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-- June 23, 2002 --
Hello everyone,
The past week has taken me to Zamin - home of Uzbekistan's most
famous national park - in the southeast, to Nukus and the fading
city of Muynak in the far west, to Samarkand in the southeast
and back to Tashkent in the northeast. Along the way I've seen
deserts and mountains, camels and mosques, and the sad, poisoned
place where the once-great Aral Sea bestowed its wealth.
I head home on 27 June so this is my last pre-departure account
After I return, I'll share at least one more message, including
tales of Muynak, its ghostly fishing fleet of the desert and Central
Asia's greatest environmental nightmare.
#
Let's begin in the west, not far from the Turkmenistan border,
where Nukus feels like an isolated frontier outpost. It isn't
frontier, but isolated is accurate.
The city is the capital of the autonomous region of Karakalpakstan
with its own ethnicity and language. Most of the territory between
here and Tashkent, 750 miles away, is desert - and not the harshly
romantic desert of films, not the desert of singing sands, undulating
dunes and welcome oases shaded by swaying palms. From the air,
the view reveals only rugged barrenness, dried lakebeds and streambeds,
salt flats, parched earth, desolation, scars of drought, too-dry
cotton and rice fields, hostility and natural privation.
One guidebook describes it as a "grim, spiritless town of bitter
pleasures," a city "of limited interest to either tourists or
inhabitants." That may be too harsh a judgment. True, the architecture
lacks distinction, mostly one- and two-story block-shaped buildings,
colors often washed-out pastels or shades of gray, brown or beige.
True, from the air it's apparent that many buildings are empty
and roofless.
Economically and ecologically, the situation is also empty and
roofless. Unemployment is high, my translator Rashid told me,
and he wondered why foreign industry doesn't invest in factories
and development here. How would a factory's products reach outside
markets? I replied. Why would foreigners choose to build here
rather than in places that are more accessible and with larger
workforces? Karakalpakstan has one of the highest rates of respiratory
deaths in the world. There is goiter, kidney disease, tuberculosis,
malnutrition and not enough water.
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As I walked around town, I suddenly thought first of Darwin in
Australia's north and then of Alice Springs in its Red Centre.
But both are far more affluent than Nukus. They prosper in large
measure as tourist destinations, gateways to Kakadu and Katherine
Gorge national parks in one instance and to the monumental natural
wonders of Uluru and Kata Juta in the other. Nukus, by contrast,
is a gateway to nowhere. Foreigners who show up are more apt to
be interested in the shrinking Aral Sea and the ill-fated fishing
town of Muynak, now 65 miles inland from the shore, than in the
culture of Karakalpakstan.
True, there's a rundown feeling, with lots of dust. On one early
evening wander, I came across a shabby amusement park, its meager
rides closed except for a slow-moving Ferris wheel with a small
number of passengers. It reminded me of the first summer of the
Nixon administration during my first internship in Washington.
I had arranged to rent a room in a house described as "near" the
C&O Canal. On my map, the canal ran through Georgetown, and the
rent was affordable. Only after arrival did I discover that the
canal runs a lot further, including through the distant suburb
of Glen Echo, Maryland.
Before I moved out after a week, I walked through a nearby abandoned
amusement park that had closed a year or two earlier in the aftermath
of race riots. It had a desolate feel, an eerie atmosphere of
fleeting entertainment and laughter past, of childhoods lost,
of gaudy thrills, of memories doomed to fade - as do most childhood
memories, good and bad.
I had the prescience that Nukus' far more downscale amusement
park faces a similar fate of abandonment. So I ate a chocolate-covered
ice cream bar and then, for 100 sum -- less than a dime -- rode
high on the Ferris wheel under a half-moon sky. At its peak, I
was higher than most buildings on the skyline.
Not all is grim in Nukus. Hollyhocks bloom bright in yards and
parks. I saw birds from my flat windows. Under the hot sun, women
walk with umbrellas, like parasols, and lots of places sell ice
cream.
The Karakalpak State Museum houses a world-renowned art collection,
mostly works by Soviet artists before the 1960s that were amassed
by the painter Igor Savitsky, who settled here for reasons I don't
know yet. Nukus' very isolation enabled Savitsky (1915-1984) to
collect what he wanted without worrying about the ideological
scrutiny of Moscow. Paintings hang crammed together in the gallery
rooms, lights off until a visitor is ready to enter. And visitors
seem few. My translator and I had the place to ourselves on a
Monday afternoon.
One room is devoted to Savitsky's own work,. Here was a man devoted
to preserving the best of works of Soviet artists -- portraits
and still lives, landscapes and avant garde experiments, sculptures
and ceramics -- yet he could preserve only on canvas scenes that
would become increasingly surreal as the Aral, in his lifetime
the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, shrank and shrank.
