level you find soviet-style shops, which somehow manage to look drab even with a post-independence abundance of goods in them. Concrete and grass parks surround sporadically working fountains, even if the socialist realist statues of revolutionary heroes are now largely gone, or replaced with less political historical figures.

As a “centre” of the Silk Road with large and impressive monuments (and thereby fitting nicely with a centralized ideology) Samarkand benefited from some intensive and expensive restoration work in the 1970s. As a result, the monuments are all deeply impressive, and are placed within an appropriately Soviet hub and spoke road system, complete with pedestrian areas lined with glass fronted shops and restaurants. And it was through these pedestrian areas and along these boulevards that I ran, appropriately awestruck at the sights but wondering slightly where all the charm had gone.

Start and finish point by our guest house – the mausoleum of Timur the Great (or Tamurlane, as he is sometimes called in the West)

Start and finish point by our guest house – the mausoleum of Timur the Great (or Tamurlane, as he is sometimes called in the West)

James Learns to Sew

Posted on by

We are sitting in our guesthouse in Bukhara after a beautiful day. We have been wandering through mosques and medrassas and up and down minarets with our mouths open, gaping at the ancient architecture, the extraordinary stone and tilework and picturing the history, fair and foul, that has passed through this silk road town. All of the usual suspects were here – Marco Polo, Genghis Khan etc. – as well as the famous Stoddart & Conolly, two English army officers whose handlebar mustaches and Victorian stiff upper lips didn’t prevent them from being inventively and lengthily tortured then straightforwardly killed for breaches of local etiquette. It’s pretty stirring stuff.

Our guesthouse – an atmospheric old Emir’s palace, with heavy wood-beamed rooms surrounding a shady central courtyard and a jewel-like breakfast room complete with carved plasterwork, lavishly painted ceilings and tiny plates of brightly coloured jams – is unfortunately full of retired French and German tour groups. So far so standard: many of the people we meet on the road are retirees, Lufthansa has good connections to this part of the world from Eastern Bloc days, and Central Asia seems to have a special allure to those who did their original travel dreaming back when the Iron Curtain prevented them from imagining they would ever actually get here. That said, the tour groups don’t bother us much, until…

My spoken French is pretty rusty at the best of times, but this IS the best of times – for some random reason many of the guest house owners and taxi drivers in Uzbekistan speak French not English. Given that French is also the lingua franca (ha ha) of half of Vanuatu, I have been speaking more French recently than I have in years. As such, I understood the elderly French lady perfectly as she walked past, and even picked up on the heavy note of disdain.

“Poor thing. He’s having to sew up his shoes!”

That’s right lady. I’m sewing up my shoes. Running repairs are a necessity on the road when you have a limited set of clothes – so far I have handily put a stitch or two in one jumper, one wooly hat with a llama on it, one set of thermals, two t-shirts and one busted rucksack flap. In a moment of train-journey-inspired boredom I even darned one solitary sock. I have also had an Oswald Boateng shirt rehemmed by a little old lady in Port Vila with an even older Singer sewing machine.

I imagine in retired-French-lady-land one would simply buy another pair of shoes. And in my-partners-and-I-sold-an-investment-bank-last-year-land I normally would too. But these are New Balance barefoot running shoes. Not at all expensive, but very, very carefully chosen, and perfect – they are extremely lightweight, offer surprisingly good support and (critically) pack down to the size of a flip flop. In New York I swapped out the laces for black replacements and delicately trimmed off all the lime green decals, so they can just as easily be used as coral reef shoes in the morning and get you past the doorman of a cocktail bar that night. They are dark red, and hence go with every outfit I currently possess. They are, as I said, perfect travel shoes.

But … replacements are not available within a thousand miles of Uzbekistan, and after four months of swimming, walking on coral reefs, hiking and dancing they have a hole in the canvas upper.

So yes, lady, I am sewing up my shoes, whether you think I look like a tramp or not. And a damn good job I am doing of it too.

