Does It Yurt? Does It Yurt?

DOES IT YURT? DOES IT YURT? Travels in Central Asia Or How I Came to Love the Stans By Stephen M. Bland HERTFORDSHIRE PRESS CONTENTS HERTFORDSHIRE PRESS Published in United Kingdom Hertfordshire Press Ltd © 2016 9 Cherry Bank, Chapel Street Hemel Hempstead, Herts. HP2 5DE, United Kingdom Prologue xi Arrivals: Bishkek xi e-mail: [email protected] www.hertfordshirepress.com PART ONE 1 Does it Yurt? Chapter 1: A Brief Background 3 Travels in Central Asia Or How I Came to Love the Stans Copyright © Stephen M. Bland 2016 1) Shoestring Gorge 5 2) Cholpon Ata 6 English 3) Boris and the Mountain 10 4) Back to Bishkek 12 Design Aleksandra Vlasova Chapter 2: The Rat-Sick Hut 16 Excerpts from ChaptersTwo and Twenty were previously published in Caravanistan, Chapters Four and Twenty- 1) The Raid 20 Three in Eurasianet, Chapters Five, Eight, Fourteen and Seventeen in Open Central Asia, Chapters Six and Seventeen in IndraStra, Chapters Seven, Eight, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Seventeen and Nineteen in Vice and 2) Independence Day 24 Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen in Registan. 3) Chicken 31 visit: www.stephenmbland.com _______________________________________________________ Chapter 3: Inauspicious Beginnings 33 1) Wooden Ships 36 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, 2) Flies in my Porridge 40 now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, 3) The Road to Nowhere 41 or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 4) Exit Strategies 45 British Library Catalogue in Publication Data Chapter 4: Border Shenanigans 49 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress in Publication Data 1) The Golden City 52 A catalogue record for this book has been requested 2) Stolen Cities 54 ISBN: 978-1-910886-29-8 3) Upscale Dining 57 4) New Friends 60 5) Bye-bye Bahodir 67 6) The Sharq 68 vi Contents Contents vii Chapter 5: Devil Wagon 70 Chapter 11: Welcome to Osh 140 1) Plague Ponds 71 1) Ош Bazaar 142 2) Commerce 73 2) Solomon’s Throne 145 3) The Bug Pit 76 3) Endgame 147 4) The Shadow of History 80 5) The Pivo Centre 81 Chapter 12: To the Trans-Alai 149 1) Njebre’s House 151 Chapter 6: Across the Kyzyl-Kum Desert 84 2) Pik Lenin 154 1) Khiva - Boiler Room Blues#1 86 3) Problema 156 2) The Museum City 89 3) Boiler Room Blues#2 91 Chapter 13: Tajik Arse 160 4) Donkeys and Disco Balls 92 1) Furious Fruge and the Black Lake 162 2) Yaks and Yaoli’s#1 166 Chapter 7: The Road Less Travelled 97 3) Yaks and Yaoli’s#2 169 1) Nukus 99 4) To Khorog with Bob 170 2) Yurtbashi 101 3) The Devil Wears Khaki 103 Chapter 14: Last Year’s War Zone 175 1) The Pamir Lodge 177 Chapter 8: The Wasteland of the Soviet Dream 106 2) No Flights Today 179 1) In Search of the Oybek 108 3) Opium Oases 182 2) The Edge of the World 109 4) The Road to Dushanbe#1 185 3) Celebrity 113 5) The Road to Dushanbe#2 188 Chapter 9: Toshkent - Stone City 115 Chapter 15: Monday Monday 192 1) Little Timur’s City 118 1) The Artificial City 194 2) Departures: Tashkent 121 2) The Old City 196 3) The Embassy 198 PART TWO 123 4) Jiving Rahmon 202 5) The Sound of the Tajik Rap Underground 205 Chapter 10: To Bishkek and Beyond 125 6) Talco Powder 207 1) Return to the Kyrgyz Republic 128 2) The Gold Scandal 129 Chapter 16: Back to Oz’bekiston 212 3) Flags and Parades 131 1) The White Palace 214 4) Lenin’s Love-In 135 2) Great Ghosts 216 5) Manas 136 3) Finger Fares 218 viii Contents Contents ix Chapter 17: The Death of a Despot 220 Chapter 22: Red Capital 287 1) There’s Always Tomorrow 222 1) The Vokzal Politsiya 289 2) There’s Always Tomorrow#2 223 2) Zhon and the Art of Train Maintenance 293 3) Goodbye Uzbekistan 227 3) Across the Steppe 296 Chapter 18: Welcome to Turkmenistan 230 Chapter 23: Dreams of the Sea#2 298 1) Old Urgench 232 1) To the Shore 299 2) The Golden Age 236 2) The Northernmost Point 302 3) Night at the Otel Gürgenç 241 3) Akbasty 303 4) A Black Legacy 306 Chapter 19: The Journey to Hell 243 5) The Kokaral Dam 307 1) The Gate to Hell 247 6) Compound Fractures 309 2) Niet Machina 249 7) Conservation 311 3) The Road to Ashgabat 252 Epilogue 315 Chapter 20: The City of Love 254 Do svidaniya Central Asia 315 1) Foto Problema 256 2) The Berdy Man Can 259 Selected Bibliography 317 3) Ashgabat at Night 261 4) In Marble 263 5) Berzengi 266 6) Turkmenistan Good 268 PART THREE 271 Chapter 21: Transit Blues 273 1) Trade and Transgression 274 2) Panfilov Park 277 3) Father of Apples 278 4) Dreams of the