Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  “Shit shit shit,” Mel muttered.

  “What? Is that a fly in your soup?”

  “No! Oh goddammit yes.” Mel fished out the fly with her spoon. “But there’s an even bigger problem. So, uh, it takes longer than I thought to get Letters of Invitation for Uzbekistan.” This was an expensive prerequisite for applying for tourist visas, one that allows Uzbekistan to screen its visitors and reap profits at the same time.

  “Like how long?”

  “So long . . . they won’t be ready before our Azerbaijan visas expire.”

  I listened in stunned silence as Mel explained that extending tourist visas in Azerbaijan was complicated, and the penalty for overstaying a visa was severe. Even more worrying, the only Chinese embassy in all of Central Asia that was currently granting tourist visas was in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, making that country a crucial stop in terms of completing our planned route. We’d receive Nepalese visas at the border upon arrival, and we’d apply in Kathmandu for Indian visas, the final stamps we needed to finish this Silk Road—if we made it that far, which required sneaking across Tibet again.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the flies twitching on the windowsill, reminding me of the Russian writer Isaac Babel’s descriptions of flies in a jar of milky liquid in Tbilisi, “each dying in its own way.” The same seemed true for how adventures perished in Baku.

  “You’re mad at me,” said Mel.

  “I’m not mad. I’m distressed.”

  “Right. At me.”

  “Not at you. At is such a direct word. I rarely feel things so directly.”

  I truly was distressed in all directions: at our lack of money to buy more than soup in this overpriced city, at the itchiness where bugs had savaged us in the night because we couldn’t afford to stay anywhere decent, at the fact that we hadn’t applied for Uzbek Letters of Invitation (LOIs) weeks earlier, in Lagodekhi, when I’d suggested we submit the applications and Mel reassured me there was no need to just yet.

  Fortunately, urgent processing for LOIs was possible—for a price. With the cellphone now partially charged, we managed to reach the travel agent who was helping us obtain tourist visas in Central Asia, and he told us to meet his friend Elchin at 4:00 p.m. and hand him U.S. $160.

  We taxied expensively around Baku in search of a bank that would cash traveller’s cheques, finally found one, then drove at the appointed time to a sketchy part of the city where a skinny, dark-featured man in crisp blue jeans was slouched against a wall. He had the look of a man who buys high and sells low. “Are you Elchin?” we called out the car window. “Yessssss,” he replied uncertainly. We handed him two crisp hundred-dollar bills and asked if he had change. He did not, but he “knew a guy.” And with that he took off.

  We waited half an hour before accepting we’d been duped. But just as we were about to leave we saw Elchin ambling down the sidewalk, in no particular hurry. He presented us with forty dollars in change and we thanked him effusively, grateful we could now afford to buy dinner. Little did we guess that this would be our life in Central Asia: a flurry of inscrutable transactions, enormous trust placed in strangers, sketchy arrangements to move a little farther down the Silk Road. We thanked Elchin once again and asked for a receipt. He just laughed, not unkindly, I think, but more as a hint that we were really pushing our luck.

  “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” observed Robert Frost, yet equally something there is that does, for how else to explain their ubiquity, the unremitting brag of them everywhere? Whether buttressed with dirt roads or red tape, barbed wire or bribes, the various walls of the world have one aspect in common: they all posture as righteous and necessary parts of the landscape. That we live on a planet drawn and quartered is a fact most Canadians have the luxury of ignoring, for our passports open doors everywhere—with the notable exception of Central Asia, where North Americans face the kind of suspicion and resistance would-be tourists from Uzbekistan get from Canada, which offers a taste of life on the far side of the wall.

  Kazakhstan’s visa application process was fairly straightforward, though it involved a mountain of paperwork and patience. Kyrgyzstan’s was similar—a little too similar, actually, for the embassy simply granted us another Kazakh visa, only with the country’s name scribbled out and “KYRGYZ” stamped above it with ink that bled into other pages in our passports. But the fixed dates we were given the visas for didn’t overlap, which meant our Uzbek and Tajik visas had to fill that gap or we’d be illegal refugees in Central Asia for a month. On a daily basis we called the travel agency, hoping for an update on the Uzbek LOIs, only to be told they were mysteriously “delayed.”

