Step by Step Read online

  There are very few other places in the world where I have seen such exotic beauty in the architecture. I scrambled out of the van to gasp at the medieval vision. It was a numbingly beautiful sight.

  To the side of the madrassa was the chubby base of the legendary Kalon minaret, an elegant mosque tower built in 1187 to call the faithful to prayer, and for centuries lit by fires to guide camel trains travelling through the night. Although Genghis Khan destroyed Bukhara in 1220, he gazed in awe at the Kalon minaret and ordered it spared, enabling later rulers to execute victims and criminals by throwing them off the top.

  An ethereal golden glow from oil lamps and elegant lights played over the brickwork as my eyes widened and traced the minaret 160 feet into the dark sky, just as the haunting sound of an Islamic prayer rehearsal drifted from the madrassa towards our guesthouse. It was one of the most intense and emotional sounds I have ever heard. The whole experience was overwhelming. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Even as I remember it now a lump rises in my throat.

  The following morning I climbed the steps with a young guide who explained the glorious blue tiles I had admired were thought to derive their unique colour from a mix of human blood.

  ‘Blood?’ I said. ‘Really?’

  He nodded. ‘In the old days people who were sentenced to death were tied up in sacks and carried up the steps.’ He indicated the stone at our feet. ‘When they arrived here in the minaret, they were thrown out of this window to their deaths. Their bodies smashed on the tiles and their blood seeped from the sacks to mix with the clay and stone.’

  It was a good story. Perhaps even true. Then I read in a guidebook about a British adventurer in the nineteenth century who had the temerity to ride into the castle in Bukhara on horseback rather than walking, as was the custom. His story was a solid reminder about the need to understand and obey local customs. Generally, I have found foreigners very forgiving of visitors who commit even the most hideous faux pas. But in the case of the British adventurer no amount of apologising could get him out of trouble. He was thrown into a deep, hideous pit. And then beheaded.

  We wandered around the buildings for a little longer, and then Shahida said she was itching to go and see a fortune teller in the city.

  Shahida was a very modern Uzbek, but she said she liked the drama of sitting with a teller. ‘It’s like a bit of therapy, Simon,’ she said. ‘Come along as well. You will love it.’

  Fortune telling is generally frowned upon in Islam but even in Bukhara, one of the holiest of cities, there were people practising the ancient art. With a grisly tale and the wonder of the Kalon still in my mind, Shahida took me to see a famous teller in the back room of a building in another part of the city. Wearing a traditional big billowy dress in gaudy yellow and green, and with a single very thick eyebrow, the teller had a mouthful of gold teeth and was quite the character. We warmed to her instantly. She winked at us both when the camera wasn’t looking, and then started to put on a good show for the viewers.

  With a flourish the teller started by announcing I was clearly a sincere and genuine man with an open heart, and she said that she could see that someone had proposed to Shahida recently, but she’d refused.

  ‘Yeah, that’s true,’ said Shahida.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, genuinely taken aback. Not by the fortune teller’s insight, but because Shahida hadn’t mentioned this on our long journey.

  The fortune teller rattled on. We leaned forward, desperate for insight. But then Shahida stopped translating.

  ‘What’s she saying?’ I hissed to her.

  ‘Erm, well, you cannot take their words literally, to be honest,’ she said mysteriously.

  ‘What are you saying?’ I said. ‘I thought that was the whole idea. What’s the point in coming to a fortune teller if you can’t take their words literally?’

  But Shahida wouldn’t budge. She talked about how the teller was just giving her life directions. She mentioned bad angels, good angels, and how only God really knows what would happen. I still don’t know what the teller told her.

  Instead of receiving a revelation in Bukhara, we all went for a dinner of shashlik, skewered and grilled cubes of meat. It was the end of our journey in Uzbekistan, a moment when Will and Dimitri could put their cameras down, and we could all have a moment for reflection.

