Tashkent is Uzbekistan capital. The objective of my visit and of many other travelers is its embassies. I’m here to get the Kyrgyz visa, the last country I’ll visit before arriving to china.

As there is no cheap place to sleep that I wanted to go to , I end up in a hotel paying 50 Dollars. Auch! Thats whats happens when you don’t do reservations.

After going four times to the Kyrgyz embassy by roads full of yellow leaves, I get my visa. I feel alleviated for not having to go to more embassies and to fill up more forms.

Ther are travellers that are telling me that the border with Kyrgyzstan is closed. In July there were fights in the streets in the Osh region (border with Uzbekistan) and seems the Uzbek side of the border is closed. I ask to the two main travel agencies in the country and they both say that they have had people crossing last week. Who do I follow?

I decide to wait a few days, in Uzbekistan I still have to visit Bukhara and Samarkand. The best is going to be checking the border status when I’m closer to the time to cross.

Legacy of the past. What is as soviet as a Lada? Well, yes, Boris Yeltsin, the red square, the tzars, the vodka, the transversal, a nuclear soviet submarine(of course, saying soviet in the name…it’s easy to find things), the perestroika, Kasparov and its chess…

If you fake Pringles, the first obvious thing you have to do is to make a tubular packaging. They are not bad, but I miss the artificial flavour of the originals.

I love Ladas, in fact I’m feeling to buy one, I feel atraction from it’s simple shapes and the non metal colors little a kids drawing style.

I’ve thought that a cool trip would be to fly to Vladivostok in the east of Russia, buying one and drive all the way back home. If I get to do it I’ll hang a sponge Bob in the mirror as in this one.

Soviet buildings. There are super wide streets with subterranean passes to cross them

This one is not a Lada, it’s not that cool.

The tram with the same colors as the buildings.

Tashkent is big enought to have an underground and it is very peculiar. I haven’t been in Moscow one that was supposed to be very monumental but seeing this one I get an idea. It’s full of lamps, marvel and mosaics.

The to best stops for me are Cosmonaut, with giant circular drawings of Russian astronauts and Khaid Alimjan(I think) with lamps looking like mussrums making it look like a fairy tale stop. Fairy tale metro stop.. Sounds weird.

The metro was designed as a nuclear shelter so it’s not allowed to take pictures. In each stop there are several policeman than don’t allow you to take pictures and that ask you the passport to see if you are illegal.

The second day I get the underground and I ask one of the policemen if I’m in the right side of the platform. Before answering me he says “Passaport”. I find it funny, the situation is so stupid! My logic must be different than his, but if I wouldn’t have the papers right I whouldn’t ask a policeman, moreover, I would not get into the metro with the plague of uniform man.

To make a test I give him a horrible photocopy of the passport and the visa, he tells me that all is fine and that I’m in the worng side of the platform. The man must be arround 50 and I would like to ask him in his all his working life he’s ever met a sungle foreigner in the underground which was “illegal”. I smile to him, not to be nice but beause I find funny imagining his face. I’ve been ask for the passport another two times today.

Every day I see weddings. Well in the Aral sea I saw non, but since I entered Turkmenistan I see at least one a day.

A pleasant park and some horrible drawings. Tashkent is full of parks and trees, nearly all the travellers I meet find the place tasteless and they don’t like it, but I’ve liked it.

Two Italians in a tandem (the one in the back part has eyes problems and is almost blind) that wanted to go to Pakistan and have had to cancel their trip as it’s impossible to get the visa here.

In the hostel I find a mixed crowd. Two French women around their 70s that are travelling Central Asia for a few weeks, one of them talks Esperanto. A british guy and a Canadian girl that met doing the pan-american route, he was on a  scooter and she in a bicycle, they got married and now they are travelling by bicycle arround the area with a four year old girl. The last one, Mike, a funny Canadian and who knows how long he’s been cycling, he crossed from Canada to Europe in a Polish cargo ship.

I see a huge poster about Jose Carreras (Spanish opera singer), this apart from being anecdotic makes me relize that nearly in every capital I’ve been I’ve seen some kind of poster or advertising about a concert or exhibition of a Spanish artist. Dalí, Picasso, Velazquez, flamenco dancing, bands, opera… our cultural legacy goes farther than what I thought.

