Homecomings

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return bring such regret?

BECAUSE, Peter Matthieson, your safe return involves a bunch of boring stuff like laundry and student loans and bank cards and having to work out what to do with that huge stash of (unexchangeable) Uzbek money the you cleverly hid in your toiletries bag and forgot about (note for any ladies travelling in Central Asia: tampons scare border guards, customs officials, policemen (but not Iranian policemen, sadly) and most other people who might conceivably dig through your belongings and thus it is good to conceal things in their vicinity; their strategic placement in the top of your bag also prevents many a search from going much further) and other things that make hanging out in embassy queues for hours on end seem posititively Bacchanalian.

On the plus side, I have been back two weeks and in that time no one has tried to put jam or salt in my tea, which I have been drinking out of a mug instead of a tiny bowl. No one has tried to serve me vodka at breakfast, either. Decent wine and gin and tonic are all plentiful. There are restaurants offering eight different international cuisines witin ten minutes walk of my house, and the primary ingredient in none of the dishes is mutton fat.

At some point I will write about my long and fruitless quest in Tashkent airport to find the correct person to bribe in order to get my excess luggage onto my flight (you might think this would be a relatively simple matter in one of the most corrupt countries in the world, but you would be wrong); the perils of bathing in holy springs along the Pamir highway; and why your next holiday should be in Georgia and/or Armenia (sneak preview: the wine has quite a lot to do with it. Also, pretty churches). That point is not 3 am on a Thursday morning though.

Day 559

Tashkent this summer is all fountains and flowerbeds and sprinklers and slightly unfortunate new architecture, and I bought an old coke bottle of fresh mulberry juice from the bazaar and wandered through the parks and boulevards drinking it and thinking that the Peace Corps are right to do it for two years. I feel like I'm only beginning to get the hang of things here,that I'm balancing on the edge. And I'm going home tomorrow, and it's not enough time.

Home from home.

Crossing the border to Uzbekistan felt like coming home. I had a stupid grin on my face all the way to Tashkent, and I rode the metro to my hotel which stopped at all the most bizarrely-decorated stations (astronauts and chandeliers forever) and I bought samosas in the bazaar and when I walked into the hotel one of my best Tashkent friends was there fixing somebody's bike, and all was right with the world.

Then I went to look for things and found out that the main Uzbekistan Airways booking office has moved the cafe with decent wifi (cafe. singular. Freaking Dushanbe has more wifi hotspots than Tashkent, which is at least three times the size) had closed and my UCell sim card, worth its weight in diamonds now tourists are forbidden to buy at all, had been blocked and my taxi driver tried to grope me and I would've bought a flight ticket to leave this evening were it not for the fact that no one knows where the bloody ticket office has gone.

And then I bought a drink and received a single teabag and a piece of bubblegum as part of my change, which is possibly my favourite Uzbekistan quirk of all (I have wrangled thirteen-odd currencies in the past six months and the Uzbek sum is still the most inept I have to encounter; guys, your biggest bank note is now worth less than fifty cents, suck it up and print bigger ones already) and I'm reluctantly forced to admit that I still kind of love this stupid place.

I do really need to find that ticket office though.

Pamir highway post goes here.

If I ever finish writing it. Timely blogging is beyond me, apparently.

Famous in Tajikistan

I spent this afternoon being interviewed by a magazine called "Women of Tajikistan" after being ambushed by a couple of journalists outside the Uzbek embassy. For some reason (possibly my expression of beatific joy - exiting a Central Asian embassy, visa in hand, often provokes this) I stood out as a Person Of Interest and so I spent two hours in the office of this publication (which must have a remarkably broad editorial scope if it is interested in the thoughts of random tourists) being quizzed over the weekly circulation of newspapers in the UK, the London public's reaction to the burqa ban in France and what my message was to the Women of Tajikistan. The interview took place partially in Russian so heaven knows how it turned out; when a translator finally turned up ("Why are there no women like Margaret Thatcher in the British parliament at the moment?" was giving me difficulties, not just because of the language) we got sidetracked into an extensive argument over whether global warming exists so I'm not sure how much that helped. At the end of the interview, the journalist apologised profusely that editorial policy didn't allow them to put foreigners on the front cover, otherwise I would, he assured me, be there like a shot (I have never, ever been so grateful for editorial policy). I still have zero idea as to what I did to excite so much interest, as foreign tourists aren't exactly uncommon here - OK, so Paris Dushanbe ain't, but it's not Mogadishu either), but I am extremely pleased that Central Asia continues right to the end to be a Bit Odd.

Osh

We decided to risk the overland trip south through Osh to Tajikistan, as things seemed to have calmed down a lot. No trouble and the town centre is much the same as it was when I visited a year ago, but the approach roads are lined with burned-out shops and houses, the anti-Uzbek graffiti mostly painted over now, and there are fields filled with UNHCR tents in the outskirts. I don't know how this can be fixed.

Carpets that I love

Shyrdaks are Kyrygyz felt carpets, traditionally found adorning the walls and floors of yurts. As you can perhaps tell, the designers are fairly unconfined by any notions of matching colours or taste, so the dilemma for the discerning shyrdak shopper is whether to spend hours (days) hunting for a vaguely tasteful specimen that might fit into some pre-exisiting colour-scheme at home, or just embrace the madness and go for purple-and-orange piece that carries a risk of seizures if you look at it for too long. If I had my own house they would be my floor-covering of choice in every room.

Yurting holiday

Dawdling in Kyrgyzstan is an almost entirely pleasant activity, even if its object (to wait out the violence down south) is somewhat less so. The reason for this is primarily because it is so easy to engage in said time-wastage in yurts up in the Kyrgyz mountains, which flicked in a day from spring to summer - morning drizzle gave way one day to bright afternoon sunshine that hasn't let up since. With this in mind, I coralled a trio of Swedes (travelling with Swedes is great: you learn the best Norwegian jokes) and we hired some horses and a guide to disappear for a few days into the hills in the centre of the country, where yurts sprout like mushrooms and there are ibexes (how do you properly pluralise an ibex? ibices?) on the mountain ridges and marmots (not marmosets. This caused a certain amount of confusion for a while) running shrieking at your approach.

I really can't get enough of the mountains here. Even when the horses are intransigent (Kyrgyz horses know damned well that foreign tourists have imbibed too much animal-welfare nonsense to follow the single piece of advice that constitutes riding instruction in these parts ("just hit it") with much conviction, and take full advantage of this, with the result that you frequently find yourself stationary in a patch of wildflowers for extended periods of time with the horse stuffing its face and you prodding it cautiously the whip, vaguely worrying that an RSPCA inspector is going to pop out from behind a rock and do you for animal cruelty, while the guide disappears over the horizon. Or possibly that's just me.) and the "saddles" appear to have taken their notion of comfort from a medieval torture chamber, everything feels fresh and bright and clean, with the high still covered with spring flowers and dozens and dozens of meltwater streams running off the hills. Wandering around the valley one evening I suddenly remembered what one is supposed to do when faced with a multitude of small streams and a large supply of flat stones and mud, and spent a very happy couple of hours damming and diverting several streams, and anyone who doesn't fully appreciate how supremely satisfying an activity this can be is probably dead inside.

