inner asian journey

8/10/2019 Inner Asian Journey

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INNER ASIAN JOURNEY

By Robin S. Heyer

May 26, 2002 (or Gemini 5, 2 centad 1)

[pictures and minor editing by Diana Gainer noted as DG]

Preliminary

You have reminded me about reporting on the Inner Asian Journey, so here it is, at long last.

Map of Central Asia, also showing the Caucasus and surrounding countries (from Wikipedia).

Terminology

By Inner Asia I mean that part of the continent of Asia bounded by the Arctic Ocean to the

north; the Pacific Ocean and China to the east; India, Pakistan, and Iran to the south; and European

Russia to the west. Thus the term includes at least five nations formerly controlled by Russia in Western

Turkestan (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan, Turkmenistan, and Tadjikistan; the recognized

independent nations of Mongolia and Afghanistan; and the still-colonial possessions of Chinese-ruled


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Tibet and Uighuristan, also variously known as Eastern Turkestan and Sinkiang or Xinjiang (the new

province) of China. One could also include Manchuland (Manchuria, known in China as the

Northeast), and the Caucasus nations of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. The last three are usually

classified as Middle, i.e., Near Eastern rather than Central Asian, because of their proximity to

Turkey and Iran. Nepal and Bhutan could also be counted with Inner Asia, being adjacent to Tibet on the

south side, or instead with the Indian subcontinent or geocultural region.

I call all of them Inner Asia because all these countries are surrounded, overshadowed,

historically and officially ignored, but frequently invaded or influenced by these surrounding

civilizations, and frequently influencing the latter. They are also inner in the sense of providing crucial

cultural and sometimes economic and military connections among these civilizations, and have

participated in crucial influences which have spread among large portions of the human species in past

millennia.

The Occasion for the Trip

When I was young, I did not expect ever to be able to travel beyond our nations borders unless

in military service, and relied on written sources. Later, in the American Bar Association and

International Law Association journals I followed with interest the establishment of the World Peace

through Law Center and its first meetings in Athens, Bangkok, Geneva, Abidjan, and Belgrade (originally

planned for Moscow, but that fell through). When the next one was scheduled for Washington, D.C., I

decided to attend. The group appealed to me, and two years later I went to the next session in Manila.

After that I was recruited for the Center Board and began to present papers at each of the following

sessions, every two years, including Madrid, Sao Paolo, Seoul, Berlin, and Cairo. The next one was

scheduled for Beijing, and I planned to go, but that one was cancelled because of the Tienanmen SquareMassacre. At that point, for other reasons, I dropped out of the organization and traveled no more for

several years.

During the years of attendance, I began taking advantage of the trips to visit a second country in

the same region as that in which the conference occurred, to get a broader picture of the major cultures

of the world. From the conference in Madrid, Spain, I visited Tangier in Morocco and Buchenau in

Germany. After the conference in industrial, Portuguese-speaking, and populous Sao Paolo, Brazil, a

side trip to tiny, isolated, Spanish-speaking La Paz, Bolivia, provided balance. From a conference in

Berlin a flight to Istanbul and a drive across Turkey, visiting the ruins of Hattusas and the world oldest

town [atal Hyk; DG] provided an introduction to Anatolia and the Turks, a further Near Easternexposure besides the Cairo, Egypt conference. The goal became to see two or three countries speaking

different languages in each of the 10 major geocultural regions of the world. Steps toward this goal

were taken in Western Europe, Latin America, and the non-Chinese Far East, the four Chinas, and the

Near East.

Eastern Europe, India, Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa remained unreached, and North

America was still incomplete. But when retirement from federal service sharply reduced income, the


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practicality of further such travel seemed past. Further, after decades of monthly travel for work, the

immediate appeal of travel was not high. Staying at home became a luxury, so travel ended for years.

Finally, in late 1995, information came that a travel service organized by former Yugoslavs taking

advantage of the end of the Cold War made possible a guided tour westward across the Pacific and

along the length of Russian Asia, into Uzbekistan, and on in the same direction homeward, by way of

Moscow. The cost would be less than guided tours normally are, and the tour format would make more

feasible a trip in such an area. So even though I had always avoided guided tours in the past, except for

a few hours, both because of the expense and lack of individual freedom of choice, I decided to try this

one. Also age, health, and greater language obstacles than usual influenced the decision. It seemed an

opportunity that had not opened before and might not again. So the trip was scheduled for late

summer 1996.

Preparations and Warnings

Contracts, payments, arrangements, Russian visa, selection of items to take, assembly of cash in

denominations recommended, etc., were completed. The travel service was to arrange a group Uzbek

visa, and provided us a multi-page, rather explicit set of advice and cautions. This booklet repeatedly

emphasized that travel and lodging conditions would be more primitive and less convenient than most

travelers normally expect. Porters would not be available, so no one should bring more luggage than

that traveler could carry alone. This was clear and emphatic. One should bring ones own toilet paper

and small-denomination cash, exchanging currency at the earliest possible time.

Also, travelers, checks, large-denomination currency, checks, and such instruments would

normally be impractical, according to the brochure. We were promised a guide throughout the journey.

The tour-group arrangements included air travel arrangements from San Francisco. I had my passportrenewed because, although in theory wed be back home before it would expire, delays could occur in a

somewhat disrupted Russian transport system, and finding oneself still in Moscow on an expired

passport might present a difficult situation. The old passport was good to the end of September, and

the trip was supposed to end early in September.

A preliminary form of trust was executed and left behind for estate purposes in case of mishap

along the way.

Uniworld, the tour organization, sent the airline tickets and other items, including a small, red-

plastic shoulder bag with their logo, with instructions to carry this at all times as a ready identifier of

tour patrons to the guides.

In the past I had never taken photographs on foreign trips, on the expectation that locally sold

picture post cards would be better and more complete and convenient. That did not appear likely this

time, so I picked up two discardable cameras, and considered three.


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Aeroflot airliner (from biathlonews.com).

Departure

On the appointed day, August 23, 1996, Thelma and Cindy drove me to the San Francisco airport

early. No other matching red bags were visible, and neither was any guide. Evidently, no other

participant was going from San Francisco. I took United Shuttle to Seattle (Boeing 737), [left around

8:05 a.m.], and carried my luggage on board. The plane was packed to the brim and short on luggage

space. According to my notes, Picture identification was required to board. My back was sore from

days of working on the trust, and mood was less relaxed than in past travel. Not sure why. Suddenly

realized, this is first overseas trip purely for pleasure and education; all others connected with Peace

through Law Center except the one to Guam and the four Chinas[partly a work assignmenta week

of Labor Department hearings in Guam. I had hoped to try taking each of my children on such trips

starting the next year, but it has not proven feasible. Thelma was not interested in going along.]

Leaving at 8:30 a.m., we flew to Seattle to catch the next plane. Though Id been to Seattle

often before, it struck me how marvelous a sight it presented. A maze of waterways, islands, and

convoluted peninsulae. Sky-blue water, forest-green woods, woven together in great complexity. A

suspension bridge. Then the greater peninsula filled with rectangular buildings, a high rise

section.Nextouter towns, with buildings here and there, interrupting the totally wooded

landscape.[Then] the wide [Puget] Sound, a huge arm of the sea twining broadly and deeply into the

land.Docks and slips and ships on the waterfront as I noted at the time. We landed at 10 a.m.

Exploring the airport led to Russian adolescents, Aeroflot (Russian airline station), but I had to

check in elsewhere. I find one other red bag, carried by Ray Heffner, retired English professor from Iowa

and wide traveler, on the tour to visit Bokhara and Samarqand (Silk-Road towns in Inner Asia). No

others, still no guide, so I wonder whether our group will be enough? Will the tour be canceled? Still,


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we proceed. I missed the right-wing (fascist) coup on a trip to Spain, the assassination of tourists in

Egypt, a coup detat in Bolivia, and survived a flight over the Balkans; the present venture should be

safer than those.

We board Russian Aeroflot Ilyushin plane, sit near front. See no emergency exit. With a

shudder for several seconds, the plane rises into the air at 12:55 p.m. from Seattle. I understand little ofthe stewardess Russian announcements and none of her English. Miss Thelma, wish she or one of the

children could have come along, but could not work it out. Observe landscape as it gradually becomes

more rugged. One passenger has a T-shirt with a Russian slogan meaning Yeltsin our President. We

reach Anchorage at 4:03 p.m., but cant leave the airport. No more red bags. Except for members of

other tours [who might later join ours], it appears we two are it! Will tour be cancelled for lack of

attendance? Still, we go on. Announcement says We reboard in about an hour, but it actually is two

(about 6 p.m.). I photograph our plane and a mountain. Six hours to fly in next leg. We leave at 6:18

p.m. Take-off repeats shudder, not a builder of confidence. The flight smoothed after a few seconds.