My days waiting the visa has been full of walks over crunching leaves sesing armies of sweepers trying their best to collect them with sweep and their hands. They’d be stunned by the blowing machine used in Burgos.

After the Aral Sea post I told you that I´d put some happier pictures. Here you have some of Nukus market we came across trying to find the bus station.

“Can I take you a picture?” I love when they ask me for a picture. Why are the foreigners the ones that always have to ask for it? We are as exotic for them as they are for us. How nice she was!

Yellow carrots. They taste very similar to our orange ones, they are used for a stew with rice and mutton fat, it’s called Plov.

Green asian eyes. The mixture of faces is very surprising, from mongols to slavs or germans, mixed with the central asian tribes and the russians.

The dressing has nothing to do with religion, if every day I’d arrive home with farinha even in my belly botton, I’d wear the same way.

Butcher, next to it there were women selling smoked fish.

Pili getting an adress to send back a picture.

The best way to carry bread around.

Nukus is the center of the Karakapakstan region that menas “the land of black hat men”, what a good name. They have their own identity, good sense of humor, a language or own dialect and a bit of independent identity.

After seen my last sunset in Khiva, I get to the capital. I shared a taxi with a girl from Granada who lives in Paris. She was an expert in interantional relationships specialized in Africa so I was able to ask her tons of things and we compared the difference life between the poor countries in Africa an Asia.

The second part of the journey was a night bus in which I as able to sleep nine hours using my incredible capacity to sleep anywhere and also, thanks to the inventor of ear blockers!

Uzbek greetings.
Fernando

Approved the plan in which we’ll create watering channels in the rivers Amy Darya and Syr Darya. The channels will water new cotton plantations providing all the Soviet Union. As a side effect the Aral Sea will dry in five years.”

The Aral Sea was the fourth biggest lake on earth. Since 1960 it’s size has decreased from 62,1 to 12,1 square meters. The most terryfing of it’s history is that drying it was done on purpose. A plan that we’d call now “unsustainable”  was approved and all the people living from it would be forced to change their lives. The unknown was awaiting them, nobody told them, nobody gave them an alternative. The experts said that it was unavoidable, a lake destined to disappear by evaporation in the middle of the desert.

We’ve been driving  over an hour by land that one day was the bottom of the sea.

In the distance, in the horizon we see where the water reached, the water level was the same as the mountain.

We realize that our driver starts crying. He’s been quite a while receiving calls non stop and with the sun glasses we didn’t k notice. We ask him what’s going on. His wife needs to go to hospital. He cries disconsolately, a hand on the wheel and the other drying his cheeks. We tell him to turn back, it’s important, we have time, we can go tomorrow with another driver. He says no. We insist but answers that without the trip he doesn’t get paid and without pay there’s no hospital. We shut up, we respect his decision  and we look to the subaquatic infinite with a knot in our thoughts.

He plays a song on the cell phone It’s “their” song, the one that reminds him of her, he plays it several times and tries to explain to us what it says with his little English. It’s about an impossible love. Each time the song finishes he shows us pictures of his wife and son. He rises his hands from bottom to top indicating that he knows his wife since they were kids and they’ve grown together. They’ve been together all their lives.

He dims the tension of the situation telling us things about her while keeping driving. I turn to the side looking into the car and I turn to the side looking out.

Water used to reach to the top of the slope on the left.

The plan was to grow rice, melons, cereals, and cotton. Lenin said that “Irrigation will do more than anything else to revive the area and regenerate it, bury the past and make the transition to socialism more certain”. Cotton was the white gold and still today Uzbekistan is one of the greatest world producers. In Turkmenistan I saw hundreds of kilometres of plantations on the way from Ashgabat to Merv.

Water salinity has got multiplied by ten killing nearly all the flora and fauna.

He get’s another phone call. It’s his mother, I don’t know what she’s told him but he smiles. Seems he’s got more relaxed. Pile and I get a bit more relaxed as well. The 4WD keeps lifting up dust as we go as if nothing happens.

The drying of the Aral Sea has produced a climate change in the area making hotter and drier summers and colder winters. This united with the pollution makes it nearly impossible to grow anything around it. Not only the ecosystem of the lake has been destroyed, the ecosystems of the Amy Darya river and Sry Darya river deltas have disappeared due to lack of water.

One of the root causes is that the water channels lost between 30% and 75% of the water due to deficient construction. This is water that doesn’t come to the Aral Sea. Only 12% of the water channels in Uzbekistan are sealed.

