An Uzbek Odyssey: Onward to Khiva

The slow train from Bukhara to Khiva brought back some of the old joys of yesteryear travel.

“Is it just me, or the skies here a unique shade of blue,” I asked Umid during the blue hour of my last evening in Bukhara. “They are very much a unique shade here in Central Asia,” he said. After four long, beautiful and memorable days, it was time to say goodbye to Bukhara.

At 3:30 the next morning, the car took me to the virtually empty railway station. In Uzbekistan, your ticket is checked at a police post near the entrance of the station and then your bags are screened through an X-ray machine. The country doesn’t have the kind of crowds India has, and so it’s a seamless process.

I had been warned by Umid that the red-eye train to Khiva was not going to be nearly as comfortable as the high-speed train from Samarkand to Bukhara. My expectations were low, as I sat on a bench on the platform and saw a star-filled sky. I was reminded of a time when travellers on the Silk Route used to let the night skies guide as they crossed the desert.

When I tried to buy a ticket for Khiva online in February, I noticed that just two berths were available. I was lucky to secure one of them, as my journey coincided with the Navroz or New Year festivities in the country. This was a time when people go to their hometowns to be with their families.

As the train with the green-colour compartments came to the Bukhara station, I was in a semi-awake state. As is the case, across the former Soviet Union, trains in Uzbekistan have a guard/conductor in each wagon. Mine was kind enough to not just help me take my heavy suitcase on board, but bring it all the way to my coupe.

Getting on the train with very low expectations, I was quite surprised to see such a clean and modern coupe that was much better than a first class air conditioned cabin in India. I would go as far as saying that it was better than some of the newer trains in Russia as well.

I was more than happy to make up for lost sleep, but I noticed one thing as soon as the train left Bukhara, my phone was out of network coverage area. There was absolutely no signal of any kind. We had immediately entered the desert and most of our journey would traverse a region devoid of water and civilisation.

My eyes opened when I heard light conversation in Uzbek. It was 7 in the morning and I felt quite fresh for some reason. The gentlemen who had the lower berths were awake and chirpy. All passengers are given a plastic, Uzbek version of the Russian podstakannik, tea glass holder. While the Russian version has two pieces, including a glass glass (for a lack of a better way of putting it), the Uzbek variant was smaller and one piece. Both variants served the purpose of holding a glass of hot tea or coffee in a moving train. Unlike in Russia, tea bags were given free to passengers, as long as they didn’t ask for too many and abuse the generosity. The trains, like in Russia, also had a dispenser for boiling water.

Conversations with the Uzbek intelligentsia

As soon as I came down from my upper berth, the curious gentlemen, already engaged in conversation, started speaking to me with much difficulty in English. I asked if they were more comfortable with Russian and they looked pleased.

“The rays of morning light on the desert are so hauntingly beautiful, aren’t they,” I asked my co-passengers. They laughed and said it was a lot easier from the comfort of the train to pass such comments, adding that those lands faced harsh climates throughout the year.

One of my co-passengers was a surgeon working at the largest hospital in Tashkent, while the other was a university professor. It wasn’t too long before the conversation turned to history and Uzbek history in particular.

“Our children speak fluent Russian still, but who knows what will happen after that,” the surgeon said. “Did you know the original name of Bukhara is Vihara? That’s right, the city was a major Buddhist centre at one time, and there was a large Zoroastrian community in Samarkand…What happened after the Arab conquest? It was all erased!”

I listened with deep interest as he spoke. “Then for centuries, it was all about Islam and we used the Persian script. That was until the Russians and Soviets came and we got rid of Persian and used Cyrillic and everyone educated person became a Russian speaker. The Soviet Union was a wonderful country. We are where we are in Uzbekistan because we were members of the union. Look at us and Afghanistan… But now, we are the next level of erasure. Lenin is gone and Timur is here. And we have replaced Cyrillic with the Latin script. Russian will be a memory in a few generations, like Persian is now. With all this erasure, we don’t know who we are.”

The great river

As I was deeply engrossed in the surgeon’s lecture, I noticed a slow change in the landscape. There seemed to be some life and then we crossed the great Amu Darya River. What a great joy it was for me to see this storied river that makes its way from Afghanistan to Central Asia and once emptied out into the now-dead Aral Sea!

“The Taliban want to damn this river, and if they do, Urgench and Khiva and Karakal-Pakstan will all turn into a desert,” the professor said. “We are looking at a major catastrophe!”

As the train starting pulling into Urgench, I asked my co-passengers whether there was anything to see in the city. They smiled and said their hometown looked like any second-tier Soviet city from the Baltic to Vladivostok! The Soviets didn’t extend the railway line to Khiva, and Urgench was the final station, but thankfully the Uzbeks did the needful a few years ago.

Six hours after the train left Bukhara, we were finally in Khiva, the icing on the cake of my journey on the Silk Route.