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 Square
Massacre. 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 Eastern
exposure 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 passport
renewed 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, redplastic 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.

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 assignment a 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 of
the 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 7:45 Captain 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 ever appears. 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 time
difference, 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 24th because 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 not
made 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
8

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, Ray
spoke 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.

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 boxed
building-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 20th century. 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 an
airliner 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 van arrived 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 she
had 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
11

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 Russian
Inner 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 youth and 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 like
marble, 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
12

square timbers, rather than the round, irregular, and non-uniform original tree sections I mean when I
say log. Most Americans would therefore not consider them logs anymore, except that the edges
remain slightly round or beveled off, giving a textured look. But they are thicker than logs in a typical
historical American log cabin, perhaps partly because of the need for greater insulation in a colder
climate, and maybe partly because of the nature of the trees available.

Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Khabarovsk from Wikipedia.

When we were on our way out of the cathedral toward the waiting van, a tiny, more elderly lady
dressed in shawl and babushka (scarf) approached and spoke several sentences to me in Russian. I did
not understand a word, but as the older lady moved on toward the cathedral, Galina characterized her
remarks briefly as Gods blessing, etc. She did not speak to anyone else in our group. Was she misled by
my beard into thinking me some cleric? Ill never know.

Log house in Khabarovsk, Sheronov Street (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.01502/).

13

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 TransSiberian 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 at
Birobidzhan, 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 vendors
hawking 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.

14

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.)

15

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 had
previously 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 a
plastic 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

16

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 of
territory 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
17

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 a
lanceolate 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
18

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-byfours), 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

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

19

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).

20

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, reddishbrown 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 no
longer 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 symbolized
power. (Tigers did, and I believe a few still do, live in Siberia.) Another source identified babar as simply
a lion (or tiger). I do not know whether this babar was the origin of the modern fictional Babar, who is
always pictured as an elephant. (Image below from The Mythical Tigers of Korean Folktales on care2.com.)

21

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 all
of 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 the American 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 to
Muscovite 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
22

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

23

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 salaam to the visa agent [this standard Muslim greeting means peace;
24

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 reached
Tashkent, 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.
25

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 countries Lithuania, Estonia, and finally Latvia and 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 inside in Russia.
As the local Tashkent tour-guide cum tour-bus driver told us that morning, a 1966 earthquake
had 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

26

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 or
Tadzhiks. 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

27

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 only
cotton, 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 people
we 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.

28

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 giftpurchase money, an error in my original planning on both accounts. In Samarqand, I picked up more
picture 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.

29

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
30

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 the
various 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, on
other 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.
31

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; kh pronounced
like the ch of 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 Cyrillic
letters, 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 gh sound 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 far outnumbered their Turkic conquerors.
In Bokhara I saw numerous large Uzbek national flags and signs representing them, and from
these and a local geography book and the local guide I learned that the flag, in the blue striped
mentioned earlier, contains 12 stars, representing the 12 provinces. Besides these provinces, the
country includes another territory, an autonomous republic or minority reservation in the north call
Karakol Paghestan (Pogheston). This name recalls the Karakol sheep and their wool, as well as the
better-known nation of Pakistan to the south. I do not know whether this is more than coincidence.
[Karakalpakstan is so named for the Karakalpak ethnic group; DG]
Here Ludmila introduced our local Bokhara guide, by a name which I at first took to be
Fushida. Because of this name, the epicanthic fold of her eyelids, her dark hair, slender figure, and
subdued demeanor and voice, I thought that she was of Japanese ancestry, and was slightly surprised at
that in such a place. It later turned out that this was my error; her name was Khorshida, and she was
not only a local but a Tadjik, the early Indo-European speaking people of this area before the Mongols,
Turks, and Russians came. The epicanthic fold suggested that this feature, so often associated with East
Asia, was already to be found this far westward a few thousand years ago, although it is possible that a
Mongol or East-Asian Turk was somewhere in her ancestry. She proved to be the best informed and the
32

readiest to answer questions in an unbiased and straightforward way of our several guides. Like the
Russians, her English was excellent. I heard no ethnic biases from her, gained the impression that she
was fluent in Tadjik (Persian), Uzbek, Russian, and English, and learned accidentally that she had been
called on to guide a British diplomatic visitor recently.