Unlike the last time I was horse trekking here, this time we weren't particularly going anywhere, so we would do a bit of riding in the morning to get some nice views, then come back to the yurt, which is always very much a working place as well as somewhere for tourists to crash, so there were always small armies of daughters and nieces (it seems that a lot of families in the towns send their children to relatives in the country for their summer holidays so a lot of the kids up here now actualy spend most of the year in Bishkek) milking the cows and horses and making cream and fetching water and cooking, while the sons and nephews herded the goats and the cattle and we rather got in the way, but everyone was very nice and fed us neverending quantities of tea and kumis anyway (ah, kumis. The one (monumental) downside to yurt living. Have I waxed lyrical on the subject of fermented mares' milk before? Oh, I have. If someone in a yurt offers you a large bowl of slightly suspect-smelling white liquid with... bits floating in it, proceed with caution (see post immediatley below this one). I don't want anyone to say they weren't warned).

One afternoon, our host invited the neighbours (i.e. everyone who had a yurt within two hours ride) over for the Kyrgyz equivalent of a kickabout, which of course meant an enthusiastic game of kok-boru, the Kyrgyz national game which can be described as polo with a higher body count and which is played with the carcass of a goat. Compared to the full village-on-village clash I watched earlier this year, this was a more modest though no less chaotic affair, with half-a-dozen guys on each team as opposed to two hundred but an equal reluctance to confine the action to the pre-agreed playing field and feeling that nothing has been achieved until someone has been carried off unconscious (he woke up again in time for dinner, so that was OK). In the evening we ate goat kebab and fresh bread and cream and wild cherry jam by the light of oil lanterns while the Anglo-Swedish contingent strove to find an acceptable excuse for refusing the fourth bowl of kumis ( a partial list of what hasn't worked so far: I'm sick, it's against my religion, I'm lactose intolerant, I'm pregnant) and convincing defense for the inexplicable fact that despite the fact all of us were unmarried, none of us were imminently planning to rectify the situation, and the mountains turned pink in the sunset. I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this.

Kumis face

Nothing is better than feeding other people fermented mare's milk for the first time. NOTHING.

Central Asian food #1 - main dishes

Above: Uzbek ladies know how to party! Correct technique for a bridal welcome party: dump the boys in a skanky dark room to drink vodka and be manly, then assemble in a huge room with delicious food and even more vodka. Eat food, drink vodka. Repeat. The two ladies sitting at the far end of the table are the brides.

So, I think I have been extremely remiss so far in devoting little or no commentary to the wonders of Central Asian cuisine. Possibly that's because "wonders" is a bit of a strong word. The food here is often delicious but, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, the base elements of the local food constitute mutton and, well, mutton fat. Sheep are prized for the size of their booty (the specimen on the left sports a particularly fine example) and fatty meat is much more expensive to buy than lean. The results can politely be described as "hearty", and you quickly become closely acquainted with the very special sensation of congealed mutton fat coating the roof of your mouth. And while home-cooked food is almost inevitably great, restaurants haven't really got the hang of variety, so you can easily find yourself carefully rotating the same four or five meals over and over again in order to avoid eating plov for two straight meals in a row and thus losing the ability to move for the next forty eight hours.

Flavouring is bizarrely hit-or-miss. The most commonly-used herb is dill, in what seems to me to be unecessarily large quantities; garlic makes an occasional appearance and while there might be a hot and spicy sauce on the table if you are lucky, the food in general errs on the side of blandness. Everything is served with bread, round, cooked in a clay oven andspectacularly moreish when fresh, less so when stale or made with mutton fat (no, seriously. In everything.). Vegetables are rather an afterthought although salads can get quite creative (too often drowned in mayonnaise though); fruit on the other hand is so good in season that I don't think I'll be able to bear going back to stuff we get at home.

In summary: artery-clogging is actively encouraged, and vegetarians need not apply (I've met one or two dedicated souls attempting to cross Central Asia without eating any meat - they were to a woman rather wild-eyed). Below is a selection of the Central Asian (well, mainly Uzbek, but there's not a whole lot of difference) greatest hits. Breathe deeply, wash everything down with plenty of green tea and think about how well your stomach is being lined for the forthcoming vodka toasts.

Plov:

Where better to start than with the king Central Asian cuisine, that exquisite mixture of rice, mutton fat, carrot, mutton

fat and a tiny bit of mutton, plov. This almost approaches a religion in Uzbekistan particularly, where among other things it is invoked as an aphrodisiac (personally, I can't imagine how you could possibly be up for anything after a plate of plov, but then again, I'm not Uzbek, and the birthrate here is undeniably high). A good home-made plov is delicious, studded with entire bulbs of garlic and heaps of mutton and carrots; unfortunately the restaurant variety can often end up swimming in half an inch or more of oil. I am going to unpatriotically admit that I prefer the Afghan variety, which isn't cooked in oil.

Laghman:

Laghman is my favourite of the local standards: thick Chinese-style handmade noodles, served either in a soup or dry with on top. At its best, it is spicy and garlicky and full of aubergine and peppers and tomatoes and limited mutton fat. At its lukewarm, flavourless worse it is still approximately 47% less likely to leave you prodding the roof of your mouth with your tongue and wondering if drinking nail polish remover would dissolve the fat coating than every other dish listed here.

Manty:

These are huge meat dumplings, usually steamed but sometimes fried. Often delicious but very easy to overdose on, especially when an enthusiastic hostess is urging you on, so much so that I can barely look them in the eye any more. The pumpkin versions (autumn only) are spectacular, only somewhat less so once you are aware that they, too, have been enlivened with handfuls of mutton fat.

Shashlik:

Nothing can be quite as good, or quite as bad, as meat on a stick. From Iran to Kazahstan, of an evening the street corners are alive with miniature barbecues with an attendant vigrously fanning the smoke, and the smell of roasting meat is everwhere. Usually alternating cubes of mutton and (you guessed it) mutton fat; I personally prefer the whole lot minced up together which is a) tastier and b) you can pretend that what you are eating isn't 50% fat.Served with lots of raw onion and (naturally) bread.

Shorpa:

Meat and potato soup, often with bonus lumps of fat floating in it. I tend to associate it with dismal roadside cafes during long-distance bus journeys where it is often the onlything served and can thus take it or leave it. Usually rather tasteless, but can be absolutely superb when homemade. I think that this one wasn't that bad actually.

Halim:

Meat porridge. Um. It's not quite as bad as it sounds (although admittedly this isn't hard)?. It's more unexpected than anything else.


Still to come (when I assemble the photos): drinks, snacks, desserts (such as there are. Likely to be a love letter to the fruit here). In the meantime I am off to take full advantage of the fact that I'm in a capital city and shamelessly stuff my face with pizza which may be of questionable authenticity, but is 100% guaranteed not to contain any mutton fat at all. Score.

