12.07.2009: crawling towards motherhood ...

Once again, at the risk of cheesiness, I'm going to begin with a pop quiz question: Ready? Ok: what and where is the world’s largest mosque? Is it

      a) the stunning and world-famous Blue Mosque in Istanbul
      b) the beautiful and oft-pictured Masjid al-Haram in Mecca; or
      c) the more or less unknown Bibi Hanum in Uzbekistan?

Of course it’s a leading question, and you’ve probably guessed that the answer is c). Or at least, it is according to the Uzbeks. That’s kind of amazing, don’t you think? They have the biggest frikkin’ structure of its kind anywhere on Earth (so they say), and almost nobody knows about it. You have to wonder why.

Actually, you don’t: I have an answer. Or rather, an opinion. I think there are two factors. First, Uzbekistan was of course a ‘closed’ country during Soviet times, and before that it wasn’t spectacularly accessible either (a bit like Kazakhstan). So it’s one of those places that has been slipping under the radar since … well, since before the invention of radar. And secondly, Bibi Hanum isn’t so much a working mosque (like the other two) as a standing-unused-and-threatening-to-collapse-in-an-avalanche-of-stone-and-tiles-at-any-moment mosque. So I guess in some people’s minds it doesn’t count. Or maybe it’s just one of those close things that depends on how you slice it – like the question “Which is the biggest country in Europe?” (Some sources say France, others say Ukraine.)

To be fair, though, I really should qualify that statement about Uzbekistan being “closed”. The word is often used to describe former Soviet countries, but it bears deeper consideration.

To start, let me say that the whole subject of travel within the USSR fascinates me somewhat, partly because I’m a traveller myself (bet you never knew that!), and partly because I went to school during the Cold War. The impression we always got then was that people in the Soviet Union were basically trapped in their grey cities forever. But in fact, I don't think that was entirely true. I mean, I wasn't there, so of course I don’t know any of this stuff, but it does seem that quite a people in the USSR travelled widely. On the Baltic island of Saaremaa off the coast of Estonia, for example, I met people who journeyed through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Soviet times, and even one Estonian guy who was in Chimkent (a fairly obscure city in southern Kazakhstan) in the 1970s. That’s the equivalent of meeting someone in Australia who went to Laos around the same time – meaning that it’s a fairly long journey to a place that was virtually unheard-of at the time, on a different continent. Similarly in Moscow, my boss Giorgy showed me pictures of his honeymoon in Beijing, and happy snaps of he and his wife Tatiana in Havana and Hanoi – all from the days long before anyone had ever heard of Mikhail Gorbachev.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: the former USSR comprised about 1/4 of the world’s landmass, and at least some its citizens travelled that 1/4 extensively. Within its bounds, you could experience things as diverse as the awesome Euro-grandeur of St. Pete’s, the sun-drenched white beaches of Sochi (to name one among many Black Sea resort cities), the ancient monasteries of Bulgaria, the Islamic republics of the south with all their stunning architectural heritage, and the Wild East that stretches almost forever before ending in an apocalypse of volcanic activity in Kamchatka. And it seems that people did.

I guess that’s why, in cities as far apart as Tallinn and Tashkent, you see evidence of Soviet tourist infrastructure everywhere. For one thing, every republic had its equivalent of Moscow’s massive Hotel Russia (though there are worrying stories attached to some of them – Hotel Kazakhstan in Almaty, for example, is said to be the first building that will go in the next big quake, so shoddy is its construction). So to say that the former Soviet republics were “closed” is a bit of an overstatement – they were apparently open to hundreds of millions of people. Though of course, that excluded billions of others.

Natürlich, you’d expect some of this Soviet tourist infrastructure to be … well, bizarre and Soviet. And if you chose Uzbekistan as the proving ground for that hypothesis, you wouldn’t be disappointed. In a four-star hotel in Samarkand, we absolutely flummoxed the people at the exchange counter by handing them a visa card and asking if we could withdraw some money. They tried not to show it, but you could tell they were totally mystified by the request, as though we’d just handed over a tiny dinosaur skeleton, then given them four or five separate little bones and said “Now, your task is to work out exactly where these fit on the skeleton. You have thirty seconds.”

