Marco Polo and the minivan
Week 21 - After five months on the road, and 8000km cycled, Ellie & Mark reach the historic city of Samarkand in mint condition
“Why do people keep mistaking us for Italians?” Ellie asked. “I’d say it’s because we’re so stylish,” I suggested, conscious of my legionnaire’s hat and sock & sandal ensemble.
“Yeah, we’re straight out of Milan Fashion Week!” Ellie laughed, with more than a hint of sarcasm. “We certainly are. John Milan Fashion Week,” I replied in my thickest Waterford accent.
Weirdly, this week, while cycling towards Samarkand in Uzbekistan, I’ve been thinking about Barack Obama Plaza; Ireland’s most famous service station. Obama Plaza is located at the side of the M7 Motorway in Co. Tipperary.
In typically Irish fashion, it was built to commemorate the President of America’s visit, not to Tipperary, but to Moneygall Co. Offaly. The service station is not in the same county as Moneygall, but it’s not far down the road.
Does the former President of America know that he has a service station in Ireland named after him? What would Obama’s great-great-great-grandfather Falmouth Kearney, who lived not far over the border from the service station, make of it?
When Kearney set off for America in 1850, during The Irish Famine, there still would have been coach houses and inns available to those that could afford them. There was still food and wealth in the country, much of which was being exported by occupying British landowners.
It was mainly poor tenant farmers and labourers, forced to survive on the meagre and failing potato crop, that were allowed to starve to death. Falmouth, from a merchant class family, would have found lodgings on his way to Dublin, where he caught the boat to Liverpool, but he probably wouldn’t have found a Big Mac.
Service stations are a relatively recent addition to Irish life. Before them we had flasks of tea, bottles of warm 7up and sandwiches wrapped in tin-foil. Hardy folk heading off to GAA games all over the country during the summer months can still be seen picnicking from the boot of their car, forgoing the service station, hopping gates and scaring cows while they commune with nature. Tickets for matches are expensive enough without adding lattes and pricy panini to the mix.
I may not be Italian, but I’m pretty sure that contrary to many menus and billboards throughout the Emerald Isle, the singular is panino and plural is panini. I’ve yet to be pedantic enough to order panini, and complain when only one arrives. I think I’ll take it up as a hobby when I return home.
Does the 150km stretch of motorway between Waterford and Dublin really need several panini-peddling service stations along the length of it? What is the ideal distance between service stations, a distance that even the most weak-bladdered and panino-starved amongst us could reasonably be expected to hold out for?
Caravanserai, service stations of antiquity
On the Silk Road, the ancient route that we are currently cycling, they reckoned the perfect distance between service stations was about 30 to 40km. This was how far a camel train could usually cover in a days’ walk.
Caravanserai, the ancient equivalent of service stations, were dotted along the Silk Road route, offering provisions and protection to the traffic that moved between Asia and Europe.
In the 13th century Marco Polo would have used the caravanserai that marked waypoints along the Silk Road in Central and Eastern Asia. Polo’s father and uncle were merchants, travelling the world for business, but originally from Venice. They spent three years in Bukhara in modern-day Uzbekistan, arranging the trade and transport of valuable goods between Europe and Asia. Marco took a deep interest in the family business.
Franco Polo, Marco’s uncle, was inspired by the round rings of lepeshka bread, popular in Bukhara and legendary in Samarkand. The rings of bread can often be accompanied by mint tea. He created a small circular minty cough lozenge for soothing throats on long desert treks. The original Polo Mint. Polo Minto, singular. Polo Minti, plural.*
This week we’ve cycled the Silk Road between Bukhara and Samarkand, both incredibly important and ancient cities on the Silk Road route. Although the original caravanserai between these cities have almost all disappeared, petrol stations and kiosks selling colds drinks have popped up to replace them, most at much less than 30 to 40km apart.
We took a needed stop at one of these kiosks, and right there beside it was the remains of Rabat i Malik, one of only a few surviving caravanserai in Uzbekistan. We were staring at the 12 metre dome, forming the roof of an intact underground reservoir cistern that fed water to the palace and fortress, the remains of which we could see across the road. Ellie spotted it, having only read to me about it a couple of nights before.