Kyrgyzstan again: a question of avalanches

What is it about this country that inevitably leads to me doing slightly silly things in pursuit of scenery? It's not as if it's hard to find the stuff here.

The pass was higher than I'd ever been in my life. The south side had been snow free, but the north was covered with overhanging snow bluffs, softened by the sun and the previous night's rain. A sentence I'd read once in a book about an avalanche disaster on K2 or some other such baleful mountain leapt to the front of my mind and lodged itself happily there, replaying again and again: "Strangely, the party had chosen to cross the snow field during mid-afternoon, the most dangerous time for avalanches". It was 2pm. Every ten minutes or so, a vast load of snow and rock rumbled off the neighbouring mountainsides, easily one of the most menacing sounds that there is. I probably wouldn‘t have been so concerned if our guide hadn't also been so very obviously Not Happy. “Too much snow, too dangerous”. With a rope or an ice axe the bluff would've posed no problems, but mountaineering equipment was just one other thing that we had not thought especially hard about. Of course, most people don't perish in avalanches. It's just that, well, some do.

The idea had been to do some gentle trekking in the hills around Karakol, in the east of the country. We had been informed by the head of the local trekking agency that there was a beautiful azure gem of a lake called Ala-Kol just two day’s hike away, and we could breeze up there, admire the Alpine scenery and breeze back down again. The pass crossing might be a little tricky because of the altitude he conceded (Oh ha ha, I thought bitterly, struggling to put one foot in front of the other at 4000 m), but there would be no snow, and we would be laughing our way down to the hot springs on the other side. Things we were not entirely aware of when we launched ourselves merrily into this enterprise: a) June still counts as spring in Kyrgyzstan, not summer and this had been the wettest and coldest June for a while and b) due to the unrest, we were the first group of tourists going up the pass this season. For a brief comparison, this is Ala-Kol as it usually looks in late June:

This is how it looked when we were there:

The similarities are, you must concede, striking.

We eventually scrambled down some snow-free boulders, which were vertical and unsteady in a way that lent new and intensely personal meaning to the phrase "rocks fall, everybody dies" and bolted across the snow as fast as we physically could, which was not very as it was up to our thighs, as one of the snow bluffs above us collapsed, sending a stream of snow and rubble past us slightly closer than I would've preferred. One slightly unexpected river crossing later (who knew that unstable ice sheets can harbour glacial streams underneath? Well, most people I suppose. I'm reasonably sure I've never uttered such high-pitched noises in my life) and we were down in a green, flower-filled valley, contemplating the uniquely ex-Soviet attitude towards health and safety. Actual mountain climbers do stuff like that all the time and at much higher, its just that they tend to have stuff like experience and equipment and some idea of what they're getting into. Evidently in Kyrgyzstan not much of this is important.

Still, the guy wasn't lying about the hot springs, and if there's one thing Kyrgyzstan is dead good for is hot springs. The thing to do with these is apparently to build a sanatorium on top and then depending on temperature either bathe in or drink the water, which of course cures everything, and everywhere you come across these decaying concrete complexes where cosmonauts used to convalesce and heads of state to meet and write constitutions and carve up new republics, and now they crumble gently but you can still get a two hour massage for five dollars. Fortunately the ones we stayed at that night were a bit too far away from anywhere for much of that, but there were still small concrete huts and huge baths smelling strongly of sulphur of which I got one of my own, because men and women sharing the same pool even while wearing bathing suits leads to the kind of moral degeneracy that even very smelly water can't cure. In the evening we talked politics, because now what else is there to talk about, and toasted to our survival and peace in the country with a bottle of vodka which had heroically survived being thrown over a cliff during our descent. It felt a little silly that here we were, wandering around scaring ourselves by having inept and mildly dangerous fun in the mountains, when everyone I speak to has a relative or friend in Osh that they're worried about, but then people are cancelling their holidays here in droves, and tourism is a major source of income in the rural areas, almost all of which are still safe, so we're probably not doing any actual harm.

Back in Bishkek now, keeping an eye on things and working out what to do next. Things are calmer now but tense, with everyone anticipating further trouble in the run-up to the constitutional referendum on June 27th. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

In less depressing news

Issyk-Kol is still beautiful.

Kyrgyzstan: bad timing

Words and phrases in Russian that I now know and wish I didn't: civil war, ethnic conflict, murder, rape, genocide. The appalling violence between ethnic Uzbek and Kyrgyz that exploded in the south of Kyrgyzstan last week is the only thing that anyone here is talking about (warning: both articles contain graphic descriptions of violence, and I found the latter in particular very difficult to read).

From here's it's pretty difficult to tell exactly who or what lies behind the eruption of violence: the interim government (and many locals I've spoken to) are quick to blame provocateurs in the pay of former president Bakiyev, ousted in April (and it certainly seems that a lot of the violence was organised in advance) and it also appears that the security forces may have been complicit in the attacks. No one here in the northeast seems to harbour any particularly strong ant-Uzbek sentiments or blame the Uzbeks for the attacks, but then there are hardly any Uzbeks in this part of the country. I rather suspect that opinions are very different further south.

I'm in Karakol, in the northeast of the country, which so far has remained peaceful and thankfully looks like it will remain so. Most of Kyrgyzstan's international borders are closed at the moment, so I'm here for at least the next couple of weeks (which actually suits me down to the ground, as rural Kyrgyzstan is as wild and beautiful and hospitable as ever) but keeping a close eye on developments (given the tight visa regimes in all the surrounding countries, short of flying back home there is rather a shortage of quick and easy escape routes even if the borders do reopen, so that should prove interesting). Watching this play out is miserable: this country is easily one of my favourite places in the world, and just a few months ago seemed to have so much going for it; although now the threat of civil war seems to have receded a little, to see things disintegrate like this is just heartbreaking.

Turkistan

The mausoleum of Kozha Akhmed Yasui in Turkistan is Kazakhstan's sole entry in Central Asia's Blue Dome Hall of Fame (currently dominated by Uzbek specimens), but a good effort, I think. I like the rose garden.

Adventures in public transport #2: across Kazakhstan by train

In Europe and America people in a train travel in a train fully aware that it belongs either to a state or company and that their ticket grants them only temporary occupation and certain restricted rights. In Russia people just take them over.

-- Laurens van der Post, Journey into Russia

The problem with Kazakhstan is that it is a sodding big country. It is approximately the size of Western Europe, except with a population of only about fifteen million and not an awful lot going on apart from a lot of steppe. Aktau on the Caspian is, according to my Beacon of Progress map, at least 1000 km from the nearest town of interest, and my own particular interest lay with the Kyrgyz consulate in Almaty, over 2000km away on the other side of the country (3000 km travelling distance. The placement of transport links here is somewhat eccentric.). Since internal flights are not exactly cheap and buses non-existent, I was obliged to grit my teeth for the four-day-three-night marathon train journey.

