Tashkent, tent

I got a new handlebar bag this morning. Swiss swapsies; it's good to meet other travellers. Same-same similar to the traded one but jazzy new electric blue and side pockets. I equip myself with colours, foremost. We're three in Tashkent having left our Dutchman in Samarkand to take his own, Southern Tajik approach. Assuming stamped passports this afternoon, William and Laurens and I will take a little scenic loop to Dushanbe. As usual it's not a place I know about but my expectations have an unfeasibly French feel, as though it were an é. Probably we'll mostly see the bazaars for dried fruit and nuts and whatever else can be panniered to eat three weeks later in a snowstorm. I've not fitted the big tyres yet. This morning Laurens was fiddling ball-bearings back into his hub while William angle-ground his rack bolts and I made espresso on the Tashkent sidewalk feeling a smug little prince. We've had a few cautionary emails from Tajik weathermen and I'm increasingly glad of my kit's general solidity.

Uzbekistan, then. Last night at a pancake party my new friend Stas explained to me that one reason nothing works everso well is that any business which is too succesful will be swiftly nationalised and its executives disappeared. What else to say?! The metro and residential sprawl have the same standard-issue Soviet feel as Tbilisi and Yerevan and there's an almost total lack of street art. I'm surprised to rather enjoy strolling about Tashkent. The police kontrols would be hilarious if we weren't kept constantly afeared of being caught on some arbitrary bureaucratic transgression, illegally-insufficient hotel-registration slips at the exit border, perhaps. At the bazaars you can get double the bank rate of exchange from men with carrier bags of currency, but you mustn't...  There's a pervasive sense of enormous legal grey area, necessities kept necessarily illicit so you can never quite relax. The vendors can't decide between blatant rip-off or honest good-value which leads to confusion at every eatery; now and then somebody tries a hundred dollars for a shoddy meal but just as often breakfast comes gratis. The tourist lady in Samarkand said "they're good people, and they want money" - not but, which is maybe fair enough. I try to assume the best and buy extortionate pears to the amusement of my more sceptical companions. The food is often bland and fat. My Persian vitamin saturation depletes under assualt of watery mutton and vodka; double satsuma-rations along the Gulf an impossible memory. I suppose it reads all gloomy but really I'm enjoying being here. Spring brings all kinds of wonders and while the city is difficult the hamlet-garden camping comes gorgeous and generous with orchard donkeys and families clubbing together our food and firewood. Fresh given eggs on a breakfast fire go a long way against wierd police and funny money.

The group effort feels like strength to strength as we learn whether and when to laugh at eachother or ourselves. Two nights ago I ruined all our pasta with schoolboy cold water and was let off far easier than I would've been on, say, a firestation. The weight has lifted from small decisions and its' pretty easy to keep moving like this; a pedal-train with lovely views and mutton stops. I'm petitioned by mother and sister to be home in time for a North-Wales cottage in August. Even with a Russian visa I couldn't ride that quick; I still wonder about aeroplanes, or China. Decisions lie over the Pamirs.

I couldn't get on with the internet cafe this morning so finishing this by Kindle by the fire by night in the forest before the border (visas granted). The moon is up, the dogs barking and those two already asleep. Photos might take a while now.

blizzard blossoms

I didn’t expect Uzbekistan to be beautiful. Or hospitable. Twice wrong of course. On the Samarkand road we spent two days in apple blossom sunshine; two nights in homes and gardens being lavished vodka and plov. For ten miles we hung on to a great cotton-boll truck like little fish on whales. On the third day the temperature plummeted 25 degrees and trudging through freezing blizzard we all four worried a little about the high Pamirs next month. In the morning I could see cherry blossom hueing through snow like a haiku. By evening the mudguarded bicycles’ slush-capture was seizing wheels solid at every red light, so we stopped stopping and I felt my lifelong mudguard scepticism vindicated. We survived two bottles toasted through with wellwishers at our dinner restaurant, suffered only one pile-up, left only one behind in the snow and by night somehow converged at the same hostel for quince jam and wafers.