His fishing boats and seascapes will never be real again here.
Another spot of brightness: the Progress Educational and Development
Center, a success story in a city desperately in need of success.
With support from the U.S. Embassy, UNICEF, Soros Foundation and
other Western grantors, the school teaches English (and German),
business, pride, computer skills and study skills. "Our challenge
is to take the best from abroad while still recognizing and retaining
the importance of local culture," Progress says in its brochure.
"It is our goal to continually develop and provide an environment
that emphasizes critical thinking, civic interest, individualism
and students' faith in their country's future and themselves."
For an hour and a half, I spoke with about 75 students and teachers
about higher education in our two countries. I explained how journalists
and students need the same character traits such as creativity,
independence, responsibility, skepticism, intellectual integrity
and clarity in communication. I asked how many of them want to
study elsewhere, either in Uzbekistan or abroad - quite a few
-- and how many want to permanently move from Nukus - virtually
none. It's home, they said. This isn't a mobile society, they
said. Perhaps the lives of these so-bright, so-motivated students
will be harder if they stay but, at the same time, perhaps the
future of their Karakalpakstan will be brighter.
#
Thunder high in the mountains. Lightning high in the mountains.
Rain mists the slopes, with low clouds obscuring summer remnants
of winter snows in the Turkestan range.
We approached the mountains - at an opposite side of Uzbekistan
from Nukus and near the Tajikistan border -- from the city of
Jizakh, driving through a valley where wheat had recently been
harvested. Sheep, goats, cows and donkeys had been released to
graze on the stubble, and atop one ridge stood a riderless horse,
its reins dangling.
Traffic included slow-moving donkey-drawn carts piled with unbaled
hay the length and height of a minivan, but wider. Traffic stopped
occasionally when a herd of cattle or flock of sheep wandered
on the road. Children squatted by the edge of the road, keeping
watch on their animals.
Climbing, climbing, climbing high above a reservoir in a part
of the country that most of the students hadn't visited. On either
side of the road, potent upthrusts of the earth were evident in
rock formations tilted 45 degrees and more untold eons ago.
After stopping in the town of Zamin to pick up food and a guide,
our route to Zamin National Park was lined with wildflowers. To
the side frothed and churned a stream, perhaps 4 to 6 feet wide.
The skies darkened, raindrops fell, temperatures fell, the windshield
fogged up. Climbing, climbing, climbing.
Once there, I sat on the porch of the dining hall at a one-time
Pioneer camp - operated before independence in 1991 for members
of the Communist party's Young Pioneer group. I heard water splashing
at the foot of downspouts and smelled stewing lamb, potatoes,
carrots, cabbage and spices from the kitchen. Words from people
inside were indistinct, as blurred as the sky. A scattering of
wind-torn petals of orange-red were as sharp as the lightning
bolts.
On a path downhill from the porch, a woman hurried with a towel
over her head for protection. My protection, a ceiling decorated
with wooden carvings, was undoubtedly more effective.
Above me, uphill, the steep slopes were scarred by rockslides
and only partly anchored by junipers.
When the rain broke, we piled into our minibus to reach the base
of Sharillak waterfall. The path was still slick and muddy, however,
and the falls clouded in mist and spray. Before we could hike
to the top, the rain resumed, accompanied by more thunder, more
lightning and, this time, hail.
But back in the dining room our lamb-and-potato stew was ready,
as was the vodka. The manager stopped by our table to talk and
told me he'd seen me a week earlier on television, interviewed
for a news program about U.S.-Uzbekistan relations. Another man
stopped by, an actor and film producer, and sat next to me at
the table. Between vodka toasts, he described his latest unsold
film project, which sounded like a mix of martial arts, fantasy
and action-adventure.
Our appetites satiated and skies again clear, some of us hiked,
slide-slipping on the steep path behind the dining hall, smelling
fragrant wild mint rubbed between our fingers, relishing the pungent
scent of juniper freshly broken from a trailside tree.
Desert and mountains, juniper and hollyhocks and the Aral Sea.
#
When I was a child, I read stories about Uncle Wiggley, the "long-eared
rabbit gentleman" and read those stories to our children when
they were young. Each episode would end something like this: If
the cow doesn't fall into the strawberry pie and if the white-tailed
deer doesn't lose too badly in the bowling tournament, next time
I'll tell you about ....
So, if my plane home doesn't get stranded by a blizzard in Siberia
and if all my luggage arrives on schedule and unscathed at the
airport in Lansing, next time I'll tell you tales about Muynak
and Samarkand.
Eric
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