Map showing Karakalpakstan (or Qoraqalpoghiston) (from Wikimedia commons).

The tour driver was unavailable that day after we arrived at our hotel in Bokhara, so I took a
lone walk, observing a sign Kolkhoz (the Russian term for a collective farm, despite the current
Russian attempt at capitalism), various buildings, a dove-shaped bird with a very non-dove-like,
narrow, sharp beak, and other points of interest. On our hotel, large Roman letters spelled Uzbek
Tourism, but a red banner displayed a 14-word slogan in Uzbek Cyrillic, referring to Uzbekistan lasting
or abiding. That night I heard shouts later identified as Uzbekistan azil abad! (May Uzbekistan live
[abide] forever!)
On Tuesday, September 3, the local Tadjik guide Khorshida told us a little of the history of
Bokhara (in English, often spelled Bukhara, but the inhabitants use O for the last two vowels). She
said that the Chinese and Indian visitors called it by a word meaning cloister (but my Persian dictionary
defines bokhar as steam or vapor), and she referred to some of the past leaders as including the
Bukhar dynasty, and later (after the Qarezmians and Mongols) the Timurids (Timur [better known in the
West as Tamerlane] and descendants) in the fifteenth century, when the town again became a political
and trade center. She described the population of the city as 250,000, although it did not look that
populous, and that of the vilayet (province) as about a million. She added that the new nation had its
own army, but we saw no signs of it.
Khorshida pointed out the Laby House, home of a wealthy and powerful man of a few
centuries ago, who is reported to have built the house on the advice of someone who assured him that
doing so would enable him to have an heir. He used his power to force the previous owner, a poor
woman, to give up the property to him, so the fountain established there has been named Force. We
visited a lecture hall-mosque-madrassa (school for teaching Arabic and religion to children and young
adolescents). The madrassa contained 162 cells for the students, supposedly one of the largest in Asia.
In the dirt courtyard were low tea tables, placed on platforms which looked rather like large, wooden

33

bedsteads. The tea-drinker would sit cross-legged on these bedstead-like platforms, with pot or
samovar and cups on the low table. The area was covered by a grape-vine canopy.

Faade of what is now the Laby or Lyaby House Hotel (from tripadvisor.com).

I believe it was here that I became aware of another particular member of the tour group who
had been through Mongolia. I do not recall her name, but apparently she was American, though
originally from India. When she became aware of the Uzbek emphasis on Timur (my trilingual history
calls him the Magnificent in English, rather than the Lame, as he is usually known in Europe and
America, but in Uzbek his description was more florid [his Uzbek title might be translated as something
like Timur, lord conqueror blessed by a lucky star; DG]), she was shocked that he would be selected as
a national hero, when he had been such a savage butcher. But this is not unusual: A number of
countries revere conquerors who enriched their own country at the expense of their neighbors, while
the neighbors have a different perspective. Attila was hero to the Huns, Genghis to the Mongols,
Bismarck to the Germans, Cato the elder to at least some Romans, Cortez to the Spaniards, Milosevic to
at least some Serbs, and some people even closer to home, though their neighbors felt otherwise.
Timur, a Turk feigning a connection with Genghis, made Uzbekistan the center of his empire, bringing
wealth, art, and scholarship to the area from other areas he conquered, including sections of India.
Still at the Laby House and madrassa, in separate stalls and rooms, was an array of beautiful and
impressive native handicrafts offered for sale, including embroidery and other needlework (susaneh),
karakol hats, kalapsh (ladys round, tailed, pillbox hats), metal work, string puppets (one depicting Hoja
Nasreddin Efendi, a famous comic character of Near Eastern fiction), and Persian-style rugs, hand-woven
in individuals homes, usually by girls growing up (usually for their future homes, but evidently
sometimes for sale). We also saw belts and some unfamiliar native stringed instruments roughly
resembling violins (but with smaller sounding boxes), with varying numbers of strings, especially seven.
Other features of this complex included suras (verses) from the Koran around the gates and on
an inn for wandering dervishes. A storks nest was present in a 500-year-old (dead) mulberry tree
planted here to assist in establishing silk-making here. Exporting silk worms and mulberry trees from
China was forbidden, but evidently someone did, and the industry came to Bokhara.

