Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  I agreed with Sagan’s conviction that “if it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.” I also suspected extraterrestrial civilizations hadn’t made contact because they’d decided, after eons of careful observation, that our planet is utterly lacking in intelligent life. Mel and I personally validated that conclusion when we set off biking again in the blazing inferno that was Uzbekistan. When we came across a concrete-lined canal we lay down in it fully dressed, still wearing our helmets, not caring that the water was a chemical slurry of fertilizers and pesticides, and ignoring the fact that on its paved shore a mangy, desiccated cowhide was still attached to its skull like a life-size poison label.

  At least Samarkand’s magnificent domes and turrets testified to human intelligence and ingenuity, if you could overlook the fact that they were built by the slaves of Timurlane, genocidal heir to Genghis Khan. A crippled shoulder and knee didn’t stop Timur the Lame, as his name was derived, from building an empire that spanned Turkey to India in the fourteenth century—severing, in the process, former intercontinental trade routes between Europe and Asia, which put an end to the glory days of the Silk Road. Credited with murdering millions and constructing pyramids with their skulls, this warrior-nomad graciously spared artists, weavers, glass-blowers, writers, and other craftspeople in the cities he conquered so that they might glorify his capital in Samarkand, which, inarguably, they did. That Islam Karimov fancies himself a Little Timur says all we need to know about the president of Uzbekistan’s leadership style. Timur himself, who wasn’t Uzbek but Turco-Mongolian, has been co-opted as the mythical founder of the Uzbek nation. Never mind that modern Uzbekistan was created whole cloth by the Soviets in the 1920s, and that both Bukhara and Samarkand are traditionally Tajik cities stranded there because of the arbitrariness of Soviet frontiers.

  The question of borders is a source of ongoing grief for tourism-starved Tajikistan, because of all the historic Silk Road sites in Central Asia, Bukhara and Samarkand attract the most visitors. Mel and I saw more foreigners in a few minutes in these two cities than during our previous six months on the Silk Road, though most pretended not to see us. The mostly older, mostly French visitors refused to meet our eyes as they looked around distractedly for their husbands or wives, who were forever ducking into carpet shops. Such tourists were usually identifiable by their scrupulously clean trekking pants, whereas bicycle travellers were instantly recognizable by their raccoon-eye sunglass tans, tattered clothes, and uncertain, lurching strides, like astronauts relearning how to walk. At least that’s how I hobbled around Samarkand, marvelling at how its tiles and curves and tessellations suggested infinite visions, infinite viewpoints, even as the city was built (and rebuilt) to honour one kind of god, one empirical narrative. It seemed to me that maps should imply that same sort of limitlessness, for where you see one road and one country there are actually many, revealing themselves a little differently to everyone who travels them. Nations borrowed from the truth and returned by morning.

  Doves cooed in the courtyard of Samarkand’s Registan, where three peerless madrassas stare each other down across the centuries, and grass sprouts from smooth, bald domes of turquoise tiles. On a street nearby a group of skull-capped men held the corners of a sheet taut beneath a mulberry tree. High in it a young boy shook the branches to send the berries raining down, and much pointing and debate ensued over the specific limbs the boy should shake to yield the sweetest storm. The men shuffled back and forth with the sheet to catch the white berries as people have probably done for thousands of years in Samarkand, for mulberry trees have been cultivated here since the fourth century BCE, their leaves being the preferred fodder of silkworms. The men gently shook the harvest off the sheet into bowls, where the mulberries looked disgusting, like mashed grubs or silkworm pupae. The latter have been proposed as a compact, fast-growing source of protein for long-term space missions—which seemed reason enough to stay on Earth. I hesitated when the young boy offered me a white berry to sample, but fortunately it tasted less larval than it looked.

  We saw more and more mulberry trees on the way to Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, for the country grew lusher by the mile. Crops, animals, or human communities sprouted from every speck of arable land, making it harder to find places to camp. One night we stopped in a field busy with bent-over workers, who shrugged when we asked if we could pitch our tent. Taking this as permission granted, we searched among rows of crops until we found a clearing, and then set up camp under the supervision of a dozen giggling boys and girls who’d followed us there in a lengthening line. Pitching the tent briefly offered them some entertainment, but when we started boiling water for instant noodles the kids grew bored and wandered off.

  The fields were honeyed with light as the sun set, and they gave off the warm smell of hay. When it grew dark after dinner Mel and I tucked into the tent, though it was still too hot for sleeping bags. I lay on top of mine and was just about to drift off when I thought I heard footsteps. Instantly wide awake, I listened but could only hear the rasp of crickets, cars on the road, dogs barking in the distance, the low bluesy moans of cows—all the usual sounds we collectively call silence. Then I heard more footsteps, followed by hushed whispers. I nudged Mel and sensed her sudden alertness. We waited, the darkness as loaded with possibility as water gathering to a drop. Nothing . . . still nothing . . . then a riot of monkey whoops, cow moos, dog barks, and wolf howls punctuated by giggles.