  People often ask me how much and how often we film on a trip. A great challenge on journeys is knowing what to film, but also when not to film, because in a strange and exotic part of the world, almost everything is fascinating. When everything is filmable it can be hard to find a guiding thread for the journey while shooting everything that moves and breathes. And it becomes utterly exhausting for the team if they are lugging a heavy 14-kilogram camera around for twelve or fourteen hours a day, constantly hunting focus and tensing their body to get a stable shot. Instead we have to pick our moments and know when to switch on, even while being ready for moments of spontaneity.

  So there are clear moments of down time, usually when we are eating or sleeping. But even then we keep a camera handy, because we never know what will happen. That became a bit of a rule on my programmes after an early journey where I was having dinner with a team on a shoot and a huge car bomb went off near the restaurant. We dived under tables, but had left our cameras behind at our B&B. There’s a saying in TV: if it’s not on film, it didn’t happen. So nothing about the car-bombing or the chaotic aftermath made it into the programme.

  Sitting with Will, Dimitri and Shahida that night in Bukhara, eating platefuls of delicious shashlik, we talked about our time with Kadyr in Kyrgyzstan, and we smiled at the memory of Bayan, the baby-naming and the kokpar in Kazakhstan. None of us could stop thinking about Mr Amir, the doughty human rights lawyer. He made a huge impression. He didn’t have a camera and he wasn’t with an organisation like the BBC. He was alone, risking his own skin to speak truth to power, and to share the reality of Uzbekistan with us. I worried what might happen to Mr Amir. We all worried what might happen to him. But he knew what he was doing, and he wanted us to carry on.

  We were now three quarters of the way through the journey, and the distance we had covered was immense. As we headed for the border with Tajikistan Dimitri produced a map and we considered how far we’d actually come. From the far north-west of Kazakhstan to the Aral Sea and the village of Aktobe then all the way across the steppes to Almaty and the Sharyn Canyon. We covered unbelievable distances following the Silk Road, before we had crossed into Kyrgyzstan and then eventually travelled on to Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara. Now we were racing towards our final border crossing into Tajikistan. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were the most repressive Stan countries, while Tajikistan was wild and lawless.

  There was one other country in Central Asia with a leader who could rival the Uzbek ruler for despotic control. Turkmenistan, the fifth country in Central Asia, was at the time ruled by President Saparmurat A. Niyazov, known as Turkmenbashi, perhaps the most dangerously eccentric leader in the world after the dictators of North Korea. Turkmenbashi stamped his name or face on everything from the local currency to the vodka. Cities, towns and streets were named after him. I had particularly wanted to see the gilded statue of Turkmenbashi with outstretched arms in the capital, Ashgabat, which revolves every twenty-four hours so the leader enjoys maximum sunshine. But the media were banned from Turkmenistan, the borders were closed to all visitors, and BBC requests to visit were rejected.

  The country’s isolation was a way of keeping out prying eyes. Anti-drugs officials in the region were adamant that senior Turkmen officials were actively involved in smuggling drugs, but the isolation of Turkmenistan meant it was hard for the international community to investigate the allegations.

  I still had one more country to visit on the journey, but I could almost see the end ahead and for a moment I was filled with a sense of sadness. Everything about the journey had been magnificent. This corner of the world was absurd, crazy, sometimes dangerous, but always thrilling.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Vodka Terrorism

  I crossed into Tajikistan, Afghanistan’s small, landlocked and mountainous northern neighbour, on a donkey cart. Usually at a border there is waiting, paperwork, more waiting, more paperwork and then finally you are allowed through to shake hands with the local fixer. At the border with Tajikistan, however, there was also a great chunk of no-man’s-land to navigate.

  ‘No filming,’ a surly guard told Dimitri in Russian. ‘And no vehicles can cross.’

  The tract of land stretched more than a mile across hills covered in wild grass and flowers. It looked stunning. But we had a mountain of gear and equipment. Initially we thought we were going to have to make multiple journeys lugging the kit along the only track. It would have taken the rest of the day.

  Then we spotted a craggy old man with a donkey cart. His face lit up with glee at the sight of Western travellers and their mountain of equipment. All his remaining birthdays had come at once.