Ex-Soviet trains aren't awful - OK, so they're not the Orient Express, but the compartments are clean (even the toilets aren't too hideous) and the bunks are comfortable and there are samovars of hot water in every carriage so the tea supply remains constant - but not anywhere I'd choose to be stuck for four days in a row. Particularly when I haven't showered for the previous two (the Aktau customs-house was good, but not that good). Plus, the scenery for the first three days was not especially stimulating. Having spent much of the past year or so visiting cities whose illustrious histories tended to end with "and then Jenghiz Khan came and burnt it to the ground", I had been given in my more idle moments to speculate vaguely about what drove a person to such extremes of destruction, but no longer. After a mere eight hours of brown, scrubby steppe I was ready to set something on fire just for variety's sake.

However, my mood was improved immeasurably when I succeeded in wheedling two kettles of hot water out of a woman at the station at Aqtobe (1000 km from Aktau in the wrong direction - seriously, what is up with the trainlines here?) where we stopped to change trains, and I can now confirm that it is both possible and exquisite to wash in 3 litres of water when the need arises; and more so when I returned to the train to find that my compartment now contained a Kazakh matriarch who immediately produced a large bag of bread and cakes and pronounced it time to drink tea. Train travel here is a ridiculously sociable affair, and though most passengers were younger guys returning home from work on the western oil and gas fields, and thus not necessarily the best choice of conversational partner (unfortunately experience has indicated that it is for the best if my Russian skills vanish entirely when faced with any unaccompanied guy between the ages of about fifteen and fifty - when the opening conversational gambit is "Soooo, do you have a boyfriend?" you know it's only going to go downhill from there), there was a family or two and seeking out the women rarely goes wrong. I commiserated with girls my age about how tiresome it was to have to find a husband when you're also trying to get your phD, admired various small children, was firmly advised against my planned travels to Kyrgyzstan ("Don't you know they're having a revolution there? Anyway, you should stay in Almaty. It is civilised. Not like Asia.") by everyone, and drunk tea and kefir (fresh drinking yoghurt, absolutely heavenly) by the bowlful. Every hour or two the train would idle to a halt at a tiny settlement with no name on the platform (I have no clue how anyone else knew where we were, I only occasionally saw a sign), just dozens of women selling iced water and instant noodles and fried fish in plastic bags and meat dumplings of dubious freshness, so although there was a restaurant on the train, no one bothered with it. As a foreign guest I was urged to eat more and more, and people kept stopping by with ice creams and blini and fish and mutton and potatoes and plov, none of which could be refused. It's probably a good thing the journey didn't last much longer, or I probably would've exploded.

73 hours later the train pulled into Almaty, and I was immediately whisked off to the house of a couple I'd met on the train, to be fed even more and oh bliss, they had a sauna too which I practically had to be dragged out of. I can confirm two things: that Almaty is indeed very civilised, and that I am never doing five nights on public transport ever again.

Adventures in public transport #1: the Caspian ferry

Waiting for the Kazakhstan ferry proved a depressingly Beckettian state of affairs. My companion in this endeavour was Juergen, a German backpacker who'd missed the previous ferry by twenty minutes, having waited a week for it beforehand and was thus understandably losing his sense of humour slightly. After a week, the only news that we had received was from a rather wild-eyed Filippino tourist who'd just taken the ferry from Turkmenistan and whose English wasn't great, but the phrase (accompanied by a lot of emphatic gesticulating) "it's hell" came across pretty clearly; we had just begun to reluctantly investigate flying, when I got a phone call from the tourist office. "The ferry is leaving in an hour. I think maybe you should go now!". Right.

Frantically dashing to the port, we were cheerfully informed that yes, a ferry was going to Kazakhstan, and we could even buy tickets, but of course it wasn't leaving at once, and in fact, no-one knew when it was going to leave, so we'd better sit down and wait until something happened. This frequently takes a while in Azerbaijan, and so it proved. Six hours later, we were all aboard the Akademik Zafira Aliyeva, a surprisingly (to me) shiny and modern boat (I only saw one cockroach in the cabin) carrying goods wagons and Turkish trucks and a mere eleven passengers (the tendency of the shipping companies in previous years to overload the ferries with passengers and the accompanying tendency of said ferries to sink had apparently prompted authorities to be pretty strict on this point) across the Caspian to Kazakhstan.

J and I had stocked up on bread and tea, expecting to ride out the eighteen-hour crossing in limited comfort and space, but this is apparently the wrong attitude to approach boat travel in this part of the world. One of our fellow passengers was a Georgian, which of course meant that within seconds a whole cold chicken, a bag of khachapuri , a (literal) gallon of wine and two bottles of chacha (the Georgian national drink, a home-brewed firewater of a potency so lethal that it should probably be banned under international treaty, and that any self-respecting Georgian male keeps at least a flask of on his person at all times in case of a toasting emergency) made their appearance. The evening predictably degenerated into round after round of heartfelt and tearful toasts to the friendship between all nations (except Armenia - it is generally not a good idea to get Azerbaijanis started on this particular topic) and the brotherhood of all men (except Armenians), one of the most enthusiastic participants in which turned out to be our chief navigator, which seemed to me to be a bit of an error given that we hadn't even left Baku at this point. Indeed, everyone having boarded around 7.30 pm, the ferry only began to move at midnight, around about the time at which England and Germany were being declared honorary members of the Caucasus.

I woke up the next afternoon, rather wishing that I hadn't (chacha frequently has this effect), but in time to get the full effect of the sun setting across the Caspian. This also meant that we were several hours behind schedule (evidently the navigator was feeling the effects of the previous night as much as the rest of us) but punctuality is an overrated trait, at least when there's plenty of tea to be had. We drew into Aktau at midnight, only six hours behind schedule to the tinny strains of the Kazakh national anthem played through the port loudspeaker system. Signs that I had entered Central Asia proper abounded: the increasingly ludicrous size of the peaked caps worn by various members of officialdom (the customs officers' looked as though they had some sombrero in their ancestry), the return of tricky geopolitical debate at immigration ("You are Irish?" "No, English." "But your passport says Ireland." "No, it says 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. Great Britain. Velikobritannia?" "That is Ireland!" "No." and so on, ad infinitum) and, as we picnicked at 2.30 am in the customs house, the presence of large women ladelling generous spoonfuls of homemade jam into our cups of tea. It's good to be back in 'stan central again.

Tea with rosehip jam drunk out of a saucepan lid at 3 am in the Aktau port customs-house. Yep, definitely back in Central Asia.

Mud volcanoes go here

They go "blop" a lot, and are fun to stick your fingers in. I'll leave it to you to imagine how muddy I got today.

Midwinter city breaks in all the wrong places

So this episode takes place back in February, when I was tangled up in the forest of red tape and consular interviews and demands for parental and spousal permission that accompanies any attempt to gain travel documents for Central Asian countries. In this bureaucracy-befuddled state, a minibreak sounded just the ticket, and location-wise the fact that you could get the relevant travel documents in a couple of hours with no questions asked was all a country needed to recommend itself to me. Uzbekistan has only one neighbour which is so enthusiastic about handing out visas, and so it was that within a couple of days of hatching this brilliant plan I found myself eyeing the Uzbek-Afghan border post with a vague sense of apprehension and wishing that I would think my decisions through a bit more thoroughly sometimes.