Aircraft looks unkempt, not recently cleaned, aging, but engines sound o.k., structure holds up.

We pass over a mud flat, a section of young trees, another section of conifer trees in poor

health, and then of non-conifers. Then winding, crisscrossing mouths of mature river in a wide flood

plain. Beyond it stands a broad mountain with some snow. Then clouds block the view. They break,

revealing a might, barren, steep, stony ridge, then an uninhabited valley. I watch the terrain until we

pass out to sea and again into clouds, then a break reveals two separate bodies of land: Mainland Alaska

and another (Russian Asia?). [Unlike most airplanes at home, the passengers were not provided maps,

but the shortest route from Juneau to Khabarovsk, our first Russian destination, would follow a great

circle arc across the Norton Sound, south of Nome, and the Gulf of Anadyr, between Alaska and the

northeast corner of Asia, according to my later calculation.] Clouds. Supper at 7:35 [U.S. Pacific Coast

time]. Very hungry, with only a banana and two glasses of orange juice since arising. Fish, noodles,shrimp salad, broccoli, carrots, pie [for supper on the aircraft].

Entering Russian East Asia

My notes continue: At 7:45Captain announces we are crossing the national boundary between

US and Russian state (so perhaps previous off-Alaska land was large island, like Unalaska). [I now think

more likely it was the Northeast tip of Asia, which I could see but which the pilot did not consider we

had entered, since the flight should finally cross the Russian east coast south of the town of Anadyr.]

At 8:25 [p.m., home time], clouds finally break. Terrain mostly jumbled and barren-looking as

in last view of Alaska, but a large river breaks [the terrain, with scattered] flattened areaswhere

smaller streams [join the river]. Then it splits, leaving large, low island in its midst, wider than either

branch, and long enough that at first I thought it [had been] two rivers joining; but they rejoin, finally,

beyond, so it was the same river all along. [The river] is fairly straight, like a relatively adolescent river.

Is it a part of the Amur-Ussuri system, or are we still too far northeast for that? [I still havent figured

that out, but the Kolyma River seems more likely.]


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Then clouds closed in again, and visibility ended. I noted turbulence at times, not surprising in

view of the rugged terrain below, but perhaps implying that our altitude is declining. I mused on the

lack of clarity of our situation, with no sign of other tour members or guide yet, but decide to proceed

regardless of whether a guide everappears. Concern remained about the flight from Baikal to Tashkent,

for which we do not yet have tickets, or the Uzbek visa, which the tour service is supposed to have

arranged but which has not been sent to us. Those would be needed.

Igor, a young passenger, introduced himself to me, and told me that he had been born in

Czechoslovakia, was living in Khabarovsk, had finished medical school, and was returning from a visit to

the United States, where he hoped to intern and refine his English and computer skills. We talked a

while in English.

At 10:30 p.m. body time the clouds break, the sun is still high in a bright sky, and the cabin crew

serve snacks of sandwiches, melon chunks, and Danish pastry. We certainly received ample meals on

the airliner.

Presence of the sun allows a judgment that we were headed more or less south over sea,

because I saw what looked like waves, but they could have been window flaws. All was blue below, but

for an occasional clump (of what?) and two curious linear cloud formations. Time resolved one to high

cirrus clouds. I could not decide whether their apparent motion was caused by actual wind or just

parallax effects from movement of the aircraft. With no known landmarks, there was no way to judge

airspeed. Finally, shadows below of clouds confirmed that the sea was a real surface, and not just haze.

I thought it might be the Sea of Okhotsk.

By 11:40 p.m. my time the sun was still high off the starboard bow. We seemed to have kept

pace with it approximately during the northernmost parts of the journey. At 12:15 a.m. Pacific Daylight

Time (San Francisco) I took a nitroglycerin tablet, and soon felt better. Because of the six-hour timedifference, Khabarovsk time was 6:15 p.m. of August 24 (not 23, because we had crossed the

international date line). We were now over land again, greener than it had been farther northward.

The navigators notes seem to show that we are passing between 32 and 31 degrees, but by my globe at

home that cannot have been either latitude, longitude, Fahrenheit, Centigrade, or direction of flight.

We were probably close to 48 degrees North and 136 degrees East.

At 12:27 a.m. my time, nearly half past midnight inside and 6:27 p.m. Khabarovsk time, descent

began. Ground and a large river, probably the Amur, briefly appeared through a cloud break. Looping

tributaries appeared on a broad flood plain, with stranded lakes or settling basins and orphaned loop

lakes, doubtless former parts of the river. Sun glare prevented judging color. The lakes looked shallow,mere spatters of water, and three seemed totally covered with algae or filled with plants, but others

were clear. The area was flatter than any part of Alaska or Russia that I had seen so far, and hospitable.

It was heavily wooded, but no conifers were then visible.

Igor tells me that Khabarovsk has 680,000 people, and that now is flood time, as we come to a

huge tangle of swamp and the main Amur, much bigger than the river scenes I had seen earlier. As we

move lower we see grazing land for cows, long narrow cultivated strips as in medieval Europe, plowed


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furrows, and scattered houses. We land in Khabarovsk at 12:47 body time, after midnight (= 6:47 p.m.

local time).

Map of Khabarovsk, showing nearby countries of China, Korea, Japan (from intelligent-systems.info).

Khabarovsk

Finally we meet our Russian guide Galina, a local instructor at the Railroad Institute. Evidently I

was in error to expect a guide before arriving at the first destination nation. The arrangement in this

case is probably standard, although some groups, of which I had heard, herd their charges from the

point of origin. A driver but no other travelers are with her. We are driven 12 kilometers along the main

street of the city to the Intourist Hotel, observing buildings along the way, but are rather tired by now.

Galina says we shall meet another member of our tour tomorrow afternoon and will tour the city

Monday, and she tells us a little about the city, but both attention and note-taking are difficult now. The

city was founded in 1858, includes musea, shops, boats and ships, and Komsomolski Square, a kind of

city park. The main street has two names, as a compromise among the Marxist and imperial pasts and

the transitional present. The street is named for Marx for half its length, and for the Amur River for the

rest (Marx and Amurski Prospekt).

On the next morning, Sunday, August 25, 1996 (we essentially lost the 24thbecause of the date line), I

arose at 6 a.m. local time by the hotel room clock, but 11:30 by my watch, so I guess the time difference

was 5 hours rather than six, as I had understood. The clock in the lobby, on the other hand, said 7:30.

The temperature in the room was 26 degrees Centigrade (= 79 degrees Fahrenheit), quite warm for me.


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I felt a little light headed. It was still dark and my energy was low, but there was much to do. Writing

letters was on the list, but stamps were not available on a Sunday. I changed some currency at the hotel

(at the rate of one US dollar for about 5300 rubles, because of the massive Russian inflation), had

breakfast, and studied a map in the hotel lobby. It shows Primorskii Krai (province) to the south

(perhaps including Vladivostok, the great naval base, but that beyond the boundary of the map),

Khabarovskii Krai including Khabarovsk (covering where we were), Amurskaya Oblast (also province) to

the north, Yakutskaya Sakha Republic (including Yakutsk, a kind of large native reservation, as nearly

as can be analogized to US institutions), Magadanskaya Oblast up the coast northward, and Sakhalin

(the large island off the coast). Dawns rosy glow appeared about 7 a.m. local time.

I then took a short walk finding three musea next to each other: art, military, and regional

natural history and ethnology. I visited the regional museum, which focused on the archaeology,

geology, wildlife, and artifacts of Russian East Asia. This place was quite interesting. It included local

stuffed animals, including a bear, birch-bark souvenirs, amber beads (some of which I bought, as

planned from before the trip, from reading of the availability of amber there), and other items. Of

special interest to me was a pre-Russian canoe, resembling the Amerindian types, but evidently notmade of birch bark as in North America, although birch abounds in this part of Asia. It was time to

return to the hotel to meet Galina and Ray before I was able to visit the art museum, but I planned to do

so later. I bought some picture postcards from a peddler on my return to the hotel, and other souvenirs

from a few of the many individuals hawking such items from truck beds, auto trunks, packs, and other

non-architectural locations. The shaman and some other Russian souvenirs were bought at the regional

museum.

The shaman figurine purchased in Khabarovsk (image by DG).