  Crossing the Caspian Sea was another hurdle. We could either fly or take a ferry to the far shore in Aktau, Kazakhstan. Boat travel was cheaper and more appealing, but we couldn’t figure out when the ferry departed. Whomever we approached with questions at the docks delegated the matter to someone else, who would delegate it to someone else, and so on in a cascade of shirked responsibility. “Go, go, go! Always they say this, always what you want is further!” despaired Atlil, an Azeri-speaking Turkish friend of a friend who helped us navigate the shoulder-shrugging attitudes of bureaucrats in Baku. When we finally found the ferry kassa (operator), the surly Russian woman said she didn’t know when the next ferry would arrive, when the last ferry had departed, or how long the crossings generally took, nor was it possible to reserve fares in advance. At this point even Atlil gave up. “Very problem,” he muttered darkly, shrugging his own shoulders now, and it wasn’t clear if he meant the kassa or us.

  At least we were sleeping better. Mel and I had gratefully accepted an alternate Couchsurfing offer from an ebullient Mexican named Julio (“Rhymes with coolio!” he introduced himself) who shared a large, bug-free apartment with a Somali-Kenyan named Idris. Both were master’s students at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, an institution whose very existence took me by surprise, given this country wasn’t renowned for handling foreign affairs with tact and sensitivity, at least where Armenia was concerned. Perhaps my understanding of international relations was too by-the-book. A year after our visit, Azerbaijan made headlines for its “caviar diplomacy” with Council of Europe members, finessing their support by offering luxury vacations in Baku and lavish gifts of gold, silk carpets, and astronomically expensive fish roe from the Caspian Sea’s depleted stocks of beluga sturgeon, whose “black caviar” sells for U.S. $2,500 per pound.

  Since Julio and Idris’s apartment didn’t have Internet, Mel and I joined them sometimes at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, where we edited video footage from the trip into a three-minute teaser to post online in hopes of rallying enough donations to afford instant noodles along the rest of the Silk Road. In Baku, thanks to Mel’s cooking, we ate everything but. “Hello, ladies!” Julio would cry whenever he came home with groceries, having usually called Mel three times from the store to confirm ingredients for huevos rancheros, Thai curry, pesto garlic bread, cheeseburgers and fries, and Chinese fried rice. Mel could work wonders when her kitchen wasn’t limited to a tiny pot on a camp stove.

  And so the days blurred by in Baku with no sign of Uzbek LOIs. The Caspian ferry came and went, so we booked flights to Kazakhstan for eleven p.m. on the day our Azerbaijan tourist visas would expire. We hoped this would leave enough time for Uzbekistan to grant us LOIs and visas, but there was still no sign of them the night before we were due to depart.

  “If only we’d applied in Lagoducky,” Mel said miserably.

  “There’s still tomorrow,” I said with an optimism I didn’t feel.

  We searched the kitchen cupboard for the chocolate chip cookies Mel had baked the night before, but Julio confessed he’d eaten them all for breakfast. “Sorry, ladies!” he called out from the next room, where he and Idris were playing video games. So we made tea and drank it in silence, wondering where our Silk Road went from here. The night sky in Baku was pale and rheumy with light pollution, the city’s steady bleed of
photons into Cassiopeia and beyond, and as I stared out the window I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen stars.

  The Uzbek LOI delay, it turned out, was entirely my fault. On the letter of employment part of the application I’d naively confessed to being a writer and even mentioned the freelance environmental policy work I’d done for an NGO after quitting MIT. I have no idea why I freely made these admissions, given Uzbekistan refuses to grant visas to journalists and expelled foreign non-profits from the country in the 1990s. Mel had prudently declared herself a student. As a result of my idiotic honesty, the Uzbek Ministry of Information was investigating my credentials and possible motives for travelling to their country, according to the travel agency handling our visa application process. Whether the agency had known the reason for the delay all along or had only just found out, they refused to say. Either way, the moral of this story is to lie through your teeth when it comes to borders and bureaucracy.