  I now consider myself a rather experienced traveller, immune to the flattery and deception of merchants in souks, and attempts by swindlers and conmen to part me from my money or BBC petty cash. However, that elderly trickster with the donkey cart was a genius. He had clearly organised some sort of complicated deal with the ramshackle customs and immigration post because he had a complete monopoly on transport across the border. He counted our bags, looked us up and down, and then he completely fleeced us. A single journey with his cart would cost us the equivalent of nearly £40. We had no choice. We loaded our bags aboard as he tried to contain his smile, then he cackled to himself the entire way across no-man’s-land.

  But of course it was worth it. Who wants to fly into a bland international airport when you could chug across a border on a donkey cart?

  ‘Welcome to Tajikistan!’ said my new guide Noor, a jolly bear of a bloke, as we arrived on the other side.

  The poorest country in Central Asia, Tajikistan’s economy was still reeling after civil war in the 1990s. At least 80 per cent of the population were living in poverty and wages were as low as £3 a month. Even doctors and government officials earned a pittance. Noor drove us towards Dushanbe, the capital. Burned-out Soviet factories and dilapidated houses littered the landscape. Petrol was sold in old glass jars by the side of the road. ‘Life was never this bad under the Soviets,’ was a constant refrain.

  Corruption was rife in Tajikistan and the country had terrible roads and infrastructure and very few hotels or even guesthouses. We had arranged to stay in the personal home of an official from the foreign ministry. He had helped to arrange our visas to visit and film in the country, and we thought he was doing us a favour. He said he often gave up his home to visiting dignitaries and we were looking forward to a restful and comfortable night after a long drive and eventful border crossing.

  As we pulled up in front of the house the official was ushering his family out through the front door clutching bin bags of belongings. The children were crying.

  ‘I’m not sure you are going to like this,’ said Noor. ‘Are you sure you want to stay here?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said breezily. ‘It’s good for us to see inside a house and get a sense of how people actually live.’

  The official stuck around just long enough to give us the keys and tell us that he would be back later to take our payment, then he scarpered. There was exceptionally limited internet access in Tajikistan, and no TripAdvisor, so we hadn’t seen the house before we arrived. From the outside it looked pleasant enough. It was on a quiet residential street near the centre of the city, which in parts still showed the scars of conflict and poverty. Housing was still intact, but ramshackle. Trees were growing into people’s homes. Patches of ground were completely overgrown, as if nature was taking back what the people no longer had the time or money to maintain.

  Inside the house, things were a little unpleasant. I had a windowless room with walls encrusted in a stinking, unidentifiable black mould. I looked closely and thought I could actually see it growing. But it was just for a couple of nights, I reminded myself. Then I tried the mattress. It was smelly, and it was sodden. I had already slept on plenty of damp mattresses in dodgy hotels and had been reminded by my packing list before this journey that I should carry a black bin bag, slit at the sides, that I used to cover the worst offenders. But no plastic sheet could have dealt with this mattress. It literally squelched as I pressed it. A small pool of liquid appeared. I had a sniff but couldn’t be sure what it was. An indeterminate fluid, I said to myself, possibly bodily in origin? Hard to say. Still, never mind, I could sleep on the floor.

  It might sound perverse, but I feel strangely honoured to have bedded down in dozens of guesthouses and hotels untroubled by even medieval hygiene standards. No traveller should return without at least a few tales of squalor and filth. It is part of an adventure.

  I went out of the room to the shared sink, turned on the tap and was idly waiting for the water to run from dark brown to clear while I watched two enormous cockroaches either mating or fighting. Then I stepped backwards and trod on the side of an enormous rat-trap the size of a brick, baited with a piece of rancid cheese. Sod this, I suddenly thought.

  At that moment both Will and Dimitri emerged from their rooms, which were even worse than mine. Will had been trying to clean a creamy mould off his pillow. We looked at each other. Then we all spoke at once.

  ‘This is a bit too crap, isn’t it?’ said Dimitri.

