Hammaming it up

From: Khiva, Uzbekistan

We spent an interesting few days in Bukhara, a beautiful city in central Uzbekistan.

There are a lot of fascinating sights in the city, but I'll stick to the highlights. The neatest sight in the city was the Ark, the former palace of the Emir of Bukhara. The citadel is large and served as the seat of the prince until the Soviets attacked and destroyed most of the building.



Nearby is the unpleasant-looking Bug Pit, where prisoners of the Emir were left to rot with scorpions, snakes and other vermin whose stock was refreshed on a regular basis. At one point, the pit was home to two British officers who got on the wrong side of the ruler.

Bukhara also has a some of stunning medressas and religious buildings, many of them spectacular at night:

The three of us took a day trip to see the buildings of the Naqshbandiyya, a Sufi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi) order based outside of Bukhara. When I was in Senegal, I spent a lot of time studying one of the Sufi orders there, so it was interesting to see the Central Asian variety. The Naqshbandiyya were a mystical Muslim order who pursued their religious devotion through meditation, arcane rituals and spiritual ceremonies, in a way very different from "mainstream" Islam. Thanks to the Soviets, and to the recent death of the order's spiritual leader, there isn't much left in the way of dedicated followers. There was an interesting museum dedicated to seven of the Naqshbandi saints, their wanders around the world and their dress, a lot of which were stunning, with Qur'aanic verses woven into the fabric. Here, the courtyard of the main order complex:

When we got back from the Sufi shrines, we remembered it was US Independence Day -- time for some celebration. We ended up doing a private wine tasting at the Omar Khayyam House. Omar Khayyam was a brilliant Persian scientist and philosopher who spent much of his life in Bukhara. Despite the protests of local haters, he enjoyed of both women and wine -- hence, the wine tasting salon named in his honor. I was pleasantly surprised by the tasting experience. We tasted 8 wines (some whites, some reds, all with generous pours), for $6 a head. The wines weren't all great, but they were pretty interesting. Most were blends of well-known European grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon with more obscure Georgian varietals. Some of the wines were from made from "native" Uzbek grapes, which had been developed in the late 1800s in the greenhouse of an eccentric Russian nobleman, then planted in large quantities in Central Uzbekistan. Overall, very cool experience.

Bukhara also had some less pleasant moments -- specifically, an incident involving the CNG (Uzbek successor to the Soviet KGB). Everything is fine now, but it was a little worrisome for a bit. Here's what happened: we had bumped into the owner of our hotel on the street, and decided to stay with her since the accomodation was cheap ($5 a night, yeah!) She had just opened her hotel and the official registration was going to be processed in a couple of days. Technically, the hotel wasn't authorized to take guests for a couple of days, although we didn't know this at the time.

A local thief and layabout called Memin, who also works as an informant for the CNG, noticed us talking to the hotel owner in the street. Then, from what the owner later told us, he followed us back to the hotel to confirm we were staying there. He tipped off another, more senior informant, who was watching by the hotel to check what we were up to. None of us noticed the guy at any point. The day after we arrived, we went to the bazaar with the owner and her husband to buy food for dinner. We hadn't noticed, but the senior informant had been following us for about 40 minutes. When we stopped to grab a beer at the bar, he started interrogating the owners, asking them to open their bags and demanding if we were staying with them.

The owners told us to take a cab to a bathhouse in another part of the city and then tried to beat the informant back to the hotel, where they quickly packed up our bags, spirited them away to another hostel, and had someone prepare fake registrations to make it look like we were staying at the new place the whole time. The informant came by our first hotel shortly after to check for (and maybe take) our bags, but the owners beat him to the punch. A weird story, but it ended up ok in the end.

The reason that both Memin and the senior informant were after us is, of course, about the money. The fines, if they had caught us, would be $600 per person, plus fines for the owners, and the informants would have gotten a substantial cut of the $2,000 total. It was an annoying incident for us, but could have been much worse for the hotel owners. To me, it was frustrating to see hard-working, entreprising businesspeople are undermined by leaches and informants looking to make a quick buck. I guess you can't expect much more from a post-Soviet police state.

I mentioned that we escaped from the bazaar to a hammam, or bathhouse. Hammams come in two varieties: the fancy, touristy kind with clean toilets and skilled masseurs, and; the gritty, cheap, slightly dirtier kind that the locals use. "Local Banya #6," where we went, is of the second type. It was a cool experience, though: you sit for a while in a very hot and humid sauna room until you can't take it, then you head into a cooler, more humid room to wash in cold water and prepare yourself for re-entry into the sauna. You repeat the process as often as you like, and I borrowed a black pumice stone from an old man to get some of the dead skin off. Think I ended up taking off some live skin too...

This has turned into a long post, so I'm going to wrap up. Be back soon...