Samarkand’s registan is enchanted by the whiteout. The hostel staff are the kindest I’ve met. Four bicycles in the courtyard drip icicles under an occasional whump of snow off the roof. A convincing gas fire glows the dining room and a holiday of Swedish linguists and French diplomatic interns chat dinner. Last night I finally slept. There’s constant planning talk in our little peloton; visas, borders, high passes and low temperatures. I listen and largely abstain, conscious of decisions made months ago slowly panning out and feeling some inertia about committing to the next few months. In Bukhara I got distance vertigo listening to a hitchhiker’s three years on Asian roads... All three of my companions plan the difficult mountain road through Tajikistan but visas and visiting friends commit each to slightly different dates. I’m largely free to choose when and where with whom. The borders are tangled, their crossings unreliable and the passes still sheathed in ice. After the Tajik visa you need a further permit and in the worst case a week’s emergency food, so this afternoon I need to muster clarity; get my head around newly photocopied maps, and get decisive. I’m excited for fitting my enormous mountain tires (they fold). For now I procrastinate chipping ice from my drivechain; quince jam, wafers…

Certain certainties:

I’ll leave Uzbekistan by the end of March.

Tajikistan and its Pamir Highway come next.

Kyrgzstan after that. 

The China question looms ever larger.


This is Tieme

This is Laurens

Bukhara

Tieme, Laurens

Samarkand

onward en masse

I was glad of a few nights rest in Mashhad; gladder still of a debrief with the first Europeans I'd met since Christmas. Three nights in a hostel and backpacker company brought out the more dutiful tourist in me. The mountain-village tour with French English teachers was alright; Imam Reza's shrine by night with a Czech astrophysicist was awesome. The mosque complex is immense and mazey, its ceilings drip mirror mosaics and the tomb itself is clamoured around by hundreds of fervent pilgrims. Those who can't squeeze through the crush pass clothes overhead to be pressed against the sepulcher. Surreal zeal. Staff pretend to guard doorways with incongruous plastic dusters while men in indoor cherry-pickers polish discoball walls. I left the following morning and after a featureless two days caught up with William at the Turkmen border.

For a country boasting The Door to Hell and ominously covered, seventy percent, by the Black Sand I found Turkmenistan's landscape surprisingly benign, here and there just like North-Norfolk. It's much damper and flatter than Iran with full rivers and miry mudflats. Salty plains of gorsey scrub. Will had only been granted three days to cross, to my five, but we cycled breakneck together for two so that he could make his visa and I could spend a rare day wandering about Turkmenabat city. The wind smiled on us and both nights we rode late into the dark. A beer, a camp, mutton samosas, pothole curses, a yurt; the country flew. I liked the friendly people, pastel suburbs and city glimpses - felt sorry not to have more time to explore. There's definitely something Orwellian about the place. Humans in all condition pick and hoe fields beneath great posters trumpeting fleets of combine harvesters. They wave at cycle tourists. The Leader smiles beatifically down from billboards everywhere.

I'm in Uzbekistan. A throat-clogging fog of dust almost obscures the landscape. The roads still have a steady stream of Iranian trucks who still pip their horns as though the familiarity is mutual. Single-speed communist bicycles are ubiquitous. The faces are changing; rounder, softer features with an occasional ocular pinch of the Far East. China isn't so far anymore, as crows fly. Yesterday morning I found Will again, asleep beneath the stinking fug of three hungover cyclists. I ate his hotel breakfast and met the other two, Tieme and Laurens from Holland and Belgium. We're all four accustomed to moving alone, now carefully negotiating those group decisions. It's good to talk and nice to slow down. Onwards, en masse, on Tuesday. Meanwhile Bukhara makes for a charming stop.

