With my Aral Experience ticked off, it was time to start south towards Afghanistan. However, before I got there I had one last big place to visit - Samarkand!
The train came through Nukus on Monday and Thursday, arriving Nukus at 12:29 and departing at 12:44, arriving in Samarkand at an inconvenient 04:00. I sat in the train station and dozed for a couple of hours until the buses started running. Still killing time, I actually got off the bus at the Amir Timur statue and walked to the Registan from there.
Unless you pay off the guards the area of the Registan Square is "closed" out of hours, but money talks and the closed will become open for a suitable sum of Sum. The most cost-effective option is probably to pay to climb a minaret. The guards will offer to let you climb the minarets for 5,000 Sum, any time of the day or night. The sunrise view is apparently disappointing - people I've spoken to recommend climbing the minarets at sunset instead. At any rate, I was unwilling to pay the graft and although I managed to penetrate the forbidden zone and take a couple of photos I was then directed back beyond the pale. So I walked on, looking for my chosen accommodation.
I didn't find it. The powers that be have built absurd, ugly walls all over Samarkand in an attempt, apparently, to keep the locals and the tourists apart. They don't work - but they did thwart my feeble attempts to get into the back streets. In the end I stayed at Bahodir B&B, a stone's throw from the Registan. For $20 (42k Sum) I got registration, breakfast, a double bed, en suite with hot water and throne, and aircon. It wasn't fancy but everything worked. The supplied towel was rather small but relatively new, well above dishrag status. All in all, considering the location, it was amazing value.
I spent several days in Samarkand, trying to conjur the ghost; but despite the magnificent structures that survive, here, even less than Bukhara, the fabled silk city has succumbed to the modern era. All my airy visions of relaxing in cushiony tea houses while watching the traffic in bustling marketplaces popped like the balloons they were. There is little romance in modern Samarkand.
However, I found some pleasure up on the mound that was the city in the time of Alexander the Great. There is a museum there that is worth seeing, and fragments of walls and other bits and pieces.
I also had a few amusing insights, such as at Daniel's Tomb. People get hung up on the lesser miracle (his half-inch-per-year growth) and miss the greater. Consider: His sarcophagus is 18 metres long. Assuming he was a man of average height, this means he has gained about 16 metres to date. There are 39 inches to the metre, so at half an inch per year it should take him 78 years to gain each metre. Thus he died about 760 AD. No, you say - he died about 500 BC? OK, then. Not only is he growing, but his rate of growth must be increasing! Another miracle!
The great tombs were impressive of course, and the Registan was stunning, but they are surrounded by so much that is ordinary or ersatz, and some have been spoiled by poor attempts to renovate them, that on the whole I was disappointed. And so I turned my mind from the past to the present and decided to head for Afghanistan.
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