Investment Biker

by Jim Rogers

  We passed thousands of dwellings dug out of lava or sandstone, walls of man-made caves carved into cliffs.

  The Christians had dug huge underground cities here, some more than a hundred feet deep, to avoid their enemies. When we examined a map of Turkey, we saw why. This was the only way through this part of the world, because the Black Sea was to the north and the Mediterranean was to the south. Over the centuries any army heading east or west would have pushed through this corridor. The Christian Turks, therefore, had built their cities underground and in the sides of mountains so they would be disguised. These cities had been discovered by travelers over the past five years, and now a tourist boom had started.

  I hit a pothole and put a huge dent in my front wheel, which made me worry about the next ten thousand miles. In Ankara I had the dent pounded out and we hit the road again.

  Now we would find out how well we’d planned. Not only was there no BMW dealer between here and Japan, there wasn’t a single shop from which to buy so much as a spare tire or a spark plug for a Western vehicle—car or motorcycle. Six thousand miles to Tokyo, across mountains and deserts, with nothing more than what was strapped on our rear frames! We had four tires tied to our luggage racks, but once these were gone we’d be out of luck.

  We made a dramatic drop to sea level, but the Black Sea, filthy and polluted, wasn’t as romantic in reality as we had anticipated. The Communists had poured everything into it, all sorts of garbage and industrial wastes, and neither they nor the Turks cared about environmental protection.

  Trabzon was lively and active. From the reactions we provoked—stares and excited talk about the bikes—it was clear that few foreigners had been through here recently. At night a cannon went off to signal iftar, the hour to break the Ramadan fast. The calls to prayer started at four in the morning, the cries clear and haunting in the thin early air.

  On a trip like this it was impossible to take along much food. When we went into restaurants, naturally the menus were written in Turkish. As usual on these occasions, we used a combination of pidgin English and sign language to ask if we could go into the kitchen. They always said yes. These were big kitchens, as if built in more prosperous times. Usually there was only one stove working, a lot of space, and not much food. The kitchens weren’t clean by my mother’s standards, but they certainly looked hygienic enough to a hungry traveler. We peered into the pots and pointed. There would always be three or four things—chicken, mutton, maybe duck. We wouldn’t eat anything raw. At the refrigerated drink-box we’d point to the bottled water, the soft drinks, or the cold beer.

  Then we’d go back to the gray, dingy dining room to wait, where we were given slow and curious country stares. The two of us, in leather jackets and chaps to protect us from the wind, rain, and spills, were like a couple of Martians entering a provincial village.

  With me leading, we headed for that part of the Soviet Union that used to be known as Turkistan.

  More terrific driving along the Black Sea, then our first bad rain day since Europe.

  As we approached the Georgian border, I decided that if I were a bright young man, I’d come here to the Turkish side and buy up all the land I could find. The map told the whole story: Now that the border was open, the traffic would return to this centuries-old route and there’d be a boom. Land here was selling for nothing, maybe twenty dollars an acre. Sooner or later this spot would be a major gateway to Europe for the Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis, who have always been the most prosperous people in the Soviet Union.

  I didn’t buy any land myself, because I invest only in what I believe I’ll be able to sell quickly, whether I actually can or not. Besides, this would be work, and I didn’t want to work anymore.

  At the Georgian border, cars had to pass over a sunken viewing pit so they could be inspected from below, but we crossed without any trouble.

  We headed straight for the black market. We rarely had to look far to find it; usually it found us. As you might expect, it is very profitable to deal in the black markets that existed in any country foolish enough to enforce currency exchange controls. The number of such countries was rapidly diminishing as governments came to realize that such controls didn’t work.

  At that time the official Soviet exchange rate for travelers was six rubles per dollar. On the black market I got between twelve and eighteen rubles, whereas today you might get 400 times that. This was one reason we carried only a small sum in traveler’s checks but a healthy stock of cash in a variety of hard currencies: Black marketeers don’t take traveler’s checks. I preferred the slight risk of being robbed by a thief to the certainty of being ripped off by a state bank.

