The road west from Bukhara runs flat and straight through a moonscape of desert dotted with small scrubs. After a few hours of sand and potholes, we wound down a valley and started to run parallel to the Amu Darya, the river which was once the all-might Oxus river, which along with the Sir-Darya to the north (aka the Jaxartes), and the Tigris and Euphrates, was one of the 4 rivers of the mythical Arab paradise. The Oxus when crossed by Alexander 2,500 years ago was a vast river bringing the runoffs of Central Asia's might mountains over 2,000 miles to the Caspian Sea. It served as the border between the Persian influenced lands to the west (now Iran and Afghanistan) and the largely Turkic lands to the east. It was the boundary of Central Asia and the Middle East.
Over the next millennium, the course of the Amu Darya shifted to the north, leaving the Caspian and joining the Aral Sea, which grew into a vast desert lake, reaching its peak in the 1950's, at which point the Soviets started large scale irrigation programs, diverting essentially all of the river's waters to feed its cotton plantations. The river, much weakened, could not support the Aral Sea, which started to dry. Today, there is nothing left of the Aral Sea except for a few salt ponds. Stalin built a massive fishing fleet to bring fish from the Aral to the Red Army during the Second World War, and today it is possible to see those same boats beached, 200 miles from any water.
Across Amu Darya lay Turkmenistan, and we drove parallel to it for about an hour, talking of how we had wished that we had been able to get visas to enter that bizarre country. At one point, the road crossed the Amu by way of an extremely rickety pontoon bridge, and then before long we reached the outskirts of Ugrench, a drab Soviet town of medium size, along the Turkomen border. From there, it's only 30km over good roads to Khiva.
Khiva today is a "museum city." Rather than a horde of angry Turkmen staring us down at the gates, there was a plump elderly lady in a traditional Uzbek house dress, demanding 5,000 Som (about $4) for entry into the city. Plus another 1,500 if we wanted to use a camera. I had read much about Khiva, and was keen to visit it, but what I walked into felt like a full-scale model of the once great Khanate, and far from the real thing.
This city is about a mile square, and is crammed full of monuments and mud brick houses. There several dozen palaces, mosques, madrassas, government houses, and between them lie traditional houses for about 3,000 Uzbeks who are still permitted to live in the old city. The signature sites are the magnificent minarets, built in the 18th century, which tower above the town, standing some 60m tall and bedecked in dazzling Majorca blue tiles. The streets are spotless, and well worn by the Tevas of the busloads of middle aged European tourists at the start or end of their Silk Road tours. (Khiva, as the furthest west major site in Central Asia, is a convenient end point for them, as it was for us.)
We spent the night in a newly built hotel in the old city, owned by a man who claimed to be the 6th generation of Khivan wood workers. The hotel buildings intricately carved wooden doors led me to believe him. It was only at night, walking back to the hotel across the old city from the local Shashlik restaurant in the new park on the other side that I felt some semblance of what the city may have been like. To fight the heat, Central Asians tend to like to sleep outdoors, mostly in the courtyards of their houses, but a great deal spill out into the street. The full moon wasn't quite bright enough for me to see the unnaturally fine state of the houses, but more than enough to pick my way through the sleeping residents crowding the street. Some boys sneaked around a corner and giggled, but mostly the city was quiet.
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