Back at the hotel, I met Ray. We had breakfast and returned to the museum area together. He

was primarily interested in the military museum, so we went there. Ray Heffner told me that he had

been an English professor and university administrator at various schools, ending in Iowa, although he


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had been raised in Seattle. His wife was a Sinologist and raised herbs, but was not interested in

accompanying him on this trip. He was 71 years old (I was 66 then), and had traveled extensively, to

Poland, Czechoslovakia, China, Nigeria, France, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, etc., in some cases giving

radio interviews. In Indonesia, he had officially advised on the establishment of the national educational

system. His interest in the military museum partly related to his desire to enlarge his collection of toy

soldiers, which he had been building since childhood.

In fact, we did not see any toy soldiers there, but many medals, some uniforms of military

equipment, including three light tanks (outside in a small courtyard), pictures of past generals, and

maps, paintings, and descriptions of local military forces during the brief independence of Russian East

Asia (after World War I, before the Communist Party-dominated army from Moscow reconquered the

area), and especially of the quick Russian invasion of Manchuria/Manchukuo, Port Arthur, and North

Korea after the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Japan. This painting and the associated materials

gave the impression of great and glorious victory over an important and powerful enemy, and did not

mention the atomic bomb, but I remember those events, and know the Russias action occurred only in

the few days after the bombs had made a quick end to the war nearly certain.

(In the United States, before the Russian invasion, though, I recall from that time hearing

experts on the radio warning that the Japanese army might still hold out for years in Manchukuo,

even after Japan itself had fallen. They had the same warning about Nazis in Austria. In the event, the

Japanese occupation army on the continent actually surrendered quickly to the Russians, in contrast to

the suicidal resistance in the Pacific islands. At this point, there really was no point in resistance. No

such holdouts occurred in Europe either.)

We spent so much time in the military museum, which I would have given only minor attention,

we were too tired to visit the art museum. I regretted that, but thought Ray would have regarded my

moving on alone as unsociable, and that seemed a bad way to start a tour which we would share for

some time. After we had lunch at the hotel, we both wanted to try one of the riverboats, and so walked

on to the river, several blocks further. The Amur River was surprisingly wide, and apparently deep

enough for sea-going ships, but the ships docked south of a metal cantilevered bridge at the very limit of

our prospect. No docks or ships were visible on our side of that bridge; the boats were simply partially

beached on a narrow, pebbly beach.

The several boats (I did not count, but there may have been as many as a dozen) were powered

by engines and designed for casual rides, holding less than a hundred passengers each. We did not want

to be gone past when we were to meet the guide, and, as I found out that day, two (rather than one)

further members of our tour group that evening. None of the boat crews, however, spoke English, Rayspoke no Russian, and I had never been in a Russian class or spoken it to anyone. The boatmen were

busy collecting fares and loading many passengers, so long, patient efforts to be understood did not

seem practical or available. I therefore just asked one boatman in my poorly remembered and very

limited Russian Time?, hoping to convey When do we return? or How long shall we be on the

water? His answer was hour, I bought two tickets ($2-3 apiece), and we went aboard.


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View of Khabarovsk showing Amur River with boats (from Wikitravel.org).

Accommodations were like a typical ferry, with adequate seating and railing. The route was not

across the river, but simply down it for half the time, and back to the starting point during the rest. The

other passengers were enjoying Sunday off work, dressed in their best, mostly families of parents and

children, and some couples. I did not notice anyone who appeared to be alone. They were well

dressed. From the river we could see a little of the city, but not much, because it was considerably

above us: the riverbanks were steep. We could see woods on the other side, and hillside homes, some

rather nice, on our side, as well as what appeared to be a cliff-side restaurant. We were still well short

of the bridge when the boat turned about for its return, but there appeared to be no traffic on the

bridge. I infer therefore that it was a railroad bridge only. It looked like typical railroad bridges here,

with its Erector Set girder tracery. (Erector Sets, for those who havent seen them, were boxedbuilding-toy sets of metal nuts, bolts, and thin, narrow, straight metal pieces with triangles and other

spaces cut out, so that they resembled the network of angled girders used to build railroad bridges in

the early 20thcentury. I havent seen any for years, but one such set was one of my favorite toys, more

realistic-looking and adaptable than wooden Tinkertoys.)

At supper time the additional members of our tour group did not appear after all, Ray went

outside to smoke, and I decided to follow my own inclinations for the rest of the trip.

On Monday, August 26, breakfast started at 8 a.m.meatloaf and mashed potatoes, although it

is midsummer and the weather is quite pleasant. Do Russians generally eat heavier meals than

Americans because of their climate? So far it seemed so, but of course my contact was still limited to anairliner and a hotel restaurant. I was fully rested and adapted to the local time by that point. Ray went

back to his room, but I remained in the lobby, and found Galina, who told me that the two ladies who

would be joining us had arrived last night at 11 p.m. on Alaska Airlines. She introduced me to them:

Elta, 86, from Michigan, a former teacher, now residing in Seal Beach, California, and Marge, who

appeared somewhat younger.


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My notes at the time show Marge as a housewife, but she later told me she was then a state

employee in Juneau, Alaska, and she talked that area up as a destination for an ocean tour. Marge and

Elta were traveling together, had previously done so over the same route in the opposite direction, and

both apparently had traveled frequently for pleasure. Later during the course of the tour I learned that

Marge was around 50, the youngest in the group, and I noticed later that she became the tour member

most helpful to the others.

Elta mentioned having bought and remodeled an old wooden schoolhouse in the California

foothills as her home. This remark set my memory going and a few questions quickly showed me that

she was the widow of Dave Starr, my supervisor for a time at the California Unemployment Insurance

Appeals Board (1966), and that I had met her once then at the house warming of that house! What is

the probability of meeting in Khabarovsk a person also met before 30 years earlier and 7,000 miles away

in Sacramento? Despite her age, she also was an experienced world traveler, having visited over 100

countries and territories, and even some remote islands and Antarctica. She also gave talks near her

home on some of her foreign travels. Although her health was poor, I found her to be a pleasant and

interesting member of the tour.

Galina accounted for some delay in assembling that Monday morning as being occasioned by

the bus being broken. A tour vanarrived soon after the introductions, and when Ray came down we

all went on the city tour. Galina spoke freely and in excellent English, complaining about the current

Russian economic and political situation, which she not approve. Her salary was undermined by

inflation, forcing her and others into side jobs and enterprises, such as her tour-guide job and cultivation

of private vegetable gardens, and she resented the wealthy of the new economy, regarding them all as

gangsters. From time to time throughout our time in Russia she pointed out homes which seemed

newer, nicer, or larger than others, invariably identifying them as the homes of gangsters. (She did not

say she favored Stalinism, but Galina clearly disapproved the changes from that system, in which shehad had high status and a salary that was high compared to others.)

Khabarovsk People (from Petras Homepage: Experiences of a Dutch Journalist 10-14 April 2003).

She also blamed the wealthy Chinese living locally, whose wealth she resented, whose influence

she regarded as socially subversive, leading Russians into corruption, and whose country she feared. A

few days later, she talked of the huge Chinese population just over those mountains as a great danger


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to thinly populated Russian East Asia. The Chinese were making claims on the Russian Far East, and

regarded the treaty settling the boundary as a colonialist unequal treaty, although at the time of that

treaty China was far stronger than Russia in East Asia, and the Chinese had never owned, controlled, or

lived this far north.

Still later, Galina criticized the native Mongol minority who lived farther west inside RussianInner Asia as drunk and lazy, exactly the same terms I heard from American Caucasians who despised

the down-trodden descendants of pre-Columbian North Americans and descendants of kidnapped

African Americans. When we finally reached western Turkestan, Galinas complaint about the local

Uzbeks was that they were getting rich by cheating the hard-working Russians. Of the Chechens she

asserted that they want nothing but war, that the Russian people prefer the Chechens separation from

Russia, but that the current rulers do not because of oil deposits.

(Ethnocentricity and xenophobia seem exactly the same wherever they appear, whether in the

US in my youthand still, but perhaps at least its worst manifestations have been reduced somewhat

or in Communist Russia. Ive heard the same sort of language from European colonialists about their

colonials, from apologist for China about the Tibetans, from an Iraqi Arab about the subject Iraqi Kurds.

But so much for Galina, who served as a window on perhaps more than she intended.)

At another time Galina characterized Sherenovsky (who published a sort of Mein Kampf,

outlining his goal of Russian domination of all the people of Inner and South Asia as part of his campaign

for the Russian presidency) as a protest (against a perceived loss of Russian prestige with the decline of

Russian imperialism?) and a hope, but he had been losing ground and switching positions. As to politics,

she emphasized that her position had become worse. On decentralization, she regarded the people

seeking local power as selfish, seeking only the advantage of their families.