  We headed across Georgia toward the Central Asian Republics, what I still think of as Turkistan—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan—what romantic names they were!—on toward China.

  Along here I could almost see the vast trains of two-humped Bactrian camels, chosen because they could carry four hundred to five hundred pounds of freight and keep up a killing pace across thousands of miles. I could almost hear the clopping of hooves and the jingle of pack bells.

  The roads weren’t good, narrow with broken pavement, gravel, and small shoulders, even worse than in Turkey, which was pretty damn bad. On a motorcycle you notice every inch of roadway, because any bad patch can cause a skid and a spill. You’re closer to the road, physically and mentally, than in a car. Still, I’d driven through many countries without good roads, and out in front again because Tabitha was worried about accidents, I made a certain amount of speed.

  As we approached Tbilisi, Tabitha again complained I was going too fast.

  This bothered me; I’m always impatient with delays. I figured we were still in the breaking-in stage of the trip, and from my point of view things were getting better.

  On all my trips I’d rarely had a companion on another bike. Of course, traveling with anybody means living in close quarters, and people rapidly get on each other’s nerves. What is one traveler’s essential rest stop is another’s intolerable delay. From earlier trips I was used to a certain pace, a certain speed, and when there was no reason to tarry, to me it was normal to drive for eight to ten hours a day and make all the time I could. That way, when I got to an interesting stop, I’d have more time for it.

  We talked it over and decided it would be better if she led, as then she could set the pace. If the going got rough, she would slow down.

  Spring arrived. In Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, we saw more evidence of the fall of Communism. Statues of Lenin lay toppled in the street, looking bizarre and out of place.

  To my surprise, here at our first stop in the Soviet Union were state-run liquor stores fully stocked with vodka, wine, champagne, and brandy. Then I remembered the vineyards we had passed. It would be hard to deny the citizens of prosperous Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan the fruits of their own vineyards. These were spirits of excellent quality, too. After all, Churchill himself drank Armenian brandy.

  Intourist, the Soviet state tourism monopoly, was learning to overcharge wildly. A half-liter of Stolichnaya in the Intourist hotel was nine dollars, four times as much as in shops in the street.

  There were lots of new monuments to Georgian heroes. We met some Georgian nationalists, local graduate students. Georgia had always been a hotbed of separatism, we learned. With great pride they told us their country had been a nation for over two thousand years. Historically there were fourteen alphabets in the world, they asserted, and the Georgian was one of them. Of course they had their own calendar. Georgia had always been a trading nation and a crossroads. There was a distinct Georgian form of Christianity that wasn’t Russian Orthodox. Stalin had been a Georgian, to their embarrassment. They showed us Stalin’s mother’s grave. These Georgians felt their country had been stolen by the Russians and tacked onto the Soviet Union, which was true enough.

  I saw similarities with the way the United States had tacked on Texas, New Mexico, and California, steal
ing the territories from Mexico. As those parts of the United States become more Latino, and as the United States begins to suffer its inevitable economic decline, I wonder if we won’t see the same things: ethnic strife and a drive for separatism, either a desire to rejoin Mexico or to be independent.

  The history of the world tells us that no borders have ever remained stable for long. The United States has been so isolated that we’ve forgotten this, but if history is any guide, in a hundred years the borders of the United States won’t be what they are now.

  The Georgians were grasping for their roots. Communism had been imposed on them, a religion, a faith, that had failed. They were forced into a melting pot they never wanted, and now these students were delirious with joy at the thought of liberation. Churches of all sorts were going up, Muslim and Christian. Becoming a man of the cloth was the area’s fastest growing profession. I was seeing firsthand what I’d always thought, that most people build their identity on religion or nationalism.

  Of course, I was curious as to whether capitalism was pushing up buds. Only small restaurants had opened and a few tiny tailor shops, but you could feel the beginning of change. Georgia had always been a merchant area and of a capitalist bent.

