Our second ‘free’ day in Samarkand.

We leave tomorrow morning for Bukhara, and I am ready to be on the road again. Three full days in Samarkand is perhaps one day too many. But that depends, of course, on one’s point of view and how one travels. Slow travel is good, but so, too,  is transition between points.

After days of trying to bring together the imaginings of Silk Road travel as gathered through literature and imagination, and the actuality of being here – really here – and seeing the breadth of modern Uzbek development, I am unable to meld the two. They remain separate in my mind now. Perhaps that will change as we pass through Bukhara and Khiva and there is less modernity and more historical evidence before us. But I have felt more antiquity in Cairo than here, more in Angkor Wat, more in parts of Honduras and Guatemala.

Some observations on Uzbekistan so far:

There are very few street dogs (and none in Tashkent)

The streets are very clean. There is an army of women street sweepers out early each morning keeping it this way.

The mix of modernity (saw an Apple-only product store here in Samarkand, of all places) and moderately old (rebuilt mausolea from 12thC looking quite new-ish) is difficult to wrap one’s head around. I mean, I have seen the posh areas of Cairo and the very poor areas as well, but somehow they both felt like they belonged to the same culture. Here, less so. The modern is anachronistic to this place without having the old as foil. I am still figuring this out in my head.

People don’t litter here. There is a little bit here and there, but nothing like what I have seen in comparible developing nations.

Tashkent and Samarkand are much greener than anticipated. There are ground sprinklers everywhere and one is not permitted to walk on or lounge on grass in parks (of which there are many).

The Russian infuence is profound – their having had a presence here since the 1840s. The Russians built out TK an Samarkand from smaller centres to the cities Harold and I see today. They build large, very broad avenues and planted plane trees on both sides and down the middle with a large pedestrian parkway between left and right traffic. It is very leafy in places and this does so much to mitigate the heat of the day.

I feel like Uzbekistan is on the peak of tourism wave. Many more will come here once word gets out. There is no tradition of ‘screw-the-foreigner’ (for $) that I have felt in many other parts of the world. If I decline an invitation to purchase a trinket, there is a shrug and that’s all.

Today we spent time walking through an enormous cemetery. It is next to the Necropolis we visited and photographed a couple of days ago with our guide, but is outside and not accessible except through a north entrance far away (which we chose) and a quiet little south entrance. All stones face one direction: Meccah. It was exceedingly hot and dry, but I do love walking through such places. The last I walked through in this way was in Torshavn, Faroe Islands. So, there are a bunch of cemetery photos, none inspiring and none good. But a record that I was there today.

This one is interesting because it shows the foothills of the Tien Shan range to the north of Samarkand:

Approaching the backend of the Shah-i-Zinda Necropolis, but from the outside this time.

Major artery in Samarkand, near downtown