She showed us the principal Khabarovski Krai provincial government building, colored likemarble, and the city hall, an Orthodox (eastern Christian) cathedral and the bishops residence, and a

World War II (in Russia, the Great Patriotic War) monument rather reminiscent of the US Vietnam

Memorial, with names of the local citizens who died in service in that war. I did not think to ask, but I

suppose that most of those casualties were suffered in the four years of large-scale, fierce combat on

the front facing Germany, rather than during the quick walkover of Japanese-occupied territory in 1945.

The cathedral had a plain and unpretentious exterior, but inside beautiful murals filled the

ceiling and every wall. Space inside was modest, perhaps 20 feet square, with no seating. Inside also

was an elderly woman praying, and some children being baptized with a brush. I had never seen that

manner of applying moisture before this.

The cathedral was the seat of the bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church of East Asia, including

Vladivostok. His residence had an exterior of logs, but faced with aged-looking board paneling inside.

Elsewhere in Khabarovsk and other places Galina showed us log houses, and gave me the impression

that at one time they had been a major feature of this eastern Russian frontier region, as they were of

some American frontier regions. These were not undressed, still-round logs, as usually pictured for the

American frontier, but are free of bark and planed flat on four sides, thus actually constituting uniform


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At one point Galina informed us that 40% of Khabarovsk had been killed in the Civil War (after

the Russian October Revolution during World War I). According to her, the principal local industries

were lumber and mining of gold, coal, and lead.

Trans-Siberian Railway

After the city tour, at 3 p.m. local time, we four tourists and our guide Galina boarded the Trans-

Siberian Railway, the longest in the world, built roughly a century ago to connect Russian East Asia with

the European homeland, an undertaking as important as, and three times larger than, the great

American effort commemorated by the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, after our

Civil War. We were in car six, two from the dining car. We later learned that a different guide, Mila, was

to replace Galina in accompanying us from Irkutsk westward.

From the windows of the train, as it headed westward, I saw broad, empty fields interrupted by

occasional, sparse, young-looking woods and wild flowers. By 5 p.m. Khabarovsk time, we arrived atBirobidzhan, capital of the Jewish Autonomous Republic, a sort of reservation (rather like those set

aside for the earlier inhabitants of North America by the United States government, when it represented

only European settlers in North America). Galina conceded that this entity now contains few Jews, and

is largely settled by other Russians. I bought some picture post cards here depicting the area. As we

rode, we could see occasional hay stacks and small aspen, birch, conifers, and other trees.

Trans-Siberian Railway (from Take a Virtual Journey Along the Trans-Siberian Railway 11 Feb. 2010).

On the next leg of the rail journey, we saw a vast area without visible humans, other animals, or

dwellings, except for one set of tiny, faded, scattered, wooden houses. To the south of us were the

Manchurian mountains. After a time we came to Bira at 5:47, a stop at a town with individual vendorshawking plums, piroshky (meat pies), one of which I bought, sunflower seeds, crabapples, bread, some

sort of red berries, and other items to the rail passengers. I took a picture with a disposable camera I

had brought, adding it to photos of the Alaska airport, the aircraft on which we came to Russia, and

Khabarovsk. In the vicinity of Bira were birch trees, a few larger trees, a few cows and birds.


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Here the fields were smaller, with higher grass, than we had seen before, several types of

wildflower, and one matured dandelion flower, ready to disperse its seeds. I was struck by how similar

the plant life of northern Asia (southern Russian Asia) was to that of the US. Although the fields looked

untended to me, they must sometimes be cut, because the plant life around each of the chain of

electric- (or telephone-) wire poles was higher than away from. These poles extended along long

stretches of the two parallel sets of tracks (two in order to allow simultaneous train movements in both

eastward and westward directions). Several trains passed us going in the opposite direction on the

other track. Sidings were well apart: two in five hours of travel.

The only paper in the restroom consisted of a roll of four-inch squares, as elsewhere, but the

texture was as coarse as typical American restroom hand-towels, confirming the prudence of the

advisory material we had received from Uniworld, the travel agency, to bring our own toilet paper (I

had).

At about 6:35 p.m. Khabarovsk time I saw a few picket fences and some puddles and reeds. We

ate supper in the dining car, but none of the Russian passengers came. They usually bring their own

food and eat at their seats. While at supper, we stopped briefly at Arkhara, but there was no time to

debark. Lines of hills enclosed scattered cattle, goats, cabbage plants, and sunflowers. The area

appeared a little more prosperous than the few hovels we had seen on the rail journey. The houses

were larger, with small, more varied, cultivated fields and healthier-looking crops than earlier in Russian

East Asia. There were also a few birds, which I had not seen earlier. A separate rail line was visible some

distance away.

On the next leg of our journey our train crossed a time-zone boundary at 9:30 p.m. Khabarovsk

time (3:30 California daylight savings time), into seven hours from my watch time. The sky was finally

darkening, but a trace of pink remained on the far westward horizon, fading away. On this part of the

trip, I finally realized who Elta was, and learned that she had traveled to over 100 foreign countries and

places, including the Seychelles, Antarctica twice, etc. She and her traveling companion (for this trip)

Marge had met on this same route on an earlier tour, going the opposite direction.

More Rail Travel and out of the Russian Far East

On Tuesday morning August 27, at about 9 a.m. Amurski Oblast time, we pass another forest,

largely birch, and a small community with larger and better-maintained houses than we had seen earlier

on the rail line. Some of the paint seemed worn, though. Even a few autos and a concrete building

appeared, evidently belonging to some organization. This was the most prosperous-looking place weve

seen since boarding at Khabarovsk. We seem to have passed the most barren and poorest area.

(Amurski time means the zone in which we were during this part of the rail travel, immediately

northwest of the Jewish Autonomous republic.)


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The train stopped when we arrived at Skovorodino at about 10:30. We could get off briefly, but

I wasnt up to it. Everyone here and on the train acted graciously, and potatoes could be bought here.

Skovorodino was the last town on our route (the farthest west) in the Russian Far East.

Proceeding on further westward, we saw mostly forest for a while, with occasional meadows

and some (presumably domestic) goats. The taiga here had more rolling ground, less flat than we hadpreviously witnessed. Some very red wildflowers appeared alongside the tracks, among the whites and

yellows. These blooms were too small for me to make out their shapes, only the color. The forest

began to reveal some tree-leaf green, and gradually changed from well mixed as the proportion of

birches grew until there was little else.

Siberia

At 11:28 the train arrived at rail yards in Urusha, a small town characterized by unpaneled log

houses, a cemetery, one motor car, one motorcycle, one cow, and one man trying to hawk a skirt in aplastic bag. The vicinity was rather hilly, with conifers appearing again in large numbers, after essential

absence since yesterday. Urusha was our first stop in Siberia, in the Province of Chita.

(Most Americans think of Siberia s including all of Russian Asia except in the Caucasus, but to

Russians it is separate from the Russian Far East. The Trans-Siberian Railroad runs northward from the

great naval base at Vladivostok, Russian for Prince or Emperor of the East, through Khabarovsk, then

northwest through the Amurski Oblast, and on westward, closely skirting the international border,

where most of the population is. When it reaches Irkutsk, it turns northwestward again, missing Tuva,

which appeared on world maps as an independent nation when I was a child, but has later been formally

annexed to Russia. The physicist Feinman visited there for that reason, and wrote a book about that.That area is Mongol by population.)

The train next traveled through the town of Amazar, a gold-mining center (which I missed

because I napped after lunch). I awoke to a prospect of heavy forest of birch, poplar (= cottonwood?),

and conifers (looked like fir) from the train. To the right side of the train (northward) were conifers on

hills beyond a few cattle in a broad meadow, interrupted by a dirt road. (I saw no paved highways,

although of course the cities had paved city streets.) A motorcycle and log cabins lined the rail line.

Here we could see the first visible tractor so far in Russia, some haystacks (domed, not rectangular like

baled hay), and sunflowers.

At 5:30 p.m. we saw more poplars and birch turning yellow by the tracks. At seven the train

stopped at a rail yard in the town of Marocha, in Chita province. A few cattle were there, automobiles

(!), and a motorcycle (the first place with more than one motor car, and only the second with a rail yard

since Khabarovsk). The houses were mostly small and wooden, but a few were of brick, and there was

one plaster-covered structure. As I watched and pondered, I was moved to scribble a few impressionist

lines, but I wont interrupt the story to put them here. At 9:30 p.m. local time where we were, the


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moon was low, big, full, and yellow. We rose along beside the Shilka River, which was shallow, rocky,

and silvery in the twilight.

At 7:15 a.m. the next day, we passed a larger town of numerous wooden houses strung along

the track for some distance. Most were of unpaneled logs, but better maintained than most others

weve passed, and picturesque, with painted shutters. Perhaps the local population would be hundreds.

