Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  So why keep stealing fire? When is enough knowledge enough? As I’d learned at Oxford, there is danger in viewing science and other forms of exploration as essentially noble enterprises. In that sense we’re all positivists from the 1870s, convinced that with just a few more facts we’ll figure it out, chart the ultimate map, engineer miracles to save us from ourselves. But “exactitude is not truth,” as the painter Matisse put it, and the notion of science as a neutral search for it should not absolve scientists—or any explorers—of moral responsibility for the facts and maps they unleash on the world.

  In the next booth the drunk Kazakh man who’d been quietly snoring suddenly woke up, chugged the rest of his beer, and passed out again. I stared out the window at a blue lake on the horizon, bluer by far than the sky. Closer up the wind-scuffed water looked like crushed velvet, and the lake was so huge the train seemed to slow down next to it, slogging along the shore at a pace I almost could’ve out-pedalled. Maybe the bicycle is the true pinnacle of all our science and longing to soar: one of the rare human inventions that has taken us farther, lifted us higher, without being warped to some sinister purpose. And for the moment I forgot about Baikonur as I wondered how my own bicycle was faring in the baggage car.

  I found out when the train stopped in Almaty. The frame was scratched but intact, and Mel’s bike was missing a handlebar grip. The baggage attendant, a different man than Mel had dealt with in Aktau, claimed he wasn’t responsible for the damage because we didn’t have a real baggage ticket. He laughed at the receipt Mel showed him. “This is what happens here, just accept it,” said a Kazakh woman in business attire who was collecting her own damaged luggage. “Welcome to Almaty.”

  I was relieved we still had bikes at all. It was after midnight and raining as we awkwardly hauled them and all our gear over three sets of train tracks to the station building. I felt sore from sitting for days on end, subconsciously shifting my muscles to accommodate the train’s movement. The taxis at the train station were too small for our bikes, so we commissioned the station wagon of a random family for the task. They drove us and our bikes to the address of Murat, a thirty-something Kazakh man we’d connected with through Couchsurfing. But the driver couldn’t find the address, and we couldn’t call Murat because we’d used up all our phone credit on the train pestering the travel agency about whether our LOIs had been issued (they hadn’t). When we finally found the place, no one answered our knock on the door. Mel began chanting Murat’s name, and the driver and I joined in, and eventually a tall, baby-faced guy shambled out, smiling through his sleepiness.

  “My friends! Welcome!” he exulted warmly, though we’d never met before.

  Over the next week Murat proved himself the patron saint of our trip. He spoke decent English and ran a travel agency with his parents, which meant he knew how to navigate all the spoken and unspoken rules of embassies in Almaty, which helped us score sixty-day tourist visas for Tajikistan. Sweet, slump-shouldered Murat wore a wide, serene smile and giggled at the slightest provocation. I could tell he hadn’t understood something I was saying if he started laughing prematurely, before the period or punchline.

  “And then this kind old woman on the train draped my sheet back over me—”

  “Hehehe!” Murat chortled.

  I didn’t bother finishing the story. Instead I checked my email, and saw a message from Julio. “KATE, HEYA! SUP?” it read in all caps. “I SENT THIS LETTER TO MEL. I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT SHE GETS IT. IN CASE SHE DOES NOT RECEIVE IT, COULD YA FORWARD IT TO HER? THANKS.”

  The actual letter read, “Dear Melissa, you are getting this email when you are in Kazakhstan on purpose, not out of cowardice but out of prudence: I did not want to make you feel uncomfortable and I did not want to feel ashamed.” Julio went on to say that the way Mel made him feel “cannot be described with worlds [sic].” He realized that the odds were against him: “. . . you are in transit and have a boyfriend. I am unemployed, not sure where to go, and on the point of leaving the former Soviet Union.” But regardless of how she felt in return, “I send you my love and blessings and wish you success in your travels so that you go back to your loved ones safe and sound.”

  Julio wasn’t the only one along the Silk Road to fall for my inadvertent heartbreaker of a friend. Shortly after leaving Kars, Alkim had sent Mel a Facebook message confessing, “You stucked [sic] an arrow into my heart.” This was accompanied by a link to a short video about our visit with KuzeyDoga, in which many of the shots lingered lovingly on Mel. Alkim was a filmmaker famous in northeastern Turkey, parts of Iran, and now small towns in Ontario where our parents lived, for the video had gone viral strictly among our families. Poor, arrow-stuck Alkim. Mel had written back graciously but firmly reiterating she had a boyfriend.