One of the proposed alternatives apart of improving the channels is to grow cotton in a more intelligent way with more productive varieties and less pesticides.

Lunch stop is next to this lighthouse. Men of the village went fishing and at sunset the women would light a fire on the lighthouse so they’d know how to come back to the village at night.

Enormous landscapes. Nothing full of nothing. On the picture you can see Pili, my travelling companion for these days. We talk about the Aral sea and about the whole world and life, we´ve become friends.

We reach the water, there is little of the lake but still the proportions are spectacular.

The Aral Sea got divided when reducing the size. Now there are two independent parts; one in Kazakstan and other in Uzbekistan.

Kazakhstan has created a dam on the sea to recover part of it. It has been able to elevate the water level 15 meters since 2005. The salinity there has decreased and the fauna being repopulated in a way that fishing has been allowed again. Unfortunately Uzbekistan does not have the money (Kazakstan has a huge amount of petrol) to undertake a similar plan.

In the lake there was an island called Vorzrozhdeniva. In 1948 the Russians created a top secret centre for research of bio weapons. It’s not known yet what happened there but one day mysteriously 400.000 animals died in four hours on the north shore of the lake. The area was cleaned up and nobody talked about it again. In 1992 the island was abandoned when the Soviet Union fell. In 2002 an international initiative went to the island to clean it and nine anthrax focuses were found. There is a very interesting story of this island from Nick Middelton in his book “Extremes along the silk road” in which he goes to visit the base.

Going down the dirt track, our driver records the way down with his cell phone so he can show it to his wife.

The Aral Sea is the saltiest water body in the world, this is why  the blue has some metallic colour, it reminds me of the Dead Sea.

“

(Map taken from Wikipedia) It’s volume has decreased from 1046 cubic kilometres in 1961 to 100 cubic kilometres now. The first picture is from when the lake had already lost a big part of it’s volume and the second one is two years old also.

Walking by the current beach we find hundreds of shells reminding us the old richness of it’s waters.

The water is highly polluted from the fertilizer and pesticides and the rest of Vozrozhdeniva.

A foldable platform abandoned by a gas company.

It’s sunset and the moon comes.

We have dinner and go to bed, we are tired, to come here we’ve been in the car five hours and tomorrow we have another while. The driver is sitting on a rock looking at pictures in his cell phone and listening to his song.

Sunsets in this immensity.

These mountains were underwater.

We leave, we drive hours under what should be water, underwater roads that should not exist. The driver tells us more abut his wife and son. He wants more kids when his wife becomes healthy again. I don’t know when was the last time I heard someone talking with such devotion about his family.

We are getting closer to civilization, we have signal again and the driver talks with his family. His wife is at home, she was in hospital yesterday. He tells us that the family and friends have put money because doctors here don’t give treatment unless they get some “extra” money. Their way of surviving as the salaries are not enough. One of those things you read about in guide books but you not always can corroborate.

We arrive to Moynaq, what was one of the biggest ports in the Aral sea. Now the coast is over 150 kilometres away.We see the boat cemetery.

The fish canning factory of Moynaq produced 20.000 cans a year, a sixth of the need of the Soviet Union. It had to close down in 1979 and 10.000 people were unemployed.

Light started been very bad as mist covered the sky giving a horrible light, when we arrived to the cemetery the sun opened and got some great clouds to give depth to some pictures.

The landscape is devastating. I feel angry and sad.

Over the mountain, on the old shore, a monument explaining what has happend.

In the aral sea this boats collected 25.000 tons of fish a year.

I imagine a fisherman that one day got surprised because his boat was touching the bottom of the lake and it had not touched it in 40 years for bring tied up in the same place. Next year pushing the boat a few meters may have been the normal and a few years later the idea of getting to the water was unthinkable. What do you do with your life? How do you feed your family? What do you do with your sailor’s hat?

Fortunately the Russian calculations were not very good and the lake did not dry up in five years. One of the reasons for this failure was that there are internal sources that come from the Pamir and Tien Shan mountains.

I wanted to see the canning plant but it’s not possible.

For a little more they are worth it.

The boats are in the same place where they used to be, on the Moynaq port.

There are boats in which you can still see net pieces. Here in the interior of a hold with silver remains of the covering.