At about 8 a.m. we arrived at Chita, a city of about 350,000 people and capital of the province of

the same name. As we pulled into a real railway station, we were greeted by a huge billboard-sized map

of the Trans-Siberian Express, showing spurs to Tashkent (capital of Uzbekistan) and across Mongolia to

China. Many people were in the station, and automobiles were evident on the streets. A military base

was visible, with barbed wire and jeep-like vehicles. Also at the station we saw a cluster of low brick

storage structures, extensive tracks, railroad equipment, rolling stock, and repair shops. Larger

structures included rail-yard buildings close to the track, large apartment complexes up to a dozen or so

stories tall, and some plastered or concrete buildings, but the houses were mostly wooden, as would be

expected in a well-wooded area. I took some further photographs here, as I had all along, using up

more than I should have, for the film I had along.

From worn plaster on one building I realized that here, as in Hessen, plaster tended to cover tan

brick on houses and other buildings. The area was quite green, compared to other places seen so far in

Russian Asia, and hills enclosed the town. To the west was a wide body of water. Beyond that were

three tall smoke stacks pumping massive soot into the sky from a large building, presumably a factory.

Irkutsk

We arrived in Irkutsk at 1:30 a.m. local time, technically Thursday, August 29. Weather was

cold. Galina left us as guide, to return to her home base at Khabarovsk by train, unable to get a return

flight. Ludmila, who had guided a different tour, through Mongolia, arrived with ten other tourists, all

American as I then thought, but one was not. The two tour groups combined under Ludmilas guidance.

She was rather gruff and argumentative, but perhaps she had found Mongolia and the Americans trying.

Ludmila, like Galina, spoke excellent English, gave considerable information of interest, and

revealed the same sorts of ethnic biases, though Galina had focused mainly on Chinese and Mongols in

that regard, while Ludmila focused on Turkish and Tadjik or Tadzhik (Persian, essentially) peoples.

On the morning tour Ludmila named the trees and the largest animals of the taiga, the strip ofterritory and ecology just south of the more arctic tundra. Her list of trees included birch, pine, spruce,

cedar, and larch. She identified the moose as the largest animal, but also mentioned the bear, weighing

two to three hundred kilo[gram]s, plus 60 more at the start of hibernation. Other prominent animals

included wolf, lynx, and mink (the last had been imported from Canada and introduced).

Ludmila showed us the local outdoor museum of wooden architecture, which also included

some wooden sculptures, including Perun, which she described as an old native god (I got the


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impression she meant a god of non-Russian natives, but Perun was a pre-Christian Russian god,

equivalent to Tarkhon or Tarqon, the storm god of several pre-classical Indo-European groups including

the Hittites [also known as Kaneshites and Luwians] and ancestor of the names Tarquin, Thor, and Tyr).

Another carved deity was Stribor (pronounced stree-bore), the three-faced god (an interesting parallel

to better-known triune deities). The buildings were (or represented) late 18th-century log structures.

Irkutsk railway station (from Wikipedia)

At this museums gift shop I bought a birch-bark box with a charoite stone on top. A Madonna

was also for sale, but it had an unattractive dark color and was poorly made. Ground cover was similar

to that at home: grasses, clover, dandelions, and another familiar plant which I cannot make out in my

notes. In addition there was a mushroom with a black rim on the cap and an unfamiliar, low-growing

plant with a thin leaf, perhaps 10 inches long, six inches wide at its widest, a smooth edge, and alanceolate or long, narrow heart shape.

Charoite stone (from www.realgems.org).

Irkutsk is the capital of its own province, which lies between the Buryat Autonomous Republic to

the eastward (through which we had passed) and the Tuva province, mentioned earlier. The city is

located at the southwest corner of Lake Baikal, which is rather long and deep enough that it is reputed

to contain more fresh water than any other body of water in the world, according to the guide. The lake


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supports sturgeon, perch, a local fish known as omul, described as 38% fat, and white fish. A large

number, supposedly 100, tributaries bring water from the surrounding highlands into the lake, but there

is only one outlet, the Angara River, which flows generally northward into the Yenisei, a great river that

empties into the Arctic Ocean at the Kara Sea.

On the bus tour from Irkutsk, we visited a village of houses built of 4 x 4 timbers (four-by-fours), with shuttered windows and some older painted decoration. We were told the population was

about 5,000. I noticed two local plants with virtually identical purple flowers, but entirely differently

shaped leaves. Also noted were two of the new group of tourists that had joined us earlier. One was

Rena, a white-haired lady, and the other a thin, heavily wrinkled, short lady who looked exactly like Dr.

Zorba from the old television series Ben Casey (Casey was a surgeon who invariably diagnosed and

treated for a subdural hematoma, under chief-of-staff Zorba). It later came out that her name was

Dorothy. She was memorable because invariably she was the last to arrive at previously chosen places,

whether leaving the hotel or returning to the bus later, and persistently wandered away from the area

to which the guide directed us.

Also at this village was a church with a mural mosaic of local stones, showing a beaver, a leaf, a

man dressed like an Eskimo holding a spear in one hand and a fish in the other, and a half-dozen

symbols which I could not definitely recognize, although they might have been meant to represent

flames, a tent, and a body of water.

Later we visited Listvyanka (Larch Place), the oldest Russian village in the area. A larch stood

in front of the church. At a distance it looked like fir, but had thick, unusual, dark green foliage, much

denser than fir. It is a conifer, but deciduous, a passerby says. We walked around on our own, and I

took some photos from my last roll of film. In this village a group of little boys boldly asked for candy or

money, and few little girls more shyly offered a few wildflowers. At the village I noticed that Elta

appeared distressed, though she had said nothing. When I asked her, she said her back was bothering

her (she was a tall and moderately heavy woman, who has now recently passed away).

Listvyanka, a small town by Lake Baikal (from John Darms

Trans-Siberian No. 3 Part 2: Moscow Lake Baikal Vladivostok, Saturday 15th

July).


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From this village our tour proceeded to Lake Baikal, where we took a fair-sized powered tour

vessel for some distance onto this very large lake, whose end we could not see. We learned the

Charoite, the stone that had been on the birch bark box, is found north of this lake, and nowhere else in

the world. The name comes from the Charo River. (We also learned that some stems which had

appeared in a local salad were fern stems.)

As our vessel approached a large rock protruding from the lake, we heard that the Buryat

people put suspected criminals and unfaithful wives on this rock. If the criminal survived the night in

this cold, slippery exile, he was exonerated, but the unfaithful wife had to swim for shore on her own.

The cold normally killed her, but if she made it to shore, she was considered guilty, because old Lake

Baikal had rejected her. This viewpoint and procedure sounds parallel to the old English trial by water:

if the accused floats, he is guilty; if he sinks, he is innocent (but dead).

According to a legend of the Buryat people who inhabited the surrounding area before the

Russians came, Old Baikal, the male personified Lake, had a beautiful daughter, named Angara (the

outlet-river mentioned earlier), who rejected her hundred suitors (the 100 inlet rivers or tributaries) and

left to marry another in the West (which I infer from geography was the Yenisei). Her father

disapproved and confined her under the guard of a shaman. She escaped and became the Angara River

(which does, in fact, as mentioned above, continuously leave or flow out of the lake). As punishment

for allowing her to escape, Old Baikal turned the Shaman into this stone and placed it where it now is.

While we were on the lake, we saw a few other large tour boats and about 20 small one-man

fishing boats on the lake. Along one shore were wooden villages, tucked up the hillsides between the

lake and higher hills. The area around the lake was green and beautiful. Near the narrow southwest

end of the lake both shores along the sides of the lake could be seen, but as we sailed farther out, land

was not visible in any direction, just as if we had been in open sea. A small boy helped the operator of

our tour boat, the Kristi, about 63 feet long. During the hour that we sailed, we could see white caps,

though feeling little wind, and after approaching Shaman Rock we approached a mountainous

peninsula.

Lake Baikal (from Nomadic Expeditions, The Gobi and North to Siberia).


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On the way back to the city, we pass much thick forest and numerous new, larger, unpainted,

six-inch-square-cross-section timber houses (the log houses Galina had mentioned but, like those in

the Russian Far East, these were squared timbers, not the original, undressed cylindrical objects we call

logs). The external timbers of these houses perhaps were stained and shellacked or otherwise

waterproofed, but allowed the underlying wood color to show through. These were very nice looking,

often on rises or small hillocks, apparently home of more prosperous, or more lavishly spending, people

than the homes we had seen farther East. We also passed one new subdivision of much larger, red brick

houses at the boundary of Irkutsk. In the city proper more prominent residences were apartment

buildings of several stories height. Upon my inquiry, someone identified the row of scattered, reddish-

brown vegetation as wild asparagus. We passed a childrens park full of trees.