Carry on up to Khiva

Posted on by

Sometimes when you travel, every now and again and only if you’re lucky, you find that you have … a moment. Circumstances combine in some weird way that puts you in the perfect place at the perfect time to get just a particularly … well, perfect mental snapshot of a place and time. And if you’re really lucky, your idealized vision isn’t then too hard hit by subsequent travel hassle experience so you get to hang onto it.

All of which happened to me in Khiva. Khiva is probably the least famous of the Silk Road Big 3, and faces some criticism for having being restored too pristinely, if you will – the Old Town is often accused of being like a museum rather than a living town, so our expectations weren’t actually that high. Plus when we arrived, James came down with a slight bug and promptly fell into a pretty deep sleep (at 5pm), leaving me to wander the town. Which is how I ended up walking through Khiva’s ancient alleys, as the sun set over the minarets and the moon rose into a perfect sickle, with the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer and the faint smell of woodsmoke and shashlyk in the air. If anyone out there ever wants to create a multi-sensory Silk Road experience, this is definitely the place to start!

The next day, with James back to full strength, was our first taste of the Silk Road proper. Mesmerisingly beautiful sites, history and romance coming out your ears (in the next installment of an occasional comment on modern restoration, to me Khiva gets it right. Sure, the whole old city has been made to look “in keeping”, but actually this style of mud-walled building is pretty common over the region which is why the modern stuff ends up being able to blend in, despite addition of satellite dishes and double glazed windows. Plus more importantly to me, the charm of the place has been retained, and in spades – in a way that Samarkand for example has singularly failed to do. Maybe it’s slightly over zealous, but for me the Silk Road came to life in Khiva. I could see the dusty caravans arriving after weeks in the desert and hear the cries of street hawkers and slavers; and let’s face it, that’s no mean feat to achieve with an investment banker!!) – with no hassle and almost no tourists.

Good job we had a decent encounter with a swindling taxi driver the next day – otherwise the place would just have been TOO disconcertingly perfect!!

Start of The Silk Road

Posted on by

Sat back in New York planning our trip, I’d sort of thought that all of the “cool” Silk Road stuff would be in Uzbekistan, with its mighty threesome of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand – some serious names to conjure with.

One of the really nice surprises of our trip thus far, then, was how much of the Silk Road we actually encountered in Turkmenistan (not that I have a particular positive bias towards Turkmenistan or anything, you understand J). And not just in the ancient ruin sense either – parts of rural Turkmenistan actually FEEL more Silk Road-y than the far more famous Uzbek sites do, particularly as you head north through vast tracts of desert (more desert-y than ever now, what with the ever diminishing Aral Sea), complete with extremely camel-y camels that wander across said desert in rather regal fashion….unless they’re being herded that is:

Camel herding meets the modern age

Camel herding meets the modern age

The ruins, also, are surprisingly fabulous. Anyone remember the Parthians, favourite baddy stars of many a Latin textbook? Well, their capital city was here. And several hundred years (and some zealous restoration) later, it’s still in surprisingly pretty good nick:

Current best reconstructed guess as to what Nissa looked like in 3rd century….BC. History's LONG in these parts

Current best reconstructed guess as to what Nissa looked like in 3rd century….BC. History’s LONG in these parts

And that’s before you get to the great granddaddy Turkmen ruin of Konye Urgench. This was once perhaps the Silk Road’s largest and most beautiful city – until Genghis Khan decimated it….then it was rebuilt and once more became perhaps the Silk Road’s largest and most beautiful city – until Timur the Great (Tamarlane to us) decimated it again and rather more thoroughly this time just to make sure it didn’t overshadow his new posterchild city, Samarkand. Yep, the most historic Silk Road city you’ve never heard of:

Konye Urgench - the minaret, all 59m of it, was built in the 1320s. You just can't get the workmen these days

Konye Urgench – the minaret, all 59m of it, was built in the 1320s. You just can’t get the workmen these days

Most of all though, what really made us feel be-Silk Roaded in Turkmenistan was the amazing hospitality of the people we met here (special mention here to our driver and his wife, who put up two hairy westerners and nearly made them weep with their amazing level of kindness….well, that and the 5 kilos of food we each ate. This is NOT the part of the world to come to if you want to lose weight!!). To them and to our guide S, a heartfelt thank you for an unforgettable trip.

