The Long Hitch Home

by Jamie Maslin

  Shit.

  My spirits sank. To be only fifty miles away was a killer. I trudged off down the road, resigned now to an uncomfortable night outside, but then another car approached, a little white Lada, and so for the hell of it I threw out a hand. I didn’t hold out much hope but it began to slow and then came to a halt right next to me. Inside were two guys about my age listening to dance music blaring from the stereo. The passenger wore a baggy gangster-style Puma hoodie, the driver, a full police uniform—by the looks of it making his way home from work in his civilian car. I handed him a note, accompanied by multiple gracious thank-yous in an attempt to avoid a repeat of last time.

  “Get in!” said the passenger, waving me inside in a manner that also said, “What you waiting for?”

  I did as instructed and was on the move once more, delighted beyond words to be heading away from this godforsaken dump, off into the night towards Shymkent.

  “DJ Pilgrim, Uzbekistan!” said the driver enthusiastically, turning up the music.

  The car became a disco. My new companions began bopping along, then laughing manically as the driver swerved to the beat, snaking along the road. I laughed too and joined in with the party, delighted at the instantaneous transformation of my situation, and so very happy to be on the move again, with two upbeat, friendly nutters, who introduced themselves as Gaxa and Pyctam.

  We approached a police checkpoint on the outskirts of Shymkent. Quickly grabbing their seat belts, Gaxa and Pyctam pulled them across their chests, holding them in place to appear buckled-up.

  “Fuck you, Pigs!” shouted policeman Gaxa, as we safely passed the cops, flicking the bird.

  Pyctam and I laughed ourselves silly.

  The next twenty minutes passed in a blur. Twisting our way through a surprisingly vibrant Soviet-era city, past flood-lit monuments and along leafy streets, we came to a halt by a small Internet café. Inside I discovered my luck held strong—Sipra was offering me a place to crash. Pyctam gave her a call on his cell, and before I knew it I was saying hello to a pretty, dark-haired American girl opposite a sprawling “Mega” mall, and bidding Gaxa and Pyctam farewell; and then, a few minutes later, stepping into Sipra’s basic high-rise apartment and being introduced to her flatmate, Dina, a twenty-one-year-old Kazakh English teacher.

  “Would you like something to eat or a beer?” asked Sipra, answering both of my prayers in a single utterance.

  From the kitchen fridge came a brown bottle of renowned local brew, Shymkentskoe Pivo. Cracking it open, releasing an intoxicating heady aroma of nuts and malt, I took a methodical first sip, savoring the bubbles’ waltz on my parched and wanting tongue. Life felt good; and it was. I thought back to the numbskulls I’d encountered at the village store and wished they could see me now, not the vagrant any more but in a world of satisfaction. But no matter how good the beer, I was even keener for sustenance. Instead of taking a hand out, I offered to cook. The girls accepted, but having already eaten requested something light. A swift inquisitive appraisal of available food and it was decided I’d rustle up one of my few culinary specialities—super thin crepe pancakes, served with lemon and sugar. They went down a treat, with Sipra and Dina having two a piece, and me doing what any self respecting guest would under the circumstances—helping to prevent wastage by devouring four.

  Sadly, both the girls had to be up early in the morning, so after recommending places to visit along my route they turned in for the night. Tomorrow’s suggestion: Turkistan, a Silk Road city home to Kazakhstan’s greatest piece of historic architecture, Khoja Ahmat Yssawi Mausoleum.

  Set up for me on the floor of the sitting room was a bed that was comfort itself: a good supportive mattress, downy pillows and a fluffy floral-patterned duvet—luxury that even Dmitriy’s cab would have been unable to match. I was warm, had a full stomach and a first-rate place to sleep. I wanted for nothing and almost glowed with satisfaction. Things couldn’t get much better—or so I thought. Before crashing out I decided to take Sipra up on her offer to use her laptop. I logged onto couchsurfing.org again, then afterwards checked my emails. A solitary message sat in my inbox, the sender’s name jumping out at me as if written in great big neon letters:

  OLIVER STONE

  Bloody hell. This looked auspicious, and I had an inkling what it was about. Hovering the cursor over the name I clicked open. Inside, just as I hoped, was a gracious acceptance of an offer I had made to the Hollywood legend: to send him an advance reader copy of my book on Venezuela—a country that featured heavily in his recent documentary, South of the Border—with a view to him writing a short endorsement for the book, provided, of course, that he liked what he read and saw promise in it. I was delighted he’d agreed, and sat with a smile from ear to ear.