Back at the hotel, after a lighter supper than wed had on the train, Ludmila seemed rather

brusque and to have trouble informing and coordinating different sections of the present augmented

tour group. A tourist complains. Shifts occur in the plan for the group. I finally was able to get stamps,

but not yet a chance to mail anything. My film was nearly gone; three loads, as planned, would have

been wiser than the two I had. Just before bed, I noticed the moon, barely over the horizon and nolonger full, as orange in color as a true orange. Then my only attempt at watching Russian television (on

a Japanese-made set, which did not seem to have volume control). Nothing on with a plot.

A city tour filled most of the next morning. We visited museums, etc., and heard Ludmilas

comments on Siberian and local Irkutsk history and geography. Siberia includes 10 million square

kilometers, and is described as established as a specified region in 1588 (the year of the Spanish

Armadas disastrous expedition against Britain: so in the same year, Spain ceased to be, and Russia

became, a great power, but Sir Walter Raleighs attempt to settle Englishmen in America failed).

According to Ludmila, the name Siber means sleepy land. Irkutsk, the city, was formally founded in

1651. The regional symbol of Siberia was the babar, a mythical animal like a tiger which symbolizedpower. (Tigers did, and I believe a few still do, live in Siberia.) Another source identified babaras simply

a lion (or tiger). I do not know whether this babarwas the origin of the modern fictional Babar, who is

always pictured as an elephant. (Image below from The Mythical Tigers of Korean Folktaleson care2.com.)


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Siberian Exile

The association of Siberia with exile has a long and many-sided history. Prisoners and political

outcasts were sent to Siberia to rid the homeland of them and to build up the Russian population in

Siberia (as the English did in Virginia at first, then in Georgia, and later in Australia). We pass a Catholic

brick church built here by exiles from Poland. Some German prisoners of World War II and virtually allof the native Crimeans were sent here, as well as many unsubmissive or politically suspect citizens

during Tsarist and Stalinist times.

Especially prominent and important in local history were the Decembrists, some of whose faces

appeared on the huge welcoming billboard (mentioned earlier) at the railroad station. The Decembrists

were a group of Russians of the nobility, influenced by the liberal ideas of theAmerican and French

revolutions and the writings and movements in Europe which had led to those two revolutions.

Previous uprisings of the down-trodden classes had occurred in European societies throughout modern

times (after the Turks took Constantinople in 1453 and Columbus reached Hispaniola in 1492), but in

Russia such rebellions had only taken the form of resistance of Ukrainians under the Cossack Hetmen toMuscovite encroachment, or uprisings led by pretenders to the throne, like the false Dmitris[false

Dmitriy is a title that refers to various pretenders to the throne claiming to be Tsarevich Dmitry

invanovich, son of Ivan the Terrible; DG]. None of these disputed the idea of Tsardom, but only the

extent of his territory or the identity of the legitimate Tsar.

In 1825 the Decembrists decided to launch their own revolution, to eliminate the monarchy

altogether and abolish serfdom. (Serfdom had already ended in the rest of Europe.) The Decembrists

acquired their collective name from the fact that the rebellion began on December 14, 1825. The

rebellion failed. I imagine many rebels were executed, but the government decided to send 221 of the

noble rebels to Siberia to work the mines there. Siberia had, and still has, extensive coal mining.

Probably the prominence of the noble families saved the noble rebels from execution, because the

existence of the monarchy had always depended on the support of most of the nobles, and executing

the recreants might have alienated the noble families involved. The hard-labor sentence was for life,

and differed little from the fates of many other Siberian exiles. Why would this group stand out from all

the rest?

Three or four reasons for the difference appear. First, because the Decembrists were from the

nobility or baronial families, they were able to maintain contact with their families, which discreetly

sought gradual amelioration of the terms of their exile and sent them money, information, cultural

materials, and other objects which could improve their lives. Secondly, some of the Decembrists wives

sought permission to join their husbands. After a time, the monarch agreed, but on extremely rigid

conditions. The wives, like their husbands, would have to stay in Siberia for life, give up all titles and

property in European Russia, and even give up their children to state custody. Yet eleven of the wives

agreed, led by the Countesses Volkonskii and Trubetskoy.

So those eleven wives also went to Irkutsk to settle. Being ladies of high society and educational

interests, they became prominent in the town. When the local chief official snubbed them and would


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not invite them to public social events, Countess Volkonskii held her own, and determined to make

them bigger cultural events than those that the official held. She invited scholars, travelers, and other

cultural leaders from throughout Europe to her events and succeeded in this goal.

Maria Nikolaevna Volkonskaya, who followed her husband, Prince Sergey Grigorievich Volkonsky into Siberian exile

(from Wikipedia, portrait by Pyotr Fyodorovich Sokolov).

The families also continued to seek amelioration of the conditions of exile, so the Tsar finally

relented and permitted the exiled Decembrist noblemen to leave the mines (but not Siberia). Being

intellectuals, they settled in the city of Irkutsk with their wives and became the intellectual leaders of

Siberia. Finally, being liberals (at least in comparison with the world of their time), they also set about to

improve their new home city, with intellectual, architectural, and educational improvements of various

kinds. One (Amurski) built a fine home which he called the White House, modeled after the US White

House in Washington, D.C. (which had been completed in its original form in 1800 and burned during

the War of 1812).

The social and cultural leadership of this group made Irkutsk so famous and modern in its

attitudes that one of its prominent foreign visitors called it the Paris of the East. That tradition has

remained. The city still honors and reveres these earlier forced residents, is filled with museums,

libraries, educational institutions (including a major foreign language school), parks, etc., and has


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become not only the most populous Russian city in Asia, which it has been for some time, but more

recently the third most populous city in Russia (after Moscow and St. Petersburg).

Irkutsk Regional Historic Memorial Decembrists Museum, formerly Volkonsky Manor (from

russianmuseums.info/M979).

During the tour we visited Volkonskiis home, now a museum in itself, with the original period

furniture and his own notebooks. We also saw a huge 1761 Russian Orthodox Church (the oldest local

one has become a museum) with elaborate gold-framed paintings mounted on a red wall, murals,

kneeling rugs, braziers, filigree, etc. A choir and numerous elderly women were present, kneeling, with

tapers lit, and a baptism was occurring.

We also saw a statue of Shelikov, who established Russian America (Alaska and the coast to the

south; at one time this colony had a fort just north of San Francisco Bay, but US President Polks

agreement with Britain on the long northern boundary of the United States to the Pacific and his seizure

of California during the war with Mexico effectively limited the feasible southern extent of Russian

America to the present boundaries of Alaska).

Through Novosibirsk (New Siberia) to Uzbekistan

That evening we went to the Airport, an overcrowded madhouse, and left Irkutsk by Aeroflot

(Russian airline) at 2:35 Pacific Daylight Time, 6:35 p.m. Irkutsk time. Flight time was two hours. We

entered a new time zone and arrived at 7:35 Novosibirsk time (Russia has nine time zones). Rain was

falling. On the way, snacks were for sale. The cola was off brand (Sunbright), warm, with dubious

carbonation, and too sweet. We arrived at the scheduled time. Russian exit procedure produced an

incredible, slow mess, with interminable standing and going through multiple paper processes, carting

bags here and there, but I guess our own have recently become the same. I strained my groin and back

a bit helping Elta with her heavy bag. Then three hours of utter chaos, pushing, with no sign of an

orderly line.

At Novosibirsk, we switched to an Uzbeki airline at 10:30 p.m. local time, one zone west of

Irkutsk, and arrived at Tashkent, the principal city in Uzbekistan, after midnight. Again great delay and

multiple checking by local officials. Every check seemed to take forever for our local group, but I went

through quickly when I said salaamto the visa agent [this standard Muslim greeting means peace;


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DG]. Our tour group, probably tired from all this (I was later told that all but two were older than I), was

full of complaints on the bus journey to the hotel.

Ludmila continued with us into Uzbekistan, failed to follow up and find things out [about] some

crucial connection matters, and argued with various passengers (I did not yet know who was who

among the contingent that had come through Mongolia) and the driver/local guide. We reachedTashkent, a city of 2.2 million and the most populous place in Turkestan (= all the Turkic-speaking

nations of Central Asia), and the hotel at 2:30 a.m. Uzbeki time. I made some notes on the days events

and some Uzbeki words I wanted to remember to use, brushed my teeth and shaved, and heard that the

local temperature had just dropped from 39 degrees C to 28 degrees in a few days, with a forecast of 26

degrees C (= 79 degrees F)cooling just in time. I went to bed at 4:40 a.m., to rise and dress at 6:30.