The border is delineated by the murky brown Amu Darya, still imposing this far east before fading into irrigation-drained ignominy before ever reaching the Aral Sea. When it was still the Oxus, Alexander the Great floated his armies across the river here on hide rafts in order to ravage the eastern satrapies of the Persian empire; now the two countries are linked by the Soviet “Friendship Bridge” (all the better to invade you with, my dear). It’s a remarkably sharp dividing line - I’ve never crossed a border where the contrast of the two sides has been so absolute. On the Afghan side, there was an atmosphere of barely-suppressed chaos quite unlike the ordered blandness of Uzbek Termez. The traffic was heavy with exuberantly decorated lorries redolent of the subcontinent, auto rickshaws and dignified old men on donkeys, everyone wrapped in shawls and blankets to keep out the freezing wind. I was painfully aware of the fact that I was the only woman on the street, and felt increasingly uncomfortable as I waited for my ride - not so much unsafe, as keenly aware that here far more than anywhere else in the world, anything could happen and quite probably would.

On the drive through barren, windswept and snow-sprinkled desert to Mazar-i-Sharif, we passed convoys of the international troops stationed nearby: Swedes, Croatians, Germans, and, of course, Americans, rolling slowly past in their humvees, holding up the traffic for miles behind them - they are said to be under orders to shoot at any car that comes too close, so everyone keeps a careful distance. Although Mazar and its immediate environs are considered “safe” by Afghan standards, an awareness of the war penetrates everything and there is a tension in the air that is palpable (although how much of it was I imagining, because I knew?). Mazar itself is an odd, mixed up city with expensive new glass buildings (“mafia money”, muttered my host darkly) standing side by side with mud houses along unpaved, heavily rutted and rubbish-strewn roads, while the immense mountains of the Hindu Kush rising to the south. Electricity is intermittent, so the city reverberates at night to the rumble of hundreds of private generators. Sometimes I could believe I was in any Central Asian city, as I was pursued by carpet salesmen, moneychangers and taxi drivers , but then I'd turn a corner and see a tank easing its way ominously down a side street. I couldn’t stop staring at the tanks whenever I saw them, they seemed so unreal, as though I’d stumbled onto a film set by mistake. I don’t think I’d even seen a tank outside of a museum before, and didn’t that slam home to me just how unbelievably I am to have been born somewhere where that's the case. Mazar may be peaceful, but it doesn't stay that way spontaneously.

The heart of the city, and the only ancient building of note is the Blue Mosque and shrine of Hazrat Ali, the burial place of the Prophet’s son-in-law, and another hugely important site of pilgrimage for Muslims. I’d seen a photo of this building at an impressionable age, and had been determined to see it for a long, long time. Although much smaller and arguably less impressive than the Haram in Mashhad, it makes a better impression because it isn't cut off from the secular city like the other place, and it's easier to take it all in at once. Rather than glittering gold, every inch is covered with the bright blue of lapiz lazuli, the colour always synonymous in my mind with Afghanistan. The weak wintery light didn’t do it many favours, and it's decorated at night night with unevenly hung strings of flashing lights that unfortunately bring to mind the Christmas decorations at my local shopping mall back home, which is not a good thing, but at dusk it becomes special. Non-Muslims aren’t allowed inside, and unlike in Mashhad, no one suggested I try, so I circled the walls and again, watching women in blue and white burqas feed the flock of pure white doves (every seventh dove contains the soul of a saint, and the overall effect is so holy that should a grey dove join the throng, it will turn white within forty days) and men in jeans and leather jackets loiter drinking tea in defiance of the snow.

For, with my usual impeccable sense of timing, I had arrived at what turned out to be the coldest week of the year, as a sudden freezing snap enveloped the whole region. Dozens of people were killed in avalanches on the main road south to Kabul, all the water pipes froze (except those in the public baths, and now I know it only takes three days without a shower to overcome my terribly British reticence regarding com`munal bathing) and the 80 km stretch of (good) road between Mazar and the border became so dangerously icy that I had to prolong my stay for several days. I spent a considerable amount of time huddling around coal stoves in unventilated rooms trying to remember if this was how people died of carbon monoxide poisoning, while my friends reminisced about how lovely the region was come about April or so. One of my hosts was a DJ at a multilingual Mazar radio station, and decided to take full advantage of this opportunity to inject some English into his programmes, and thus my discovery that there is nothing so terrifying, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, than a live microphone that someone expects you to talk into. My international broadcasting career began with a slightly uncertain introduction to the Black Eyed Peas, and hearing my voice coming out of the car radio while creeping along beind a convoy of tanks was one of the odder moments of my life.

We were on the way to Balkh, a small market town about half an hour from Mazar with a lot of stray dogs and rubbish in the streets and two thousand year old city walls and not a lot to distinguish the fact that it was once Bactria, the mother of cities and a pearl of the Silk Road. Ravaged by earthquakes, droughts, Jenghiz Khan and other occupational hazards of Central Asia, there is now barely anything to remind one of its glory days as the place where Zoroaster was born and the Alexander the Great was married and more trade passed through the markets here than through Samarkand and Bukhara combined. The remains of a mosque and mausoleum crumble in the filthy central square, and I suddenly thought about what London might look like in 200 years, which was not a very pleasant thought so I stopped thinking it. But a little way out of the city lie the ruins of the oldest mosque in the country, over thousand years of decay but still standing, with the faintest traces of lapiz lazuli in niches covering every column, which were once studded with the gemstones. UNESCO had covered the whole thing with an awful corrugated iron roof and there was no one there but the caretaker's cat and chickens (who got on surprisingly well) but it was still living; people still come on Fridays to pray there. Later, back in Mazar and politely trying to convince the local carpet salesmen that I really did not need a carpetal representation of Amir Timur (and let me just take a moment to say that no one, be they Ayatollah Khomeini or your pet Labrador, is improved by putting them in a carpet, and it is a mistake to try), I was offered silver Bactrian coins dug up from the fields around Balkh (I wish I could say it was my ethical stance against the looting of cultural heritage rather than a lack of cash that made me demur, but that would be very, very untrue). Bactria was still there, still not quite dead, and I thrilled at it.

Except that getting starry-eyed over romanticised versions of the past when the present is so imperfect and the future is so uncertain is troublesome here more than anywhere. At dinner with a family I’d met at the shrine, we sat around an oil lantern eating pilau, admiring babies and discussing wedding plans and politics. The presence of the coalition troops inspired no great ire in anyone I spoke to: "Only backward people hate the Americans. Everyone else just wants to work for them" (although it's worth noting that I was also told that "only backward people wear burqas". In a week I saw precisely one woman apart from me who wasn't wearing a burqa.) Yet there is clearly discontent: the day before I arrived, a Taliban member of the Afghan police force had killed two Swedish soldiers and their just outside the city. The local lad had been engaged, and working with the troops to save money for his marriage later that month. This story was the main topic of discussion for that week, but spoken about with resignation, in the knowledge it would soon be superceded by another tiny tragedy, even here, in the safest part of the country. Still, the consensus seems to be that things are slowly, slowly getting better. And yet, I couldn't help feeling that the presence of the coalition troops here was daft. This is not really the place for a discussion of the rights and wrongs of the invasion, but Afghanistan felt so much more foreign to me than anywhere else I'd ever visited, so self-contained and self-involved that the very idea that any Western power could successfully impose by force a an alien form of government on this country s ludicrous and the very height of hubris. I suppose it remains to be seen. The troops don't seem to be going anywhere for the moment, and they keep some kind of order in Mazar, but I can't see where it is going to end.

