Next morning we head east into the rising sun, and the endless 2-lane road glistens silver ahead of us. It's rough, and 80 kph seems to be about our best safe speed. There's snow on the steppes around us, and Mike says we will start climbing soon. We can expect the road to be icy when we get a bit higher.
The road here is just three or four lanes of packed mud and when one lane gets too bad we move to another, but Mike says this is not bad. The last time he was here it was wet and slippery.
We pass a few isolated farms on hillsides and then a couple of horsemen with dogs herding cattle. One carries a long pole with a rope noose on the end. It's the Mongol version of a lasso and it doesn't look elegant, but it seems to work.
At odd intervals we pass statues of wildlife by the road. I guess they are local but we pass what looks like a cheetah as well as snow leopard, mountain sheep and eagle. I know they have the others around here, but the cheetah is new to me.
Cheetahs have been used as hunting animals in several cultures and the first ones here might have been imported over the silk road. All sorts of animals were hauled back and forth across the silk road and the lion, which often appears in carvings on Chinese tombs, never lived in the wild in China. Captive lions were brought over the silk road to royal zoos in China, and the Chinese were so impressed they began carving stone lions to guard tombs.
We pass a few villages off to the side. The villages themselves are not remarkable but the cemeteries are full of stone tombs that look like small temples, and from a distance the cemetery looks more like a village than a graveyard. Distances are deceiving on the steppes and several times I see what I first take to be a distant city, and then realize it is a not-so-distant cemetery.
Around the city of Karaganda we see coal mines. It's rush hour here, and the streets of full of buses carrying people to work.
Beside the road huge hot water pipes join apartment houses and factories. Kids run along the tops of the pipes, and people take water from overflows to wash cars.
As we leave town we pass huge coal mines, with lines of suspended buckets dumping coal on piles the size of small mountains.
Perhaps every 20 miles or so we pass a house or a yurt. Made of felt over a circular framework of criss-cross willow sticks a yurt is a portable Mongolian house -- the equivalent of the teepees used by plains Indians in America.
The Mongols themselves are very much like plains Indians, and they may be close relatives. Scientists think North American Indians are descended from Asiatics who crossed from Siberia to Alaska during the ice age, and one tribe in Northern Canada may have crossed in historic times.
Some time in the 12th century one of Ghengis Khan's armies lost a war in Korea, and when one of Khans armies lost a war it was not a good idea to come home. This army disappeared, and some anthropologists believe their descendants are the G'witchen people of the Canadian Yukon. Apparently the languages match, and there are no traces of G'witchen in North America before the 15th century.
They did not come straight from Russia to Canada, of course, but their last move is on historic record. When the U.S.A. bought Alaska from Russia the G'witchen were living near Fort Yukon, Alaska, and they traded with the Hudson's Bay Company post there. When American officials closed the post the factor talked the G'witchen into moving to Canada so they could continue trading with him.
The ancestors of North American Indians left Asia before horses were domesticated and they had no horses until after the white man came. After they got horses the culture of the northern Plains Indians changed and in many ways it developed along the same lines as the Mongols, who may have been the first people to train horses.
The big difference between Indians and Mongols is that most Indians were hunters and most Mongols are herdsmen, but that may not be as big a difference as it seems. When the Navajo Indians got sheep from the Spaniards they became herdsmen, and the Nez Perce Indians bred a distinctive and very successful line of horses.
A yurt looks plain but travelers say it is a very nice place to live. When Ghengis Khan built a palace he also built an enclosed park -- 16 miles long, by some accounts -- beside it. The park was planted with grass from the Mongol steppes and stocked with game, and Khan and his close friends lived in the park, in yurts.
I see one yurt with a modern-looking house trailer parked beside it. Later, in a town in south Kazakhstan, I see a yurt covered with aluminized canvas. It looks strange, but may be very practical.
We climb a ridge and I know people must live here because I see tracks leading off on both sides of the road. People would not live on the ridge because there is no water here, and the winds must be very strong, but the ground drops away a few hundred yards on each side of us and I guess there may be houses on the hillsides. For us, the horizon is 50 to 100 miles away on each side.
On the ridge we pass the remains of a circular hut of mud bricks, about 15 feet in diameter. It has no roof, and we assume that the roof it once had was made of skin stretched over wooden poles. It may be the remains of an old watch-tower.
