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.
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.