Tasting Notes – Chal

Posted on by

Well, how do we follow our last post? And how do we respond properly to so many wonderful messages of congratulations from friends old and new, some of whom we had no idea were even reading (Hello Kim and Arfa!).

Well, the answer has to be yet more multi-cultural stunt drinking. And after kava in Vanuatu and banana homebrew in PNG what better than Chal, that lovely Silk Road drink made out of semi-fermented camels milk? Mmmmm…

We were still in Turkmenistan, and had been dotting about seeing the sights – beautiful, psychotic Turkmen horses, ancient ruins, semi-mythical (and only semi-Islamic) shrines and home stays in the mountains. We had eaten fresh grapes in the shade of the vine and I had come within a hair’s breadth of milking my first cow. But – and it is a reasonably large but – we had drunk no vodka. We had been expecting to encounter a wave of post Soviet nostalgia and to be welcomed with multiple vodka toasts to comradeship and to blinding headaches. As it was, we were welcomed extremely warmly, but with Islamic grace being said at every meal we were not expecting any serious booze at any time soon. As it happened, we were not to have vodka until I got hoiked out of a hotel swimming pool by the Kazakh 2007 All-Asia powerlifting champion (180kg bench press, apparently, as mimed on the fingers) and made to down shots to the glory of world peace, but that is another story.

Turkmen horses. Bred for crazy. Lucy actually rode one of these later...

Turkmen horses. Bred for crazy. Lucy actually rode one of these later…

The story goes that when Ghengis Khan destroyed this town he spared the minaret because it was so high his hat fell off when he looked up at it. Yes, THAT Ghengis Khan.

The story goes that when Ghengis Khan destroyed this town he spared the minaret because it was so high his hat fell off when he looked up at it. Yes, THAT Ghengis Khan.

We were having lunch after a short swim. In a cave. 60 metres underground. In a seemingly bottomless pool of lava-heated water (15 feet deep near the shore, and sloping down into the blackness as far as the imagination can see). I made a jokey reference to wanting a beer with lunch, and instead was offered Chal. Why not?

The view from the pool (the bats are rather shy, and hid in this photograph)

The view from the pool (the bats are rather shy, and hid in this photograph)

Here’s why not:

  • Serving: life lessons, number 368 – never, ever trust a drink that comes in an old plastic soda bottle with the label peeled off. Particularly if someone tells you that it has come out of a camel
  • Appearance: imagine crumbling fine, soft cottage cheese into turpentine that your Polish decorator has been using to clean off-white paint brushes for a few days. Put in above-mentioned bottle. There you go
  • Technique: I don’t really know. I do know, however, that my instinct to shake the bottle to mix up the cheesy-looking bits into the liquid failed for two reasons. One: the cheesy bits steadfastly refused to emulsify (they don’t like collaborators in this part of the world). Two: the stuff is fizzy, and warm, and explodes absolutely everywhere when shaken and then opened
  • Aroma: exactly as you would expect semi-fermented camel’s milk to smell. Kinda milky, kinda camelly, kinda semi-fermented (As an aside, what does semi-fermented actually mean? What does it MEEEEAN?)
  • Taste: would you believe it, actually rather nice. A little yoghurty, yet surprisingly refreshing. It tastes a little cooler than it actually is, which boggles the mind slightly – in a good way
  • After effects: I have no idea whether semi-fermented actually means alcoholic (see above plaintive question to the universe regarding meaning). There was no booze buzz, no hangovery effects, no poisoning of any kind – just a swagger in the step that yes, you have drunk slightly off camel’s milk and yes, you get to brag about it