leaving Iran

Turkmen samosa crew

Turkmenabat

Uzbek border closed for lunch

Bukhara

 

free speech and movement

Yesterday I arrived in Mashhad; Islam's second city and my final destination in Iran. My next two visas are confirmed and the Turkmen border is two day's ride away. I will be sad and glad to leave. The initial sense that I am to be looked after here has been tested and proved comprehensively. Family home to factory floor, opium den to police cell I have been welcomed, cared for, indulged and overwhelmed in more diverse company and setting than I could have optimistically hoped for. Islamic notions of duty, the ambassadorial inclinations of a vilified people, a pathological curiosity of Westerners or the fetishisation of liberal Europe could all be thanked for my cosseted passage but the simple, Persian explanation - which I mainly prefer - is that 'Iranians are nice people'. Alas I feel my own duties as ambassador for Englistan have been dispensed rather less consistently. Dirty, greedy, short-tempered... I have my moments, afternoons even, of good grace, but too many times I've answered welcome with gruffness. In my defence it's usually because I'm hungry; long-road weary in strange towns searching for a sandwich, or anything. Every third Iranian boy over twelve years of age has access to a motorbike and the other two ride pillion. Whatever happened to BMXs? I can't outrun a 125 (but they love to see me try) and so my sandwich searches are escorted by cavalcades of teenage gigglers keeping pace to practice their what are you from?s. The correct response of course is to stop and engage, work on my reciprocal friendliness until somebody in the sandwich-know shows up, but apparently I have to relearn this daily. Oh and impatient ire will be filmed by matey pillion; give thanks for the Youtube ban. Mystifying that I still don't carry enough food to prevent this kind of scenario; hangry, a friend used to call it. Really though even at my least gracious I am generously assisted and I've gotten much better at relaxing into the necessary exchanges; photos and stilted, repetitious conversation for food and direction. Lovely, big-hearted people.

The impression of scale is likewise borne out. Of course anywhere can be big if you don't move in straight lines but Iran really is the largest country I've crossed (almost twice now). In my novel celerity it feels I've ridden through every landscape in every season on every road. Vast place. In the last two weeks alone I've slept on palmy beaches, in windy desert and up frozen-bottle mountains. Two nights ago I camped in the dry corner of a carefully irrigated young wheat field beneath gnarly Wintered almonds, waxing halfmoon glowing snowy peaks; I couldn't photograph it properly. I've enjoyed the transitions, kit rotations and new views. Welcome chill after the Gulf, delicious greens after the desert. The anticipated desert hardships manifested as little more than wind and trucks, although the one exacerbates the other; crosswinds amplify passing truck squalls exponentially. Turbulence like big waves hitting. With unflinching drivers, single carriageways and only sometimes a skinny shoulder of rough macadam the hazard is significant. But for all their vehicular terror the truckers themselves quite mitigate the obvious desert concern of short supply. My distance/speed/food arithmetic didn't account for the winds and twice I was fairly rescued by a timely packed-lunch donation. There was even another, more salacious offer from a driver and his unveiled mistress which I shan't detail and didn't accept; Valentine's day, no less.

Mashhad sports a Very Holy shrine/mosque complex and sees twenty million pilgrims annually. It is accordingly congested. Today I saw a mosque islanded on a roundabout and can't help but think that such a holy place should have fewer cars. I'm staying with Vali, a fascinating polyglot who's helped me secure a whole five days to cross Turkmenistan. He rumours a trio of cyclists a day ahead of me who, after a couple of pretty solitary months, I'm keen to catch up. I've a sense of the closing chapter, of difference ahead, and keep thinking that I've been saving up all sorts of insightful, arrest-worthy things to write about Iran from the relative political safety of Uzbekistan (!). In fact on reflection I realise that I'm much more confident with the personal and aesthetic narrative; I've little to comment politically. Only a strong and general scepticism about the conflation of state and religion. It unnerves me. Nothing too controversial there, so I'll say it now. I'll let you know when they've let me leave.



mosque sleeping

I've known it was possible since Turkey but never really cared for the correctly assumed lack of privacy. There were ten of us in the end, tramps, truckers and a tourist. I was embarrased to blow up my airmat and did so as quietly as I could when all else were snoring. And they did snore, terribly, predictably. Gone three I dropped off. A couple of hours later a rising mumbling which, ears plugged and eyes buffed, I didn't investigate. I woke with a start at five thirty; fifty bums raised in prayer and me the last remaining sleeper, only thankful I'd not chosen the mecca wall. Not my favourite morning.

Imam Reza's shrine