  * * *

  As the sun rose in a bright and clear blue sky, I set off for Turkistan, home to Kazakhstan’s greatest historical building and its most significant site of Muslim pilgrimage, the Khoja Ahmat Yssawi Mausoleum. Built in the fourteenth century over the grave of renowned Turkic holy man and mystical poet, Khoja Ahmat Yssawi, the mausoleum was constructed by one of history’s great tyrants, not Iraq butcher Tony Blair, but Tamerlane (also known as Timur), an interesting, if thoroughly ruthless, despot whose rampage of conquest killed seventeen million people and created an empire that stretched from Turkey to the frontiers of China, and from Russia to northern India. If anyone epitomizes the cruel and merciless despot then it is Tamerlane. Throughout Asia he constructed towering cemented pyramids of human skulls outside the cities he conquered, the structures’ main ingredient coming from the heads of the men, women, and children who once resided there.

  Unlike other empire builders, Tamerlane demonstrated little interest in actually governing the areas he sacked. Rather, his approach was that of a ram-raid looter, but with one key distinction; as well as stealing and then carting back to his place everything that took his fancy, he would often indulge himself in the wholesale slaughter of the city’s inhabitants. In Northern India alone he put five million people to the sword. Such a total and utter just-for-the-hell-of-it overkill terrified inhabitants of other cities to the extent that often they would surrender without a fight. Were there an award for history’s top malignant and vindictive bastard, then Tamerlane would certainly be one of the nominees. Legend has it that when he conquered Ottoman Turkey, rather than kill the Ottoman Sultan, he opted instead for unending humiliation for the unfortunate former ruler. Tamerlane is said to have kept him as a pet, shipping the Sultan back to his palace where he was forced to live out his days in a cage, looking on while his naked wives were made to serve Tamerlane and his guests.

  But there was more to Tamerlane than vengeful spite alone. In a sense he was the ultimate James Bond villain of his time, a maniac set on world domination but with a strange fondness for the refined: culture and the arts, both of which he promoted. He surrounded himself with scholars and scientists—often captured during conquest—and would plunge into impassioned debate with them, even on campaign. His private library was packed with scholarly manuscripts, and his quest, it seemed, was sometimes as much for knowledge as power, with him displaying a passion, love even, for mathematics, medicine, architecture, and astronomy. On a giant 110 square board he would play a modified version of chess, known today as Tamerlane Chess, that included several new pieces: giraffes, elephants, war engines, camels.

  His love of architecture saw the transformation of city Samarkand (in modern day Uzbekistan) into the greatest city of Central Asia, a monumental trophy to Tamerlane’s ego and military prowess, a magnificent capital city that swelled in size with captured scholars, architects, artisans and craftsmen—the lucky ones, spared the grisly fate of so many of their fellow vanquished, thanks alone to their profession. To Tamerlane’s court came foreign envoys, including the Spanish ambassador of King Henry III, Ruy González de Clavijo, who returned to Europe with tales of magnificence and brutality, fueling the West’s imagination for the exotic and mysterious Samarka
nd, which under Timur’s rule became a masterpiece of Islamic architecture, stuffed with fine works of art and literature, as did other cities of his near empire—an example being the one I made my way to now.

  I arrived at Turkistan by mid-morning after an easy hitchhike from Shymkent that took me past several massive billboards plastered with magnanimous images of the country’s iron-fisted dictator, President Nursultan Nazarbayev (whose regime, irony of ironies, has enlisted war criminal Tony Blair and his low-life former director of communications [minister for propaganda], Alastair Campbell, to help clean up his image),170 and onwards through an ever flattening landscape of cotton fields, salt marshes and steppe, to the fringes of the Kyzylkum desert.