Back at the border, the Afghan official ran an uninterested eye over my passport, then invited me to share his lunch. Across the river I knew I could expect an hour's wait, a thorough interrogation and a search of every pocket and bag. I figured I could stay just a little longer.

Thalassa, thalassa

I've reached the Caspian Sea! I haven't seen the sea for a very long time so it's good to be back by the water. Even if said water carries a certain oily sheen. Baku has been an oil boom town for over a century, and boy does the landscape around the city show it. I believe the correct adjective is "dystopian". I am apparently going to have a lot of time to appreciate it, as the next ferry to Aktau in Kazakhstan is unlikely to leave until Friday or so. The concept of timetables or schedules for this kind of transportation has yet to catch on here.

Azerbaijan has been a pleasant surprise so far. I was extremely grumpy about having to leave Tbilisi with its coffee shops and wireless hotspots and dilapidated European architecture and khachapuri and plum conserve for a country which I expected to be expensive, time-consuming and tiresome (an impression based, entirely unfairly, on my experience of getting the bloody visa, but six separate embassy visits can do that to a person). And then I spent my first night in a tiny village eating the greatest dolma in the world because I'd met a girl on the bus, and the second at the best hotel in the next town being wined and dined for absolutely nothing, because her father knew someone. Good going, Azerbaijan!

Something I've really missed: Central Asian grannies, lurking under their multicoloured headscarves, sweet and innocent right up until the alcohol comes out and you find that the words "No thanks, I think I've had enough!" have no meaning for them. Still, mulberry vodka is pretty damned good *collapses*

Iran again

OK, I suck at travel blogging. I'm sitting on no fewer than six half-finished posts including Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and India, which were months ago. But! I am stuck in Tblisi waiting for visas (Kazakhstan, the promotional literature that your consul showered me with assures me you are A Beacon Of Progress! I find this hard to believe when your visa application process is more convoluted than, to take an example at random, Afghanistan's.) in a hostel with free wireless, so that means spam time. First up is Iran, which had plenty of good bits which did not involve police stations.

While if you were to choose any city in Iran to be stuck in for three weeks while police conducted enquiries about you it would be unlikely that you would light upon Mashhad as your first choice, it probably gave me a better feel for the country, specialised policemen and all, than the same amount of time spent wandering around in rhapsodies over Persepolis (not that I wouldn‘t, on balance, have probably preferred the latter). Mashhad is short on tourist sites and tourist traffic (apart from religious tourists), but has great ice cream and is very well-stocked with Iranians, who I think most visitors would agree are by far the best thing about a trip to the country. Over the past year, I’ve become used to the effusiveness of Central Asian hospitality, so the fact that enthusiasm with which I was invited into homes, English classes, music lessons, birthday parties, ancestral villages and goodness knows what else really took me by surprise is saying a lot. I've rarely been in a country where the language barrier was so universal, and not being able to eve begin to read the shop signs and so on was very disconcerting (my proudest achievement in three weeks was learning to distinguish between the men and women’s toilet signs in Farsi) but this was more than compensated for by the determination of complete strangers to make sure I was OK and knew where I was going and what did I think about Iran and did the English people like Iran and did they know that the Iranian people wanted a just peace and also nuclear energy and so forth (on several occasions I had taxi drivers making detours to pick up English speaking friends or relatives so we could discuss these topics more effectively). Hospitable, smart (so many engineers!), erudite (the poetry, you guys), and with a incredible ability to picnic at the drop of a hat (I have come away with a vague impression that all Iranian car boots are equipped with a barbeque and skewers of marinated chicken ready to go at a moment’s notice), Iranians rapidly became some of my favourite people ever.

Travelling alone as a woman in Iran was also surprisingly easy, dress code apart (of which more anon). Solo travel as a woman in Central Asia means accepting a certain level of hassle from pretty much any guy you meet, which by now I've got pretty good at ignoring, but the taboo on interacting with unrelated members of the opposite sex in public in Iran meant that this almost completely disappeared (almost. It seems that everywhere in the world there are guys who think that following a woman in a car and persistently offering her a ride is alluring. Hint: it's not). In private houses there's no segregation at all, but once I'd got used to being relegated to the back of the bus, the public divide was almost relaxing. The camaraderie in all-female environments was instant and comforting; I felt more at ease here than in most other countries I've travelled in, confident that if I got into difficulties there would be an army of helpers at my back, all of whom I could rely on not to ask if I needed company in my hotel room that night.

That said, the legally enforced dress code makes it difficult to forget that you're in a country where the government, at least, finds your gender strange and somewhat troublesome. Women are required by law to dress modestly: in practice for foreigners and most younger women), this means a long trench coat which reaches to at least mid-thigh, plus headscarf. Opinions seem to vary as to how much hair is acceptable. In most of the city, no one really seemed to mind when my headscarf fell off (as it frequently did) as long as I put it back on again; however, every so often I would be accosted by a woman who would firmly tuck any escaping tendrils of hair back under my scarf. Mashhad is generally a religious, conservative city, and I though saw no burqas at all (unlike Afghanistan, where they were pretty much universal) and very few niqabs; the garment of choice for most of the women in Mashhad was the chador (for a quick pictorial primer on Islamic dress for women, see here). This literally means "tent", and is basically a large cotton sheet (usually in fashionable black) that you drape around yourself and hold closed with a greater or lesser degree of expertise (guess which category I fell into). This garment rapidly became my nemesis: I never got the hang of even putting it on, and found it impossible to take myself seriously wearing one (a feeling enhanced by the fact that I was invariably wearing somebody's spare, which was usually in an appalling pink paisley pattern and made me feel like I was wearing a duvet cover). I felt the overall effect was rather like a bad Halloween costume crossed with a toga party gone horribly wrong, and I never required the level of expertise necessary to look remotely dignified when walking in it. My only comfort was that I was not the only one - many other smart young women seemed to be struggling, and some of the more pragmatic had opted for bulldog clips as the preferred method of keeping the damn thing on.

