Out of the frying pan, into the fire
Week 20 - last week’s Ustyurt desert cycle felt tough, but the Kyzylkum desert in Uzbekistan is a whole new level of hot as temperatures reach 43 degrees.
After I finish washing the red desert sand from my tired body with the bliss of my first shower in three days, I stand in front of the mirror and look with interest at the strange new alien terrain of my own body.
I think I’ve lost some weight, or maybe that’s just a bit of dehydration. Like camel humps, maybe the water between my fat cells is a bit low?
But the first and most noticeable thing about me is the all-over mosquito bites that have made me look like something from a medical textbook.
Three nights earlier, we camped outside the back of a restaurant with the most incredible view of the Amu Darya river flowing through the desert sands, and on its far bank, Turkmenistan.
The friendly restaurant owner had invited us to pitch our tent on one of several outdoor dastarkans - eating and resting platforms - overlooking the river, but warned us through mime that there would be mosquitoes.
He wasn’t wrong. They swarmed in incredible numbers, addling both Mark and I and driving us into the tent as soon as we were able. Mark reacts worse to mosquito bites than I do, but we were both absolutely covered.
After the bites, the strangest thing about me is my farmer’s tan, which has reached epic and distinctive proportions: despite our frequent applications of factor 50, I have been cycling in hiking sandals for the last few weeks now, and my feet are as stripey as some kind of subspecies of Zebra.
My forearms and face are tanned more than usual, but my hands, daily ensconced in fingerless cycling gloves for many hours, are white, and my fingers are brown again from the knuckle down. I have one even darker stripe on my right wrist, where my long-sleeved top is weirdly about 1cm shorter than on the other arm.
To top off all this alarming and possibly comic effect, last week I gave myself my first haircut: I’ve had dyed blonde hair since I was 15 years old, but it’s growing out. It will be interesting to see how grey I am, because I have no idea.
I stop my self-scrutiny. Outside, it is a punishing 43 degrees, and the sky is a searing, almost luminous blue. We have brought our bikes into the room with us, because they were reaching an alarming temperature outside.
We arrived into this roadside restaurant and hostel at 11am, while it was still just about tolerable to cycle. Now it is nearly one: for the next five hours, we will need to rest. It would be possible to cycle again for a couple of hours before sunset, but we are happy with what we have done today, covering 107km since 5am, when we started.
The Kyzylkum desert
Welcome to cycling in the Kyzylkum desert, whose name translates as “red sands” in Turkic languages. It’s the 15th largest desert in the world and a good portion of it is in Uzbekistan. We have been crossing a part of it on our way to the Silk Road city of Bukhara.
On Wednesday, the day after my self-inspection revealed the many ways in which this trip is changing my exterior, we rolled with relief out of the desert and into Bukhara’s maze of streets, and checked into a small family hotel, from where I am writing this post.
We had covered 634km in six days, including one short day of just 60km, meaning that we averaged 114km on the other days. Pretty good going, but not without its cost: we are both in need of a day off, very tired and with cold-like sniffles. We will rest in Bukhara before pushing on to Samarkand.
Mark wrote with honesty about his experience of the Ustyurt desert in Kazakhstan for our last installment, and we knew that the stretch from Aktau to Beyneu was going to be tough due to the lack of amenities along the way.
The Kyzylkum desert has been a whole different kettle of fish. But it’s true to say that we have acclimatised somewhat, not least because of the experience in Kazakhstan.
Into Uzbekistan
Last Thursday, we took the overnight sleeper train from Beyneu across the border into Uzbekistan as far as Nukus, and thereby hangs a whole other tale that we will tell at some stage. We arrived into Nukus Friday lunchtime, and on Saturday morning we set off, enjoying a couple of days in the fertile Amu Darya river plain where cotton, apricots, peaches and watermelons are grown.
Before we crossed the river, we made a couple of short detours to check out some Silk Road landmarks of staggering history. The first was a Zoroastrian “tower of silence,” a couple of thousand years old: it was a place where bodies would have been taken for “sky burials” - disposal via carrion birds - according to Zoroastrian beliefs, which don’t allow corpses to pollute earth, fire or water.
It was an eerie and extraordinary place, its walls of river mud more akin to some kind of giant alien termite mound than something man-made, and it had phenomenal views down over the river.
The highly contested route alongside the Amu Darya, being the natural Silk Road route and a vital source of water through this otherwise hot and arid region, has seen countless battles for its control.
The next landmark we wanted to see was Qyaur Fortress, built by Alexander the Great during his 329-327BC campaign to control the trade route. It still stands, and has no associated tourist trappings. We arrived at it at 12 noon, and had our siesta in its awesome shade, with no disturbance but the sound of camels and the occasional passing moped.
We then took a slight detour and headed south to Khiva, a city with some outstanding ancient monuments including its incomplete minaret tower, Kalta Minor. It is phenomenally beautiful and with a history of over 2,500 years. Its inner old town, known as the Itchan Khala, is protected by two concentric fortified walls and has more than 60 important heritage sites within.
Like Bukhara and Samarkand, this history and this breathtaking beauty comes with a dark side: Khiva was once a hub of the slave trade of the Islamic world. Up to 100,000 people, mostly Persian and Russian, were bought and sold there each year.
Slavery was ostensibly abolished in 1873 when Russians took control and there was a brutal and bloody slave revolt, but the last Khan was known to have populated his personal harem with enslaved women up until 1920.