  Mel had the enormous grace not to be mad at me, though my screw-up meant we barely scrambled out of Azerbaijan before our tourist visas expired. It didn’t help that Azerbaijan Airlines made us unpack our bikes from the cardboard boxes we’d painstakingly procured and taped together in Baku, forcing us to expensively cocoon them instead in what looked like Saran Wrap. This thin pretence of protection meant the frames, gears, and wheels had no padding beyond the clothes we’d wrapped around them, but somehow the bikes landed in Aktau, Kazakhstan, in one piece.

  The next day we vowed to continue bashing our heads against the nearest Uzbek embassy, now two thousand miles away in the former Kazakh capital of Almaty. “You’re sure we can bring our bikes on the train?” Mel grilled the ticketing agent. Travelling with bicycles is far more challenging than travelling on them, so we’d debated leaving our cycling gear in Aktau because we planned on coming back here with our Uzbek visas anyway. But if we weren’t granted visas, there was no point in returning, and leaving the bikes behind might tempt bureaucratic fate.

  The travel agent reassured us that bikes were no problem. “Da, da,” she muttered.

  “And there’s food included with the ticket?” I asked. “Like meals served?” I assumed this would be the case on a seventy-two-hour sleeper train but wanted to make sure.

  “Da, da, da, da,” she intoned wearily.

  In these half-hearted reassurances we should’ve heard the ominous opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth. At the station the next day I guarded our bags on the platform in the pouring rain while Mel wheeled the bikes to the baggage car, where she was forced to bribe the attendant to get them on the train. For the second time in as many days we weren’t sure if we’d ever see our bikes again, especially when he hand-scribbled a dubious receipt for Mel. Then we boarded only to learn, based on the vast quantities of food other passengers had brought, that there was no meal service. All we had was stale bread, a few apples, and the kind of peanut butter that lists peanuts last among its many ingredients, most of which I recognized from organic chemistry classes. But it was too late to bolster supplies. The doors clanked shut with amputative force and we creaked off to Almaty.

  The train swayed drunkenly on its tracks and men swayed drunkenly through the cars. People were stacked in bunks like produce on shelves, some fresh, some overripe, most way past expiration. Outside, the desert was dull and wet with rain, a wide stare of dirt and grass. Blinking into view every few hours were concrete-block towns prowled by skinny dogs, all ribs and scuttle. I worried we’d look like them by the end of the ride, given our lack of food, although the air itself seemed caloric with vodka and fried dough vapours. Fortunately the Kazakhs across the aisle were as generous as they were prepared. Arrayed on the table in between their bunks was a feast of fried fish, boiled eggs, some kind of salty and oily soup, deep-fried bread, hard jewels of candy, and a skinned goat’s head. They even brought porcelain plates and metal cutlery. After handing us forks and knives, they urged Mel and me to pare meat from the goat’s brow.

  Throughout the meal the Kazakhs chatted and joked with each other, their smiles so huge they absorbed eyes, joy triggering a brief blindness. A grizzled old man walked past me and playfully pinched my nose. Children swung through the aisles as though the train were a jungle gym, and I envied them their squirmy impropriety as we sat with the adults sipping tea. A red-faced toddler with curly blond hair and legs like stumps crawled into Mel’s lap, crushing her quads. She had the pudgiest cheeks I’d ever seen. Later she wobbled down the aisle, kissing all the other little kids she could find, but the vast bumpers of those cheeks mostly prevented her lips from making contact.

  We kept waiting for others to go to sleep, or at least the kids, not wanting toddlers to outlast us, but soon enough we gave up. Mel slid sideways into the upper bunk, which barely fit her from head to toe. “So cozy!” she giggled. I squeezed into the bunk beneath, its ceiling so low I could feel the heat of my breath bounce back onto my face. There were no curtains for the bunks, so we slept fully dressed. The sheets that had looked so crisp in plastic upon boarding the train were now clammy and wrinkled with our collective exhalations. I pulled one over me for a pretence of privacy.