I estimated about 60 - 70% chador coverage in day to day usage, but they were compulsory wear at many religious sites, and above all when visiting Mashhad‘s raison d‘etre, the Haram, or shrine of Imam Reza. The eight Imam of Shia Islam was martyred here during the ninth century, and the shrine surrounding his tomb has grown into an enormous glittering complex of golden domes and minarets and courtyards and fountains and flags and spires that look like a Baghdad from 1001 Nights (although most of it has been built or rebuilt since the Islamic Revolution, and golden minarets sure lose their mystique when you see them in their pre-gilded concrete state) and should really be off shining on a hill somewhere rather than peeking out between gloomy concrete hotel blocks and its very own ring road. It is one of the foremost sites of pilgrimage for Shia Islam, and millions come to visit every year. Visitors of all religions are welcome in the magnificent blue-tiled courtyards and museums full of donations from grateful pilgrims (including a whole floor full of stuffed fish. No, I’m not sure why either) but non-Muslims are not technically supposed to enter the holiest parts of the shrine, surrounding the Imam’s tomb. However, it's a little difficult not to: even on the occasions when I visited without my friends, I was surrounded by helpful women who assumed that of course I would want to pray there, and firmly pulled inside one carpet-covered entrance.

(A brief aside on this: my feelings about my decision to visit the shrine are decidedly mixed. Almost every foreign tourist who comes to Mashhad ends up visiting, and in general people are pretty relaxed about it; the unspoken rule seems to be that as long as you observe the dress code and behave respectfully, no one will question your presence. Regardless of this, the official rule is no non-Muslims, and I prefer to respect the boundaries people place on their places of worship - I had initially decided not to try to enter the shrine itself. However, when it came to it I was entreated and encouraged by every Iranian that I met to do so, to the point where I felt that refusing would cause more offence, and, let's be honest, this kind of thing fascinates me and I was really, really curious).

The gilded exterior is fabulous enough, but the interior is astonishing. Just like any medieval cathedral in Europe, religious devotion backed by political might combines to form something magnificent that is designed to awe. Every surface covered by carved or painted or mirrored tiles in an overwhelming riot of colour and opulence and splendour. Pilgrims kiss the golden doors and stream through to the central halls, lit by an eerie green (the colour of Shia Islam) light cast by spiral energy-saving light bulbs set incongruously in vast and intricate chandeliers, illuminating the tomb of the Imam himself which is surrounded by a vast cage of silver and gold. Screens divide the hall in two for men and women, with half the tomb on each side, but from both the susurration of hundreds of people whispering in fierce, intense and earnest prayer, each individual entirely focussed on the tomb and on fighting their way through the throng to touch the gilded cage, push money and gifts through the grille and beg the Imam for his assistance. Despite the number of people, it felt very private, hundreds of personal conversations with the Imam. At the back women sat cross legged reading the Koran and reciting prayers, some weeping, some readjusting their chadors knocked askew during the struggle for the tomb, some retying them to gear up for another attempt. Keeping order were half a dozen stern and severely-dressed young women armed with long-handled green feather dusters to prod individuals who were getting a bit overenthusiastic and clinging to the cage a little too devotedly. One of them eyed me suspiciously, but the presence of my Iranian friends seemed to reassure her, and I hurriedly moved on.

So intense is the atmosphere surrounding the tomb itself that it was a relief to escape downstairs to the family mosque. Brand new and covered with mirrored tiles, yet somehow managing to avoid looking like the interior of a giant disco ball, it’s a place where the sexes can mingle, and was blessedly relaxed; old women in wheelchairs, and small girls tripping over their too-long chadors and whacking their brothers with strings of prayer beads while their parents prayed - this was clearly a family day out. In a way, this was the most interesting part of the shrine, because while I recognised the intense devotion from various religious sites and events I’ve visited in Europe, I've never encountered such a relaxed environment at a place of worship back home. Probably it exists in some places, but here it bespeaks a religion that permeates everyday life and society as a whole in a way that Christianity doesn't quite anymore, at least not so much in Western Europe. I do wonder if it ever used to be like that back home, if the pilgrims at Canterbury used to bring their kids and plonk them down at the back of the shrine in the charge of grandma while they went to pray. This is one of the ways I felt I barely scratched the surface of Iran: in a way it's a much more liberal country than many in the west give it credit for (or at least, it has an expanding, highly educated middle class which is much more liberal than its government) and the way the majority of people seem to practice religion here is at odds with the strict theocracy that the Ayatollahs would like to believe that they have, or the stereotypical portrayal in so much of the Western media. Ayatollahs or not, people would still come here in vast numbers; the Imam is far bigger than the Revolution. One day I am going to get to Persepolis, but the scenes at the Haram are I think always going to be the most vivid memories I have of Iran. Mainly I feel as though I learned more about what Iran isn't than about what it is, which makes it even more frustrating I can't come back. This country has got to me in a way that others haven't, and it's going to be lurking at the back of my mind for a long time.

The frosty Caucasus

That is all.

And now we will drink a toast to nature.

Every self-respecting Georgian male carries a flask of chacha and a couple of miniature drinking horns with him at all times, in case of a toasting emergency.

Joy

So, I am in Armenia, and there are old churches and green valleys and spring sunshine and Mount Ararat and fruit brandy and orchards blossoming and I am having one of those days where I am filled with a fierce happiness that the world exists and I am in it.

Escape

And all it took for me to run screaming to the Aeroflot booking website was the 437th dreadlocked idiot urging me to stop thinking and feel, man. I am en route to Armenia, where I am reasonably sure no one will tell me this.

India pretty

I confess to still longing for Iranian flash and glitter, but Mughal architecture isn't bad either.

In which I am briefly an international superspy

I am writing this from Delhi, which is not at all where I was expecting to be a few hours ago. I must say that India is rather a startling place to have thrust upon one unexpectedly.

It is the week leading up to No Ruz, the Iranian new year, and I had been rather hoping to spend this week peacefully jumping over bonfires (it's a thing), admiring Achaemenid ruins and having earnest young men recite Persian poetry at me (an occupational hazard all over Iran, but utterly delightful). I, sadly, had reckoned without the efforts of the Iranian security service.

These diligent gentlemen hauled me off the bus from the border, assuring me that they merely wished to ask me a few questions; the generalised hysteria which greeted my suggestion that they might show me some ID ("This police station is our ID!") suggested that they were not necessarily the concerned members of the tourist police that they claimed to be. Over the course of numerous lengthy interviews over the following few weeks, it became apparent that they were highly suspicious of my motives of entering the country, and had in fact been waiting for me ever since I applied for my visa in Tashkent. My gender, marital status, failure to utilise a travel agency and "impolite way of sitting" all told against me. I was quite obviously an MI6 agent.

Let this be a lesson that all may profit from: NEVER bring a computer or a camera into a country policed by paranoiacs with an active imagination. It's amazing what can be concocted from the most innocuous sources. Half-finished end-of-term reports on my English students became evidence that I was recruiting Uzbekistan's most talented linguists as secret agents. A document that I had been proofreading at UNAIDS indicated that I had been setting up high level meetings with members of the government. Photos of a party in Tashkent were clear proof that I had been fraternising with expat Iranians (never mind that said photos contained no Iranians whatsoever). I apparently spoke too many languages (that sound you hear is hysterical laughter from anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of my tortuous French or Russian. Actually, it was probably the Russian that swung it. It is an inherently suspicious language.) to be an innocent traveller. In the face of such brain-straining deductive logic and fiendishly penetrating questioning along the lines of "If you're so interested in travel, why didn't you study tourism?" , I found myself quite unequal to the task of proving myself a mere tourist ("you don't LOOK like a tourist..."), and thus received instructions yesterday morning to leave Iran within 24 hours, or face "certain incarceration", and while I like to think I am always open to new experiences, finding out exactly what the inside of an Iranian jail looks like ranks pretty low on my list of priorities. I took the next flight out of Iran.