This time it’s been impossible to choose less pictures and I’ve got over the max limit I like for the post.

General view of the cemetery. Don’t try, the water can’t be seen from here.

We leave Moynaq. It’s lunch time so we stop to eat a soup with vegetables, meat and noodles in square shapes. We eat it in a moment and leave to Nukus so that our driver can meet his family soon.

After the tasteless people of Turkmenistan being with people here is like being in a party. People smile, they answer you, they look at you and ask things. So next post I’ll put you some pictures of smily people to counteract the dramatic post of today.

Pili and I split. She goes to Samarkand and I go back to Khiva, I feel like seeing another sunset there.

Soon more.
Fernando

This must have been a normal saying in Khiva, it was the biggest slave market in Central Asia until the 19th century. The slaves were brought from Turkmen tribes from the Karakum dessert and from what today is Kazakhstan. Now it’s a wonderful city in which walking is a pleasure.

I start where I left it in the previous post, on the top of the Islom-Hoja minaret.

Each corner has something to see. The city has 16 madrasas.

A camel they’ve put there as decoration.

Out of the city wall there are also interesting things to see. Here a mosque with a more humble minaret but equally beautiful.

A woman cooking bread. They have their ovens outside. The bread is awesome.

Khiva was a secondary branch of the silk road. Even though it started growing in the 17th century it didn´t become important until Timur converted it to the capital of his empire in the 16th century.

I see people talking in Spanish in the street and restaurants. I listen to the conversations, many times I enjoy more listening to the conversations that revealing my nationality and talking with them. The conversation is suspicious, too many familiar names… They are from Burgos (my home town in Spain).

This is how traditional columns are in Uzbekistan, with carved wood and this shape.

Even it’s small I’ve been walking a lot in Khiva, I wanted to see each mosque, each caravanserai and each madrasa. My knee is quite well after being run over in Tehran. I miss my osteopath Daniel, the knee has been cracking each time I stand up.

At the market outside the walls.

There’s nearly nobody living in the city, the living houses have been removed so there are only tourists left. Preserving is good but they’ve gone a bit too far, there is not much atmosphere on the streets, it would be nicer to see some movement of locals around. It’s also true that the silence of walking tourists than the sound of traffic.

Uzbek hats, they are funny. They are made of a tough material that can be bent and they become flat.

The moon accompanies me one of the days. If a sunset in Khiva is already beautiful, a sunset with a moon is a gift.

I love the colours of this minaret, seems it’s been drawn in a tale. In Uzbekistan the minarets have no muhaidins or speakers that act as muhaidins. The Azan (calling to pray) is forbidden since 1998 after a wave of terrorist attacks.

The west gate and the unfinished minaret of Kalta. Mohammed Amin Khan wanted to build a minaret high enough to see all the way to Bukhara (over 300km away) but in 1855 died four years after it was started so it was never finished.

Again in the Kalta unfinished minaret and part of the Khuna Ark fortress.

The wall was rebuilt in the 70s.

My time in Khiva finishes, I leave tomorrow.

In the guess house I’m staying I meet Pili, an Spanish girl that is travelling by herself for 15 days. We talk and I tell her I want to go to the Aral sea, I find interesting the idea of going but going is expensive and I want to share the cost with someone. We decide to go together. I think it’s going to be an emotional place but sad.

See you soon.

Fernando.

I’m liying in the title, it’s going to be Khiva in two pictures. I think the picture I wanted to post is better understood having seen the first picture.

This is beautiful, I’m thrilled with this city. I’ve arrived to Uzbekistan starving and dying to get a shower to remove the desert sand from me. When I arrived I’ve crossed the city looking for a hotel and I’ve forgotten about food and shower, I couldn’t waste a sunset in Khiva.

This is the first picture. A general view with two minarets and some of the wall of the citadel Ichon Qala.

This is the picture I wanted to show you. At 56 meters high with the purple colours of the Madrassa(place to study) Islom-Hoja minaret. It’s the highest minaret of Uzbekistan. This minaret is seen in the previous picture on the right. The views are perfect you can see the wall , the mosques and the madrassas of the city. On the left Kala unfinished minaret and on the right Juma minaret with 47 meters and green lines. Is the minaret you see on the left in the first picture.

I just felt like posting this picture, but soon I’ll put more. It’s going to be difficult choosing.

Soon back.
Fernando