In the same hotel, we spotted a sign saying “Panorama Café – Rooftop Views” and pointing to an elevator. Starved of coffee as we were in this tea culture*, we followed the sign, hoping to get a decent cappuccino and a glimpse of the city sprawl. The lift took us to the sixth floor, and stairs led to the seventh. There we found the entrance to the café – closed and locked. But we also found the “rooftop views”; a tall vertical ladder leading to a panel in the ceiling, which (in theory at least) could be flipped open like a trap door. Thing is, though, even if it hadn’t been padlocked, how the hell were you supposed to get your coffee up there without spilling it? This is the kind of design quirk that you find in so many buildings in the former USSR– to my endless amusement, I have to say. Having lived in so many old terrace houses in Sydney, I’m a big fan of logic-defying architectural features. They give a place character ;-)

Btw, nowadays many of these Soviet tourist shrines have faded. Hotel Uzbekistan in Tashkent, for example, appeared almost empty when we visited. And the hulking Hotel Samarkand was closed, boarded up and apparently awaiting demolition. The weirdest thing about this (for me at least): at least some of it is due to an insatiable appetite for Turkey. It seems that, these days, nearly everyone in the Russian-speaking world with an income is either there right now or planning their next visit.

Guess that’s just another one of those things about the former USSR that I’ll never understand.

Sorry for the long digression … let me get back to Bibi Hanum. I was going to say that, to me, it perfectly exemplifies something that has occurred to me quite a lot in Uzbekistan, and especially in Samarkand: namely, that this country is an undiscovered gem.

The complex, as I mentioned, is massive. Whether it’s technically true or not, you don’t get to be called “The World’s Largest Mosque” for nothing! As you walk through the entrance portal, the sense of scale is rather powerful, and your brain lurches a little. Your next thought (if you’re me) is something like “Y’know, The Pope ought to be embarrassed at the tiny little chapel they built for him in Vatican City … it’s a frikkin’ outhouse compared to this!”

(Then again, I s’pose the Pope has more important things to be embarrassed about ;-)

I also mentioned before that Bibi Hanum isn’t overly structurally sound. The reason for this is that Samarkand is an earthquake zone. A little over half a millennium ago, the city was struck by a big quake that brought down many of the outbuildings in the complex. However, the main hall was left standing. Here’s the cool part, though: the hall was mainly constructed of very hard stone, but much softer stone was used like mortar to cement pieces of the structure together. In the quake, the soft stone crumbled like biscuit. The hard stone, meanwhile, stayed intact but moved and re-settled, leaving vast fractures in the walls and the dome. And that’s how Bibi Hanum stands today – more or less in its original shape, but with cracks and fissures visible everywhere, dramatically demonstrating the Earth’s destructive power.

Standing inside, you have the strange sensation of being on a movie set that was specifically designed to self-destruct … so that the hero can make, y’know, a heroic escape. You can almost close your eyes and imagine those cracks getting even larger as the ground shakes beneath you. At the same time, though, there’s a kind of serene austerity to the place which is slightly magical.

Less serene – but just as entertaining – is a carved stone block in the courtyard which fell from one of the outbuildings during the Big Quake. The way the stone is placed leaves just enough room for a woman to crawl underneath and emerge on the other side, and local lore has it that if she does, she’ll conceive a child soon afterwards. (Not so surprising when you remember that this is Central Asia - it’s all about conception here ;-) So you stand and watch young women crawling through, encouraged by parents who have that maniacal grandchildren! grandchildren! look in their eyes, even as they laugh and jest. They’re doing what the American comedian Al Franken calls “Kidding On The Square” – when you mean something seriously but you disguise it as a joke. So they laugh and cheer, and keep telling the dutiful daughter to crawl under the rock. Then when she finally pokes her head out the far side, the instruction changes to “Now come back through the other hole, so we can have two!”