Thus, I find myself in Delhi with no hotel, no plan, no clue; just a raging sense of unfairness (funny how we think life should be fair, when it never is). Later I will write properly about the incredible times I had in this wonderful country (well, the parts outside the police stations), which is so ill served by an illiberal and repressive government at odds with so many of its people. Iran is an easy country to fall in love with, and I feel like I have been cheated out of an affair that could have lasted and lasted. I probably won't be able to visit Iran again, at least while the current state of affairs continues, and what angers me most is that my experience, which I was so sure would prove the opposite, has instead just born out the warnings of my friends who told me I shouldn't risk the trip. I will never regret visiting Iran, but I wish it could've ended any other way.

Well, there's no point wallowing in self pity at this stage. I have a subcontinent to deal with.

Xayr O'zbekiston, yakshi qo'ling

Tomorrow morning I'm leaving on what I hope will be a six month trip through Turkmenistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and back to Uzbekistan. Getting the visas was such a performance that it became an end in itself, and now I have a passport full of stickers it's begnning to sink in that oh crap, I'm leaving tomorrow. Now the thought is almost overwhelming: I have Persepolis and Isfahan and Kashgar and the Hindu Kush all before of me, and I am so excited and terrified that I can hardly breathe.

I've no idea what it's going to be like; I've never travelled alone for such a long period before, and although I'm reasonably confident of my ability to handle most things these places may throw at me, I'm a little worried I may find it all too mentally exhausting and crash after a month or two. Except this is what I've been dreaming of for years, and I've lived on my own for a year in one of the most frustrating and ridiculous countries in the world (I love you, Uzbekistan, but good Lord, you don't make it easy), and I've just spent a week in Afghanistan (this did seem like a sensible idea at the time), and now is not the time to wuss out. I can do this.

It is, however, a great shame that the buildup to epic journeys has to be ruined by bloody packing. Marco Polo was strangely silent on this point (mind you, things would be a lot easier if I had my own caravan of camels). My backpack capacity seems to decrease every time I use it.

Premier league buzkashi

I am (still) recovering from a new year spent in Bukhara, primarily being fed. New year is the most important winter festival here, and, like all good festivals, involves family and food in large quantities. Just when you’ve finished three courses and are eyeing the fruit bowl and contemplating whether there is in fact a polite and non-messy way to eat a pomegranate, out comes the fourth, and then you sort of want to die. In an attempt to prevent myself from sinking into a mutton-and-oil-induced stupor (a recognised medical condition in Central Asia), I’ve been spending the weekends stomping around the mountains (Tashkent has had a disappointingly mild winter, with only a couple of desultory snowfalls, but the weather in the mountains certainly make up for it). Given that flailing around in waist-deep snow loses its novelty after a while, I jumped at the chance to spend a day with some friends at a village which was hosting a championship of that most Central Asian of games, known variously as ulaq, kukmar, kupkari and kuk-boru. Never heard of it? Yes, you have. You know, the one with the dead goat? Yeah, that one.

The Tajik name (buzkashi) translates, more or less, as “grab the goat”, which pretty much sums the whole thing up. A goat is slaughtered and the head removed; the carcass is then soaked in cold water overnight to toughen it. The next day, several dozen horsemen assemble and fight over it. I think there’s a method for goal scoring in there somewhere, but lets face it, that’s not especially important when you are engaged in serious horseback wrestling. Enjoyed primarily by the historically nomadic Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Tajik people (indeed, Kyrgyz evening TV schedules give pride of place to a buzkashi Match of the Day, complete with interviews inarticulate players, grumpy managers and overly groomed commentators), my announcement that I was going to a game was met by blank looks by my Uzbek colleagues, who eventually admitted that this might be something that “those weird people in the mountains do”. Indeed, the playing field was a plateau set in a mountainside outside a village miles from anywhere, almost on the Tajik border. We were deposited by our rickety-lada-driving taxiste on an icy footpath, and immediately had to fling ourselves out the way of a hundred or so horsemen hurtling past on a detour from the field of play. Rule one of buzkashi seems to be that the game is wherever the goat is.

The spectators had ranged themselves across the hillside among dozens of makeshift barbeques and snowdrifts sprouting cooling vodka bottles. The horsemen (and yes, they were all men) ranging in age from six to sixty (and the rule was not necessarily one man, one horse) hurtled around the field below, caked in mud and slush. Every so often, the guy with the goat would decide that playing on the field was cramping his style and make a beeline directly up the hill towards the onlookers, forcing everyone to make a run for it, scattering fur caps, empty vodka bottles and spare goats in all directions. Over the chaos, the commentators, aided by a monumental sound system the looked as though it had been patched together from several dozen car radios, kept up a breathless, multilingual commentary. As a group containing the only two women in attendance, our presence attracted a certain amount of excitement and we were immediately invited to introduce ourselves on the sound system and tell everyone how much we loved Uzbekistan (a lot, obviously) and drink a toast to international friendship.

The four of us wandered around taking photos and dodging stray horses, offers of dinner and marriage, and people who were keen to show us their photo album of their horses which they had named after Premier League football teams. The game (or games - someone assured me that several teams came and went, but I really couldn’t tell the difference) went on all afternoon, and as the sun went in it became bitterly cold, prompting the spectator to up their fortification with copious quantities of vodka, plov, shashlik and vodka. Since none of us had really dressed for subzero temperatures, we were by this time all too happy to accept all of the above, and the proceedings rapidly became pretty merry. Eventually, a team (or person? I really never got the hand of the rules) and they (or he?) were awarded an extremely irate-looking eagle as their prize and everyone stumbled back down the hill, carrying the prone bodies of their friends who had medicated against the cold too liberally or received a knock on the head from an over-enthusiastic goat-chaser, only stopping for one final vodka-fuelled picnic in the snow at the bottom of the valley. By this time we were firm friends with Premier League Horse Guy, so we retreated to his brother’s house to defrost and drink toasts to love and international friendship and horses named Arsenal and so on. I have no memory of how we got back from the mountains, but those who were alive to the particulars of our chauffeur’s driving on the icy roads assure me that this is a good thing. Sometimes one is happier not knowing.

Anyway, drunk driving aside it was something I was glad to have experienced, because my time in Uzbekistan is rapidly drawing to a close. In a couple of weeks I'll be heading to Turkmenistan (fingers crossed for the most awkward visa in Central Asia) and Iran (headscarf-tying practice in progress), so every day at the moment is an exhausting mixture of hanging around in embassies perusing prmotional leaflets exhorting me to consider the investment opportunities inherent in the Pakistani towel industry and visiting every nook and cranny of Tashkent I could never be bothered to before (Hello, museum of cotton-picking, can't think how I missed you!). And for those of you who asked, pictures (including buzkashi) are (finally) here.