Throughout our days in Russian Asia, one did indeed, as warned, need to bring ones own toilet

paper, as advisories and travel articles had warned, as well as essentially all other personal-care

amenities, as advertisers call them. In Tashkent, Uzbekistan, however, the hotel provided good toilet

paper and shampoo in the rooms.

Map of Uzbekistan (from infoplease.com).

Uzbekistan is essentially the same as ancient Transoxiana and medieval Qarezm, a strip of land

along and between two rivers flowing northwestward into the Aral Sea. The two rivers are now

known as the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, but in classical times were known as the Oxus and Araxes,hence the name Transoxiana, or beyond the Oxus (the Amu Darya). The southern end of Uzbekistan

is separated from Afghanistan by the Tien Shan Mountains, but mere arbitrary lines drawn by Stalin,

without natural boundaries, separate the country along its northeast side from Kazakhstan (although

the Kizil Kum or red desert is the effective geographic barrier) and, on the southwest, from

Turkmenistan (which contains the Kara Kum, or black desert). The Aral Sea marks the northwestern end

of Uzbekistan.


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Tashkent, Uzbekistan

It was now August 31, 1996, the fifth anniversary of the independence, such as it is, of

Uzbekistan, but Ludmila says no celebration will occur. The existing Republic government of the former

Soviet Socialist Uzbekistan declared the republic to an independent nation in 1991, following the

example of other soviet socialist republics in the former Soviet Union. At first the efforts of the

Baltic countriesLithuania, Estonia, and finally Latviaand others, such as Moldava and Georgia, were

met by Russian pressures and violence. (Russia had seized these nations, except Georgia, in 1940 as part

of the deal for partition of Poland between Stalin and Hitler.)

As the trend of Soviet Socialist Republics declaring independence spread, Russia had acquiesced,

at least officially, and created a new, looser association of nations, the CIS or Confederation of

Independent States. I do not know the details, but I get the impression that the CS is more like a

combination common market area, like the European Union, and a military alliance, like NATO, than a

real federation. At any rate, Uzbekistan declared its independence after the European republics and the

softening of Russian objections, and allows private business activity, but when I was there it still

maintained the collective farms of the Communist Era. I did not see any Russian troops in Uzbekistan

while I was there, and a local guide in Bokhara answered my question about that by saying she was not

aware of any Russian troops in Uzbekistan, but thought there were in Tadjikistan nearby (which I already

knew, from newspaper accounts of battles between a fundamentalist Islamic group from Iran and

Russian troops in Tadjikistan).

Not feeling able safely to carry the bags now, I put mine with the others for bus transport,

although I had intended to keep them with me at all times, as I normally have for many years. We took

a morning bus tour of the city of Tashkent, revealing wide avenues, shade trees along the main streets,numerous private automobiles (Volgas, made in Russia), sheep, cattle, alfalfa, maize, blue cabbage,

peach trees, grape vines, and cotton in well-tended fields. Some horse and donkey carts were seen on

the farms. In general, the farms, homes, and clothing of the Uzbeks I saw gave a more varied and

prosperous appearance to this country than what we had seen of Russians or the few more indigenous

people in Russian Asia, much better than in the Russian Far East. Both farms and city showed many

people outside and visibly working here, while in Russian Asia I never saw anyone visibly working the

generally derelict-looking farms, and few in the city but the car-trunk and truck-bed salesmen, though

perhaps more of the local population work insidein Russia.

As the local Tashkent tour-guide cum tour-bus driver told us that morning, a 1966 earthquakehad destroyed the city, after which it had been rebuilt in its current improved style, with areas for

greenery, trees lining main streets, and so on. The architecture was mostly typical, blocky, Russian-style

concrete, especially of public utilities and services, such as the post office, telephone office, etc. Most

people here dressed largely like city people everywhere, but occasional Saudi garb appeared, a few thick

veils and one long aba, on elderly people. (I had seen shabby looking turbans and aba on two men at


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the airport, but the one elderly woman with them, though otherwise in Arabic dress, was not wearing a

veil. In the long wait in crowded quarters, she had squatted on the floor.)

This local guide-driver resided in Uzbekistan, but was Russian by name and appearance, as were

many people in the utility and technical industries. On the other hand, the farmers and merchants were

either Turkic people (originally from farther east) or the earlier Iranian types, known here as Tadjiks orTadzhiks. The non-Russian Uzbeks were generally shorter, with darker hair and skin than most of the

Russians I saw, but the difference was not greater than that among US Caucasians of different

backgrounds, climates, and habits. Uzbekistan is normally a very hot, largely desert country in the

summer, so tans are inevitable, in addition to any genetic differences that exist.

From Tashkent, a relatively modern-looking city, our bus travels roughly southwestward toward

Samarqand, as the Uzbeks call it, often written Samarkand by Europeans and their cultural offspring.

This is an ancient town along the long and famous caravan route known as the Silk Road from China to

the West(Uzbekistan, Iran, and Europe). The name of Samarqand has stayed the same for at least

two or three millennia, perhaps longer, and means essentially sugar fruit or lump sugar production,

but the name of Uzbekistan has changed often, as various conquerors came.

Joseph Stalin, the effective dictator of Russia during the 1930s and 40s, assigned the present

boundaries and the Uzbek part of its current name to divide and thereby weaken the influence of the

conquered Turkic and Iranian peoples of the area, giving them ethnic names designating the four Turkic

dialects and the earlier Iranian group which inhabited Muslim Russian-controlled Central Asia (under

Lenin, all five of these groups had been lumped together in one political unit). The Uzbeks were the

most numerous group in Russian Muslim Central Asia, but were the majority only in the irrigated area

between two rivers emptying into the Aral Sea. When the country became independent, it

substituted -stan(country or territory,a borrowed Persian or Tadjik word) in place of SSR. The

same country has been known by other names; before Genghis Khan, it was Khwarezm (where el

Khwarezmi invented the title algebra and the foundations of that branch of mathematics, the use of

equations and letters and other non-numerical symbols for unknown or unspecified numbers and

arithmetic procedures). Genghis Khan destroyed this kingdom for violation of the international law of

sanctity of envoys, going on to start the Mongol invasion of Russia, since to Genghis, all Westerners

must be alike and the culprits must have gone west to hide among the Russians. Tamerlane (Timur the

lame) later centered his empire there.

Samarkand

On the way to Samarqand, we saw many farms and brightly clothed country people, mostly

women and children, along the long paved road quietly waiting (to hitch a ride with a passing motorist,

we are told). Very few men wore turbans or other Arabic dress, although the people are mostly Muslim.

Some of the men, instead, wore foldable square hats, with brims upright about two inches. These hats

were later identified as elders insignia. Only one of all the women along the road wore a veil. I never


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did see anyone stop to pick up one of these waiting people, but I suppose so many would not be there if

they did not have reason to think they would get to town that way.

Uzbeki men wearing their elders hats (from collectspace.com).

The land was very flat, dry, clayey, and gray where not irrigated, but intensely farmed. Our bus

passed small brick buildings that might hold a few people (bus stops), a few old adobes, some orchards,

vineyards, and row crops, well-fed dark sheep, a few tractors, magpies, and miles of purple sage.

Various small, tan brick roadside stops each provided tables, colas, a wide variety of melons, and a privy.

These stands were well maintained and rather attractive, usually with some abstract Persian-style

architectural decoration, which also were displayed on bridge guard rails and similar structures which

elsewhere are usually very simple, plain-looking, and without embellishment.

According to our guide, under Russian control the country had been required to grow onlycotton, but with independence crop rotation prevailed between cotton and wheat. As the bus

proceeded, police repeatedly stopped it in isolated places along the route every few miles, not quite

hourly, perhaps at county lines. The driver got out each time and conversed with the officer out of my

hearing. When he returned on one occasion, he explained that the purpose of these stops was to check

the authorizations and other papers of unfamiliar drivers, so perhaps this was to limit movement

within the country. A newspaper article a year or so later, however, ascribed a similar experience to

local graft, in which the local police officer would demand a bribe before allowing a traveler to proceed.

I did not watch the meeting, so I cannot confirm either account.

Uzbekistan seemed relatively prosperous, though pockets of poor remain. Most of the peoplewe could see were well dressed. The men wore mainly western clothing, except for the square elders

hats, but the non-Russian womens finery were mostly full dresses of bright colors such as red, blue,

etc., often with gold or silver glitter and equally brightly (but differently) colored Persian pantaloons or

bloomers underneath. Often the dress was sheer enough to allow the pantaloons to show through.


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An Uzbeki woman in characteristic colorful dress at the bazaar (from Ichanqalahotel.com).

I noticed that our tour group (the Mongolia-trip people) was particularly unruly and rude today,

perhaps because of the limited sleep last night. Eltas back was bothering her; she looked about to cry.