34

Two characters from Turkish shadow puppet theater, neither Hoja Nasreddin, but Karagz and Hacivat (from
www.ourpastisunifyingus.com/materials/Karagz%20Oyunu_1.pdf).

Abdul Aziz Khan in the seventeenth century built another madrassa, which we saw across
from one built by Ulugh Beg, making it higher to surpass his predecessors effort, but that extra height
made it difficult to reach because of the climb to it. One mosque had 40 columns, reflected in the
enclosed pool. A museum had a woven look through using 18 kinds of brick to build it. Cheshme Ayub,
a natural spring in the town, was regarded as holy water, which was used to wash the faces of
worshippers. Numerous other buildings, often with steep stone stair access, were part of the tour, but
again difficult for the oldest tourists, so a few (including Elta) chose not to try them. One building
contains a painting which had been preserved with camel milk and vegetable oil.
Healthy-looking maize was growing everywhere, even in the hotel decorative garden, and
carafe-shaped kiosks were common, serving fast food. Quince grows here, and the local economy
depends largely on cotton, silk, karakul wool, natural gas, and shoes. A few British-style roundabouts
or traffic circles were seen: short, circular roads to avoid right-angle intersections. Much archeological
digging had been done in Bokhara, with international assistance, and building restoration, presumably
to encourage tourism as well as reclaim heritage. Khorshida said that when she was a child she had
never seen one huge medieval building that we saw, because it had been dug out entirely since then.
(She appeared relatively young, so that cannot have been too many years ago. I suspect the archeology
and restoration has been done only since independence.) The process still appears to be proceeding.
At the palace of a medieval ruler, Sayyid Amir Ayub Khan, we saw a swimming pool overlooked
by a small, shaded observation balcony. According to the story, he had 40 wives, and would sit in this
covered balcony to watch them, throwing down an apple on occasion. The wife that caught the apple
would spend that night with the amir. Decorations included carpets depicting mountain weather of the
homes of some of the wives.

35

Khorshida arranged to get me a cassette of local music, at my request. I had been unable to
locate any at the outdoor market stands, though many other things were available. At one, I got a chess
set, depicting rotund alcoholic characters as the pieces. We had dinner and entertainment outdoors in a
courtyard with the large tea tables on platforms, as described earlier. The performance was very
colorful and pleasant, with native string music and dancing. The dancers appeared Indo-Persian, Far
Eastern, and European, and wore wigs of long, dark, wavy hair as in ancient Greek paintings. During
this meal under the stars, Venus and Jupiter were out in full glory.

Back to Tashkent
On Wednesday, September 4, we took the bus to the airport, flew for one hour back to
Tashkent, and after checking in at the hotel, toured the museum of applied arts, led by the lanky, male
Russian guide mentioned earlier. He also told us that the new Timurid Museum would be opening in
October to commemorate 600 years from Timurs birth, so we could not see that institution on our
current journey.
According to the local guide, Tashkent, on the Churchiq River, became 2000 years old in 1983,
but had played no major role in the past, except that four major international routes met there, forming
the char su (four corners) connecting China, India (through Afghanistan), Europe, and the Near East
(through Iran). It became the fourth largest city in the USSR (now CIS), with 2.2 million people. (It is
located in a mountainous area at a corner of a narrow strip of territory barely connected to the rest of
Uzbekistan.
Tashkent originally was named Chech (hill town). When the Arabs conquered the area during
the early Muslim expansion, they called it Shash or Shashkent. From the twelfth century and under the
Timurid dynasty the name was Bin Kent. Under Russian control and since then it has been Tashkent
(tash stone + kent city). From the 1880s to 1950 a Jewish settlement existed in one part of the city.
The museum was built in 1889 by an ex-ambassador to India. In 1966 an earthquake shattered the
central city, but the offices, department stores, and other large buildings were rebuilt. A cosmonaut
named Janibekr was native to a place 35 kilometers out of town. Japanese prisoners built an opera
house in Tashkent from 1938 to 1942. The guide characterized the local ballet as very good, the operas
less so. He identified a place in the city called Mustaqilik square. (He did not say how it happened that
Russia had Japanese prisoners, but the timing suggests that they may have been taken during clashes
along the Manchurian border after the Japanese Army had seized that area in 1931 and moved farther
into China proper in 1937.)
At the museum the guide explained that the numerous oriental rugs (Persian style) were
actually intended as wall hangings, typically made by girls before marriage. A girl would make two or
three for her future home, in blues, green, yellow, brown, and pink. We saw black-and-white and greenand-white traditional mens hats; alabasters with incredibly intricate, abstract decoration; and an eightpointed star in a metal window guard or grill.

