I’m off in a couple hours for the grueling .. but I’ll get over it .. 20 hour flight to Urgench in Uzbekistan (LA-Istanbul-Urgench) and then 3 hour drive to Nukus. Here is the first post where I told about Uzbekistan. Then a friend in Japan asked me “but why Uzbekistan?” and I replied as follows:
I have never been anywhere in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan).
I have a friend who worked for the State Department and was posted in Uzbekistan for 2 years. She says it is a good country to visit – the government, although authoritarian, is stable, the people are very friendly to travelers, and the excellent train system makes it easy to get around. It is also where the great cities of the Silk Road are located.
Here is what AI has to say:
“The major Silk Road cities in Uzbekistan include Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva, renowned for their rich history, stunning architecture, and vibrant culture that highlight the region’s past as a central hub for trade and scholarship between Europe and Asia.”
I’ll be there for three weeks and able to visit all these cities, other cities, and the countryside. I am going on my own but my friend in the State Department knows the travel agent in Uzbekistan who makes all the travel arrangements for the US Embassy and she will be helping me.
It’s going to be a while before I can write again, but stay tuned!
The formalities of getting out of LAX went very well – I have nothing to complain about Turkish Airline except they don’t have Economy Plus, BUT I had an empty seat for the longest leg and was able to sleep easily, off and on, throughout the 13 hours. I just made the connection in Istanbul, arriving at the gate as they were boarding. After arrival in Urgench I went with a driver directly to Nukus which took another 3 hours.
The driver spoke only a few words of English but we communicated fine with google translate. The system can provide a written translation of Uzbek but doesn’t know how to speak it yet, so we used Russian. It seemed the driver could speak both fluently.
We drove for more than 2 hours through fields and fields of cotton. There were also rice fields, some corn, orchards I never identified, what might have been hay, grape vines, and I probably missed some of the crops. It felt quite prosperous, and then we hit the planes of nothing reminding me a little of what the I5 looked like before they started irrigation.
This is the Welcome to the Independent Republic of Karakalpakstan gate, an autonomous republic of Uzbekistan established in 1991, a year after Uzbekistan established independence from the USSR, although if you want to buzz through wikipedia you’ll see there is, of course, a long and interesting history of this area.
We made a toilet stop at a market-cafe-gas station place with the nicest toilets, it was great, and they had a huge bird cage which was fun to look at.
After settling into the Jipek Joli Art hotel (the room is lovely, the bathroom is great, the bedding is especially comfortable) I decided to walk the few blocks to check out the State Museum of History and Culture of the Republic of Karakalpakstan. It was small but interesting and particularly fun because there was a young woman, a few months from graduating university, who was practicing English by showing me around. She was a delight, and on a side note, I was nuts for the kids (yes I asked before I took this picture).
They had an example of the traditional house below, and a large selection of clothes. There was also a lot of paintings, jewelry, stuffed animals, ceramics, models of ancient forts and artifacts found there, and more.
Looking up at the roof of the traditional home.
After the museum I went for some food at Sofram, the place recommended by the hotel. It was comfortable, friendly, but also it was a Turkish restaurant with a special room frequented by tour groups-my least favorite, and I didn’t get to sample what was unique to this place.
I couldn’t keep my eyes open so I slept for a couple hours, did this, and now I hope to sleep until morning!
Breakfast at the hotel was good! This is the mostly savory table, there were sweets too, and they made eggs to order.
“The State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan named after I.V. Savitsky”
The building straight ahead is the main space, currently closed for renovations as it has been for the last few years. The building to the right is open but what is available to see is greatly reduced. From an article in The Guardian written in 2019: “The lost Louvre of Uzbekistan: the museum that hid art banned by Stalin. This museum in a bleak outpost has one of the world’s greatest collections of avant-garde art, rescued from Stalin’s clutches by an electrician. But now it needs a rescue of its own.”
I came an entire day out of my way from the next closest place I wanted to visit to see this museum and the remarkable collection of Russian avant garde art, but it was not to be. The main building is under renovation and the second building has only a couple pieces of the rescued art. I think the agent that booked this side trip might not have been fully aware of the degree of the shutdown.
I think there were only two rescued pieces on view, this being the main one, “The famous Bull painted by Vladimir Lysenko, who was also imprisoned, had to be taken down the day the KGB arrived. Savitsky renamed it Fascism Advances and put it back up the next day. It was only during perestroika that any of this could be spoken about.”
(My version of this picture is so full of glare, I’m using one from the article, and I might need a copy for my wall – Fascism Advances.)
There were other pictures and artifacts on display and here are some examples.
We, myself, Driver Davron Saidov, and Guide Tolqin Rajjaboyev (feel free to reach out to him! +99895051692) began our journey through the desert passing by Chilpik Kala, Toprak Kala, Ayaz kala, and Kizil Kala.
First we find Chilpik Kala, a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence where the dead were left to be exposed to the elements. Once only bones remained they were put in an ossuary. “This Zoroastrian ritual was practiced to prevent the contamination of the sacred elements of earth, water, and fire by decomposing bodies.”
Notice the line of green trees marking a river’s flow. To the right, desert forever, to the left, irrigation.
You need cement to make concrete and I don’t remember if this is for cement or concrete but in any case it’s an important facility.
Next we find the three fortresses each with its own very long history that I won’t repeat here.
“Kyzyl-Kala Fortress, one of the oldest monuments in Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan Region, confirms the existence of a once-powerful and developed civilization in the Kyzylkum Desert. The outpost, whose name aptly means “Red Fortress”, remains steeped in legends which awaken near-visible images of the life which once transpired on this desolate site.”
Toprak Kala, I think the most important of the fortresses but I forget the details and anyway I got so distracted by…
…I got so distracted by these adorable painters that I wasn’t paying attention!
