Our Journey Along the Silk Road (Take Two)

I know, this is crazy. I took a summer vacation and I didn't even intend to.

It started with being unable to package my impressions of the Silk Road trip into a few (or even several) paragraphs. Continued through our first week of visitors during the last week of June. Then ran into technical difficulties (the internet, our phone line, and the electricity all went out in turns over a 2 week period in July). And my good writing intentions have also just generally fallen prey to the topsy-turvy turn in my schedule for work and play during July, while Anya's preschool has had a vacation, and I too have scheduled in more play time with her, instead of just amping up the nanny.

It's been a fun six weeks or so -- definitely fun to spend more quality time with Anya -- but, starting with the road trip in June, it has also been a period when I feel like all the infrastructural, organizational, cultural, and governmental frustrations of Central Asia have nuzzled up closer to me than I'd have preferred. (As usual, I guess I have to leave a deeper exploration of that for the next post.)

You got a taste of that in my description of the extended false start of our road trip. The trip itself, once it finally got underway, was a lot of fun and a wonderful chance for me to see more of the landscape and civilization in the region surrounding Dushanbe. It was really a chance to see something new in this place that has already become familiar and feels very much like home to me. (Imagine my surprise when, as the mountains of Tajikistan peeked into view out of the dry plains of southern Uzbekistan, I had a real pang of relief that we were finally nearing home!)

Much belated impressions:

To me, Bukhara was a dusty, sandy-colored, wind-swept, furnace-hot Central Asian version of some frontier town in the Southwest or the Old Pueblo itself.

It was also the most touristy place I have ever seen anywhere that used to be part of the Soviet Union. It was very disorienting. At times the area right around the town center, Labi hauz, felt like some very touristy stretch of a town in Italy -- Florence? -- where everyone and everything is oriented toward visitors and their pocketbooks. I guess Bukharans ought to be able to partake in this just as much as anyone else, though, and we did quickly get used to it.

People almost across the board say they like Bukhara more than Samarkand, but for me it wasn't that simple. Part of it was the touristy-thing. Precisely because Samarkand doesn't have a concentrated old ancient city center, which for Bukhara serves as the focal point for all of that tourist-oriented mishigas, that really isn't an issue there. Samarkand felt more like a living city than Bukhara, albeit one with thousand-year-old relics of architecture sprinkled in and among the contemporary buildings and people, which I guess for some reason made it a little bit more enjoyable to me. Although many people fault the Soviet-era reconstructions of the architectural ruins there, apparently I'm no stickler for authenticity, and I found the handful of monuments we had time to see in Samarkand truly amazing. My favorite was the Shah-i-Zinda "street of mausoleums," but we left enough undone that there is more if we're able to make the same trip again (maybe even taking the long detour to see ancient Khiva, too??) in spring.

Mainly, though, I think the meaning of this trip for me was deeper than simply the physical movement and observation of new places it entailed. It kind of shook up my outlook on life and got me paying attention to something new. I had been in a sort of rut in my work over the course of the spring, focused on writing up research I'd done in the Russian Far East before we came to Dushanbe, and I'd gotten kind of separated from the world around me here in Central Asia.

Even before we left home I borrowed an armful of books from the community office at our embassy, to give us a head start and a basis for understanding what we saw on our travels. The highlights:

• The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York), for recent and older history as well as fascinating cultural context for Bukhara but also for parts of southern Uzbekistan we drove through and even the isolated mountain valleys close to where we spun our wheels our first day out on the road
  
• The Lost Heart of Asia, mainly for atmospherics
• Stories From the Silk Road, a surprisingly useful story book aimed at older kids, whose pictures successfully captured Anya's imagination, enough that she had as much excitement and anticipation as a two-year-old can realistically muster for seeing the "blue biwdings" of both Bukhara and Samarkand
  
• and, last but not least, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, a scholarly but really interesting history of the sea change in culture and authority that Bukhara endured as it came under the wing of the Russian Empire between the 1860s and 1900.

My reading did help me (and Dan and Anya) appreciate the travel more, but it also nudged my thoughts out of their rut and opened me up to some new ideas for the future -- again, in terms of both work and play.

I don't expect this to translate immediately into new work in the archives and libraries here. Who knows: come September, I might be doing something completely different from historical research and writing. For the rest of the summer, I'm happy to sit back and let all the laziness and haziness and heat wash over me here in Dushanbe.