The Silk Roads

Yerevan, city of pink tuff, with its Cascade stairway and the statue of Mother Armenia watching over it. A few dozen kilometres away, Khor Virap monastery faces Ararat, the Armenians’ sacred mountain, now on the far side of a closed border. In the churches, the light comes mostly from candles. To the east, the temple of Garni overlooks the Azat gorge, and Geghard monastery burrows into the cliff.

Nearly two thousand metres up, Armenia’s great lake. In the evening the sun sets through the reeds and the water turns copper: the perfect place to pitch the tent.

In the north of the country, the Debed carves a canyon hiding medieval monasteries and old Soviet industrial towns. We follow the railway that runs on towards Georgia. At Haghpat, in the gloom of the gavit, light falls from an oculus as if down a well.

The wooden balconies of the old town, overlooked by the statue of Mother Georgia. From there, a trip to Uplistsikhe, the cave town carved above the Kura, a caravan stop long before our era. In the gloom of a church, a shaft of sunlight cuts across the frescoes.

Baku, land of fire: at the Ateshgah temple, flames once burst from the ground, tended by worshippers from India. The old town’s alleys are full of children, glass towers glitter at night above the Caspian. To the south, in the Gobustan desert, human figures were carved into the rock thousands of years ago. Here begins the wait for the cargo ship that will carry us across the sea.

At last the cargo ship leaves Baku by night, and the Flame Towers recede, changing colour. That night, 27 July 2018, the Moon slides into the Earth’s shadow: the longest total eclipse of the century, blood-red above the Caspian. Then a whole day of glassy sea, until the lights of Turkmenbashi.

Once ashore at Turkmenbashi, we find ourselves in Turkmenistan, one of the most closed countries in the world. From the very first kilometres, the desert: camels by the roadside, bikers in fatigues who stop for a chat.

Ashgabat, a white-marble capital risen from the desert at the foot of the Kopet Dag. Empty avenues, fountains, spotless palaces, the golden statue of Niyazov, the “Turkmenbashi”; even Lenin sits on a carpet-patterned pedestal. A stage-set city, immaculate and almost deserted, where you take pictures under the eye of the police.

In the heart of the Karakum, a gas crater has been burning non-stop for decades. From afar at night, only an orange glow above the dunes; at the rim the heat is almost unbearable. We sleep beside it, and sunrise slowly dims the “Gates of Hell”.

To the north, near the Uzbek border, Konye-Urgench was the capital of Khorezm until Genghis Khan and then Tamerlane razed it. A few monuments remain, scattered across the steppe: the Kutlug Timur minaret, some sixty metres high, and the mausoleum of Turabek Khanum, whose dome unfolds a mosaic of 365 facets, one for each day of the year.

Moynaq was a fishing port. The Aral Sea has retreated more than a hundred kilometres, and the trawlers now rust in the sand among the scrub. At night, under the Milky Way, this ship graveyard becomes one of the most striking landscapes of the whole journey.

On the road through Khorezm: mud-brick desert fortresses, donkey carts and mountains of melons. Then Khiva, a museum-city enclosed in clay ramparts, where the unfinished Kalta Minor minaret gleams with turquoise tiles.

Holy Bukhara, its madrasas and trading domes where caravans once crossed paths. In the afternoon heat, stalls of blue ceramics line up in the shade of the great portals.

Samarkand, a legendary name. The Registan at sunset, its three madrasas covered in mosaics; the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, a lane of blue mausoleums. We are halfway between the Mediterranean and China.

Khujand, the Alexandria Eschate founded by Alexander the Great at the mouth of the Fergana Valley. Facing the mosque of Sheikh Muslihiddin, the Panjshanbe bazaar overflows with bread, spices and dried fruit beneath its pink arcades.

Back in Uzbekistan, in the heart of the Fergana Valley. Kokand was the capital of a khanate until the Russian conquest of 1876, and the palace of Khudayar Khan still keeps its tiled façades. In the Friday Mosque, a forest of carved columns holds up a ceiling painted in a thousand colours; in a house nearby, an old man tunes his long-necked lute for us.

Kyrgyzstan begins with a mountain road. The milky-turquoise Naryn cuts its gorges between arid hills, then spreads out into the Toktogul reservoir, ringed by bare mountains. Little by little, grass takes over the slopes.

Kyrgyzstan is first of all grass and sky. On the high pastures, nomadic families spend the summer in yurts or old caravans, among their horses. We share kumis, fermented mare’s milk, and sunsets stretch on endlessly over the mountains.

Along the great lake, then up the valleys that climb from its southern shore to high pastures where horses graze. A berkutchi, an eagle hunter, flies his bird above the steppe: a nomadic tradition handed down for centuries. Further east, the spruce forests of the Tian Shan, only a few mountains away from China.

Across the Kazakh border, we climb to Big Almaty Lake, at 2,500 metres, held in a cirque of Tian Shan peaks. On the ridge, the domes of the observatory watch the sky. At sunset, the summits catch fire one by one above the milky-green water.

The road comes back down to the steppe: Almaty spreads out at the foot of the snowy peaks of the Zailiyskiy Alatau. In the Green Bazaar, under the great hall, dried fruit, spices, horse meat and mare’s milk are still sold as in caravan times. In Panfilov Park the eternal flame burns before the 1941 memorial; from the top of Kok-Tobe, the city fades into the haze.

On the last day we hike above the Medeu valley, up to the meadows of Kok-Zhailau, among the Tian Shan spruces. A waterfall deep in the gorge, the city drowned in haze far below: this is where our journey along the Silk Roads ends, without boarding a single plane.