KIWIS ON THE SILK ROAD
With a lot of planning and a little bit of luck two Kiwi couples successfully completed a ‘trip of a lifetime’ along Central Asia’s famed Silk Road. Jeanette Knudson has the story.
Imagine a clear blue sky, the atmosphere perfectly still and the weather amazing. Mountain peaks upon mountain peaks covered with pristine white snow disappear into the distance. A gravel road runs across the plateau, strewn with melting snow; the road has been recently graded, the snow piled back into banks along the sides. If we could see 1200 kms to the south east we might view the Himalayans and Mt Everest. We are at nearly 3000 metres above sea level, where it’s possible to get altitude sickness if you’re there long enough. We are in the Pamir Mountains, the roof of the world, just four sixty-plus New Zealanders and our young Kyrgyz guide, Talent. There’s not another person or vehicle around. We park the Nissans which have been coughing in the thin air, and get out, surveying the spectacular scenery. The border post is a few kilometres behind us. We’ve left China and are now in Kyrgyzstan. Our journey takes in the Silk Road and traverses 16,000 kilometres from Hong Kong to Poland, crossing eight borders with 10 or 12 different guides. Nearly two years prior to crossing the Pamir Mountains, our friends Maurice and Anne O’Reilly told us they would like to drive the Silk Road and invited us to join them. We agreed. Both couples owned a pre-millennium 4WD Nissan Terrano, ideal for the journey because they were not too computerized.
Preparing to go
But there was a massive amount of preparation – educating ourselves about the countries, the route to take, spare vehicle parts, communication radios between the vehicles, visas, inoculations like rabies, what to take with us like emergency food and a full medical kit, and everything else from spades to wet wipes. Anne took a portable toilet and I took disposable incontinence nappies against Delhi belly – thankfully they were not used. As we prepared, I dreamed of bed bugs, squat toilets, political unrest, police corruption and awful diarrhoea – all realities in the countries we drove through, but not as bad as in my imagination. At the last moment, before the cars were placed in a shipping container to be
transported from Auckland to Shenzhen, China, Maurice had a brain wave and we had the route of our journey and the flags of the countries we visited, signwritten along the sides of the vehicles. Officialdom knew what we had in mind and the local people could see their own country and how it fitted in with our journey. The signwriting became a focal point where people gathered to interact with us, usually through one of our guides.
Our route
We determined our route before we left home. We flew to Hong Kong and collected the vehicles in Shenzhen across the harbour from Hong Kong. We expected, once we arrived, to take possession of the vehicles at the port and be off immediately, but it took us five frustrating days to work through the bureaucracy of drivers’ licences, vehicle testing, insurances and so on with the help of our Chinese manager. Once done, we drove north through the limestone karst country around Guilin and up to Xi’an, where we biked on the massive city walls and visited the renowned terracotta soldiers. After Xi’an we joined the Silk Road, turning west through the oasis cities that skirt the north of the Taklamakan desert. It was a very different China – less people and traffic, open modern leafygreen cities, clear blue skies, many of the people Moslem Uyghurs rather than Chinese Han. After a month of driving in China we arrived at Kashgar near the border, with its distinctive Middle Eastern culture. Then it was over the Pamir Mountains via the Irkeshtam Pass into Kyrgyzstan, which only six months before had seen serious ethnic riots. After two days in Kyrgyzstan, we spent two weeks travelling through Uzbekistan. These ‘Stans used to be part of the Soviet Union until its break-up in 1990. A year later they became independent. Today they are all dictatorships and police states of varying degrees. Nevertheless they are fascinating and the ordinary people are friendly and welcoming. It is a land of blue tiled domes, madrassas and mosques, and cities with exotic names like Samarkand and Bukhara.
Sea change
We made a side trip to the Aral Sea, possibly the world’s greatest ecological disaster, and camped on the shore. Then it was into the last of our Stans, Kazakhstan, and a visit to the Caspian Sea before travelling across Russia, Ukraine and Poland – = lands of Orthodox churches with their beautiful gold domes and elaborate icons. But they are also countries where the police earn their keep by stopping innocent motorists on trumped up charges and fining them, as we experienced. Our journey together finished in Krakow, Poland where we visited the very sobering Nazi death camp of Auschwitz – over one million Jews died there. The O’Reillys went on to race at the Nurburgring in Germany, and Martin and I travelled to Denmark and Norway for another month and a half.
The main story is a brief summary of two and a half months travel on the Silk Road. Of course that near-mythical term does not describe a single road, but rather a series of routes from China through Central Asia to Iran, the Middle East and Europe. Lesser roads went into Afghanistan, India and Russia, with the traditional beginning in Ch’ang-an, China, Xi’an of modern times. From there the tendrils of the Silk Road stretched west to the shores of the Black and the Mediterranean Seas. While the route was named for the exotic cloth of silk, other commodities were also traded, such as porcelain, horses, gold, fruits and spices. The Silk Road had its heyday between 100 BC and 800 AD, but trade continued into the thirteenth century, it’s most famous travellers being the three Polos, father, brother and son, Marco.
Sturdy Nissans and rugged roads
Our 4WD Nissans equipped us well for the rigours of the road. Though we were left with an overwhelming impression of China’s march into the modern world, we still experienced Old China. The new roads were amazing – straight through mountains and valleys via tunnels and viaducts, often high above industries or farms. But we also used numerous old roads with their ruts and pot holes, mud and dust. The modern motorways were full of huge trucks heavily laden with goods, one after another, all going to the western cities. Passing them was a mission with our vehicles made for driving on the left hand side of the road.
