Samarkand: Registan, Bibi Khanym, Shar-i-Zinda

Global Traveller Blog Posted on April 17, 2019 by

I awoke to a beautiful day. Promising! I got directions to the train station ticket office to buy my ticket for onward travel. I found the office quite quickly and rapidly arranged for my train ticket to Bukhara in a couple of days.

Chores and errands out of the way, I now headed to Registan to begin my exploration of Samarkand.

Nothing can prepare you for a first glimpse of The Big Three medressas of Registan: Ulugbek on the left; Sher For on the right, Tilla Kari in between. It’s like seeing Venice for the first time or Notre Dame for that matter. With such an array of towers, domes and glistening mosaics, it’s an overwhelming emotional experience. I tried to imagine what it would be like seeing this on camelback after weeks in the desert. Probably the way I felt after grappling with so many transport hassles: Ah, it’s all been worth it!

Although many writers complain that it’s touristy I feel that it is in no way as touristy as so many European sites such as Venice or Florence  or Dubrovnik. yes there were visitors that’s to be expected but it was hardly jam-packed or elbow-to-elbow. Also there were many women dressed in traditional clothes so I assume there are a lot of people from Uzbekistan visiting. That makes a big difference in fact. When people are coming to visit their own heritage it’s a whole different vibe from people coming to check an item off my bucket list. I had understood there were a lot of Russian visitors but I didn’t quite pick up on that.

I explored each medressa in detail taking my time to examine the fine workmanship. It was a little like the Taj Mahal in India that creates an overwhelming effect from a distance but also merits close examination of it’s fine detail work. In other words you could be five hundred yards away or or 5 inches away and you would still find it marvelous.

Tilla Kari

Samarkand flaunted its wealth by lavishing gold leaf on this mosque. The ceiling is actually flat but designed to look domed.

Part of the interior was devoted to a display of the traditional crafts, such as gold embroidery, that I was later to admire in Bukhara.

Ulugbek

Finished in 1420, Ulugbek is the oldest medressa with a stunning mosque.

Sher-Dor

Notice the lions on top. This would be a very relaxed interpretation of Islam which normally prohibits the portrayal of living figures. Sher-Dor  was built in 1636.

After Registan, I headed to the Bibi Khanym Mosque, also a monumental work. The sheer size and scale of these buildings just never ceases to amaze. This engineering marvel nearly collapsed in an earthquake in 1897 and was then rebuilt.

The interior courtyard contains a large marble Koran stand.

The mosque is also beautifully decorated.

Continuing along the paved paths, next stop was the Siob Bazaar and a surrounding area lined with small shops.

I stopped for a light lunch that was surprisingly good.

 

Then on to the Hazrat-Hizr Mosque where former President Karimov is buried. Considering his record, which caused heads to explode at Human Rights Watch, there was a steady stream of reverent visitors.

Shah i Zinda

But perhaps the most marvelous was the Shah I Zinda complex, an avenue of mausoleums that contains the finest tilework in the Muslim world.. To climb the steps and see those towering mausoleums one after the other, the outer walls covered in glowing blue mosaics left me gasping and now I’m grasping for words! Even photos can’t captured the effect.

The most beautiful interior is the Shodo Mulk Oko mausoleum built in 1372.

The tilework was so exquisitely done that it has barely needed restoration since it was built.

Linking all of these sites were extremely well maintained promenades lined with grass in flower beds. Now some will say that it was over done. I guess I can understand that but there are a lot of people that want to appreciate these incredible sights. What are you going to do? These monuments have to be protected and experience shows sadly that people left to their own devices may very well make off with some of these mosaics.

Truly, Samarkand is one of the wonders of the world.

 

Tashkent to Samarkand

Global Traveller Blog Posted on April 16, 2019 by

The weather in lived up to the grim forecast. It was raining when I left the hotel in Tashkent to get to the train station. I left in plenty of time.  Or so I thought.