In the days of the Silk Road nobles in this region -- who were generally descended from bandit chiefs -- made their living by taxing, protecting and sometimes robbing passing caravans. They would have had watch towers on most high points, to watch for caravans and competing bandits.
Most nobles around the world preyed on trade and traders at one time or another. Historians tell us that most of Germany's famous castles along the Rhine were built to exact tolls from traders and travelers on the river.
We are on a Kazak national highway but the road is just a strip of packed mud, three or four lanes wide. When one lane is too rough, we go to another. After an unfinished bypass around one town, we get back to a better road.
Finally Mick signals that he is down to 4% fuel, so we stop for coffee and trade trailers. It doesn't hurt a gas engine to run out of fuel but if a diesel runs dry it will suck air into the fuel injectors. If Mick gets air in his fuel system he will have to tip the cab and use a wrench to loosen the fuel line to each cylinder, then crank the engine to blow the air out, then re-tighten the lines and start the engine.
Our belly tank slowly fills the tank of the tractor as we drive. Our tractor tank is full, and as Mick pulls our trailer it will fill the tank of his tractor.
The road is paved here but the pavement is breaking up into washboard, with ridges about six inches deep. Parking areas beside the road have concrete ramps to repair cars and trucks on and they must be needed because some of the ridges in this road would be enough to take the muffler out of most cars. Several times we pass broken down cars and trucks with people working on them.
Jaan stops at a village market and gets out. As we pull up he tells us he wants to buy some bread. While we wait two boys offer us smoked fish. Mike doesn't want it -- he said someone gave him some when he stopped for diesel on his last trip, and he doesn't like it.
Later that afternoon we pass a herd of 20 or 30 two-humped Bactrian camels running loose in the desert. Mike thinks they are wild, and they show no signs of domestication but they are not afraid of us. They amble slowly away as we stop beside them.
We're coming up to Lake Balkhash, in southeastern Kazakhstan. It covers more than 7,000 square miles, which is nearly as big as Lake Ontario. The lake runs east and west, and a long peninsula divides it nearly in half. The western end of the lake is wide and shallow and it drains into the eastern end, which is narrow and deep. The Eastern end of the lake has no outlet, and the water is salty.
The lake contains about 20 types of fish, 14 of which were planted here to create a fishery. The other six are native to this lake, and are not found anywhere else in the world.
We are coming in to the north shore of the western end of the lake, which is rocky and fairly high above the water. The south shore is flat and swampy, but we can't see it from here.
We turn west, along the north shore, and follow the curve around the west end of the lake. As we turn south we can see the Tien Shan mountains along the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. A few hundred miles to the east is a northern panhandle of China, and a few hundred miles beyond that is Mongolia.
The villages look different here. Before we saw one house within each fenced yard, but in this area the villages are broken up into compounds with four or five houses in each compound.
By 6pm we pass the 7,000 km mark on this trip. We've been out for 14 days, so our average is 500 km per day. We are nearly 2,000 km from the Kazak border.
Near the town of Balkhash we meet a motorcycle carrying about a dozen logs maybe six inches in diameter and eight or ten feet long in the side-car. The whole load must weigh close to a ton.
Kids by the road hold up dried fish to show us. They seem to have bundles of several fish, pressed together.
Later we see groups of fish salesman sitting by the road, warming themselves around a burning tire. The flame is orange and there is lots of smoke. There isn't much to burn around here and in the old days camel herders and others burned dried camel dung as fuel. Now they use scrap tires, which are probably more plentiful than camel dung was in the old days.
About 8pm we have done 830 km in 14 hours, and we pull in at an isolated police post. There's a car and a Turkish truck there already. The cop on duty asks for a "present", and Mike pays him. We're parked on the side of a shallow hill, and that night I walk about a quarter mile to the top of the hill. Except for the police post, the only lights I can see are stars. They are very big and very bright, out here in the Central Asian desert.
Next morning there are several more cars parked around us and a bus full of passengers on the highway. The bus apparently broke down, and the passengers are stranded until it can get going again.
It's still dark as we start out and Mike peers at the signs when we come to a crossroad. We leave the main road here for a route the maps shows as a secondary highway, and 100 yards on we see what "secondary" means as the road virtually disappears. The bumps show like miniature mountain ranges in the headlights. Mike swears and slows to little more than walking speed, and the truck rattles as we bounce over the bumps. A few hundred yards later we find more pavement, but it's rough.
