Hot Spot: Lifting the veil

As the secretive 'Stans' start opening up to the tourist dollar, Gill Charlton explores the Silk Road countries of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan

Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Merv: the names conjure romantic images from my childhood of great walled cities, royal pavilions set in rose gardens and shimmering turquoise domes, beacons for merchants leading trains of two-humped Bactrian camels across the merciless black sands of the Karakum Desert.

Central Asia was also the setting for the Great Game, a world of Victorian espionage and reckless adventure played out by British and Russian agents. They found a closed land ruled by xenophobic, power-crazed despots. In this respect, not much has changed, but slowly the lure of the tourist dollar is opening doors. Even Turkmenistan, the most secretive of all the "Stans", is issuing tourist visas.

With so much of the Middle East currently out of bounds, this part of the world has acquired new attraction for those seeking something out of the ordinary. And extraordinary it certainly is.

"There is a worldwide fuel shortage," our Uzbek guide, Nita, tells us as we pass yet another rusting petrol station on the road to Samarkand. She frowns when I gently disabuse her. The country's schools and universities are also closed for the autumn as students are forced to help bring in the cotton harvest.

"They really enjoy it," says Nita.

"They live in hostels, go to parties and sing karaoke." Has she picked cotton? "Only for a few days," she says, revealing her regime connections. So was it fun? "No, it was very hard," she finally admits.

We give up guide-baiting. It is all too easy in Uzbekistan, the repressive former Soviet republic run by president-for-life Islam Karimov.

Fortunately, we have Jude on board, a British tour leader who can separate fact from fiction for our group of eight looking for a Silk Road adventure.

"If you have any doubt about our power, look at our buildings," says an inscription on an arch with a 22m span designed by Tamerlane, the son of a small-town chief who battled his way to rule from Delhi to Damascus in the 14th century. He rebuilt Samarkand after it had been sacked by Genghis Khan, but cracks appeared in the brickwork even before the scaffolding came down.

Colin Thubron, visiting the city 20 years ago, remarked on how few of the glazed turquoise tiles remained on the crumbling mosques and madrassahs (religious schools).

Tamerlane would have approved of the massive post-independence renovation programme, though purists are appalled. The monumental archways and minarets of the Registan, made from millions of slim biscuit-coloured bricks and faced with glazed tiles in vibrant shades of blue, yellow and ochre, rise again to the height of an English cathedral.

A keen eye will spot the subtler hues in patches of original tilework; the very best - flowing majolica script and mosaics of delicate tulips, lotus and iris - made by enslaved Indians and Persian masters, are found in the Shah-i-Zinda mausoleums.

I was disappointed to find that Samarkand's historic core has become a sanitised showpiece for the regime. Tourists are herded along an avenue linking the main sights (electric carts available) past kitsch souvenir shops, a model school and an approved restaurant.

Bukhara, a day's journey by road, is much more engaging. Domestic life still goes on behind high walls, but here schoolchildren engage strangers in the street to try out their rote-learnt English.

Visitors stay in converted merchants' houses among the dusty alleys and can safely walk at night through the cavernous medieval trading domes that take on the cloak of ghosts past.

By day the madrassahs, once places of contemplation and groundbreaking scientific experiment, are turned over to shopping arcades where women plead with us to buy cashmere from China, batik from Indonesia and sparkly shawls and spices from India.

We leave Uzbekistan through a scruffy customs hall and trundle our suitcases across a barren no-man's land to its neighbour Turkmenistan, which sees fewer than 5000 tourists a year. On this side is a neat modern immigration office with chairs, tables and an air of efficiency.

Our government-assigned guide, Murad, is funny and well-travelled. He is also adept at fielding tricky questions and disarmingly honest about his country's lack of human rights. "We know our leader was a tyrant," he says of former president Saparmurat Niyazov, whose personality cult took the country down the road to isolation.

"But we are a new country and we needed him." When Turkmenistan became independent in 1991 it exported only gas, oil and cotton. Everything else, including all its food, was imported from Russia.

Little appears to have changed: the state runs almost every aspect of people's lives. Private enterprise and political dissent are stamped on.

Our minibus bumps along a poor road ("we haven't cracked roadbuilding yet") to Merv, said to be the largest city in the world until Genghis Khan's men put its entire population to the sword in 1219 for backing the wrong side.

There are still long stretches of city wall that rise to 30m and a few tumbledown palaces, but the city has been largely reclaimed by the desert.

Archaeologists have instead concentrated their efforts on the nearby oasis of Gonur Depe, intent on proving it to be one of the world's top four urban civilisations in 2000BC (the others being Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley) and the birthplace of the Zoroastrian faith.