Sea#1 281 5) Appleness 283 Prologue Arrivals: Bishkek We arrived at Manas International Airport in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan to thunderous applause from the plane’s passengers. It felt as if they gave every successful landing an ovation. Perhaps it was a bonus; the plane’s emergency exit hadconsisted of a frayed escape rope. Conveying the impression that they wanted to prove they had a bus, but most likely a remnant of Soviet era full-employment, half an hour later the airport shut- tle took us the twenty metres to the terminal building. Despite our arrival, however, our baggage wasn’t so fortunate. Inside the grey terminal building, futile lost luggage forms in Cyrillic were distributed and filed beneath a single flickering TV on which an advert for a local strip joint played on a loop. Our pre-booked driver having failed to materialise, we acquiesced to the hawker’s insistent overtures and took ataksi, a beat up old Lada VAZwith a hole in the floor. Approaching the urban sprawl, ahotchpotch of angular derelicts and half finished, stagnating Chinese construction projects lined the wide streets. Weaving their way around traffic on crutches, limbless men held out tin cans, begging in the middle of the road. A jigsaw of mismatched panels hap- hazardly cobbled together, the buses, dilapidated Mercedes Sprinters known as marshrutkas belched smoke as they laboured through potholes. In the garden ofour accommodation, Gulnara’s Nomad Home,sickly brown beans climbed a trellis towards thesummer sun, the sky already a bleached silver void at seven AM. Shrugging away the room reservation I’d xvi Prologue printed out, the proprietor herded us into a yurt, the traditional, cylindrical tent dwelling of Central Asia. Latticework covered in shyrdak- handwoven Kyrgyz felt rugs- led to curved, blood red rafters which stretched to the tun- duk, the ‘door to the heavens,’a vented area at the apex which admitted no air whatsoever. At forty-one degrees Celsius, it felt like hell. Jetlagged, we shuffled into the city centre, where garbedin turned-up jeans and tracksuit tops, posses of rude boys loitered beside fountains, arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders. What you needed most in a region- blighted by water shortages, it seemed,was fountains, a symbol of defiance in the face of nature. Outside a defunct casino, a plethora of bored soldiers patrolled the empty square, sweat dripping from beneath their saucepan-like caps. The President was due to pass. As the leader of a new-born country, it was of paramount importance that people either have faith in you or fear you, preferably both. As the motorcade receded, though, the militsiya quickly melted away. There was cotton candy to be had from the babushkas in shady Panfilov Park. PART I CHAPTER 1 A Brief Background hen I told people I wanted to visit Central Asia, their first ques- tion was invariably ‘where?’ shortly followed by ‘why?’ Whilst neighbouring Afghanistan has become notorious, albeit as a barrenW wasteland where ill-conceived wars endlessly rage, twenty-five years after emerging from under the Soviet yoke, Central Asia remains an enigma, an area shrouded in mystery that people struggle to locate on maps. Even after I explained my reasons, most people’s comprehension hit a brick wall after Kazakhstan. The size of Western Europe, Kazakhstan has only mar- ginally wormed its way into the Western consciousness due to newsfeeds referencing its vast oil and gas reserves. So that was where I was going then, Kazakhstan. Hailing from the graveyard suburb of Enfield, North London, a street market and festival trader at the time - largely because I can’t abide having a boss - I’ve always had the propensity to become obsessed by off the beaten track places with bizarre histories. For nigh on a decade it had been Laos and Myanmar; now it was Central Asia. A land of nomadic horsemen peopled by the descendants of Jenghiz Khan’s Great Horde and a single nation of Persians, during the nineteenth century the once hugely important Silk Road states became a pawn in the so-called Great Game of expansion and espionage between Britain and Russia. With Afghanistan left as a buffer state separating these two empires, the rest of the region soon fell to Russia, disappearing for over a century behind what would become known as the ‘Iron Curtain.’ The advent of the Russian Revolution of 1917 saw Central Asia’s fortunes further reduced.

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