I don’t do sunbathing. I don’t do sitting on a beach or round a swimming pool. I would be bored out of my mind! If I go to a new destination, I like to explore and find out more about the place that I have arrived at.
First and foremost, I am a travel photographer and writer. I like to visit new places that are of particular interest to me. The world is now such a small place and there are many more places to see and I don’t expect to go back, unless that place has something special to make me want to go back again.
Uzbekistan was a bit like that.
When I announced to my friends and family that I was embarking on a trip to Uzbekistan, not only did they look at me with dumbfounded expressions on their faces, they nearly all said to me, “Where on earth is Uzbekistan and why do you want to go there?” At least, that was the polite version of what they said!
They were two very good questions, and ones that I had asked myself when researching the trip, so I proceeded to answer them as follows:
Where is Uzbekistan?
“In the middle of nowhere”, I replied. I took out my battered and well-travelled old atlas to show them. I had folded down the page to make it easier to find. All the ‘Stans are located in the middle of the Asian continent, wedged in between Russia, China and India. Uzbekistan is literally in the middle of all the other ‘Stans, bordered by Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Not a beach in sight, in fact, in Uzbekistan, you can’t get much further away from the sea. There is plenty of sand, though. Much of Uzbekistan is made up of desert, two deserts, in fact – the Karakum and the Kyzyl-kum – pretty desolate and forbidding places.
All of which led to their next question….
Why Uzbekistan?
Earlier that year I had embarked on a voyage of discovery to China, and in Xi’an in particular, I became fascinated by the history of the Silk Road and the countries of Central Asia through which it coursed on its way to the Mediterranean Sea and beyond to Italy. The centre of the Silk Road trade was a place called Samarkand.
Having also been to India and visited the great sights of the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and Fatephur Sikri, I have read widely about the Emperors of the Mughal Dynasty and discovered that their ancestors included Amir Temur, the “hero” of Uzbekistan and Genghis Khan, the great Moghul ruler from Mongolia.
These two great conquerors, the China connection of both Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan, the ‘khanates’ of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand that are all in present day Uzbekistan, provides a wealth of history to explore.
The final aspect that attracted me to this part of the world was the escapades of the secret agents of Britain and Russia during the ‘Great Game’ played out in the early/mid nineteenth century. The British had been ruling in India for several decades and the Russians under Tsars Nicholas and Alexander, were interested in finding ways of infiltrating their influence into India. They did not know how best to approach this so they sent a number of special agents down into the region to discover the lay of the land and to ‘befriend’ the local rulers and encourage the opening of trade relations with Russia.
The British, on the other hand, were keen to defend their borders and repel any potential invaders but they did not know the area in detail either. As the British had already extended their involvement into Afghanistan, they were able to mount various expeditions into the same region to do exactly what the Russians were doing – to ‘befriend’ the local rulers and encourage the opening of trade relations with Britain. The rulers of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand became key players in this ‘conflict’.
All this history is condensed into a small part of the Central Asia region, in present day Uzbekistan, a developing country which is opening up to western tourists, following the break-up of the Soviet Union.
With this in mind and to experience some of the history about which I had read, I decided to go and have a look for myself.
I had no idea what to expect, apart from what I had read on the internet and in the one guide book that I had managed to find. Even this did not have many pictures, so I was left to conjure up my own imagination and develop my own ideas of what I was going to encounter in this small and deserted country.
How wrong I was to be……
What an extraordinary country…….a journey I will never forget. The scenery, the preserved and restored architecture, and the people I met were all quite remarkable.
I feel privileged to have been able to visit a country that, until very recently was oppressed by the regime it was under, and is now beginning to stand on its own feet as an independent country, although still very reliant upon Russia for trade. Uzbekistan considers its history to be so important that it is now beginning to open up to western tourism.