Trib 9/26/7 590
The knotty Silk Road
My journey across Central Asia has me wandering through uneasy questions of war, peace, capitalism, religion and our entwined future.
By Arthur Alpert
Usually, I return from travel refreshed, having escaped routine for novelty. It’s almost a month, though, since my Silk Road adventure and well, it rattled me.
I’m assaulted by questions and – darn it – I cannot stop thinking.
Example: Oasis-hopping through Central Asia I listened as the guides reinforced what I had read – its history is war, tribal, imperial and religious war. In China I bumped into a traveler fresh from Mongolia who wondered aloud if history is nothing but the story of successive "megalomaniacs."
I disagreed then, but now I wonder. Is war our natural state and peace just the time out that proves the rule?
Everything is relative, as I am reminded whenever I abandon my tasteless skim milk for the thrill of 2 percent. At home I watch market capitalism corrode democracy and family values, but the Silk Road offered a different perspective.
A Moslem Uighur entrepreneur in Xinjiang, China warned us we would find "rigidity" across the border in Kyrgyzstan. They don’t "understand the market," he said. What understatement!
High in Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan Mountains the vistas inspired but our tour hit its low point. They assigned the wrong vehicle for bumping along terrible roads. The ethnic Russian guide was inflexible, the Kyrgyz guide little better. And on the shores of Issyk Kul, an immense, lovely mountain lake, we were booked us into a Soviet-era hotel – no choices and the hotel made them. Da!
Capitalism, my apologies.
Change is afoot. In a Kyrgyz airport, a bearded elder wearing the national hat (think, Alpine Swiss yodeler) sits near me.
"Salaam aleikum," he says.
"Aleikum salaam."
Later, his family gathers around - wife, adult children and grandchildren, including a bright youngster.
Isken, who is 11, asks my name.
"Arthur, I say, smiling, "as in King Arthur."
He shoots back, "I’m royal, too. Isken like Alexander of Macedonia."
His older sister works in marketing. The family has relatives in Pennsylvania. Isken, who speaks Kyrgyz, Russian and Turkish, as well as English, isn’t sure what he’ll do when he grows up - maybe business.
Not a terrible choice, I think.
Radical Islam is scary, so I am alert in Xinjiang, China’s Moslem province, where Arabic script, ancient mosques, mausoleums, minarets and madrassas paint a Middle Eastern picture. Everybody is relaxed, though, friendly, even warm.
One Moslem Uighur businessman talks religion. He observes Ramadan and other holidays. He tries to be "good." Prayer five times a day? That would be so inconvenient. Sounds like some Reform Jews I know.
A young woman in his employ wakes to pray at 5 AM, but her ambition is to study hotel management in Switzerland
This Islam is unthreatening but is it universal? Beijing warns the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will be targeted by terrorists from this very place.
Speaking neither Uighur nor Chinese, I’m in no position to convert my impressions into conclusions. However, I’m skeptical of China’s story, too. China’s rulers used conspiracies, real and imagined, to amass imperial power long before Dick Cheney learned how.
I just cannot know.
And there’s a deeper problem – certainty. Take those Kyrgyz Mountains. Because I looked it up, I can tell you they dwarf the Rockies. However, that’s all. I got a D in geology. There’s the rub. I brought me to the Silk Road, with all my limitations. Which leaves me wondering how I can know anything for sure.
Alpert is a semiretired newsman in Albuquerque. Reach him at aatruth@swcp.com. His column runs the fourth Wednesday of the month
Sorry to be late posting this, hich ran in the Albuquerque Tribune August 22, 2007:
FAR EAST EXCURSION
Good cuisine, dancing, bazaar create unique experience during China
Travels
By Arthur Alpert
Tashkent, Uzbekistan – Albuquerque International Airport at 6 AM. San Francisco nonstop to Beijing. Tiananmen Square. The Great Wall. Sleeper car to Xi’an, where the Qin Emperor buried himself with terra cotta warriors, and then the flight to Urumqi, capital of China’s Far West.
And I am dragging.
Tourism, I tell myself, is a mechanism for seeing fascinating foreign people and places – in utter darkness.
Three days later, I recant.
Somehow I have found myself in the Middle East and Xinjiang province, populated mostly by Muslim Uighurs, grabs me, smiling, in a powerful embrace.
o In the restaurant, under the grapevines, the kids – recent high school graduates, clean-cut, joyful – fill the dance floor. Sam sex couples go first, then boys and girls together but not touching until the dance becomes communal, shortly before the music ends. It’s Middle Eastern music – upbeat except when they slow dance to the Russian Balalaika or accelerate wildly to – no kidding! - "Paloma Blanca". Did I mention the strobes?
All this in Turpan, once an oasis on the fabled Silk Road.
o You approach almost all the mosques through leafy, tranquil gardens. The desert dweller’s idea of heaven?
o The Sunday bazaar at Kashgar isn’t what it was, says our guide. Yet they sell everything from sheep to nuts. Pretty soon, I quit shopping to watch people.
The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic, with roots in northern Mongolia. They are easily distinguishable from the Chinese – er, Han Chinese – because they are whiter and their faces are broader.
After that, however, it gets complicated – some look Mediterranean, some Indian, some downright Midwestern. I find many of the women beautiful. I know that because while most wear headscarves, few cover their faces.
A good thing, too – navigating their motor scooters and motorcycles through traffic would be challenging in a chador.
o They are always smiling. Maybe that is because Beijing is throwing money at them,. but it sees to spring from a deeper place.
In a quite farm town outside Kashgar, we see a motorcycle-powered pickup bringing fruits and vegetables. Why? A farmer’s wife explains they have only enough land for a rice crop and some farm animals. Then she shares her life with us for 30 minutes – how her six kids are doing in school and at work and the sadness of the empty nest.
"My heart has gone out of the house," she says.
Our guide predicts the growing city soon will turn this village into a residential suburb.
o Speaking of real estate, we traveled out of Turpan to see the remains of an ancient city built of adobe. In Turpan itself, we traced underground channels built by ancients to funnel snow melt from the Tian Shan mountains to farmers and town dwellers below. Acequias, anyone?
o The young woman who knocks on my hotel room door in Turpan is Han Chinese, wears lots of bright red lipstick and offers services beyond the usual massages. But I am old and need my sleep.
o We eat too much, but the Uighur cuisine is hard to resist. Pilaf with spices and vegetables. Soups with noodles. Lamb, chicken, even fish kebobs,. I loved the pumpkin dumplings and yogurt dessert.
o We saw no blue skies in the industrial east, but here there is no industry and auto traffic is not yet stop-and-go, so the Tian Shan peaks rise into blue, bluer, blue.
o At the roadside, they sell a round little roll that looks very much like a bagel. Turns out to taste a bit like a bagel. Warm and chewy, it ranks as the best "nan" west of Urumqi.
o Hosh is the Uighur word for "so long." It is time to get back on the road bound for fabulous Samarkand.
Alpert is a semi-retired newsman in Albuquerque. His column runs on the fourth Wednesday of the month.
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