It was awesome to be able to enter the huge stone reservoir, walk down its steps, with each one taking us lower into the cistern and a little further back in time. We were completely alone, no other tourists or locals in sight.
It is eerily quiet, cool and dark underground, inside the cistern. We were surprised to find water still forming at the bottom of this structure, a structure more than 1,000 years old. It still works!
The caravanserai along this route provided water, shelter, security and provisions for traders travelling the Silk Road, but they were much more than that. They were centres of trade, some specialising in wholesale supply of certain goods. They were medical centres, with their own surgeons and bone setters. Rabat i Malik had its own bathhouse, with water supplied by the cistern we were standing in.
These waypoints were also centres of art, culture, politics and news from other lands. Scholars and poets gathered in them to talk with and listen to travellers and traders who arrived with news from far flung places.
Many of the serai were built and owned by the Emir of the kingdom in which they were located. In essence, they were state owned and run. If you used a caravanserai, you paid for the privilege, and that money went into the coffers of the local Emir.
It’s easy to get swept up in the romanticism of these places, especially when you’re standing in quiet solitude in one of them, with the ghosts of a long and colorful past echoing silently off the walls.
That romanticism is easily dashed when you consider the workaday logistics of a caravanserai. We’ve used the squat toilets of some modern day service stations on this road: many of them are the stuff of nightmares. Even with a bathhouse, we reckon a functioning caravanserai must have been fairly honking back in the day. Useful, vibrant, and interesting, but honking. The stench of humans and camels in perfect harmony beneath the baking sun.
Some historians suggest that the spread of the Black Death (bubonic plague) to Europe in the mid 1300s was through caravanserai. It was common for poorer merchants, travellers, and especially their slaves, to sleep in the barn with the camels and livestock, picking up fleas and other crawlies from the assembled critters. We neither dipped nor drank from that small pool of water in the end of the Rabat i Malik reservoir cistern. We returned to the kiosk for an ice cold drink.
Once again we find ourselves in a position where it’s difficult for us to believe that we’ve cycled here, to the actual road used by the Marco and the rest of the Poli. We’ve now cycled 8000km, all the way from Tramore Co. Waterford to Samarkand Uzbekistan, an ancient and legendary city. It doesn’t seem real. We’ve cycled all the way from Waterford to the road used by Marco f@€kin’ Polo!?
The noticeable change on this stretch of road, compared to last week, is that availability of water. We are cycling through the Zeravshan River valley, the river that has supplied water to Rabat i Malik for over a thousand years.
Watermelon vendors line the tree shaded hard shoulders, more plentiful than Wexford strawberry slingers in high summer.
The farmers are out baling hay. There are meadows full of sunflowers and peach trees swaying gently in the breeze as we sail past. We’ve picked ripe warm apricots from trees growing wild at the side of the road. So plentiful is the fruit in this region, that many of the apricots fall from the trees unpicked. We’ve been cycling over them.
Temperatures are still hitting the high thirties, but it’s much more bearable when you can stop under the cover of a cool tree, eat a piece of free fruit, and buy a cold drink from a shaded shack. We’re averaging a very manageable 100km a day in these conditions.
The most common crop that we can see in the fields around us is cotton. The fields are well irrigated, to the point where they are flooded at the early stage of the plant's life cycle. Cotton is one of Uzbekistan’s largest exports.
Although we’re incredibly appreciative of the green surroundings, and the occasional haze of water as we cycle through irrigation systems spraying the vegetation around us, we know that it comes at a very high price.
The world’s biggest ecological disaster
Since the 1950s the rivers that fed the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, were diverted to provide water for the profitable cotton industry in Uzbekistan. The use of industrial irrigation systems needed to support the scale of the cotton industry continued to grow to the point where in 2014 the Aral Sea completely dried up, creating one of the worst environmental disasters our planet has ever witnessed.
The once huge expanse of the Aral Sea was home to 24 species of fish, and it was surrounded by lush forests and wetlands. A whole population of people lived by and worked the Aral Sea for thousands of years. When the sea completely dried up, the vegetation and wildlife there died with it, creating the Aralkum Desert. Some of the people, who could afford to do so, moved away. They were the lucky ones.