  We decided to stay here for a few days. This was the rhythm we would develop on this trip, to drive till we found something interesting and then stop for some time. Meeting one Georgian led to meeting others—professors, writers, filmmakers, publishers, and minor government officials—who all wanted to talk about the massacre. A year before, in April 1989, there had been a street festival celebrating Georgia’s nationhood—a lot of kids out dancing and playing the guitar and serenading, that sort of thing. It was spring, and it had been going on for a few nights. This was not a demonstration, because this crowd wasn’t that far advanced politically; this was still a Communist, military-controlled state. But the damn local general sent in the tanks, at two o’clock in the morning. All these young people dancing in the square and he sent in the tanks. About fifty were killed.

  We went home with a publisher, Alex Zaza, who showed us an underground film about the massacre. A Russian filmmaker had been in town and shot the entire thing. People had run every which way, panicked, and tanks rumbled by. We saw an interview with the father of a girl who had been killed by the Communist soldiers. He kept saying, “What’d they kill her for? My only child! She was a sixteen-year-old girl, down there dancing.”

  The filmmaker had even interviewed the general in charge, went to him as if he were a sympathetic interviewer. At the end he asked, “Don’t you think this will arouse the people of the Soviet Union and they will get rid of people like you?”

  The general looked stunned, as if he suddenly wondered, Wait a minute, what have I been doing here?

  The students showed us the memorial in front of the town hall to those who had fallen in the massacre. Fresh flowers had been placed there. This was so risky, so courageous, that it made the hair on my neck rise, as if at any minute the Communists would sweep down with more tanks to punish the town for its uppity ways.

  In an effort to keep up with world affairs, back home I read three papers, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times of London, and yet I couldn’t remember a line about this bloodbath.

  Then it hit me. Few outside knew about it. A lot was going on in the Soviet Union that wasn’t going to make the Western press, never would, because few from the West ever came to these places. The Times had one or two bureaus in the Soviet Union, in Moscow and maybe Leningrad. Even if it had wanted to send someone, it wasn’t easy to travel here, and probably the reporter in Moscow wouldn’t have wanted to come to Tbilisi. Besides, the spaces here were so vast, thousands and thousands of miles across, that there weren’t enough reporters to cover it all. And of course the Russians weren’t about to tell anybody they’d just had a massacre in Tbilisi.

  The students gave us a copy of the video to smuggle out. Police states and dictators are going to have a hard time in the future. A hundred or even twenty-five years ago you would have printed your protest or plastered it on the wall with posters. Now an amateur with a video camera can make a wallop of a visual impact.

  The next morning I was out jogging and puffed my way into the town square, over which rose the big statue of Lenin. I circled it on a look-see. Without warning the police came out of nowhere and stopped me, pointing guns.

  I shook my head, not understanding Russian. They gestured at the statue and back at me, their eyes accusatory. They were afraid I was some rabid nationalist intent on destroying the last monument to Lenin in town. In sign language I gestured and said hotel in Russian, pointing in the direction I hoped it lay. I went jogging off.

  Still under martial law, this was obviously a hot area. The Russian army told us not to take the main route to Baku, that it might not be safe, and suggested a more scenic way, which I was sure meant even worse roads. We talked it over and decided to ignore their directive and took the main route. We passed a column of twenty friendly tanks—friendly to us, anyway—heading east to help occupy Baku, their steel treads wrecking the road’s already worn asphalt.

  The next day, four hundred miles farther on, as we rode into Baku, a major center of oil production, all around the road lay rusted pipes and drill rigs, idle, unmaintained, a cluttered junk heap. No wonder Soviet oil production was down. Communism again. Nobody owned any of this, so nobody took care of it. As long as a manager met his quota, that was fine. If meeting his quota meant stripping a few drilling rigs to have six left instead of sixty, he’d do it, he didn’t care. This oil field looked like a scrap yard. Under capitalism the eye of the owner is constantly on a building or a business or he loses it. Not the case here.