  We stayed quiet until Mel, as usual, couldn’t contain herself. “BEEF AND NOODLES!” she hollered randomly, prompting the kids to scream in delight. They ran off laughing and shouting “beefandnoodles, beefandnoodles,” repeating the foreign syllables like a mantra or spell all the way home, or at least until we couldn’t hear them anymore, in part because we were laughing so much ourselves. Just another night on the Silk Road, with silence settling over the fields and the crickets resuming their own strange incantations, spells that conjured beads of dew from blades of grass and lulled us to sleep under a smoke of stars.

  9.

  The Source of a River

  Pamir Knot

  For all Marco Polo’s exaggerations about the Silk Road, he deserves credit for downplaying the hardships of his journey. When the Venetian merchant’s caravan was raided by thieves in a Persian desert, he reported without hyperbole, in the third person, that “Messer Marco himself was almost caught by these people in that darkness.” He managed to escape, but his companions were killed or sold into slavery. He was similarly tight-lipped about suffering illness on the Silk Road. In Badakhshan, where modern Tajikistan and Afghanistan meet, Polo noted—again in the third person—that “he remained sick for about a year.”

  I was far less stoic when I woke up feverish in Tashkent. “I think I’m dying,” I rasped to Mel in the Uzbek capital, sounding as though I’d gargled with barbed wire. I suspected this was the outcome of waiting in line at the Chinese embassy a few days earlier behind a man who periodically let loose violent explosions of phlegm. At the time, it seemed a small price to pay for Chinese tourist visas, for once obtained the only remaining bureaucratic hurdle we’d face on the Silk Road would be sneaking illegally into Tibet again. That is, if we made it out of Uzbekistan, which hinged on the authorities accepting our fake OVIR receipts. I couldn’t tell where my fever ended and the world began as we biked to the border. When the Uzbek officials proved more interested in our marital status than our OVIR receipts, I was too wiped to feel relief.

  In Tajikistan we stopped at the first house we saw, hoping to camp in the yard. A clean-shaven man with nut-brown eyes came to the door of the whitewashed plaster building and introduced himself as Bobo. Despite the heat he looked crisp and immaculate in a white skull cap, a white T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and white capri-style pants. His sandals slapped loudly as he led us to a grassy plot of land where we could set up the tent. I was desperate to crawl inside, but Bobo invited us back to his house for a meal, and I couldn’t refuse because I could barely talk
.

  Bobo quietly repeated our names as we walked: “Katerina, Melissa, Katerina, Melissa.” Inside his refreshingly cool, dark home, his wife laid out two cushions next to bread stacked like plates. Then she brought out bowls I was sure contained some kind of gristly meat, judging by the amorphous shapes inside them. When I raised a fork to my mouth, I tasted the cool freshness of tomatoes and cucumber instead. Just as I thought the meal was over, his wife entered the room with the main course: a pyramid of plov, an oily mixture of rice, meat, and carrots that both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan claim as their national dish. After a few token bites I retreated to my sleeping bag, where I should’ve been all day.

  The next morning I tried to convince myself that my aching muscles, raw throat, and pounding head were a dramatic improvement from the day before. After an hour on the bike I gave up. I lay under a tree on my Therm-a-Rest mattress, choking back tears as sweat dripped across my skin, sometimes feeling like ants were crawling over me, and sometimes, to my horror, there actually were ants. An hour or two later Mel urged me back into the saddle long enough to reach the nearest Tajik homestead. Another family graciously took us in, but their home was so loud and hot and swarming with flies I almost would’ve preferred the ants. A fan stirred the heat around the room, in which an older woman, possibly blind, idly waved a tennis-racket fly zapper around. It threw off sparks as bugs soldered their bodies to the air. This stochastic noise kept me awake despite my exhaustion, as did the TV, and when that was turned off the dogs barking outside were just as bad. All night I took turns dousing myself fully-clothed with a hose in the yard and then dozing in the brief coolness of the water evaporating, until the heat woke me up again, so I’d shuffle outside to repeat the ritual.

  When I was still sick the next morning, Mel arranged for us to share a jeep ride to Dushanbe, the capital city of Tajikistan, where I could see a doctor who spoke English. I don’t remember much about that drive except for techno music so loud that each throb of the bass was a hammer to my skull. Somehow the old man next to me slept through it, his head swinging at me like a wrecking ball on the rough road, whose switchbacks were decorated with smashed cars and trucks.

  The doctor’s English was less fluent than I’d hoped. He peered down my throat, a puzzled look on his face, then scribbled something on a piece of paper. “I writing good recipe for you!” he said, not sounding very convinced. The pharmacist translated the prescription into four containers of liquids and pills that I was instructed to take at various times a day for the next week. At the hostel in Dushanbe, where we pitched the tent in the yard because it was cheaper than a room, Mel Googled the labels on the medicine to make sure they wouldn’t hurt more than help. Her searches revealed that silver nitrate is seldom used in the Western world, for it can cause severe gastroenteritis that may end fatally, and that Dexoral is only approved for veterinary use in most countries. Cipfast was ciprofloxacin, more commonly known as cipro, a general antibiotic used to treat a wide range of bacterial infections. She couldn’t find any information at all on Traclysan. I took cipro, put the rest of the good recipe aside, and went to sleep for what felt like a week.