  Mel was also checking email on Murat’s computer, and when she exclaimed, “YES!” I was a bit startled by her reaction to Julio’s confession. But it wasn’t his love she was celebrating; it was an update from the travel agency: our LOI reference numbers had been issued.

  We were frantic with joy until Murat scrutinized the documents more closely: the LOIs gave us permission to obtain Uzbek tourist visas at the embassy in Baku, not Almaty. Fortunately the travel agency reassured us that the issuing city could be adjusted. A few days later, after waiting outside in a line of cigarette-smoking Kazakhs, we handed our passports, application forms, and money to the Uzbekistan embassy staff. Twenty minutes after that, our Silk Road stretched wide open all the way to China.

  If the visas worked, that is. Murat thought they all looked counterfeit. The Kyrgyz visa was a fake-looking stamp on a Kazakh visa. The Tajik visa was childishly filled out with blue pen. The Uzbek visa declared “THIS PERSON WILL NOT WORK IN UZBEKISTAN.” Murat really cracked up over this last one. “Who would go to Uzbekistan for work?” he giggled, his huge sides heaving. I wished we had our Aliens’ Travel Permits from Tibet to show him, purely to provoke that riotous laugh, so I told him about them instead. I only got as far as “and then we turned ourselves in to the police” when he roared prematurely—not because he hadn’t understood, I suspected, but because surrendering oneself to the authorities in Central Asia was a darkly comic notion. I suddenly felt unnerved by what lay ahead, namely a country so suspicious of foreigners that we were mandated to register at hotels every night and had to surrender those receipts in order to leave the country. That was problematic, given we planned to camp across Uzbekistan. But we brushed off these concerns and boarded the Trans-Kazakhstan the next morning with Uzbek visas in our passports, the bikes formally checked into the baggage car, and enough snacks to last the trip, all thanks to Murat.

  Crowding the aisles was the usual circus of chubby toddlers, families slurping goat’s head soup, and boozy men dozing in the dining car. To the south the Tian Shan mountains towered from the horizon, and to the north the flatness was relieved only by the nodding heads of spring grasses. Eventually the mountains shrank away and the steppe turned buttery in the late afternoon light. The train stopped at a dusty station where plastic bags wafted like pollen on the breeze. People wandered the platform but seemed uninterested in boarding; perhaps they were just out for a stroll. Women with shiny black hair pulled back in bright red and blue scarves sold dried fish from piles stacked on the platform, pyramids of scales that glinted gold and silver.

  As the train clanked forward again a young man and woman with lofty cheekbones suddenly raced to get it, their faces lit up and full of laughter. Do people always grin like that, running to catch trains? A few minutes later they came through the dining car, holding hands and looking serious and ordinary again, and I wondered whether we’re most alive in our moments of longing, the act of launching for a place we’re not certain to land. As the train accelerated toward the Caspian Sea it made a clopping sound followed by a queer suspended pause, as if every fifth beat the wheels didn’t touch the tracks, which somehow I hadn’t noticed before. Out the window, barely six feet from the speeding train, a burro flicked it
s wiry tail at flies but otherwise didn’t budge as we passed, and neither did the bird perched between the burro’s ears.

  Part Three

  I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.

  ELLEN MELOY, THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TURQUOISE

  8.

  Wilderness/Wasteland

  Ustyurt Plateau and Aral Sea Basin

  Getting off the train in Kazakhstan felt like starting the Silk Road afresh, only properly this time, because we didn’t miss our stop. People mobbed the platform in Beyneu, little more than a stretch of bare dirt bordering the rails, which vanished in a hot blur in both directions. We unloaded our gear and bikes in the only empty space we could find, against a whitewashed building flanked by poplars, then Mel went off in search of water. Only when the wind changed direction did I realize why such an enticing, shady spot had been vacant, and why those trees were flourishing in a desert: we’d parked ourselves next to the public restroom.