36

The Uzbek carpet purchased by the author (image by DG).

The guide also described the typical traditional home in the area as having a clay floor (which we
know from Citrus Heights can be very hard and smooth in a dry country), a fire in the center, a table
over the fire (he did not mention why the table would not burn), a carpet or wall hanging over the
table, division of the house into a part for males and a part for females, and windows facing a courtyard,
but none facing the street.
On Thursday, some members of our tour group changed some travelers checks at a local bank,
with great delay. The local guide continued his tour of local sights, including a 375-foot tower, which he
said was the third tallest in the world (I wonder), and gave us some national background: Uzbekistan
was established as a separate republic in 1924, according to him (earlier it had been part of a single
Turkic jurisdiction under Russian control), and in 1930 Tashkent became the capital. The country now
was producing about 4.5 million tons of cotton annually, about as much as in the Soviet era. Irrigation
is from the rivers through canals. About eighty percent of the children attend Uzbek schools, 20%
Russian schools, and 1-3% Kazakh schools. The population is 72% Uzbek, 8% Russian, 5% Tadjik, 2%
Karakol Paghestani, and some Ukrainians and Koreans (!). He did not explain why Koreans live here, nor
why these numbers do not correspond with the presence of Kazakh schools but not Tadjik schools.
His description of the meaning of the Uzbek flag differed a little from another I had heard.
According to him, blue was for water (presumably the two main rivers, which essentially provide all
water used in the country), white for cotton, the biggest crop, and green as the Muslim color. The
native Uzbek had identified green as the color of life, presumably meaning vegetation in the irrigated

37

areas. Other Muslims, outside Uzbekistan, have merely said that green was Mohammeds favorite
color, as would not be surprising in someone living in an arid country with limited greenery.
Apartments in apartment buildings were limited to nine square feet per person under the
Russians (one square yard!), according to the guide, but it sounds fishy to me, since it would be barely
enough to sit or stand, never to lie down; perhaps he meant nine feet square, or nine times as much.
He showed us the first Central Asian University (established in 1920), the madrassa at the char
su, and an inscription of a passage in Arabic script by Ali Shir Navai (nav-aw-EE), the first Uzbek poet,
translated as:
Know, all human kind:
The greatest curse is enmity,
The greatest blessing, amity.

From Tashkent, Uzbekistan, back to Russia and Moscow

Our tour of Uzbekistan over, we returned to the hotel, where I noticed the flag of Malaysia (a
Muslim nation in southeast Asia), which is a joint-venture partner in the hotel. One of the Mongoliatour tourists stayed an extra day in Tashkent, and the other 13 of us proceeded to the airport at about
5:30 p.m. There, after some confusion and disrupted departure, we boarded at about 8 p.m. Uzbek
time for Moscow on an Ilyushin 68 (Russian-made aircraft). Ludmila did not accompany us, but told us a
Moscow guide would meet us at the airport in Moscow.
We were told that flight time would approximate four hours, with one time change. (The travel
time sounded rapid but plausible, if Moscow was really 3000 miles away, as we were earlier told. The
United States is also about 3000 miles from coast to coast, and takes 4-5 hours, depending on prevailing
winds and other factors. Yet one time-zone change in such a distance seems dubious, when a
comparable distance in the United States would require three time-zone changes. Today, while
composing this, I see from my old atlas that Moscow is only 2000 miles from Tashkent, and is two timezone changes away.)
Stewardesses were fluent in Russian, English, and Uzbeki. This time, physical take-off was
smooth, in contrast with the shuddering aircraft flown into Russia from the US and across Russia. The
flight was uneventful. Because of the late hour, nothing could be seen from the plane. We landed and
looked for the Moscow guide, who was to give us a brief tour of Moscow, get us to our hotel and back in
the morning, and see to our departure. After a considerable wait, it became clear that no guide was
present, or likely to appear. Finally, an arrangement was made after midnight with an individual who
would provide a bus and drive us to the hotel on the opposite side of Moscow for $300. Evidently the
bus itself belonged to some government agency and this individual driver-entrepreneur was
borrowing it without permission for his own enterprise.