I got to the train station where I bought the ticket the day before at 8:34 for a 8:55 train which seemed fine. As I was going through security however the guard looked at my ticket and said oh no the train leaves from another station. Another station! What other station? There’s another station about 5 km away. Who knew? It did not appear either in my LP guidebook or in my extensive online research. How could there be a new train station? Who has new train stations?

So I grabbed a taxi right outside not even bothering to wait for the Yandex taxi. I pointed out to the driver what time I had to be at the station and he took off. It was through heavy rush hour traffic and in the pouring rain.

We arrived at the station one minute  before the train was scheduled to depart. The security guard took one look at my ticket, grabbed my suitcase and started running, beckoning me to follow him. We raced down the platform through the rain, upstairs, downstairs. I’m  panting hard under my day pack, trying to keep up. Finally he got to the train and threw my suitcase aboard.  I climbed aboard with about four seconds to spare. Literally.

But kudos to the security guard for making the effort. Whoever you are–thank you.

And I was not the only foreigner to go through this. There were at least two other couples  who were running up also at the last minute. So it seems as

Three hours later we arrived in Samarkand also in the pouring rain. Not too much sightseeing today. I was glad that I had extended my stay to make a three-night stay rather than the two nights I had initially intended.

I grabbed a taxi to the Emir b&b a place I immediately liked. It seemed homeu and friendly. The owner spoke English and the place was well located.

By now it was lunchtime and although the hotel was well-located for visits, there was not one single restaurant or dining establishment or cafe around. Of course I was starving and became desperate for something to eat. First the owner tried to direct me to a place where there were a couple of cafes but I just could not follow the directions. and got lost in a maze of manicured walkways. Time for a taxi! I  finally arrived at a place called Old City. It was very Russian and cozy and really hit the spot with some wonderful beet and walnut salad and then some noodles with vegetables and meat.

I took a taxi back and took a look at the Gur-E-Emir Mausoleum which was just steps away from my B&B.

 

This contains the tomb of Timur, the 15th-century monster who managed to eliminate 5% of the world’s population on his rampage through central Asia, northern India and Turkey. His big hero was Genghis Khan. Don’t get me started. But he knew his architecture. The medressas, mosques and mausoleums that make Samarkand so spectacular are largely thanks to Timur and his impeccable taste.

The central highlight of Samarkand is Registan, the ensemble of three medressas that is simply breathtaking.

But not so much in fading light on a drizzly day! Again, I was so glad I had the time to return on a brighter day. This is what I had come to see.

It took me some time to get oriented. Samarkand is divided into the Russian part of town where the train station was and old Samarkand which had the madrasas and mosques and mausoleums. This older part dates back to the 15th century when Samarkand was the capital of the Silk Road. Built after Genghis Khan and his murdering mob swept through and leveled everything in their path, these buildings were protected and restored by Russia and then the Soviet Union. After independence, the Uzbeckistan government also made sure that Registan and the other (equally incredible) sights were kept in shape. It’s the jewel of the country, if not all of central Asia.

I found the Russian part of town surprisingly attractive. It was laid out when the Russians invaded in the 19th century and, unlike later Soviet style architecture, the wide boulevards were lined with low one-story colonial-style buildings interspersed with modern structures of course. It’s on a much more human scale than Tashkent.

I returned to the hotel eagerly anticipating the next day.

Tashkent

Global Traveller Blog Posted on April 15, 2019 by

After a good night’s sleep I was up and out early this morning.

First order of business was to get a SIM card. With a SIM card I can grab a taxi through the invaluable Yandex taxi app. Taxis are a dirt cheap way to get around to this vast and sprawling city. You can cross the city for less than a euro.  Tashkent is really not a walkable city. Even less so then Almaty I would say. It’s like the city planners looked at 50 acres of land and decided to put in a monumental building in the middle of it, then landscaped it all with flowers and bushes. It’s  pretty but a whole string of this kind of urban planning means that it’s impossible to walk anywhere. The boulevards are  wide, tree-lined and attractive but the side streets are unpaved.