  The stench didn’t stop an ample-waisted Kazakh woman from shuffling over to me. The red velour bathrobe she wore gave her a dishevelled but oddly glamorous look, like an opera singer who’d just woken up. The woman gestured at my bike and made pedalling motions with her hands. I shrugged and smiled, offering her the bike. Below her head scarf a huge grin swallowed her eyes, two dimples in rising dough, then she sped off with alarming speed. Men in pit-stained tank tops and dusty suits stepped aside to let the bike pass, then the crowds closed behind her.

  “Velocipede, BYE BYE!” someone said, laughing.

  My bike was vagabond, Mel was who-knows-where with our water bottles, and the toilet fumes could’ve knocked the train off its tracks, so why did I feel like singing an aria? Because just beyond Beyneu was the Ustyurt Plateau, a desert stretching from Kazakhstan into Uzbekistan, and after a month in the bureaucratic doldrums, including 144 hours on a train, we finally had permission to go there. I was prepared to walk the sixty waterless miles to the Uzbek border, if that’s what it took. Fortunately the lady in red returned my bicycle, Mel struggled back with several camel humps’ worth of water in aptly named dromedary bags, and we set off spinning into the desert’s immaculate yawn.

  Even in April the heat was scorching. With no buildings or trees or clouds to block the sun, it blazed down on us with undiluted intensity. The road was less a feature of the desert than its erasure, a bare strip of land in a land itself mostly bare, except for a six o’clock shadow of grasses and herbs. Salt frosted the dirt in a cruel illusion of coolness, the result of brackish water evaporating in the millennia since the Ustyurt Plateau lay at the bottom of the Paratethys Sea, a breakaway remnant of the Tethys Ocean. The Paratethys drained away as the Tethys slipped under the Eurasian continent, uplifting Central Asia in the process. Now the sloshing of the drom bag on my bike was the only echo of the ancient shorelines I could just make out on the horizon, where the putty-coloured desert flared up into ridges of clay and gypsum.

  The dirt road had been concussed into concrete-hard peaks and valleys by transport trucks hauling goods to Uzbekistan. Fortunately traffic was scarce, and we could avoid it entirely on the alternate tracks that snaked beside the main road, where vehicles had veered off in a fruitless search for smoother driving. As I cut across the desert to one of these sidetracks, I could smell the sage crushed beneath my wheels, a fragrance I blissfully associated with sneaking out of the Mars Desert Research Station. I stopped and fixed a bouquet of the herb to my handlebars, so that winds all across Uzbekistan would waft the spice of freedom into my face.

  “This reminds me of Utah!” I exulted to Mel, who was biking next to me in the parallel tire track. It was rare that we could ride side-by-side without fear of being run over.

  “Right, Utah,” said Mel, suddenly very serious. “Where you went to space camp that one time . . .”

  “It wasn’t space camp!” I protested.

  “Ah, my mistake, the Mars simulation.”

  Merciless teasing was Mel’s deepest expression of fondness. We were having a grand time, as if the widened horizons of the desert were not just a fact of geography but a mood. The Ustyurt Plateau reminded me of Utah, Ladakh, the Gobi Desert, the Taklamakan Desert, the Tibetan Plateau—basically every place that had ever mugged me with its beauty, its sense of peeled-wide possibility. When a reporter asked Orville Wright to describe where he’d flown the world’s first airplane, he dreamily mused that the Outer Banks was like the Sahara, or what he imagined the Sahara to be. Travel is perhaps one part geography, nine parts imagination. You launch from the Outer Banks and land in the shifting dunes of northern Africa. You set off for Mars and end up—marvellous error!—on the Silk Road, this conjuring of dust and light and desire between Europe and Asia.

  Marco Polo never knew this trade route by its modern name. “Silk Road” was coined by a German geographer in 1877 to describe the flow of goods and ideas between East and West. The term remained fairly obscure until explorers in the mid-1900s recognized its romantic appeal and slapped it onto book covers about travels in China and Central Asia. Today the Silk Road remains a clever marketing ploy, a catchy name to connect the dots of a holiday and lend it a kind of historic momentum, for tourism is one part geography, nine parts souvenirs and selfies in front of ancient monuments.