  When I finally crawled out of the tent I felt well enough to interview government ministers about wilderness conservation in Tajikistan. This was the main reason we’d planned to come to Dushanbe, and if anything, these meetings further aided my recovery, for they involved a quantity of waiting as recuperative as bed rest. Mel and I would schedule a meeting for, say, two p.m., and the government minister would graciously promise to send a car to pick us up. When no car appeared by three p.m., we’d call to inquire whether plans had changed, only to be told to expect a ride “soon.” We’d wait another hour, call again, and be told, “Soon, soon.” An hour later, the car would arrive and the driver would reassure us “in two minutes office.” Twenty minutes later, after numerous inscrutable stops and starts along the tree-lined streets of Dushanbe, we would finally arrive at the minister’s office only to be served tea and told to wait some more.

  We quickly learned to bring our e-readers on these outings and I passed the time revisiting Rumi, who was born on the edge of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, though he also spent time in Iran and of course settled in Turkey. All these countries claim the poet as their own, which is ironic given that Rumi’s whole oeuvre is one long argument against borders, as well as a radical call for the renouncement of power, wealth, and other things nation states generally hold dear. “Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands, or your own genuine solitude?” Rumi asks. “Freedom, or power over an entire nation?” I doubted the dictatorial president of Tajikistan had actually read these or any of Rumi’s lines, for in perverse commemoration of the poet’s eight hundredth birthday the Tajik government issued a coin with Rumi’s face on it.

  Perverse or perhaps appropriate, as Tajikistan is the poorest of all the former states of the Soviet Union. This country seemingly boasts more goats than people and more vertical than horizontal land, and more than half its gross domestic product derives from citizens working abroad and sending money home. Given the lack of funding for basic services in Tajikistan, I’d been pleasantly surprised that a colossal 17 per cent of the country is protected within Tajik National Park. Sadly, this statistic is less impressive than it sounds. Without money to hire rangers to efficiently patrol and protect the reserve, its mostly unmonitored terrain makes it an ideal conduit for drug trafficking and the illegal hunting of wildlife—including the curlicue-horned Marco Polo sheep and the elusive snow leopard. Mel asked one government minister roughly how much wildlife was poached from the park each year, and he said something tight-lipped to the translator.

  “No poaching, or no statistic—it’s hard to say,” she offered grimly.

  Though Tajikistan apparently lacks the funding to build robust fences or enforce fines in national parks, the government mysteriously conjured millions of dollars to build such critical infrastructure as the world’s tallest flagpole (demoted a few years later to the world’s second tallest flagpole, after Saudi Arabia built one twenty feet higher).

  “Our tradition is optimism. It is Tajik way,” explained the translator when I brought up such excesses, prudently refraining from translating my questions.

  “Is he an optimist?” I asked, nodding toward the government minister. He was frowning into his tea and tapping his foot impatiently.

  “No, he is more like Kazakh,” the translator admitted. “Pessimist.”

  But pessimism seemed a decidedly Tajik trait whenever we mentioned our plans to bike across the Pamir Plateau. “It is very extremely there,” a different government minister warned us. “Very extremely. Those mountains, you cannot breathe.” Three of the greatest mountain ranges on Earth—the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram, and the Pamir—meet in what geographers call the Pamir Knot and locals call the Bam-i-Dunya, Persian for “roof of the world.” Similarities with the Tibetan Plateau are more than nomenclatural, given the lowest valleys loom higher than most peaks in North America, and streams film over with ice even in the summer. But one person’s extreme is another’s comfortable, just as wildness is relative, and perhaps sanity too. Pedalling across deserts and mountains for months on end through varying intensities of rain, shine, hail, and snow? Reasonable. Chemically analyzing the microbial equivalent of cholesterol in a sterile laboratory six storeys high? Very extremely.

  Clearly I was feeling better. When we biked out of Dushanbe a few days later I was charmed by everything: the crazy traffic, the potholes, the way car horns in Tajikistan could sound like police sirens, donkey brays, bicycle bells, trumpets, the simple bleep of a curse word redacted on TV. The road out of the city was half-melted, sticky as tar, but I felt so regenerated after the long break I was sure I could power through superglue. That lasted about an hour. As the sound of car horns faded the farther we rode from the city, so too did my energy. We took a break in a village and quickly drew a crowd of little boys.

  They were more interested in our bikes than us. Af
ter talking expertly among themselves about the size and number of the gears and the quantity of panniers (or so I guessed from what the boys were pointing at), they grew concerned that passing cars would knock the bikes over, parked as they were on the road shoulder. With our permission they wheeled the bikes to a more protected spot, taking enormous care to leave them exactly as they’d found them, right down to the flourish of Mel’s backpack propped against the rear wheel. A few hours later, during another break, a different group of small boys threw stones into the branches of a nearby tree to knock down apricots, which they gallantly offered to us. The fruit was delicious, possibly because it was forbidden: while some boys raided the tree a few others kept watch for the orchard’s owner. Eventually the boys grew tired of throwing stones at apricots and started aiming them at each other. We distracted them by letting them try on our helmets, which they loved because they could whack each other on the head and not feel a thing.