After Khiva, it was time to leave the green of the Amu Darya and cycle across more desert, crossing the Kyzylkum to Bukhara.
I neither love nor hate the desert. I admire the efficiency with which it dissolves all your personality and sense of self and rapidly leaves you as just a bundle of your most basic needs. At dawn, and in the peace and cool of the morning, until about 8am, I admire its beauty. By noon, I don’t want to see it any more.
The rules of cycling in the desert
Here are a few ways in which we have adapted to the conditions:
We wake at 4am, pack our bikes and quickly eat something and set off at 5.
We cover as much of our skin as we can to avoid evaporation and sunburn, and lather on the factor 50 everywhere exposed.
We cover our mouth and nose in a thin scarf. This stops you inhaling dust and airborne nasties, but also prevents evaporation through your nose and throat, and when you drink through it, you provide your respiratory tract with a little welcome humidity.
We make sure we are carrying enough water not only for our planned distance, but also for unforeseen things like punctures. We will drink at least half a litre per hour, plus a few extra. It’s a lot of extra weight on the bike but there is no way around it.
From about 9am onwards, we regularly douse the top of our hats/headscarves in water. This is not a waste of water but a really good way to provide cooling and avoid sunstroke.
We stop cycling for the day early, and only cycle again in the evening if we have more distance to cover.
Relay desert dash
For the second week in a row, we’ve cycled not quite with, but certainly at the same time as, English couple Sam and Dan, who are on their way to Australia. Sam and Dan cycle a little faster than we do, and aren’t quite as dead set on the dawn starts, and so we’ve been playing a game of what I like to call “relay desert dash” - often catching up with each other on breaks and in the evenings.
It’s been really nice to have others to share some laughs with on the road, but we are by no means the only cyclists on this stretch.
In the past few days we have met Grace, cycling on her own from Beijing to Istanbul, Ilya from Russia who is headed to the famous Pamir highway in Tajikistan, a trio of cyclists from the Netherlands and Germany, and Guillaume, a young French solo cyclist from Lilles who cycles in the heat of the day and yet always manages to look strangely dapper, as though rather than cycling in 40 degree heat, he is on his way into town to meet some friends for a drink.
But as with everywhere in the world that tourism has caused differing exchange rates to rub shoulders in inhospitable environments - I’m looking at you, Kerry - the locals whose businesses line the A380, the main and only sensible route across the Kyzylkum, are hell-bent on extracting as much hard cash as they can manage with a straight face from passing tourists.
This has actually led to me having my first genuine “fuck this country” moment of the entire trip, when I was followed into a filthy toilet by a young man at a roadside café to ask me shiftily for 2,000 Som (about 14 cent) for the privilege of using the toilet.
His boss had accompanied me to the door of the WC not two minutes earlier to explain that I was a customer and not to be charged.
I rounded on the poor lad, and he backed off with some placatory gestures.
The day before, Mark had been short-changed by an old lady who smiled a brief and insincere apology through her gold teeth. When we queried the bill in one café, it just didn’t add up and turned out to have had a “special service charge” added. We have had to get into the habit of standing and getting people to tot up the bill in front of us.
It’s an unpleasant feeling, but I just keep reminding myself that it’s a very tough life out in the desert, and taking comfort from the thought that running the gauntlet of the “dynamic pricing” in these rare but precious watering holes has been a part of the experience of all travellers on the Silk Road for many many centuries: as inevitable, as much a part of nature, and as sapping as the mosquitoes of the Amu Darya.
Neither will suck you dry, but both will take their fill.
While it’s certainly true that we have received much more genuine hospitality, kindness and curiosity in places that aren’t on a main tourist route, it would also be a massive hypocrisy to complain about the impacts of tourism while ourselves also being tourists. And we are grateful for every rest stop offering cold drinks and shade along the way.
Foodwise, we have been cautious, relying largely on big plates of lagman (a noodle dish that is really the spag bol of Uzbekistan) and piping hot somsa, a ubiquitous meat pie served at many roadside shacks and cafés. It just hasn’t been the time or place to challenge the body with a dose of the traveller’s complaint while pushing to our limits with our mileage and the heat.
This, combined with the terrible temptations of sugar and caffeine to fuel the cycling, has meant not a great diet in the past week and the first thing I did after we arrived in our lovely calm, cool little hotel yesterday was to make a big tuna salad with lots of fresh veggies and we devoured the lot from our camping pots in our room.
Away from the desert, there are better offerings. Roadside tandur ovens cooking bread (non) and somsa are interspersed, on the greener stretches, with stands selling watermelon and apricots and other fresh produce.
We have more of this to come: the road from Bukhara to Samarkand is no longer in desert but in small farms. We are both looking forward to the cooling presence of trees; in the outskirts of Bukhara, we happened upon the sight of recently mown fields of actual grass, with fat and glossy cows standing in them. It was kind of blissful, after days of monotonous sand, scrub and dead locusts.
There will be more desert stretches to come. But for now, I’m going to have a nap under the air con. Mark is already snoozing. When we wake, we will clean the sand off our bikes and start planning the coming days and weeks: we have at least another 10 days in Uzbekistan before we cross into Kyrgyzstan.
No matter what the immediate future brings, one thing is for certain: it won’t be boring.
Hold her steady and keep it between the ditches!
I’m already looking forward to the book.
Fabulous footage and appropriate sound from Bobby McFerrin. Loving every episode. Happy trails folks