My guys: Tolqin and Davron and our white Chevy, where 90% of the cars on the road look exactly like this one, white because of the climate, Chevrolet because they make them in this style in Uzbekistan, and imported cars are priced out of reach. Tolqin and Davron, they were both lovely, kind, knowledgeable, and willing, lucky me.
We had lunch in a yurt situated beside a river, and we ate a heaping platter of fried fish from that very river as well as local bread and very delicious tomato salad. (I’ve had that tomato salad a couple more times, always delicious. Turns out they grown acres of hot-house tomatoes here so they ripen on the vine.)
There are three fortresses on this site all from different eras. It’s all like a movie, can’t you just picture it.
See those people walking into the fortress? I didn’t do that either.
Across the road, here’s the family friendly encampment of yurts available for rent.
With the fortress in view, you can ride a camel if you want.
Here’s our last gate (I didn’t show all the gates…) as we leave Karakalpakstan, nearing Khiva, our destination for tonight. My hotel in Khiva is called Kheyvak, perfectly situated inside the ancient walls, surrounded by the old city.
I spent most of the day with the guide, Tolqin, and for the whole morning I thought well, I have a free day tomorrow so I’ll go back to all these fabulous places and take pictures at my leisure. After lunch I realized this was not a good plan because there was just too much and it turns out I was too tired to go back anyway, but I hope these give the idea, just imagine it all multiplied by three, and I included a couple pictures from the internet too.
A two hundred year old wooden gate. Fortunately/unfortunately when I started to compose a little summary of Khiva’s more than 2,500 year history, google’s AI did it better: “Khiva has been destroyed and rebuilt at least seven times throughout its history, a fate common to most ancient Central Asian cities that served as important Silk Road trade posts and were subjected to numerous conquests. While it’s impossible to give a precise count, the city’s resilience is evident in its surviving architecture, with the current walls dating to the 17th century and the well-preserved Ichan-Kala (the inner city from late Medieval times) being a UNESCO World Heritage site.”
This is an internet aerial photo where you can see a bit of the wall, one of the four gates leading into the city, and prominently featured is the unfinished minaret, called Kaltaminor, begun in 1852 and meant to be the tallest minaret in the world, construction stopped in 1855 when Muhammad Amin Khan, the force behind the plan, died in battle in Iran.
We had a glorious lunch on the second floor balcony of a nice restaurant but one that was not big enough to hold the tour group hordes populating other more well-known places. We had a lamb and a beef kabob, both excellent, a sampler plate of dumplings, and four kinds of Khiva Quesadilla, everything delicious.
Good idea, after lunch I decided I’d better start taking some pictures.
Women making bread in much the same style as I’ve seen in so many places. You roll or pat out some dough and then you whack it against the side of a red-hot oven. Here they heated the oven by burning dried cotton stems, and that was different.
A silk carpet workshop open for visitors. There were other workshops too especially wood carvers but I didn’t stop in. Also there are shopping stalls along all the walking streets in the center of the center of town, all what you’d expect, all just for you and at a very special price, just for you. I should add there are no children following you and no one asks to sell you something more than once. It was very calm actually.
So many brides as is often the case in picturesque places and also in holy places, and Khiva is both. The brides and grooms take two sets of pictures I learned, always one set in traditional wear and another set in western style white gowns.
One of the inner courtyards. I haven’t spoken yet about the extremes of weather in this part of the world, Nukus included, with soaring heat in the summer months and deep freezing cold in the winter. You can see how they spend all the time outside when the weather permits and when it’s too cold people of means will retreat to a heated yurt.
This type of glazed tile decorated palaces, mosques, the madrasas, homes probably, I lost tract of where I was, there was so much of it.
An inside room in one of the palaces I think. There is an old palace and a new palace, both quite grand.
Most of the vendors were on the street so she must be special?
The king’s reception room. I don’t remember which royal family built it.
This is about 1/4 of the Friday Mosque below, an internet picture. It’s being refurbished now so I decided to use this picture because it’s cool looking and one of the oldest original structures, first documented in the 10th century, rebuilt in 1788.
I’ll talk more about Khiva tomorrow!
I talked about the brides before, and here’s a lovely one on the steps of my hotel.
Yesterday was such a go-go day I needed to take it easy in the morning and thought I’d head out around lunch time, which I did, but I didn’t last long. I was wandering through a more residential area to a quiet restaurant recommended by the lovely young woman at the front desk of my hotel. Above and below is an example of the courtyards found in most buildings especially those used as guest houses.
Sorry this all looks so plain compared to yesterday, I think along with my legs, my eyes were tired too!
And following are two buildings currently converted into guest houses.
This building is also a guest house. What the sign says: “Traditional Residence, Architectural Monument, XIX Century, Taken Into State Protection”
Here’s where I ate another yummy-good tomato salad and plov, the national pilaf-type dish of rice, vegetables, and some bits of meat on top.
I went out to one of the gates where you can buy a ticket to walk on the wall but by the time I got there I was already too hot and too tired for more walking in the full-on sun, and although I tried to imagine coming back when it was cooler… I knew deep-down that was wishful thinking.
This is I think a very good summary of the sites and short history of Khiva. The pictures are great and the text is concise and to the point. Actually, you can click around in this site for all kinds of interesting reading.
This day I was out of the heart of the inner city and we can see how radically the decorations have dropped off.
Heading back to my neighborhood.
Another view of the restaurant attached to my hotel, the Kheyvak. Notice the curtained platforms where people can eat in the traditional way.
And here’s the courtyard just out my door. I’ve got an early day tomorrow, off to the airport at 7:15 giving me 15 minutes to have a coffee and some food.
Ah, I forgot about these, a very old door and a sewer cover for Ingalill who collects them.
