By Tom Wheeler, Ankara, Turkey
Meintjeskop
Ditaba NoIII/2000
Tribute
This contribution is at the request of
Hanneke Eilers and is a tribute to the wonderful job she has done as Editorial
Assistant of Meintjeskop Ditaba for the past 4 years.
The adventurers
It was time again for the intrepid Ankarans
to set out to tend their pastures on the steppes of Central Asia. This time it
was the turn of Shoes Mtilwa to try the delights of horse meat out of date aircraft
and yet another unintelligible set of languages. Also for the latter day lady -
adventurer, Dr Donna Louise Wyckoff-
Wheeler, who is game to travel on camels, Soviet era aircraft or clapped out
Volga cars, as long as she can get around the world on the 40th parallel. No pith helmets though.
The other innovation was to try to visit
three Central Asian republics in a row, rather than tackling them one at a
time. With our characteristic unbounded optimism we had to believe that the
air-services were better and the planes safer than in the early 90s.
Kyrgyzstan
We decided to go to the furthest point
first - Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, camel spitting distance from the border
of the Xin Jiang province of north-west China and work backwards. The big
surprise was to find our Turkish Airlines plane was carrying a group of adventure
trekkers with distinctly South African accents.
Knowing that to stay in Bishkek would not
give us a true flavour of the country we asked to visit Osh, the 3000 years old
city on the Silk Road in the south of the country and Lake Issyk Kul. Not
trusting the Foreign Ministry to lay on these more offbeat trips, I asked for
help from a private travel agency in Bishkek.
Arriving bleary- eyed at Manas airport on
Saturday morning 26 August (3 hour time difference), we found two travel
agencies vying for our business and our dollars. The Ministry-approved one said
it could get us to Osh that morning, while, according to them, my favourite did
not have the ability to pull the necessary strings.
What choice was there? There was no problem
a fist full of dollars would not solve. Having got rid of one travel agency we
sat back in the vast gloomy room filled with assorted parcel-toting travelers,
which passed for a VIP saloon. Our guide was to be a young Russian hustler with
an eerie likeness to Putin. We watched with beady eyes under our bushy eyebrows
the to-ing and fro-ing and speculated on whose arms were being twisted, whose palms
were being greased and which passengers were being bumped off the ancient Antanov
40 prop job to get us to and from Osh the same day.The requirements for travel in Central Asia
are to keep calm, expect nothing and anything and jump when you are told that
the plane is ready.
Suddenly we were told to rush for the tiny plane
standing on the apron outside. After along flight beside the snow-lapped
mountains south of Bishkek, the plane suddenly turned left into a narrow cleft
in the Kyrgyz Alatau range of the mountain. Soon we were flying below the level
of the peaks as we crossed over to the south-western part of the country.
Interesting as the visit was politically,
Osh will be a hard destination to sell to tourists in spite of its age. It has
little more to offer than any other dull Central Asian agricultural city.
Romance has to be dollied up.
Lake
Issyk Kul was different. It lies at 1600m above sea level, yet never freezes.
We did not get further along than 20 per cent of its 600-km coastline. We ended up in Bosteri a small resort town, which
just coincidentally was the hometown of our Foreign Ministry desk officer
escort. His parents were delighted to see their
young diplomat son and his lovely new lawyer bride in such “important" company
in hometown.
His father pressed us to sample the local
delicacy, kumys, fermented more's milk. After a few sips of this substitute for
turpentine we declared ourselves sudden converts to abstinence as behoves good
Moslems. (BOZO, a thick fizzy drink made from boiled fermented millet tried on
the streets of Bishkek, was both more familiar and more acceptable .)
Memorable parts of the Issyk Kul trip were
visiting a brand new and grand Islamic style tomb built in advance in case of
need by a local mafia boss and protection racketeer, and being photographed
with a real live eagle on my arm above my head, a protesting camel behind us
and the snow-covered lien Shan range ( yes, you got it ) across the lake as a
backdrop.
Thirty
miles out of Bishkek is the Ala-Archa Canyon, which looks for all the world
like a movie set in the Rockies. Wonderful for a cool stroll after the daytime
heat of Bishkek.
As the Kyrgyz were keen to hustle us out of
town so they could concentrate on the much more profitable visit by the Aga Khan,
we will pass over the rest of the visit.
Shoes
Mtilwa and Mrs Donna Wyckroft-Wheeler at the Ala Archa Canyon near Bishkek,
Kyrgyzstan.
Uzbekistan
For a change our Uzbekistan Airlines flight
to Tashkent arrived in daylight. But our Honorary Consul, Michael Timcke, was
not letting us idle about. After a quick snack lunch of a club sandwich and
glass of orange juice for four (Intercontinental price USD 112-RBOO - caveat
emptor) we met the Deputy Mayor of Tashkent in the new Mayoral building which would
have made Pretoria Metro Mayor Joyce Ngele green with envy. The Old Raadsaal
was never like that even when it was new.
The main reason for our visit was to attend
the 9th independence celebrations of the Uzbekistan Republic.
But before that we grabbed the initiative to be the first country to lay a wreath under
full glare of the media at the new monument to the citizens of Uzbekistan who
gave their lives in the struggle for freedom from the Soviet Yoke. Very
appropriate we thought.
The festivities were a spectacularly
beautiful series of folk dance and other cultural tableaux. Even more dramatic were
the extreme security measures. Hundreds of trip-trucks and even trams were
parked ose to tail around Independence Square to prevent penetration of
potential car bombers or any others who might be a threat to the safety of the invited
guests.