  ‘Is there definitely nowhere else?’ I said.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Will. ‘Anything would be better.’

  Most of our kit was still in Noor’s van locked in an old garage. We gathered our personal bags and cameras, checked outside to see if the ministry official was lurking, and then we legged it down the road. We trotted along a few streets to the centre of town, found an old hotel and Dimitri tried to book us some rooms. The lady at reception was apologetic.

  ‘We only have a few rooms, and they’re fully booked,’ she told us through Dimitri. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Is there nowhere else?’

  ‘I don’t think so. We don’t have many hotels in Dushanbe. Maybe you could stay in someone’s home?’

  ‘Erm, no thanks, we’ve already tried that.’

  We were just about to give up and head back to the mould house, when the woman happened to say, almost as a parting apology: ‘I’m just sorry I can’t lower the price for the rooms on the top floor?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  It turned out there was a whole suite of rooms that had just been redecorated and refitted, perhaps for visiting warlords and drug barons.

  ‘But you wouldn’t want those,’ she said, smiling but certain, ‘they are incredibly expensive. We are going to charge . . .’ and with that she leaned forward to shock us, ‘fifty dollars per night for them.’

  It took us a while to persuade the woman that given the circumstances we could afford them, despite tight BBC budgets. Settling into my luxury suite that night was a delight. The ceiling was painted in stripes a shade of fluorescent yellow, the walls had what looked like carpet for wallpaper, and there was a scattering of pictures in the bathroom that were moving animation waterfall scenes. It was the gaudiest, tackiest place I have ever stayed, and the competition for that title is fierce. But the bed was dry. And the room even came with a free apple and a bottle of vodka.

  The next morning the beezneez elite were much in evidence on the streets of Dushanbe. Former warlords, corrupt politicians and mafia bosses were driving around in expensive Western cars. An 800-mile border with Afghanistan, the source of 90 per cent of European heroin, had made Tajikistan a major drug transit route.

  The police were woefully underfunded. The main drugs agency in Dushanbe was so strapped for cash they had just one van and the head of the drug squad doubled up as the driver. We had been allowed to ride along with the drug squad as they raided an apartment and captured an unlikely dealer: a forty-five-year-old mother of six t
rying to sell an undercover officer a kilo and a half of heroin, worth tens of thousands of pounds after it was smuggled down a long chain through Russia to Europe. It was an almost unimaginable sum in Tajikistan. In the West a seizure like that would result in congratulations all round. In Dushanbe the police just shrugged. It was a daily occurrence, they said. Then the head of the drug squad took me back to the police station and showed me his exhibits locker, a single room with half a ton of heroin worth more than £100 million, or more than half the national budget of Tajikistan. I questioned whether they were tempted to sell it. The chief of the drug squad was indignant.

  ‘We may be poor, but we’re not criminals,’ he said proudly.

  Tourism was virtually non-existent in Tajikistan. The only foreigners I saw were aid workers or businessmen investing in high-risk ventures. But the country was getting back on its feet, and streets that resounded with gunfire just a few years before were now hosting outdoor cafés and promenading couples. Tajikistan had a long way to go, but personally I loved the place. The Tajiks were friendly, generous, hospitable and devoid of obvious envy, even when a couple of them debating our salaries asked us, wide-eyed, whether we earned more than $10,000 for each camera shot. Anything more than $100 was considered a fortune.

  Of course, for visitors seeking an entirely different cultural experience, the isolation of Central Asia should be part of the appeal. Almaty and Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, had a few Western shops, but the rest of the region had been forgotten by Western businesses. Yet we ignore Central Asia at our peril. Economic growth and jobs would be a useful bulwark against political discontent and emerging militant groups.

  Geographically the Stans are closer to India and the East, to which they look for cultural leadership at least as much as they look to Mother Russia or the West. At a celebration of the end of the civil war in Dushanbe, I saw teenagers queuing to take photographs with ancient cameras next to cardboard cut-outs of Bollywood stars, not Hollywood icons.