There’s no center of town in Tashkent at least not any that I could figure out. The taxi drove and drove and drove before finally getting to the Ucell mobile phone company. Maybe you can get SIM cards elsewhere but who knows where.

The process went fairly smoothly especially considering how not smoothly everything else works in this country. I was in and out and only about an hour. Then the next order of business was money.

One of the things that makes traveling in Uzbekistan so difficult is the money confusion. ATM machines are not everywhere and where they do exist you’re not quite sure which card they take. So last night I got some money on my Mastercard but I really wanted to get money on Visa. Following instructions from Lonely Planet and online I brought a lot of cash which had to be exchanged into local money. Only banks can exchange money.

Fortunately, I noticed that there was a big five star hotel not too far from where I got the SIM card so I headed there,  found a bank outlet with a currency exchange and changed some money. With money and a SIM card that enabled me to call taxi I was good to go.

Except the first place I had to go was back to the hotel to exchange my sandals for shoes as my sandals rubbed a hole in the side of my foot. So back to the hotel to change shoes, then another taxi to buy an onward bound train ticket to go to Samarkand. In Uzbekistan you can’t  buy train tickets online, you have to go to the train station. So off I went to the train station and got my ticket which was fairly straightforward. Or so I thought. More on that later.

The train station was right near the entrance to the metro and the metro in Tashkent is one of the major sites to see. Using the metro you can see how much the former Soviet Union had invested in their Soviet States. The Tashkent metro was modeled after the one on Moscow and it really is a beauty. Each station is elaborately designed with soaring ceilings and magnificent lighting.

Taking pictures in the metro however is forbidden as there was a bomb attack several decades ago. Security is tight at the entrance to the metro but the officer on duty, knowing a tourist when he saw one I suppose, just waved me in.

The idea was to get off at a stop near a restaurant recommended by lonely planet but the metro opened onto another confusing criss-crossing of boulevards. I realized I had absolutely no idea where this restaurant was so I called a taxi again, this time to the Chorsu bazaar, Tashkent’s major market. Before tackling the bazaar, I grabbed lunch at a nearby cafeteria. Soup was OK but the noodle dish was dreadful. Between the restaurant and the bazaar was “bookshop row”. One bookshop after another were displaying their wares. It was hard to tell what was on sale but they certainly did not look like Western best sellers or bodice-rippers. They seemed very serious, had no pictures on the cover and seemed possibly quite religious.

Also in the neighborhood was the Kulkedash Medressa and Juma Mosque. Bustling with people, this was clearly a popular meeting spot. Many of the interior cells of the Medressa were devoted to crafts such as calligraphy and wood-carving. Small boxes carved from oak were a popular item.

Speaking of religion, I would say that Uzbekistan was substantially more conservative than Kazakhstan. I saw more women in long gowns and head scarves although by no means everyone. The younger women adopted a more western style but always dressed modestly.

The Chorsu bazaar was quite a trip. It was a vast circular space filled with every single type of food you could ever name. There were sections devoted to meat, dairy, spices, nuts, seeds and dried fruit. There were gigantic radishes as big as tomatoes,  plump red turnips plus greens and plenty of dill.

I was hoping to find a place that sold jewelry or handicrafts or fabrics but no such luck.

By now the gray weather had settled into a drizzle so I decided to return to the hotel and make plans for the end of my trip. I arranged my flight from Tashkent to Almaty with no trouble using Bravofly. It was a flight that for some reason did not appear on the Uzbekistan Airways website. The original plan was Tashkent-Samarkand-Bukhara-Khiva but working out a flight from Khiva back to Tashkent  became a nightmare. By the time I got a credit card to work on the Uzbekistan Airways website, there were no places left on the flight I wanted. It was dispiriting. The travel arrangements were getting so stressful I realized that I needed to dial it down a notch. Forget about Khiva and spend extra time in Samarkand and Bukhara which were the real highlights anyway. Also the weather forecast looked extremely spotty for the next week. I wanted to stay long enough to get some sunshine in these legendary places!