  There were no such monuments on the Ustyurt Plateau, just the desert itself, which pleased Mel and me enormously. Much fuss is made of the distinction between tourists and travellers, particularly by those who insist, perhaps a little too strongly, that they fall in the latter, supposedly less superficial, category of foreign experience. Mel and I weren’t camera-toting consumers of packaged sights; we were seekers of the raw and the real! At least until we reached the Kazakh-Uzbek frontier at dusk, where a perspiring Uzbek border guard frowned at our passports and questioned our motives for visiting Uzbekistan.

  “Journalists? NGO? Correspondents?” he suggested with a sly look.

  “Tourists!” we chorused brightly.

  A Cyrillic sign welcomed us to OZBEKISTAN. This nation’s similarities to the land of Oz would prove more than etymological, starting with the road beyond the border, which was so gilded in the setting sun it looked paved in yellow bricks. That it was paved at all seemed a feat of wizardry. Hiding behind the iron curtain, in Uzbekistan’s case, was Islam Karimov, an undemocratically elected despot with a flair for corruption, torture, and forced child labour in state-owned cotton fields. Though he has passed away since our trip, Karimov at the time commanded such fearful deference from his citizens that when his cavalcade was due to drive past some cotton fields that had already been harvested, the locals glued wads of cotton back onto the plants so the president could behold the nation’s bounty. Such rancid paranoia suggested that Mel and I should take seriously Karimov’s decree that foreigners register with the Office of Visas and Registration (OVIR) within seventy-two hours of entering Uzbekistan, and judiciously collect receipts from hotels every night, without which we wouldn’t be allowed to exit the country. At the very least, it seemed prudent to conceal our campsites. But in the desert there’s no such thing as out of sight.

  We pitched the tent a mile or so from the road on dirt cracked into neat polygons, as if by some enormous impact, possibly the bricks of Uzbek currency we dropped there. The single U.S. hundred-dollar bill we’d handed to black-market traders just inside the border had yielded hundreds of bills of Uzbek som, so many that they were held together with elastic bands, just like in the movies. It would be nine days before we found a hotel willing to relieve us of some of this money, in the form of bribes for doctored OVIR receipts that testified to us staying in sanctioned tourist accommodations. For now we buried the relative fortune deep in our panniers and tried to ignore the extra weight.

  The next morning we inched across the Ustyurt Plateau as though velocipede were not just the Russian word for bicycle but a historically accurate description of the contraptions we rode. Anyone observing Mel’s and my slow pace would’ve readily
believed our bikes lacked pedals, tires, and drive trains like the cumbersome two-wheelers fashionable on the streets of Paris in 1876. Our hard-earned leg muscles and lung capacity had atrophied during our month-long hiatus from the bikes, meaning the previous day’s jaunt of sixty rough miles from Beyneu to the Kazakh-Uzbek border was akin to running a marathon after weeks of bed rest. Even worse, the border road’s washboard texture had substituted bruises for where our butts used to be, so that Mel and I howled in unison whenever we mounted our bicycles. We resorted to pedalling standing up, which made for slow progress. I consoled myself with an old Arabic saying I’d read somewhere: the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel.

  By that measure we were right on pace. At one point we passed a pair of camels with flopped-over humps and shaggy dreadlocked hides, nibbling with pursed lips at what looked like pure dust. Judging by the letters AL spray-painted on their ribs, as well as the jaunty scarves tied around their necks, these camels were domesticated, being one of the few large species that can survive the blistering heat and aridity of the Ustyurt. Another is the saiga antelope, an ungulate with dual unicorn-like horns that I thought I kept spotting on the horizon, only to see the four-legged creatures disappointingly resolve into more camels. This wasn’t unexpected, for saiga populations have been decimated by illegal poaching for their horns, which are prized as aphrodisiacs by traditional Chinese medicine, the form of “healing” most harmful to life on Earth. The herds also periodically suffer mysterious mass die-offs, possibly due to bacterial infections from domestic animals. As a result, saiga are rarer than free speech in Central Asia. Based on photos I’d seen, their bulbous brown eyes and nose like an abbreviated elephant’s trunk made them look Dr. Seussian, even extraterrestrial. But who was I to judge? From the perspective of Uzbeks, Mel and I were the aliens in the Ustyurt, a pair of pale, mute barbarians who opted to bike for nine days across a desert that locals sped through by car or avoided entirely. Then again, the Uzbek language has no word for “fun.”