a2b – Crotos on the Golden Road To Samarkand

We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.
                James Elroy Flecker

This is a section of the tour I’ve been looking forward to. Not that I have any personal knowledge of the place or that I would particularly want to cycle there, but it is a region with an interesting history, a lot of romantic/fairy-tale associations and I wanted to see how easy it was for the riders to communicate via the internet in this tightly controlled country. In the middle ages it was the seat of one of the great empires of Central Asia, founded by تیمور/Timur the Lame/Tamburlaine/Tamerlane/Timurlane/Emir Timur or Amir Temur as Joachim Lent calls him. Whichever way you prefer to spell his name he was a fairly successful Emperor - ruthless and unimaginably cruel, but that’s emperors for you. His speciality was to build pyramids of skulls and after conquering the city of Ispahan, Iran, he built one of 70,000. His main ambition, to restore the empire of Ghengis Khan was never achieved. More recently the country was under the grip of the Soviet Union and since the dissolution of the USSR has been in the hands of another bunch of thugs. For several years the USA and the UK maintained relations with the present dictatorship; the excuse for propping it up was that this relationship/alliance was part of the strategy of the War Against Terror - see the review of ‘Murder in Samarkand‘, or better still read the book. Since Uzbekistan changed its mind and decided that the new Russian Federation was a better horse to back, kicking out all USA military presence, the UK government has done an about-face and denounced the Uzbek government as a brutal dictatorship.

One of the more interesting observations Lent makes is about the reaction of the people to the tourers. They are pleased to meet so many from such a mixture of foreign places, and even more impressed when they learn they have cycled from Greece. The reaction on learning they are travelling to China is more muted. He doesn’t explain why but this may be more likely to be because of the relationship the Uzbeks have with the Uygurs [the people of Xinjiang] and the mutual distrust between the Uygurs and the Han Chinese than anything to do with events in March this year.

Click here for Joachim Lent’s blog and links to other related posts can be found on the Crotos - BatiCCycle page.