We cross over a range of low hills, with scrub grass, sand and gravel on both sides of the road. On the other side we come into a more settled area, with trees.
For miles on end the road is lined with several rows of trees that look like nut trees of some kind. That makes sense -- the giant nut grove has a first class road running through it, and the road has the protection of trees. Bus shelters along the road are covered with mosaic tiles.
Then we run down a long hill into a little bit of heaven. It seems we've been up on a plateau, and the temperature and the weather change as we drop down into a valley. This land is warm and well watered, and we drive past a series of nice farms. The people here don't seem to be rich, but with country like this who cares?
Many of the trees around here are strange to me, but the villages look nice. We don't see much of the houses because they all present a blank wall to the street, but children play and cattle wander in the streets. A dog lies in the middle of the street as we approach, and does not move until Mike honks the horn at him.
Finally we turn onto Highway A35 across the south of Kazakhstan. It runs parallel to the mountains and maybe ten miles from the base where they rise suddenly out of green fields, and it's the best road we've seen in this part of the world.
This is also part of the main line of the old silk road. The Tian Shan Mountains run east and west and one branch of the road part went south of the mountains, the other came through here. This was part of the main route through the Dzungarian Gap, south of the Altai Mountains to Ghengis Khan's capital at Karakorum.
We pass by a police post, then stop a few hundred yards on. Mike is now down to 15% fuel and Mick has 30%, so they stop and switch trailers. Jaan thinks he has it made when a dealer offers fuel at what sounds like $10 for 100 liters, but he's disappointed when it turns out it's ten Tenge or about 25 cents per liter. We stop for lunch and Mick makes cheddar cheese and onion sandwiches.
Some Iranian truckers are repairing a tire and I walk back to take a picture but when a policeman at the post sees my camera he warns me off. No pictures near a police post. I take a couple anyway, then talk to the truckers. They're friendly.
We're in Moslem country now, and when kids approach us the greeting is salaam. One teen-ager offers us hashish.
From Poland to Russia we ran out of late summer through fall to early winter, but now we're going back to summer. About half the trees in this area still have leaves, and the temperature is 23 degrees Celsius.
It's harvest time, and we pass several truckloads of sugar beets, heading for a mill.
We pass a fleet of buses with German advertising. I guess they were bought used in Germany, for use in some town around here.
I like this place. The towns look comfortable with people talking, kids playing and animals grazing in the streets. Mike is not pleased because cattle, horses and sheep wander back and forth across the road.
Most of the houses are set back from the road, behind a ditch, and most are built in a sort of family compound with several sheds and outbuildings. In some towns, the streets are lined with beautiful trees. Some houses have corrugated steel roofs.
The road here is dual track pavement divided by a median about 50 yards wide, with greenery and nut groves in the median. The road signs are different here -- Mike says they are in Turkish.
That's a surprise but it should not be, because this area was the homeland of the Turks before they conquered Turkey. There may still be more Turks around here than there are in Turkey.
We climb a long steep hill through a rock cut to cross one high pass. There's a police post and a market at top, and a line of trucks from Iran stopped at the police post.
The median on one section of road is about six feet wide, and there are cattle grazing on it. The farmer who owns them gets cheap grazing but the overall cost must be high because we pass at least one dead cow on the road. We see the cow after a tanker truck cuts us off while making a violent turn to avoid it.
At another point all traffic has to stop while a herd of several hundred sheep, driven by three men on horseback, cross the road.
We miss our turn to the border and have to cut back because we come to a crossing for cars only. As we drive back a roadside vendor waves a wad of bills in an offer to exchange money.
Our road to the border is two lanes wide, and a village straddles the border. In the village we smell wood smoke from cooking fires and the street is lined with vendors offering gallon cans of fuel. Mike says gas is cheaper here than in Uzbekistan.
We join the lineup abut 6pm and the vendors descend on us. One is a money changer who offers 45 Cymma for a US dollar. When I don't buy he offers 45.5 and 46, shouting his offers as I sit in the truck, several feet above his head level.
When I still don't buy the money changer asks me what I want. I'm not buying because Mike has no idea what the rate should be. He says the man may be offering a real deal, but he will buy at the bank. Later I learn that the trader was offering a good price -- Mick got 4,200 Cymma for 100 German marks.
A couple of hours after we join the lineup Jaan finds that the lenses have been stolen out of the sidelights on his truck.