  A wrinkly old truck driver dropped me off in the center of this modest Silk Road city of seventy-thousand people, opposite three clapped-out Russian buses parked outside the dusty grounds of Tamerlane’s greatest Kazakh construction, the Khoja Ahmat Yssawi Mausoleum. Standing proudly behind a mud-brick fortress wall, dotted along its length with regularly spaced battlements, it was a building unlike any I had seen before. It looked part desert fortress, part mosque, part royal palace. Towering out of a brown and faded landscape, rose the giant structure, its front comprised of a sandy-colored brick façade with a cavernous arched entrance portal that rose into a V-shaped point, making up the tallest part of the mausoleum. Protruding from this archway, rising high up on its walls, were multiple twisted beams of wood—the purpose of which I have no idea. Two rounded battlement-topped bastion towers sandwiched the portal on either side; behind which the structure suddenly transitioned into something very different: more mosque than castle. Perching on its upper levels were a pair of glorious domes, one big, one small, both tiled in turquoise and gleaming in the light of a cloudless sky. Beneath the domes fell clean straight walls clad in exquisite light and dark blue tiles, laid out in repetitive geometric shapes and Arabic scripted calligraphy, their uniformity only broken by the occasional carved wooden door or delicate lattice window. And standing alone in front of the main structure was a smaller building in a corresponding style, its diminutive size serving as an exclamation mark, highlighting the majesty of the larger architectural wonder behind.

  I strolled towards the mausoleum along a path of crazy-paving, thronging with hordes of Kazakh tourists and school groups. After mingling among the other sightseers examining the mausoleum’s extremities, I passed through the arched entranceway and stepped into a cool and surprisingly plain interior. There were no grandiose embellishments here, only plain white walls and ordered gray floor tiles, creating a serene atmosphere. Several rooms were open to visitors, but none compared to the majesty of outside. With no placards for me to read in English, I quickly had a look around, then headed back outdoors where I spent the next hour marveling at the intricate detail of the structure’s exterior.

  * * *

  I was long since used to my presence drawing plenty of attention in remote towns, and as I walked through Turkistan’s bustling streets it was no different. Such atypical appearance served me well, with a lift quickly coming from the driver of a beat up Soviet-era car.

  A curious-looking chap sat behind the wheel, sporting a tufty beard from his chin. Wrapped up in a thick leather jacket with big furry lapels and cuffs, he wore a brown skull cap on his balding head. I handed him a note. Considering it silently for a moment, he looked at me and smiled.

  “I am Muzappar,” he said “I take you to meet my wife.”

  Fair enough, I thought, let’s see where this leads.

  It led to a local school canteen.

  The children must have been in class, or maybe off on an excursion, as the place was empty but for several teachers and catering staff, sitting at a row of plastic-covered tables eating cakes, breads, candies, and sipping at bowls of yogurt.

  Muzappar introduced his wife, a plump old mother hen of a woman with a mouthful of gold teeth—a common sight in the region—and sat me down between her and an attractive, and rather buxom, young teacher, who among a mouthful of pearly whites flashed a single golden tooth my way as she smiled; something I found rather fetching.

  “This celebration for Norouz,” said Muzappar’s wife. (Norouz being the imminent Persian New Year).

  Neither she nor Muzappar spoke much English, and the young teacher none, so I did as often before: graciously smiled and nodded while getting stuck in to the food. On completion of the meal I received a surprisingly forward and unexpected offer from the delightful young lady next to me: would I like to stay at her house tonight? Muzappar’s wife delivered the question, noting that, “she has own house and will guest you tonight.” Muzappar was a world of none-too-subtle suggestive nods, whose meaning was clear.

  The free accommodation was tempting, but this one seemed like a bad idea. I didn’t fancy a repeat of the situation with Mandy, so I politely declined. Muzappar sighed, accompanying this with a slight shake of the head, and an expression that spoke of lost opportunities. Such was his disappointment it almost seemed as if he’d received the offer himself. In fact, I got the distinct impression that he not only fancied his wife’s work colleague—an understandable reaction—but also the prospect of living vicariously through any potential escapades I could have got up to with her.