On the one hand it’s great to have all of your travel arrangements locked in place but on the other hand not having flexibility can make you overly subject to bad weather. Six of one half a dozen of the other.

I ducked into a neighborhood restaurant that was about to close but they sent me on my way with some takeout pilaf and bread and a piece of chicken. It turned out to be just awful. Maybe the worst meal I’ve ever had.

Shymkent to Tashkent: Border Crossing

Global Traveller Blog Posted on April 14, 2019 by

I slept poorly last  night as I was wired about the border crossing into Uzbekistan. One of the reasons why I chose the train rather than taking a bus or minibus across the border was I figured that the border officials would be more familiar with this newfangled e Visa program at a train crossing rather than in a minibus with a bunch of locals. Uzbeckistan only recently eliminated visa requirements for Europeans and allowed others, including Americans, to apply for a visa online. before that, a Letter of Invitation was required.

I had heard stories of long delays at the border, customs officials going through your bags to look for forbidden medication and crucially important customs declarations. I can’t remember the last time in my long travel history that I was uptight about a border crossing.

Unfortunately the train left shortly before 7 a.m. which meant that I boarded the train quite exhausted and with the beginnings of a head cold.

About three and a half hours later the train stopped and the officials boarded the train. Obviously there are no pictures of this experience.

The head immigration officer was a beefy fellow who sat down in the seat and pulled out a device that seem to be a custom laptop with a forward-facing camera. I have never seen anything quite like it. I produced my passport and my e-visa which he scowled at for quite some time as I became increasingly nervous. He was going to stamp my passport, had the stamp right on the passport but then stopped and gazed again into his screen. I waited and waited and finally I got the stamp. I return to my seat and thought all was over. But no. He left the car and about 10 minutes later came back. He motioned to a young Korean guy to translate and asked to see my e-visa again and then asked through the Korean translator who spoke excellent English if he could see my papers again. Is this a letter of Invitation he asked. No I said it’s an e-visa which I got online. Finally he scowled and walked away.

But the ordeal was not over. There was still customs to deal with.  Once he immigration authorities left we rolled on the few hundred meters and then the customs people boarded with more questions. They were  friendly enough even though they asked to open my bag and then asked where I was from. I said I was from New York which seemed simpler and always gets a really good reaction. Then they asked how tall the Statue of Liberty was. Since everyone was being so friendly I tried to be about as charming and delightful as I could muster up in my diminished state. I laughed uproariously and said I didn’t know.

Then the big guns came on. A very attractive thirty-something guy boarded, all dimples and smiles, and set himself across from me  all ready to shoot the breeze. Why was I traveling alone?  I said I was widowed and my kids were grown. He couldn’t have been more charming and even just ever-so-slightly flirtatious. We laughed and chatted about New York, about where I was going in Uzbekistan, about how much time I plan to spend in Uzbekistan all interspersed with him expressing a desire to of course go to New York. Then he wanted to know what I thought of Trump.  I replied honestly that we really hate him but then he said “oh but Ivanka Trump is very beautiful.” Yes I agreed quite beautiful and greedy. Then he wanted to know if I had brought anything illegal in my suitcase because America is known for  drugs and guns. “Oh no!” I said that I hate guns and drugs, would never have them and went on and on and babbled about that for a while. He spoke excellent English and was so pleasant but eventually I realized that actually I was being interrogated. How much money did I bring with me? Was the Freedom Monument in New York?   Etc, etc. As attractive as he was, I found myself silently begging please please go and leave me alone. Please go. Finally he and the other three or four guys who were hanging around left and the train stood there for a while.  The whole process took a good two hours.