While Mike goes out to explore I sit in the truck, to guard it. Kids drive a small herd of cattle down the sidewalk beside me. When Mike comes back he brings shish kebab on a pita, with onions. He says it cost $1.
This is our third lineup at a border this trip but the other lines were in open country. Here we're in a village, on a cobblestone street with houses on both sides. Most of the houses are actually set back from the street, but the yard in front of them is totally enclosed and they show only a blank wall, with a gate to the street. Some of the gates are wrought iron, and through them I can see courtyards and house with red tile roofs.
There's a sidewalk beside the walls, then a deep stone-lined ditch between the sidewalk and the street. Bridges cross the ditch in front of the gates, but it's narrow enough for people to step across.
Near the border a massive double arch of white concrete, topped by three blue domes, spans the street.
If I had time and spoke the language I would like to explore this village and meet the people, but I can't. Like the sailors of old who travelled the world but saw only the seaports today's truckers, and in this case their passenger, see only the roads and the truck stops.
Still, I am luckier than most. I can see this village because Mike is hauling a computer for the Bank of Uzbekistan. If I were a tourist I could come here only with a guide from Intourist, and I could see only what the guide was willing to show me.
And even on the road, the life of the village goes on around us. As we approach the border a fat man rides past on a tiny donkey, leading a good-looking horse. He is beating the donkey with stick, and he looks like a character in a cartoon.
Night falls and we are still in the line-up. Near midnight I am wakened by a fracas on the street outside. A truck heading the other way has broken down and is blocking the street, and the driver of a car caught in the jam is arguing with a policemen.
Suddenly the policeman pulls open the car door and takes a swing at the driver. He misses, but the driver jumps out and takes a swing at the policeman. He misses too, and they argue for a while and then cool down. Finally the man jumps back into his car and drives away.
We pass through the arch but we are not yet in Uzbekistan. There's about a mile of international market here which seems to be open to vendors and purchasers from both countries.
We get to the Uzbek border about 9am -- 15 hours after we joined the line just a couple of kilometers back -- and an hour later Mick and Mike are still in the office.
Mick's truck is parked ahead of us and it starts to move. I'm pleased, until I see Mick coming out of the office.
That's a surprise but not a problem. Mike came out of the office first and in order to get moving fast he took the first truck in line. Mick climbs in with me and we drive off -- about fifty yards. We're just moving to get out of the way.
We have our permit -- it cost $150 and it allows us to drive to Tashkent, 23 km down the road -- but we also have a problem. Someone from the bank has to come to show us the way, and the bank is not answering their phone now. Mike and Mick go back to the guard-house to wait while I guard the truck.
While I wait a small boy drives about ten cows down the sidewalk past me. Vendors stroll up the other side of the street, selling food and services to truckers lined up to enter Kazakhstan, and housewives and school-kids walk by.
It's past 11.30 by the time Mick and Mike come back, with chocolate covered ice cream on a stick. It looks good and I go the same vendor, who offers me two for an American dollar. Mick says don't bother, and he gives me his.
It's supposed to be strawberry but it doesn't taste like any strawberry I've tasted. Mick doesn't like it, but I do.
While we're waiting Mick tells me about the Turkish system that truckers call "Marlboro Control. When you enter Turkey you tell them where you're going and what route you're going to take. They give you a route card and you have to get it stamped at every guard post on the road.
But most police demand a pack of cigarettes before they stamp it, and if you get to Istanbul without a stamp they will turn you back. Now they have motor ways the police in Istanbul will accept your motorway ticket as proof that you didn't leave the route -- but they still have Marlboro control on some routes.
We're sitting in a bus shelter across the road from our trucks, and a couple of local teens join us. They're well dressed and they speak a few words of English, and they would obviously like to practice but they are shy. One of them stands on the railing around the bus shelter, then squats on it. They both spit frequently.
Mick says that even if they are well dressed, you can smell them at 100 yards. We're not all that sweet ourselves after a couple of weeks without showers.
A woman with her head wrapped in a black scarf and wearing a dark coat offers Mike 23 Cymma for a German mark, and Mike buys 50 marks worth. I buy 450 Cymma for $10 American -- the first rate I refused last night.
Our escort arrives about 1pm -- 19 hours after we approached the border -- in a military four-wheel drive van. The driver turns on his blue flasher as we head for Tashkent.