  This was one of the reasons the Soviets never built their capital base, because they’d never built any capital. Riding along the Caspian Sea we saw hundreds of these discarded drilling rigs, all stripped. Nobody maintained the pressure in the wells. Back home you maintained them because you wanted the extra 50 percent from a well. Here, they took the oil off the top and left it. They were doing what they accused the capitalists of, skimming off the easy money and running. Capitalists would have maintained these wells till they ran dry, otherwise they’d be bankrupt capitalists.

  We pulled into Baku, where there had been a gigantic massacre three months before in January. Three hundred to four hundred people had been killed, but this time it had been Christian Armenians slaughtered by Muslim Azerbaijanis. Baku was still under martial law—lots of Soviet personnel carriers, the army strongly in evidence—even though all the Armenians had left Baku since the killings. My thesis about ethnic strife in the Soviet Union was unfolding before my eyes.

  Few Americans knew about the massacre, even though Baku is one of the largest cities in the Soviet Union, the heart of its major oil-producing region. It was down here on the Caspian Sea, where Western reporters didn’t come much.

  A large portion of Baku’s population had been Armenian, but two months before we arrived they had returned to Armenia. They wouldn’t sit here and be slaughtered anymore. The mobs had even ripped down the statue of the Armenians’ best poet, their Shakespeare, from the outside wall of the main library, leaving a blank space. One ethnic group didn’t want the heroes of another group to stand. When things go wrong on a macroeconomic level, it’s almost always this way. People find someone to blame, whether it’s the blacks, whites, Christians, Jews, Muslims—whoever—especially if there’s a successful minority, like the German Jews in the 1930s.

  Baku was under such tight martial law that we couldn’t even find a restaurant open at night.

  We crossed the Caspian by ferry to Krasnovodsk.

  This put us on the eastern, desert side of the sea; in contrast, the western side had been wet and fertile.

  Out here, too, the region was shifting, changing—Uzbeks against Meshedi Turks, Uzbeks and Kirghiz fighting in Osh. There had been clashes in Samarkand in 1988, and in Tashkent, Ashkh
abad, and Novyy Uzen in 1989. Some of the skirmishes had been against the Russians, but much of this had been tribe against tribe, one ethnic group attacking another.

  The usual reasons were all around us. Not only eco-catastrophe, but Islamic fundamentalism and plain old bigotry, plus all the usual economic reasons: a shortage of land, appalling living conditions, and a lack of jobs. Growing seasonal cotton meant that for much of the year the local men had no work.

  What a fascinating part of the world! Back in the early days of Communism, this had been known as the Virgin Lands. The bright young men of that time had come down here to make their way in agriculture. They had to irrigate to grow crops in the deserts, so they’d used the Aral Sea for water. Khrushchev had been one of those bright young men, and he and his crew irrigated much of the Kara Kum Desert. Kazakhstan had become a gigantic farmland, a desert that had bloomed into vast arable tracts. The Russians had piled in here. The area became 40 percent Russian, whereas before it had been all Muslim and Turkic.

  Khrushchev had come down here to make his fortune. Brezhnev had been here, too, under Khrushchev, which had given him his big chance. For them, this had been the California gold rush. If they could succeed, their fortunes under the Communist system would be made. In the same way that Ronald Reagan, from the Golden State of California, could become president of the United States, these fellows would hail from a golden part of their world, one they had transformed into the promised land. By the time they were done, Uzbekistan was producing 67 percent of the USSR’s cotton. Kazakhstan was producing a huge proportion of its wheat.

  This farming miracle, however, has required vast amounts of water as well as herbicides and insecticides, which are said to be used in this region at twenty-five times the national rate. The result, after all the years of draining, cultivation, and fertilizing, has been one of the world’s largest environmental disasters. Khrushchev and his crew used two thirds of the water of the Aral Sea for irrigation, and much of the land has been poisoned by sea salt. Flowing north to the arctic, as do all rivers in Siberia, the Aral Sea used to provide 13 percent of all the fish in the Soviet Union; now not a fish in it is alive. The river water and groundwater were salty and contaminated. Rates of birth defects and infant mortality in the region were among the world’s highest. Fishing villages, once at the edge of the Aral Sea, are now thirty miles away, surrounded by dry land.