Around the Silk and the Cotton Road.

It is always so inadequate to take a country and wrap it up in a couple of paragraphs. There’s the food. The language. The faces. The countryside. The horses. The steppes.

And you can’t help but glide over the surface. As a traveler you see what you are shown. The locals show you the best. The sheets are clean on the uncomfortable beds. You manage to negotiate the squat toilets, because you know when you leave you can go back to soft paper and sweet smelling soap. With the traveling I have been doing, there are always local guides. Professional maybe, but they are fearless in their dissection of the country in which they live. So it is with Kyrgyzstan. And to some extent it is with Uzbekistan. Our young guide Nasiba, is from a family who live in Bishkek. She has three sisters and a brother. Her mother is from the Talas region. The Talas women are known for their strength. You marry a Talas women so that she will organize your home. Naziba carries her mother’s strength. She is funny, unapologetic, passionate. In the Kyrgz culture, the youngest boy will stay and look after the parents. If there is only one boy then it falls to him. The girls normally follow a path where they marry by about the age of 26 and move in with the grooms parents where they will look after the household. Nasiba tells stories of her mother teaching her cooking or other skills and saying , “ this is for your future mother-in-law” or “ your future mother in law should thank me for this.” Nasiba eventually had the courage to say that maybe she didn’t want to get married. Seems her mother is fine with that. The boy has made a good marriage and already has given them twins as grandchildren, so Nasiba is off the hook. Because there is a whole tradition here of girls being stolen by men who need wives. I read a book before coming called “ Sovietstan.” In it there is a story of a young girl who went to her best friend’s engagement party and the fiancé asked her to walk outside with him when she was bundled into a car with three of his friends holding her down. She was driven out to the country, with the fiancé professing love for her and when she got to his house a feast was ready. Her own family and boyfriend had been alerted and were also there crying and begging her to return with them. It seems that when the grandmother approachs with a white shawl and covers the head of the abducted girl it means that the marriage has been agreed. This poor one was exhausted and fearful and gave in. This bride kidnapping is called Ala kachuu. And although they say it has died out as the culture has become more sophisticated it still exists. They report in 2021 one in three marriages rural marriages begin with an abduction.

The Soviet Union has it’s rubber boot all over these countries. There are many older people still sentimental about the Soviets. Health care, schooling were all free. But all of the industry and agriculture was in service to Russian growth. In Kyrgyzstan they built hydro electrical power plants. They dammed the main river and flooded valleys full of villages. In Uzbekistan. they forced all the small farmers to grow cotton instead of crops. The Aral Sea, once the third largest lake in the world, began shrinking in the 60’s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects..and all that cotton was Shipped out of the country back to the Soviet Union. That was the talk I heard, but what did I see? In Kyrgyzstan I maybe saw a handful of tourists. Lots of LADA’s these old Soviet cars that had been left behind.In Uzbekistan, There is a Chevrolet factory , and 90% of cars on the road are chevy’s. In both countrys I saw children coming from school. All neat and bright in white tops and black skirts or trousers. All the little girls have big ribbons or pom-poms in their hair. In Kyrgyzstan they people have strong Mongolian or Tibetan features. In Uzbekistan they are much lighter with features that seem to come from the other direction, Persia.

Kyrgyzstan is 90% Muslim, but most of them are not observant. Some head coverings mixed in with long black ponytails. There’s no pork on the menu, and the Imam will call from the minaret but it’s rare to see anyone heading to prayer. There are more headscarves in Uzbekistan particularly among the older women, but the younger hijab wearing girls are there too.

The table is always laden with bread. Butter. Dishes of homemade jam. Towers of sweets and pastries. It’s very important, it seems, for the table to be heaving with stuff to show welcome. Home cooked meals consist often of soup, a salad of tomatoes and cucumber, and potatoes cooked with meat. The countryside is full of cows, sheep, goats and horses. And they eat them all. Yes, even the horses. Inconceivable to think of those strong lean beauties being carved into steaks, but the herds of horses are bred for the purpose. Horse meat and horse milk are an intrinsic part of the food chain in Central Asia.

The markets are laden with pomegranates and persimmons. Root vegetables abound. And mountains of tomatoes. Spices, rice, buckwheat, teas. Wheel upon wheel of the fresh bread. Grapes. Figs. Walnuts and macademias. And everything you could want to do with milk on it’s way to butter.

And of course there are rugs and carpets. This is the world of weaving and felt making.

It seemed that everything was different. Doors. Cars. Faces. Clothes. Food. It was only in Bukhara and more markedly in Samarkand that tourists ( In which group, I know I belong) became evident. I found I was happier sitting in a park watching the locals go by, carrying or chasing their babies. I had a few words. Salaam, Rahmat…but after that it was a lot of smiling.

It’s different traveling to places untried. Time moves outside of the clock. So good to be allowed to dip in.