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After this unexpected expense ($23 apiece, but apparently someone either did not pay the right
amount, or at all), we reached the hotel about 3 a.m. without actually seeing any of the city, checked in,
and arranged for bussing back to the airport in the morning, to leave at 8 a.m. to clear customs, etc.,
starting at nine, for 12 noon flight departure. I went to bed at 4 a.m.
With two hours of sleep, I arose with difficulty in a mental fog, the third time on this venture,
grabbed a bit of breakfast at 7:40 a.m., helped two tour members get their passports back from the
hotel people in time, and took the bus to the airport. No guide appeared that day either (Friday,
September 6). A $70 additional visa fee was required because Uniworld, the tour sponsor, had failed to
arrange a visa for reentry into Russia from Uzbekistan after leaving Siberia, as they were supposed to
have done. Thus an extra $93 unexpected expense complicated the cash situation. No information was
available on the flight, and no chance now existed for getting another gift as I had intended to do in
Moscow to complete the list.
We waited much of the day at the proper assigned flight terminal, but no personnel appeared
for the Russian airline. I had focused on learning a few Uzbek words and could not conjure up enough
Russian for any practical use in this situation. Also, I was too tired. It occurred to me that me that I
might be getting too old for this. Four members of the Mongolia tour gave up on Aeroflot, our
scheduled airline, and bought $2400 business class tickets (only business class was available) on Delta
Airlines, the American carrier, and left. Two others also left on different flights previously arranged.
Thus only seven of us were left, and we were rid of the ugly American blusterer (and his wife,
whom I never heard utter a word), a travel-service owner, and a Rumanian physician (so the group was
not all American as I had thought), who was fluent in Russian but did not get any information of listen to
the loudspeaker announcements (all in Russian) on our flight. Just after they left, we learned that our
flight was delayed, probably to about 5:30 p.m., but supposedly still expected to leave.
Personnel from various American airlines at nearby terminals offered to provide us more
comfortable waiting space (no real arrangement for that existed in the airport), but gave us no useful
information. They said that Aeroflot commonly has the same problem, because its failure to pay its bills
makes it unable to buy fuel. At this point we have been advised that we shall probably have to go to
another part of the airport to catch our plane, but except for one or another of us scouting around, we
generally stayed where we were.
After further waiting and some anxiety, several sources finally coincided in reporting that our
flight was assigned to a nearby gate, so we would not need to leave the area and thus possibly have to
go through the lengthy customs rigmarole over again. Finally, some progress occurred. We got through
boarding-pass issuance and passport inspection smoothly. Then huge numbers of people descended on
a tiny, overcrowded area with 10 seats, but the luggage-X-ray crew were chatting and reading
newspapers instead of processing anyone through.
When they did start the process, Dorothy, the independent Dr. Zorba look-alike, instead of being
last as usual, was the first of our group to enter the x-ray inspection area (a glassed-in room, rather than
the open arch typical in the US). She was unwilling to allow her camera to be X-rayed, for fear of
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damage to the film. The crew assured her that her film would not be harmed. The argument was
lengthy, preventing anyone else from proceeding. Dorothy had to show her independence one last
time, informing them that she would not allow it, and if they refused to let her through without the Xraying, Russia would just have to keep her. The workers were polite, but equally adamant. Dorothy
could not just slip through by main force or fleetness of foot, because the physical layout was such that
the inspection crew (four people whom the traveler had to pass) had to open a solid door on the other
side to let anyone go further. Still, we had to wait. At last, after all sorts of arguments and bluffing,
Dorothy finally allowed the X-raying, and we went through that inspection room without further
significant delay.
When we finally got through the inspection area, we entered another waiting room, but all
other members of our tour group sat down, insisting that the flight currently boarding was for a French
town (not on our itinerary). I do not recall why they thought so, but I checked with the employees doing
the processing, who confirmed that we should go through. I went back and fetched the others aboard,
with some resistance. Our flight left about 6:45 p.m. Moscow time (7:45 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time). All
of us were exhausted, thirsty, and hungry, there being no opportunity to deal with those needs in the
airport, unlike like airports in many other places.