The site is an unexpected delight: the excavations have revealed a vast maze of mud-brick walls standing several metres high. Viktor, the director of the museum in nearby Mary, conjures up a world of prosperous farmers growing wheat, worshipping at fire and water temples, and ruled by kings who lived in palaces.

The rich were buried in tombs decorated with intricate mosaics of mythical creatures and surrounded by valued possessions: solid-gold goblets, carved ivory trinkets and lapis beads, which we view later in Mary. If this site were anywhere else in the world it would be crawling with tour groups. We have it to ourselves and can wander at will through buildings where terracotta wine amphorae lie abandoned where they were when the river that fed the oasis changed course.

"Wait until you see our new capital. You will love it even more than this," says Murad.

Ashgabat entered the Guinness World Records last year for having the greatest concentration of marble buildings in the world. We drive from the airport along miles of pearly white canyons: ministries, office buildings and apartment blocks embellished with gold domes, balconies and railings. The result is a car crash of Western and Islamic architectural motifs that leaves us speechless.

Niyazov's successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, continues to run the country as his personal fiefdom. A former dentist, he has designed the new Institute of Dentistry in the shape of a giant molar. It is one of many such bizarre designs. The Arch of Neutrality - topped by a gold-plated statue of Niyazov that rotates so it always faces the sun - resembles a Sputnik rocket.

The nearby gas ministry takes the form of a giant cigarette lighter and the main hospital is supposed to be a giant syringe. Murad points all these buildings out with pride and tells us that the cost of this megalomania is £40-billion and counting. The funny thing is that nobody seems to enter or leave any of these buildings.

Like an Orwellian Big Brother, Berdimuhamedow beams down on his subjects from giant electronic screens that line the city's eight-lane highways. There is little traffic and few people in the streets except for roadsweepers in padded coats brushing up fallen leaves (nobody would dare drop litter).

It is something of a relief to find pockets of normality beyond the white marble. The old Russian market sits among dilapidated concrete apartment blocks bristling with satellite dishes.

Such is the xenophobia in Turkmenistan that most people avoid eye contact with foreigners, but here the traders press us with free biscuits and apricots. The young women browsing the stalls are beautiful: storybook princesses in their figure-hugging floor-length velvet gowns, embroidered caps and long black plaits.

We move on to spend the night camping beside the gas crater at Darvasa. In October, the desert days are hot but after dark the temperature plummets. Despite sleeping beside the world's largest gas fire, I shiver through to dawn swaddled in a padded down coat as well as a sleeping bag. I wonder how Marco Polo would have coped; perhaps he layered up in furs.

The different strands of the Silk Road continue west through Afghanistan and Iran, but we turn east again and cross the Amu Darya, the once-mighty River Oxus, to the fertile oasis of Khorezm, a bucolic land of small farms, orchards and ruined fortresses dating back to the age of Alexander. At its heart lies Khiva, an atmospheric museum city that belies its dark history of cruel khans, slavery and misogyny.

Dilia, our guide, says that in 1924 when the Russians banned the veil here, a group of local women came to the main square and threw their headcoverings on a pyre. "It was a gesture of solidarity," she says, "like in the '60s when we burnt our bras." But when the women returned home they were stoned to death by their husbands and brothers for bringing shame on their families.

Today brides parade through the streets of Khiva wearing tiaras and white Western-style dresses to the tomb of Pahlavan Mahmud, a 14th-century Muslim saint. They come to have their union blessed and to drink water from a well said to aid fertility. Outside the mosque their girlfriends dance provocatively with the local boys to rock music from a boombox.

This strange fusion of East and West, of religion and superstition, underlies modern Central Asian culture as its people struggle to find ways forward while their leaders want to turn the clock back and control every aspect of their public and private lives. It is an interesting struggle to witness. - © The Daily Telegraph

IF YOU GO...

GETTING THERE

Gill Charlton travelled with Wild Frontiers (wildfrontierstravel.com), which runs guided group tours all over Central Asia.

WHERE TO STAY

SAMARKAND: Hotel Malika Prime (malika-samarkand.com). A convenient hotel with simple clean rooms near the Registan square. Double room R800 through booking.com.

BUKHARA: Lyabi House (lyabi-house.com). A 19th-century merchant's house in the old centre with 40 rooms. Helpful reception staff who speak good English. Double room R900.

KHIVA: Orient Star (hotelorientstar.com). Rooms are converted student cells in a former madrassah within Khiva's old walls. Best rooms on the second floor (upper level). Double room R900 booked through its sister hotel in Samarkand. All hotels have free Wi-Fi access.- ©The Daily Telegraph