The exposed sea bed, containing layers of dried pesticides and fertilisers that had run into the lake for decades, turned into a carcinogenic dust that blew into the villages and towns on what was once the shoreline. This deadly dust caused cancer and respiratory diseases among some of the people that remained.
The fields of cotton and sunflowers that stretch off to the horizon on the road around us this week have cost a lot. We’re conscious of that. It must be incredibly difficult for someone who once lived by the Aral Sea to witness sprinklers watering the trees and flowers that line the landscaped motorway verges on the outskirts of the cotton-rich cities in the part of the country we now find ourselves in.
With water comes life, and the variety of things to look at and get distracted by make this stretch of land much easier to cycle through than the Kyzylkum Desert.
On the long straight desert highway you need to be very comfortable with being in your own head for long periods of time. These busy country roads require a change of tack; you need to be at ease with friendly shouts, whistles and salutes, requests for photographs, and a whole heap of questions.
The people of Uzbekistan don’t mess around. They are incredibly friendly and forthright. “What age are you?” can often be the first question. Marital status and number of children will be in there too. “How can you afford to cycle for two years!?” It comes from a place of genuine interest, and always with a pinch of fun.
We’ve been very lucky to meet folks in Uzbekistan that have the quality I look for most in people when I’m in a new country, feeling a little vulnerable and unbalanced: they have a readiness to laugh. Always ready for a laugh and joke. They display in abundance that characteristic that is much prized in Ireland: they’re great craic.
Even at the end of a particularly fraught and intense session of haggling, when voices have been raised, and backs repeatedly turned, there will be a wry smile, a handshake, a shake of the head, and then a laugh. They’d be tough, but throughly enjoyable, clients to bargain with at the Fethard Car Boot Sale. They’d fit right in.
21st century camels
We haven’t seen as many camels on this leg of the Silk Road as we saw in Kazakhstan. They’ve been replaced by the Damas minivan. The pint-sized motorised workhorse is inescapable. It’s by far the most common vehicle on the road, used for ferrying people and all manner of items up and down the highways and byways of Uzbekistan.
It’s not unusual to see items stacked worryingly high on the roof of these compact vans, or see items three times wider than the van itself strapped to the back of them. For a little van, they pack a punch.
One of the things that appeals to me about the Damas van is its simplicity. They are manufactured in Uzbekistan by Chevrolet, purposely without any onboard computer to complicate their maintenance. They are relatively inexpensive and easy to fix. Such is the success of the Damas van that they are exported from Uzbekistan to Russia.
A Damas would make a right handy little camper conversion. That could be my tired legs speaking.
As ubiquitous as the Damas van on the Uzbek highway is the somsa, a meat, onion and gristle filled pastry that is sold absolutely everywhere. A somsa is akin to a very meaty Cornish pastie, with lumps of fat replacing the potato.
They vary hugely in quality and price. You can buy them for a couple of euro in up market restaurants, and for less than 50 cents from roadside stalls. They are at their best when served freshly cooked and pipping hot from a wood-fired clay tandir oven. They’re at their worst when they’ve been sitting in their own grease all day, reheated and limp.
We’re more partial to a perashki, a deep fried dough pie with a variety of fillings. Again, best served completely fresh and piping hot. This is top notch street food. Our favourite filling so far is spiced mashed potato and ground meat. Perashki are an Uzbek variation of the Russian pirozkhi. We’d much prefer a perashki to a somsa any day of the week. I’ve yet to work out if its perashki plural, and perashka singular. We haven’t bought just one on its own.
We must cut strange figures to the folk of Uzbekistan going about their daily business in their Damas vans. Swaddled in scarves to avoid the sun, cowering beneath trees, foraging for fruit, guzzling water and wolfing down perashki, pointing at things, and often laughing like loons. We are fashion weak, but thankfully, we’re leg strong.
Hold her steady, and keep it between the ditches!
*Marco Polo’s uncle was not called Franco, and he did not invent the Polo Mint. I may have gotten a little carried away.
I'm loving the history and the sunflowers! When I'm next in Massimo's I will ask about the plural and singular.
What a beautiful video, what a beautiful piece of music. I love that old guy and his Umbrella Holder.