  Minutes later and we were back on the road together, with Muzappar dropping me on the outskirts of town on the road heading north. Waiting here was a line of Kazakh hitchhikers, doing so in the Central Asian tradition, where money was changing hands. I didn’t want to appear part of this group, so I hiked on up the dusty road into an expansive flat landscape of perfect uniformity; two simple halves, one of clear blue sky, the other scrubby grassland-steppe.

  My next destination was Otrar, the ruins of a former Silk Road city where, a century before Tamerlane, the actions of the city’s governor would change the course of human history, bringing down the mighty Khwarazmian Empire of Persia, and setting in motion the expansion of another far greater empire that, at its height, was eight times the size of Alexander the Great’s, and four times the size of the Romans’; an empire built upon a simple natural resource, grass, that fed horses by the millions ridden by unstoppable waves of nomadic archers; an empire that would lead to the brutal death of millions and see its founder’s name go down in legend, as both an evil and ruthless barbarian, and the most successful military commander the world has ever known—Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire.

  The story of Genghis Khan begins in the heart of the vast grassland plains of Central Asia, the steppes, where nomadic tribes roamed wild and free, characterized by their equestrian lifestyle of hunting on horseback (a Central Asian innovation) with distinctive and formidable bows made from a combination of wood and bone that were capable of a range of over 1,500 feet. Born to the name Temujin in a remote Mongolian yurt in 1162, the child who would go on to be called Genghis Khan was delivered clutching, so the legend goes, a coagulated blood-clot in his tiny hand, a sign from heaven that the infant was destined to be a mighty warlord. The young Temujin’s upbringing was marred by the butchery and killing of inter-clan feuds that saw his father poisoned when he was nine years old. His father had been the head of his small clan, and so by tradition this role as leader would normally have passed to his eldest son, Temujin. But at such a young age, the rest of the clan refused to be led by him, and so deserted Temujin and his immediate family, who were forced to roam the remotest parts of the region’s steppes and reduced to hunting small game and digging for roots. It was during this time that Temujin, still in his teens, murdered his half brother for refusing to share the spoils of a hunt with the rest of the family.

  As he grew older, Temujin realized that the only way his small band of family members could survive was through forging links with other clans, and the best way to do that was marriage. So he was wed, but soon afterwards his wife was kidnapped by a rival tribe, a common practice in the dog-eat-dog world of the steppes, where if you wanted something you simply took it. Incensed, and with
the assistance of his childhood friend, Jamuka, Temujin gathered together a band of warriors to ride in and rescue her, and then destroy the offending tribe. The mission was a success, and at just twenty years old Temujin had successfully annihilated one of the great tribes of Mongolia, a tribe that had feuded with his father. Despite Temujin and Jamuka’s collaboration and subsequent joint leadership of their increasingly powerful tribe, tensions grew between the pair, centered around a disagreement as to who was eligible to serve in the tribe’s highest ranks. In contrast to tribal tradition, Temujin believed it was simply a case of ability and loyalty; whereas Jamuka, son of a nobleman, believed in the old way of doing things, reserving the highest ranks for those of aristocratic birth. In the end, Jamuka rode off in disgust, splitting the tribe and taking his supporters with him. Two years passed before Jamuka and Temujin would meet again, when Jamuka, who had now formed a coalition of tribes, ambushed Temujin and his followers. Despite Temujin’s forces suffering a crushing defeat, he managed to flee with his life, regrouping, with his loyal survivors, to fight another day. For his captured generals there would be no second chance: Jamuka boiled them alive.

  If this was meant to piss off the man who would become Genghis Khan then it did the job. Temujin swore that never again would he be defeated and he began building an army in earnest, uniting disparate tribes against Jamuka. Casting aside the old tribal conflicts, he created a fighting force based on merit where the spoils of war would be shared accordingly, and instigated a system of training where even children were required to practice the arts of horsemanship and archery. This was something they were trained to do in conjunction, learning to fire arrows at the precise moment the hooves of a galloping horse were simultaneously off the ground, providing the archer with stability and accuracy of shot.