And he protects us from inspections. At one roundabout the cop tries to pull us over to check our papers. We pull over but our escort comes back with lights flashing. The military policeman in our escort van seems to out-rank the policeman on point duty, and we go on without being inspected.
In the days of the Mongol empire this area was part of a country called Sogdiana and camel-pullers from Samarkand, which used to be the capital of called Sogdiana, handled most of the traffic on the Silk Road.
Some historians think they bullied their way to the top and that may be true but it may also be a mistake because the Silk Road did best under the Mongol emperors Ghengis and Kublai Khan, and they kept tight control of everything.
The Mongol empire stretched most of the way to the Mediterranean Sea, and Mongol soldiers and messengers patrolled the whole of the Silk Road. There were no bandits on the road in those days, and no city anywhere took control of anything away from the Khans.
But the cities of Central Asia had a head start on the Silk Road because the best base to work any trade route is from near the middle. Samarkand was near the mid-point of the Silk Road, and a good place to work from. In the days before North American Free Trade most Canadian trucks travelled east and west, and six of the ten biggest trucking companies in Canada were based in Winnipeg, which is about half way across the country.
In the US three very big trucking companies are based in the small town of Joplin, Missouri, which happens to be a good spot to base trucks.
And Sogdiana may have been a good base for camels on the Silk Road. Tashkent seems to have taken over from Samarkand as the major center but as I travel with Mike, Mick and Dave I see good looking tractor trailers from Central Asian Trans, based in Tashkent, several places in Russia. As the oil, mineral and other wealth of Central Asia is developed the new Silk Road will become a major trade route, and Tashkent may be the base for most of the transportation.
As a modern country Uzbekistan mines gold, copper, tungsten, lead, zinc lithium and coal, and has gas an oil wells. It's one of the world's leading producers of cotton, and a big exporter of vegetables and fruits, furs and wines.
They're not rich now but they have the raw materials. The big problem is transportation, and trucks could supply that.
Tashkent is also a nice place with wide streets and lots of trees. The people are closely related to the Turks, and Mike says it's a lot like Turkey.
Archaeologists think Tashkent was settled as a farming village named Dzhadzh, or Chachkent, or perhaps Shashkent, about the first or second century BC. It was conquered by Arabs in the eighth century, and got the name Tashkent -- which means "stone settlement" in Uzbek, about the 11th century. It was conquered by the Mongols in the 13th century.
The modern European-style city of Tashkent dates back to 1867, when it became the administrative center of Turkistan.
In the old days it was one of the center-points of the silk road, and one of the main streets in Tashkent is still called caravan street. It's been paved for more than a thousand years, to control the dust that rose as the caravans passed through town.
Now Tashkent has about 2 million people, out of about 22 million in the whole of Uzbekistan. They say the temperature here may drop to freezing in winter but not very often. While we're here the weather is spring-like, and the air fresh.
Like other cities built by the communist regime Tashkent has massive apartment blocks but here they are decorated with colored tiles and have patterns worked into the brick. We see a lot of single-family houses too, more cars than in Russian cities, lots of streetcars and plenty of trees on most of the streets.
We pull up on a main street across from an old building with a narrow gate and a gangway beside it. The police stop the traffic and Mike backs toward the gate.
Most of the big rigs here are straight trucks and we collect a crowd as Mike backs the tractor-trailer toward the narrow gate. I appreciate what he's doing because I'm licensed to drive a tractor trailer, but I've never been any good at backing up.
Mike has less than a couple of inches clearance each side as he backs through the gate, and only a couple of feet in the gangway. We're doing great until we reach the courtyard, and a combination of a sharp rise and a sharp turn that the trailer just can't make. We stop with the under-run guard at the back of the trailer just touching the surface of the road.
We can't go any further and bank officials will have to figure some other way. For now, like camel pullers just in from the desert, we need a bath. Mick parks his truck behind us, and Khochkazov Hydaibezgen from the bank leads us to a public bath. I never find out what job he does at the bank, but he speaks good English.
The civic steam-bath, a few blocks from the bank is a big old marble palace with lots of good socialist art in the lobby. It's under repair, and they apologize.
But it's still not bad. We strip in a big locker room and pay the attendant 30 Cymma or about 65 cents about for a couple of towels and a lock for a locker.