Anyway ... the rest of our stay in Samarkand partly entailed visiting many other monuments, from the amazing ‘alley of mausoleums’ near the central market to the observatory I mentioned last time, and more of the Four Ms** than you could shake a digital camera at. And yes, they were impressive. I think what I liked more, though, was the sense that, while this city feels venerably old and utterly implacable, at the same time it continues to re-invent itself at a great rate. There are whole streets in Central Samarkand that seem like nothing more than construction sites – even the main street, Tashkent Kochasi, which runs right from the Registan to Bibi Hanum. About half-way along the street there’s a Swedish medical clinic in shiny, perfectly pristine condition, looking as out-of-place as a pair of Malaysian tapirs fornicating wildly on the pitch at Old Trafford during a match. Everything else is between 25 and 50% built, so there are bricks, tools and earth-moving equipment strewn all about the place in chaotic piles. It’s just wonderful to walk along the arterial road connecting two magnificent monuments and see brickies and cement mixers stop for prayer, or sit in a circle and share an enormous tray of plov.

Also cool is the sense that, as tourists, you share the experience of Samarkand with some interesting folk. I mean, in the hotel where we stayed there were a few whining Americans - you know, the kind who only travel in order to point out how crap everything is in comparison to what they're used to at home***. But just as commonly, when you find yourself talking to (or eavesdropping on) other travellers, they're people you might actually want to talk to. For example, along with a few 'Men of The Stans' we shared our hotel with a German nurse who was taking a break from hard work in neighbouring Tajikistan - a poor and recently war-ravaged country, but one for which this woman seemed to hold genuine affection. She had some amazing stories to tell. (Wish I'd met her sooner, so that I could've heard them in detail.)

About an hour after we'd checked in, the relative peace of our surroundings was disturbed by the roar of motorcycle engines. In Bukhara we'd seen a large group of British bikers, and when we heard the noise outside our windows we rightly assumed that it was them. I went out for a cigarette as they came came to a dramatic stop - switching off their GPS systems and climbing out of their leathers - and a little while later I got a chance to talk to one of them. He was from Melbourne, as it turned out ... which was a good thing, because most of the British guys on the tour seemed like surly bastards.

The Australian biker explained to me that an English tour company had been inspired by the Long Way Round TV series - in which Ewan McGregor rides his bike around the world or whatever - to create a tour package along similar lines. So this is what these guys were doing: riding from London to New York, through something like 37 countries in 81 days. I don't remember the exact numbers, but in any case he'd already been through Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan and a bunch of other places that made me extremely jealous. After Uzbekistan he was heading up to Kazakhstan, so I gave him a few tips about things to see in Almaty. I don't think he'll have enough time to see it properly, though.

Oh, and one last thing: the plov in Samarkand is golden. You might remember I mentioned plov before; it's the national dish of Uzbekistan, and the word comes from the same root as 'pilaf'. I've eaten a lot of it in Kazakhstan, because its fame has spread throughout Central Asia. But the plov in Almaty is generally an off-white colour (or slightly reddish if you add a bit of powdered tomato). I'd been told, though, that any place you go in Uzbekistan will have its own special variation, and in Samarkand this turned out to be true. The rice there was a rich yellow colour, laced with caramelised onion and studded with soft, plump garokh (sort of like yellow peas). It was absolutely mouth-watering!

A highlight of the last few days was sitting in a bizarre plov house where most of the tables were hidden inside booths that almost looked like they belonged in a sex shop, eating moist, golden plov while the locals wondered how the Hell these foreigners had discovered their local haunt, and just feeling extremely pleased to be here.

And so, as I sit now on the rooftop terrace of our hotel, reclining in a tapchan (yay!) and looking out over the floodlit mausoleum where some of Timur’s family are buried, I have two main thoughts. First: the mausoleum's beautiful blue dome looks an awful lot like a hot air balloon from this angle. And second: I feel very privileged to have caught a glimpse of this incredible city. With any luck, it won’t be the last time …

(*Rightly or not, in my head I tend to divide the world roughly into ‘tea cultures’ and ‘coffee cultures’. Australia, for example, is predominantly a coffee culture. Of course a lot of people drink tea there, but the tea is just ok, whereas the coffee is very good. KZ provides a handy contrast: the tea is far better than in Australia, but the coffee sucks.)

(** Mosques, Madrassas, Minarets and Mausoleums.)

(*** Not meaning to single out only Americans here. I actually wanted to say "Americans and Australians", because Australian people are just as guilty of the travel-and-whine as their trans-pacific cousins. It's just that in this particular hotel there was only one other Australian ... and he was pretty cool.)