Coming Home
The take-off was smooth, the plane full, I noticed a few infants a few rows ahead of me, and I
met an Iranian-American grandmother on the plane. I do not recall her name. I offered all six of the
remaining members of the tour group a stopover at my house if they could not go on that night,
because none lived in Northern California, but in the end none did. I slept for one and a half hours, had
supper, asked a stewardess where we were by then (two hours out; she said over Spitzbergen), and
slept as long again. It was a long and trying day, and we still had customs process and airline transfers
ahead of us, but after the meal and two naps I felt better, except for an aching back. Another meal was
served about seven hours out, as we proceeded further westward. Shakun, the lady from India, told me
that October and November are the best times to visit India, as I went over the remaining places I would
like to visit and sketched out ideas for trips to take with each of my children. Marge suggested ship
tours to and from Alaska, where she was some sort of state official. I made some notes and slept again.
We flew a polar great-circle route and landed on the American west coast, but I cannot recall
the time. I believe we landed and went through customs in Seattle, and I then continued on to San
Francisco. It seemed like the next evening by body time, but technically it was still the same evening by
calendar time. In Seattle some of the remaining tour members, except Elta, took their leave. Thelma
met me at the San Francisco airport, we thanked and repaid Elta her generous loan, and went home. In
a way, it was a circumnavigation of the globe, but really only a sort of skull-cap journey, in light of the
polar sweep on the last leg.
The journey was the first I have made solely and entirely for pleasure and education, the first
(and probably the last) with a tour group for more than part of a day, the farthest, into the remotest
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areas that I have visited, and the most tiring. It was, however, fascinating to me to see the people and
places of these countries, learn a little more history, touch briefly two world regions and interacting
cultures I had not seen before (Russian and Inner Asian), and get a glimpse of the geography, economics,
politics, and ethnography of these areas.
Russia seems to have given up most of its former empire, as Spain, Austria, Turkey, Germany,
Italy, the low countries, Britain, Japan, France, Portugal, and the United States did before it, and
gained a degree of freedom of expression lacking at least since the Mongol invasion, and probably ever,
but to have lost ground economically by following American advice to privatize publicly created assets
too rapidly and unequally.
Uzbekistan seems perhaps as independent as a country in its situation can be, and both more
prosperous and less disrupted by the changes. I could not get a good picture of its government from my
brief encounter, but democracy and freedom are probably not yet present. Even on a special holiday, I
saw no national flags waved by children, as in the US on Independence Day, but there did seem to be
some sense of pride in national independence at least among some young adult members of society.
Though the country is Muslim, turbans were essentially absent and veils rare. It struck me however that
I saw hardly any elderly-looking people outside our tour group. Do the older people there look younger
than we, or do people not live to old age, or do the elders just stay home?
It is also fascinating how much is the same in different parts of the world, though languages,
building styles, clothing, and symbols vary. Maize, developed by pre-Columbian Middle Americans,
appears basic in Africa, Turkey, and Uzbekistan, and is grown in China and elsewhere. The same is true
of cotton, which grows extensively in Egypt and India, and is the biggest source of income in Uzbekistan.
Many plants and animals are alike or similar in Russia and America, depending more on latitude and
rainfall than on longitude and other aspects of culture. The typical range of basic attitudes of people
seems fairly similar in most places I have been, except on a few specific subjects and areas.
I am glad to have been able to go, but of course, in the end, there is no place like home.
Love, Dad

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