Inside there's a shower room, with weak trickles of cold water, and a small pool with murky cold water. I really want a swim and I dive in for a minute, but I remember the Ralph Davies trucker who swallowed water in the shower, and I don't open my eyes.
The steam room is better. Green tiles with wooden seats on them and an electric heater under a pile of rocks. Throw some water on the rocks and you get a burst of steam.
Three or four local men are there already. None of them speak English but one has some German, and he translates. The first question here -- and with every other male Uzbeki I met -- is how many sons do you have. My answer of none is not acceptable, and I will soon learn to lie a bit.
The one older man in the steam room boasted three wives and eight sons, and most of the younger men have two or three sons. They are friendly, but they obviously find it hard to respect a grown man who has no sons. Daughters, of course, don't count.
The steam bath costs 30 Cymma each and for another 100 Cymma we get a shave, hair wash and haircut. My barber is a fat woman about fifty years old who speaks no English but who can communicate by waving her hands. She shaves me with a razor blade mounted in a pocket-knife-like holder, but she strops it first and the shave is reasonable. My hair was carelessly long, even by Canadian or American standards, and she cuts it back to the norm for Central Asia.
I give her an American one dollar bill as a tip, and she is very happy with it. Hydaibezgen tells us the official rate is 47.50 so we lost a bit on the border, but we didn't do too badly.
Then dinner. Hydaibezgen leads us to an outdoor cafe beside a building we later learn is the city hall. They have some good-looking meat pies on a buffet but Hydaibezgen hustles us past them. All the tables are taken but one man picks his meal up and walks out into the park when Hydaibezgen speaks him.
Then Hydaibezgen goes inside and comes back with four bowls of "Plov". It's a mixture of rice, peas and other grains with spices and meat and it bears a very close resemblance the dish we call a pilaff.
But it's the national dish in Uzbekistan and apparently Hydaibezgen would consider it rude to offer us anything else. Not only that, but apparently Plov must be prepared by a man if it is to be considered fit to serve to a visitor.
After the Plov we order bottles of Chinese Xin Jiang beer and pastries with meat and onions inside, tough brown bread and tomatoes with chives sprinkled on them.
We walked to the steam bath and we walk back through Tashkent's famous melon market. Several blocks of the city are covered by piles of melons and small tents in which the vendors rest. I recognize watermelon, cantaloupe and honey dew, but there are several other kinds I don't know.
Melons are wet and sweet and somehow they manage to stay cool if they're kept in the shade, and the melon markets of the oases were big attractions in the days of the silk road. To a camel puller coming in from a long haul over a burning desert, a melon must be a real treat.
Where there was not enough water to grow melons some oases were supplemented by underground canals called quanats. From a clear mountain stream workers would dig a tunnel, perhaps 200 or more feet below ground level and 100 of more miles long, to bring cool water to an oasis far out in a desert. Nobody knows for sure when the first quanat was built but some of them still bring water to villages and even cities, like the Chinese city of Turfan, in the middle of deserts.
Melons from Tashkent were a special treat for people over most of the ancient world. In the days of the Silk Road they used to dip melons in molten lead to seal them, and ship them by caravan to markets as far away as Rome.
I can't help wondering what life was like in the old days, when Tashkent was one of the main stops on the old silk road. It was near the center of the known world, in those days, and all the latest products and ideas of three great civilizations met in this market place.
Then a few caravans were raided, hundreds of miles to the west. As the raids continued fewer caravans came through, and the markets of Tashkent slowly wound down.
Conquest by the Mongols in the 13th century was good for Tashkent, because the Mongols opened the silk road and Tashkent again became one of the main crossroads of the world. More so than before, because the road to Karakorum branched off here and traders, artisans and others coming from Europe to Ghengis Khan's court had to pass through Tashkent.
But as the Mongol empire wound down Tashkent was again left in a backwater, first part of one empire and then another. Russian Communists brought a rail line to the city and began development of mines and oil wells, but all the developments were controlled by Moscow and the profits went to Moscow.
Now Tashkent is opening up again, as trucks from the west come in. For now it's on the main line from Iran and Turkey to Moscow but that may change when the civil wars wind down and roads are opened east of the Caspian Sea.
But it will be on the main line again when roads are opened from India and Pakistan through Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. The border is closed now because Afghanistan still resents the Russian invasion, but the roads will open some day and Tashkent will again be a major world center.
It's also a nice place to live, with a wonderful climate and nice countryside.