As usual, Michael had done his stuff and we
had our Turkmenistan Airlines tickets clutched in our twitching sleepless.fists
after having dragged our heavy suitcases up the stairs of the heavily
barricaded Tashkent airport for a 4 am departure.
What we did not know, is that we were due
for a (scheduled) deviation north-west to Almaty in Kazakhstan before journeying
back over Tashkent to Ashkabad, city of love. Central Asia was never strong on transparency,
even onairline schedules. Still, been there, done that now, too.
Turkmenistan
Ashkabad has changed its face even in the
two years since Johan May and I were there. Gone is the old Ashkobod. which was
described in the 1996 Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia as ” Ashkabad is not the end of the world, but
you feel it surely can't be more than a short bus ride away.”
Most noticeable is the 70-m tripod called
the Arch of Neutrality near the new gold domed Presidential Palace. It is
topped by a gilded statue of the Great Man himself turning to face the sun and
with something behind him that looks like angel's wings. Again our objective
was to see something besides the capital. The second city, Mary is a major
farming centre, yes on the edge of the desert, but Soviet planners conveniently
laid on a canal across the desert from the Amu-Darya (Oxus) to feed the cotton
fields.
Besides the largest herds of camels we’d
ever seen, the city is famous for its ancient predecessor, Merv, which dates
from 600 BC and was once one of Asia's greatest cities. Alexander the Great
founded a city called Margina here.
There were four other cities, not on top of
each other like Troy, but on vast adjoining sites. Fable has it that Merv was
the inspiration for Scheherazade's Thousand and One Nights. Difficult to
imagine today, after the Mongol hordes went
through it.
My 1956-vintage German Special course at Stellenbosch
University came in mighty handy, as it was the only way to communicate with our
self-taught Turkman host at the Soviet era guesthouse. A few "ich"s
and "jawohrs” made Afrikaans indistinguishable from German, to him anyway.
At dinner we were faced with a groaning board
of a Turkmen feast horsemeat and all. After a while we pleaded for mercy. No
more courses, no more courses, please pIease ... !
The Caspian Sea: Emirate
Back to the other side of the country to
the Caspian Sea city of Turkmenbashy, shown on older maps as Krasnovodsk. It is
so dry and arid that it makes Laingsberg look like a tropical paradise.
The reason for its existence is that the Russians
sailed down the Volga and into the Caspian in 1717 and launched their campaign
to conquer the last remaining part of Central Asia, the Emirale of Khiva, from
here.
They also built the cutest little Moorish
style railway station at the starting point of the Trans Caspian Railway which
links up all the local former Soviet Republics.
The town has received little attention
since the Soviets built a culture palace in the centre in the 1940s. Sad, we
could not view the auditorium, because the lights did not work. In a ship
modelling studio next door town boys made replicas of traditional fishing
skiffs while the pride of the now defunct Soviet navy are in glass cases, to
bring a tear to the eye of the naval captain lost in this remote backwater with
his memories of former glory.
The town's main business is oil refining
and maybe one day it will be the jumping off point for the Trans Caspian gas
pipeline which will make the country rich.
We stayed 10 km away in a barren fishing village/seaside
resort called Awaza. Unlike Sumgayiat on
the other side of the Caspian in Azerbaijan, reputedly the most polluted place
on earth, the water at Awaza was clean, even if the beach was hardly inspiring.
Still it was good enough for another of
Donna's series of pictures with her feet in the .Indian Ocean, the Atlantic
Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Black Sea, the Caspian, Lake Issyk
Kul ... No picture in the Aral Sea, but we are working on that. Since they
diverted all the water out of the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya to plant cotton
in Mary and elsewhere, the Aral Sea has
all but dried up. Now the former sea bottom is a poisonous chemical dust bowl
and you need a helicopter to get to the water. Come to think of it,, we'll skip
that one
Life on the Other Side
At this stage I am prepared do a critique a
Central Asian airlines and give a briefing on the protocol. You carry your own
luggage abroadand stack it at the rear- so travel light. On arrival, stay
seated until the captain and crew have walked down the aisle, the length of the
plane (a 40 seater isn't very big) and have left by the back door. For catering
Turkmenistan Airlines is best. In addition to free glasses of mineral water you
can buy Mars bars, chips and boxes of fruit juice from a trolley. The safety announcements
on Kyrgyzstan Airlines are best but it does not help much because they are in
Kyrgyz and Russian.
The fun has gone out of changing money in
Uzbekistan, because the black market rate has been pretty much eliminated. But
as the largest note is 200 som. worth about 30 US cents, paying a USD 1000
hotel bill can be quite an experience. Here is a toast to the American Express
card.
But in Turkmenistan when you ask to change
a few US dollars into manat the hotel porter disappears out the front and
fifteen minutes later returns in a Merc with 1.5 million manats in 200 and 500
manat notes for your 50 dollars. That means a saving on the hotel bill of
nearly 70 per cent.
Epilogue
I have great respect for Marco Polo. He did
all this on foot and on the back of a camel.
We thought we were having a hard time
cooped up in a jet propelled Yak for 45 minutes at a time.
Lunch time, Thursday 7 September: back in
the big smog, Ankara, after a trip to the lands beyond belief. If you don't
think this is real, there is an official report too, written by Shoes. So it's
impartial.
Good luck, Hanneke. Come and see us when
you get get bored with Holland!
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