  Whenever the train stopped, the already hot air became unbearably stagnant. I pressed my hands and face against the window, its glass luxuriously cold if damp with condensation. Rain pearled on the outside pane. The bunk was barely wider than my shoulders, and I had to brace myself to avoid pitching into the aisle as the train rocked along, making it hard to sleep. I thought about how Mel was forbidden from dozing in her parents’ car as a kid, as were any visiting friends. “Look, kids,” her dad would say, “you don’t want to miss this,” nodding at the same fields and forests we saw every day from the school bus. Mel still finds it hard to sleep in moving vehicles, and I wondered whether she was awake now. I didn’t want to ask in case I woke her. Eventually I drifted off myself and dreamed about snakes, specifically about adopting a coral snake as a pet, which was strange because I wasn’t fond of reptiles. My sheet slipped off while I was dreaming, but an older lady very sweetly draped it back over me. At least I assume that’s what happened, because all I remember is waking up and kicking out in fright, convinced a snake was twining around my legs. The woman, startled by my reaction, beat a quick retreat down the aisle. “I’m so sorry,” I called after her in the wrong language.

  “You okay?” Mel asked, peering down at me from the top bunk. I explained what had happened and she nodded; it made as much sense as anything else on this trip, itself surreal and unpredictable from moment to moment. Was I already dreaming of snakes when the lady draped the sheet over my legs, or did the sensation of the sheet summon the dream in an instant? Does a dream anticipate or merely reflect a given reality? I often wondered the same thing about the Silk Road.

  The next morning we sniffed out the dining car, a bright, breezy room with vases of fake red roses decorating all the tables. Mel and I ordered hot water to mix with Nescafé because we had scant money to spare for anything more substantial, and settled into the chairs with books. Before long a balding Kazakh man with beer on his breath joined us, despite the surplus of other available places to sit. He wore an off-white tank top with yellow armpit stains and stared dully into enormous distances, occasionally slurring a question at us in Russian while leaning in uncomfortably close. We pointedly ignored him until he went away and found his own table, where he ordered a large glass of beer. After a few sips he fell asleep.

  Kazakhstan was a fast slide through sameness. I periodically turned the vase of fake roses so that their petals followed the sun. A woman walked by with an open briefcase full of shiny metal watches, but nobody in the dining car wanted to invest in watching time crawl. The slower the better, as far as I was concerned. The train ride offered a welcome suspension from stress and logistics, a blissful surrender to fatalism. Would the LOIs for Uzbekistan come through? Was the Silk Road as we’d dreamed it over? Would we ever see our bikes again? I sipped coffee that sloshed with the train and stared out
the window as if I had nothing else to do in the world. Because, as I realized with relief and amazement, I didn’t.

  The steppe seemed to soldier on forever. Gaunt horses searched the dunes for spiky grasses with their soft lips. Once in a while industrial pipelines bridged the tracks in inverted U’s. We passed rusting machinery and crumbling buildings, outposts that looked abandoned until little kids ran outside to wave at the train. We passed graveyards of fenced tombs crowned with crescent tin moons, the most solidly built structures around. And at some point, though I couldn’t tell exactly when or where, we passed north of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, launch pad for the Russian space program.

  I felt a twinge—not of regret, exactly, but of old ambitions shucked almost completely. I’d always expected to see this part of the world, but not from the fogged-over windows of a stinky, overcrowded sleeper train. In my childhood imaginings, I was on a Saturn V rocket launching for Mars.

  Named for a town that is actually hundreds of miles away, just to throw off spies, this fenced-off spaceport was the launch pad for Sputnik, as well as the first man and woman in space—and, less gloriously, for an unknown number of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Astronauts rave about how they can’t see any borders from low Earth orbit, yet the whole enterprise of space exploration is fuelled by a rabid nationalism. The same loyalty to arbitrary lines that sparked the Cold War also launched humans to the moon. How does cynical ambition, the capacity for mutually assured destruction, give rise to something as wondrous as a stroll on the Sea of Tranquility?

  I thought of the Wright brothers, who shortly after making their giant leap at Kitty Hawk sold their plane to the highest bidding military, a fact I’d taken in at Oxford like a knife to the heart. But whether you blatantly sell out like the Wrights or not, all science and exploration carries a Promethean risk: if you steal fire from the gods, you can’t predict or control how the flames will be put to use. The “survival of the fittest” mechanism behind Darwin’s theory of evolution was adopted by the Nazis as eugenic justification for genocide. Fanny Bullock Workman’s careful surveys of Siachen helped map the way to war over the glacier. When Galileo pointed what we now call a telescope at the rings of Saturn, the device was better known as a spyglass, and soldiers on Siachen use versions of them still.