As we pass through the market I see people buying what looks like a confection and ask Hydaibezgen about it. He buys me a chunk and I find it both salty and sour, but I never find out what was in it. I may be happier for not knowing, but in any case I eat it with relish.
This was abut mid November and the leaves are falling from deciduous trees. Some look like Canadian maple and oak trees. Even main downtown streets are littered with leaves, and old women rake them into piles and burn them. We used to burn leaves in Toronto when I was young, but we don't do it any more.
Mick's truck blocks the main gate to the bank building and we have to go in and out through the guard's office. Half a watermelon lies on a table in the guard room, with a long knife beside it. With a smile one of the guards cuts a slice and hands it to me. It's crisp, sweet and cool.
We're like sailors of the old days, who could tell the locals about other parts of the world. They all want to meet us, to look at our trucks and even to buy us meals. A man named Timur who drives a 10-seater passenger van for the bank exchanges a look at the inside of our truck for a tour of his van. He wants to know how much power we have, how many cylinders and how much fuel we carry.
He earns about 400 Cymma a month -- less than $10 American, but he can live on it and he's better off than most, because the average wage in Uzbekistan is about 300 Cymma a month.
Most people want to know how long it took us to get here, and what route we took. A thousand years ago I might have spun them a tale abut mystic seas and haunted castles or whatever, but in this world I show them a map. I'm not sure they believe it any more than the old timers would have believed the tales of old.
Apparently the powers that be have decided they cannot unload us today, and they have arranged a place for us to park. We thought this building was the central bank but it turns out it is just a data center. An army jeep leads us downtown, to the enclosed yard around the central bank building. It's a tight fit to get our trucks through the gate but we make it, and they have to move a dozen or so cars to make room for us at one end of the parking lot.
But we're settled in a prime parking spot. As we later find out we are only a couple of blocks from the center of town, but we have a private parking spot within a walled enclosure and a company of troops to guard us. We can eat in the bank's cafeteria and use the washrooms, and all the troops who guard the bank seem to consider us personal friends. As we walk through the downtown area, most of the men in uniform recognize us and wave.
That night we go out for a few beers with Bekhzod Dekhkanov who works as a engineer programmer, for the bank. He speaks some English, and has even been to London on bank business.
His wife was pregnant when he was told to go to England, he tells us, and he left her with his parents. Then she could not come home when he returned, because she could not move or take the baby out in public for 40 days.
There are few cars in the downtown area at night, and groups of people wander down the middle of most streets. Sidewalk vendors sell balloons and Polaroid pictures of people, and there are Christmas-style colored lights on some buildings.
We pass a big park where a restaurant seems to be serving meals at open air tables.
Bekhzod takes us to a restaurant he says in the biggest in Tashkent. Like some other restaurants we will see around Tashkent the ground floor of this one seems to be mostly open-air lobby. It has comic-books style murals of Ali Baba types on the walls, and the meals are served on a second floor enclosed only by a figured steel railing.
We sit in the basement at mess-hall style tables with, four chairs to a side, butted against the walls. Bekhzod orders a couple of jugs of beer and a couple of plates of nuts. The beer is sweet and unlike any other I've tasted, but its good.
It turns out that Bekhzod has a torn American $100 bill that he can't spend because it's torn. He will sell it to me for $80, but I give him $100. I will spend it in the States but later I learn that there are some very good counterfeit $100 bills in the area. I wonder if I had one of them?
We hear a ruckus at the far end of the bar. Two men pull a woman away from a table and to the stairs, while she screams in protest. On the stairs she grabs the railing and they can't move her until one of the men punches her hard, several times, in the face. Bekhzod looks a bit embarrassed, but none of the other patrons in the bar seem to care. Even the women and the waitresses ignore the incident.
Bekhzod says the woman is the sister of one of the men, and she has disgraced her family by coming to the bar.
Some dancers come out. They're dressed almost like harem girls in movies and their dance is the sort of eastern dance some so-called "exotic" dancers try to imitate but these girls are good and, surprisingly, the dance is not erotic.
After the dance, Bekhzod warns us, the dancers will collect money. It's the custom here, and not considered to be begging. They will be happy if only one person at each table pays, and he will pay for us.
When the dancer comes she is proud. She stands, head high and hand out, and awaits her pay. Bekhzod hands her some Cymma, and I don't mind giving her a couple of American dollars.