Yet she offered to lend me some cash for more gift buys. I noticed Id used up all my photo film and gift-

purchase money, an error in my original planning on both accounts. In Samarqand, I picked up morepicture postcards, stamps, and a local painting on paper of a local mosque, and during the tour several

other items, mostly gifts except for a set of chess pieces and two trilingual paperbacks, an Uzbek

geography and a (laudatory!) biography of Tamerlane in Uzbek (written in the Cyrillic alphabet, with

modifications), as well as in Russian and English.

At supper, after arriving at the hotel Afrawsiab (named for a legendary leader of Turan[in the

Persian classic, the Shahnama; DG], the Turkic-speaking conquering horde of Central Asia) in

Samarqand, Ludmila the guide and several tour members did not appear. Such of us as came ate

together at a large table. It happened that colorfully (but modestly) dressed belly dancers performed

for a family affair in our dining room at supper, so we got a graceful, free, and unexpected performance.

Throughout the Uzbek part of this journey, the weather was equable, contrary to my concerns,

but I hear that as little as a week earlier would have been difficult for us because of the heat. We saw

more of the local costumes in Samarqand, one velvet with sparkle designs, most with no design, colors

bright and usually deep, a few nearly all sparkle. Many wore jagged, multi-color, opaque dresses

without glitter, reminiscent of a Mexican blanket. Almost all the dresses were loose, flowing, full, and

ankle or mid-shank length. A different style, but still different from most western clothes Ive seen, was

a semi-transparent, pastel overdress with extensive glitter and sleeves, over an opaque, sometimes

sleeveless, colorful underdress.

Most of the women were bare-headed, but some wore colorful scarves of some smooth

material like silk or sati. One wore a scalloped, stiff crown, one a brightly beaded pillbox type hat with a

streamer, and one a metallic-beaded bun-crown or net. A few ladies costumes used sequins instead of

glitter, one jacket with so many it looked like a coat of mail with no cloth showing. Of course, one

example is not a sign of what is typical. The glitter was more attractive and seemed more elegant than

the sequins, but perhaps sequins involve more time to attach.


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In recognition of independence, a public performance did occur in an open area in the city that

morning, on a large stage, with free seating. Instrumental music, some dancers, etc., provided

entertainment, and the national flag or representations of it were prominently displayed in the central

part of town, but no long speeches by politicians. The flag consists of three wide, horizontal stripes: pale

blue, white, and green, for the open sky, cotton, and, and [plant] life, according to a local resident. A

few of the female dancers had small, round hats, about the size of the mens square hats. Only one of

the dancers was tall and wore a western-style gown with bare shoulders; she looked Russian to me.

Apparently this celebration was what drew all the people in their best clothes to come to town.

Most of the scattered audience consisted of families, with parents and children, but in some

cases without an adult male. Many little girls and a few little boys had crew cuts. This surprised me,

because Ive never seen little girls with crew cuts, except in rare film parts. When one babe in arms

looked at me, the mother said to it Bopo. I am not familiar with the word, but perhaps it means a

grandfather.

In the afternoon, we visited a structure which in effect is a museum commemorating Ulugh Beg,

grandson of Tamerlane, king of this country for 40 years (1409-1449), assassinated by religious zealots.

During his life he had a deep interest in astronomy, created a large catalog of stars with the help of his

son, and built an observatory (before and without telescopes), including a huge sextant, on the same

site where this museum now stands. The sextant is still there, built into the ground. When built, the

pertinent part of it could move, like any sextant, and permit calculating the celestial altitude of any

visible heavenly body, but it is no longer movable. We descended into the sextant, which looked maybe

about the size of a large round room, maybe thirty to forty feet each way.

Part of the monumental observatory of Ulugh Beg in Samarkand (from Wikimedia commons).

We also visited numerous other buildings, mostly mosques and madrassas (religious schools), a

memorial for Ali (the assassinated son-in-law of Mohammed), the government parliament building,

which looked quite new, and a number of other, older buildings and statues recently uncovered by


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archeological digging. Most had steep adobe or brick stairways to climb to see them properly, a

problem for some older members of our group. Only the parliament building looked new and had

proper grounds and manicured flora.

At the site of Ulugh Begs giant sextant, one retired building contractor-tourist complained to

another member of the group that the builders (of a modest bed for greenery leading to the relic)couldnt even get the corners square, a rather rude and insulting thing to say in public of ones host

country. This same tourist, whose name I do not recall, also made himself notable in other ways during

the journey. Despite the warnings and cautions in the literature sent to us, and an obvious age sufficient

to justify an expectation of greater maturity, he had brought a huge steamer trunk, large enough for a

full-grown man to fit inside without unusual flexibility. Fully loaded, it was far too heavy for him or any

one person to lift or carry, so he was constantly complaining that his health would not permit him to

carry it, he being diabetic, and demanding that the tour guide arrange for workers to carry it about to

and from his room in the hotel, airports, buses, etc., although the tour advisory letter had warned weeks

before departure that no such service would be available in most places where we would be. He

criticized essentially everyone in and around the tour group and many of the things shown us by thevarious guides. The only time I ever heard him say something favorable about someone was part of an

excuse for a verbal assault on another tour member. I just remember him as the obnoxious tour

member or simply the ugly American.

On this freer part of our tour, Dorothy also became memorable. She was invariably late in

arriving at the bus, at the start of a tour or at time for return, always wandering off beyond the area

designated by the guide and out of sight, as happened at the parliament building and other places. This

persisted to the end. The rest of the tourists were civilized, but these two convince me that, if I were

ever to travel again, it would not be as part of such a group, unless on a ship. This was my one and only

time with a tour group, except for one-day excursions into East Berlin and Shenchen, mainland China, onother trips.

Despite these observations, Uzbekistan in general and Samarqand and Bokhara in particular

were the most fascinating parts of the entire journey, so much so that if it were feasible it would be

appealing to go again (but being sure to avoid most of August).

Bokhara

On Monday morning, September 2, 1996, our tour bus set off westward for Bokhara, with

Ludmila and a driver, with all the tourists, when Dorothy showed up. We passed healthy-looking

orchards, numerous farm tractors (in contrast with the Russian Far East and Siberia), current

construction of numerous new brick buildings, two larger adobe or concrete buildings (we were told

these were for chickens, but none were outside, and I do not know whether they were hatcheries, egg

factories, or feed lots for fowl intended for eating), and rather dry and relatively barren ground for the

rest of the way. We did see Persian-style abstract decoration on bridge guard rails, between support

posts.


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We stopped at a rather nice roadside stop, with melons, soft drinks, and a privy. The Russian

guide Ludmila warned us not to eat melons grown in Uzbekistan, on the basis that the melons here were

grown on the ground, where they were exposed to chemicals, causing her and some tourists to suffer

intestinal woes on her prior trip through. Nevertheless, Iran and Transoxiana (Uzbekistan) have long

been renowned for their tree fruit and a wide variety of large, juicy melons. These particular melons

looked so juicy and appealing in the hot, dry climate that Ray and I were sorely tempted. I had planned

to try to arrange just a bit, then judge the effect, and increase intake on other occasions if no ill effects

appeared. The melons were large enough that the proprietor cut them, a few slices at a time, and

offered individual slices for sale. Ray and I decided to buy a single slice and divide it between us, which

we did. It was delicious, refreshing, and caused no ill effects. Thereafter all hotel meals offered an

assortment of fruits and melon slices, of which I always partook eagerly in this very warm country.

As the bus entered the town of Bokhara (accent on the last syllable: Bo-kha-RAH; khpronounced

like the chof Loch Lomond or yuch, the dialect expression of disgust), we passed through a gateway

placed there as a marker of the ancient Silk Road, which also reached here. We also passed a big new

brick entryway to the town. The entryway was still under construction. Here I saw signs in Cyrillicletters, but also some letters had extra marks over and beside them not seen in Russian or other Slavic

languages, unfamiliar spellings of place names, and an occasional letter F (which does not exist in

Slavic Cyrillic [and which represents a ghsound in Uzbek; DG]). For example, Russians and other

Europeans spell Bokhara with A in the last two syllables, but a local sign spelled it with O in those

syllables. When I was puzzled by this, I was informed that this was the local Uzbek language spelled in

Cyrillic letters, with a few extras added, as northern Europeans added the U, W, and J to the

Roman alphabet. The use of O in some places where others would use A appears to be due to the

Persian-like pronunciation of a long A as aw (as in saw), which seemed to the Uzbeks closer to the

sound of Russian O than A. This pronunciation is probably due to the earlier, Iranian (Tadjik)

inhabitants of the area, who initially probably f

inner asian journey

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