Making in-roads
The Chinese are also building new roads into Central Asia to replace the old atrocious ones, and soon trucks will be able to drive easily from China to Poland in a couple of days. In fact, the stories of the appalling roads over the Irkeshtam Pass proved to be a thing of the past, though they were still gravelled, steep and winding as we ventured into Kyrgyzstan. The roads in western Uzbekistan were often in a poor state of disrepair and the 4WD vehicles were essential for our journeys to both the Aral and Caspian Seas.
To the Aral Sea
Once we left the main road and turned northeast to the Aral Sea, there were no formed roads, but a choice of wheel tracks to follow across the flat plateau of sparse spindly grey vegetation. It was slow, bumpy, dusty travel. The guide car drove in front, but at one stage Maurice and Martin grew impatient and raced ahead, fanning out onto other tracks, grey dust billowing behind in their effort to outrun him. Refusing to be outdone, he sped past the Nissans to take what he considered his rightful place at the head of the cavalcade. And so we rattled and shook all day across the desert, meeting few other travellers. We concluded that our guides, inexperienced and anxious in the great outdoors, had not taken guided tours to the Aral Sea before and they were, in fact, practising on us. The road to the Caspian Sea proved to be atrocious, a rough bumpy trail across the desert on which we travelled at 20 kilometres for hours. But it was all part of the wonderful adventure.
Squat loos and ‘guest houses’
Toilets away from the cities were always a source of anxiety, horror or amusement. The state of cleanliness or otherwise, whether the flush worked, the smell you met from metres away, the rubbish dump you could see below, the other patrons with whom you shared a long cubicle – all became subjects of conversation.
In Central Asia we stayed in several so called guest houses – homes belonging to locals who vacated them to give us accommodation and earn extra income. There was no running water as we understand it; just plastic tanks they manually filled above a basin from which water ran down when you turned a tap on. The toilet was outside, a version of the New Zealand at-the-bottom-of-thegarden long drop. The Central Asian varieties were squat toilets with just a narrow slit in the wooden floor. It was the geriatric knees that were the problem, but I learned to cope. We slept in the guest houses on bedrolls that were rolled up in the day time. You could feel the wooden floor boards but we were tired enough to sleep well.
Food and vodka
Food was always an interesting experience. We usually ate in small restaurants where the locals ate, because it was cheaper and far more interesting than in the hotels. It wasn’t easy to make a selection from a menu in a totally foreign language, though sometimes pictures accompanied the wording. In China Anne got our guide to write on a serviette, ‘No spicy food, please’ so we could show it when ordering. In Central Asia we tried the traditional dish, plov; once it was unpalatably fatty, and another time, delicious. On our last night in Russia our booked accommodation proved to be a very run down former Soviet health spa, and we wondered what we were coming to. However the hospitality was warm and genuine. At dinner we were seated with the director and his friend. Neither spoke English but the friend spoke a lit tle French. The director was armed with bottle of vodka and we all enjoyed great hilarity as he encouraged us to stand and raise our tiny glasses again and again. On the subject of vodka, Russia’s problems are very evident even to the casual eye. Supermarkets contain shelves and shelves of different types of vodka, some very cheap. Urban back streets have piles of empty bottles and every young man carries a bottle with him. No wonder the young women are trying to marry foreigners over the internet to escape their future in Russia.
Hunting for diesel
Our two vehicles ran on diesel and everywhere we purchased diesel with ease – except in Uzbekistan. The first time we called at a number of service stations, all with diesel pumps but no one would sell us diesel. Eventually station attendants indicated we follow a young man in his old Lada. He led us into a run-down industrial area and told us to wait. Soon he returned and opened his boot to reveal a row of five gallon plastic yellow containers and he poured the contents into our cars. Four or five times we bought fuel on what seemed the black market – and sometimes it was real cloak and dagger material, with the vendors posting guards to ensure no one witnessed the exchange.
Chaos at border crossings
The border crossings were both entertaining and frustrating experiences. Often the more undemocratic and restricted a country is, the more bureaucratic and inefficient it becomes, with bribes, corruption and tedious form filling. Each border crossing before Europe took between three and five hours. We queued to leave one country, our passports inspected half a dozen times and our luggage and car contents looked over. Then we drove along the road to go through the process again to enter the new country via another lengthy process. The most shambolic crossing was between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Queues and chaos everywhere. It was amazing when we sailed effortlessly into the European Union. We felt very grateful to live in a democracy like New Zealand.
There were dangers as well.
In Russia we were on the main road and an old Lada came headlong out of a side road, straight towards us at high speed. I screamed. Martin braked and swerved, and just in time the inebriated driver realised we were there and veered away, narrowly missing us by a whisker and not stopping to apologise. We were left shaking at our near miss, grateful for God’s protection. Would I do it all again? Without a doubt. I came home looking for my next adventure, remembering with pleasure the many people and events we met on the Silk Road.
Writing up the adventure
Martin and Jeanette Knudsen, together with Maurice and Anne O’Reilly, have tackled a number of 4WD adventures, including in New Zealand, Australia and Africa. In 2011 they drove 16,000 kilometres from Hong Kong to Krakow. Both Maurice and Jeanette wrote diaries and blogs as they journeyed and took hundreds of photos. Back home, Jeanette decided to turn the adventure into a book. “Four Kiwis on the Silk Road” was published in November 2017. The aim was to relive the journey, as well as share it with a wider audience of both armchair travellers and actual adventurers on the Silk Road. The book provides a very readable and interesting account, with route maps and 40 colour photos.