The Korean guy was friendly and talkative. Actually he was of Korean an ethnicity but born and raised in Tashkent. Stalin had expelled several hundred thousand Koreans in the 1930s and most wound up in Kazakhstan and Uzbeckistan.  He had worked for a while in Shanghai but had to leave because the air pollution was so bad that his baby daughter’s life was in danger. He was traveling with his wife but for some reason appeared in my car. I was getting so paranoid at this point, I fleetingly wondered if he was somehow working with the police.

I had arranged for the hotel to send a taxi even though I knew that it was going to be overpriced because it seemed simplest.  I was exhausted and ravenous at this point. I thought the trip would be five hours but it was actually six because Tashkent is an hour behind Almaty. Illogical but true.

The taxi driver spoke English fairly well and told me that he had applied for the Green card lottery system and was waiting for an answer. He hoped to do his dissertation in macroeconomics in a university in America and wanted to know if I thought that it would be possible. I told him I’d absolutely no idea but that he should consult the university’s website and contact them directly.

So finally we arrived at the Empire hotel which, to be honest, is completely unprepossessing and rather overpriced for what it is but the manager was absolutely adorable and advanced me money to pay the driver and get food. Of course there was no currency exchange open because you can only exchange currency at the bank and it was Sunday. Anyway he really couldn’t have been nicer and ordered some food and I proceeded to rest up for the rest of the day.

Later on, I met the hotel’s other american guest, Nick, who was working on a doctorate in Turkic languages. He was delightful company and filled me in on life in Tashkent, such as the fact that there is no town center. He also walked me over to an ATM two kilometres away that fortunately coughed up some cash.

 

Shymkent

Global Traveller Blog Posted on April 13, 2019 by

I got to the Turkestan bus station at about 10 in order to get the minibus to Shymkent. As the main commercial hub for the region, Shymkent is a popular destination with one minibus after another leaving the crowded bus station. It took about two hours to get to Shymkent and then I caught a taxi to the Hotel Askar. Thanks Allah for the Yandex taxi app (the Russian Uber)!

The Hotel Askar was a tiny place with virtually no lobby but the room was well-appointed. Unfortunately the receptionist did not speak any English whatsoever. Bring out the Google translate app! At least the place was on a quiet street right in the center of town.

After getting settled in and making a quick taxi  trip to the train station to buy a train ticket for onward travel, I headed to the nearest place for my first dish of plov. Even though it was a chain restaurant I really liked the fragrantly spiced rice with raisins and chickpeas.

Shymkent is a busy trading town and the largest town in southern Kazakhstan.  There’s a large market on the outskirts which I didn’t get to. The center of town is another place of wide tree-lined boulevards lined with small shops. The roads are in very good shape but the sidewalks not so much. You really have to watch your step to avoid sudden and deep potholes.

 

I wandered into some back streets to see some residential housing which seemed quite well constructed. I was glad to see that some apartments had air conditioning which I’m sure is a must in the sweltering summers here.

A shady gazebo also must provide some cooling relief.

It’s extraordinarily  pleasant to walk around particularly once I found a nearby park.

Here’s where you top off your SIM card!

It was great for people watching.  I find the typical Central Asian face of Mongoloid eyes and high cheekbones attractive and expressive possibly because I’m not very used to seeing that. Dress is more conservative down here than it was in Almaty. More women sport headscarves but it’s far from 100%. People seem to maintain a healthy weight despite a meat-centered diet. As elsewhere though, women seem to get chubby after 50.

I can’t say that Shymkent is a must-see or on anyone’s bucket list but it does give a view of a bustling Central Asian market town. Most people come here as a base to visit Turkestan and other places but I’m glad that I went direct to Turkestan first and spent the day there before coming to Shymkent.

As tap water is not drinkable in Kazakhstan I had grown accustomed to hotels providing a bottle of water with the room. However in this hotel, for some reason, there was no bottled water available and I had to find a market to buy it. With all labels in Cyrillic though, this posed a problem. I first brought back lemon soda and had to run out again. I wound up with sparkling water which at least allowed me to brush my teeth.

I turned in early to rest up for my 7am train.