The Silk Road, Uzbekistan

Cass writes…

'In all other parts of the world light descends upon earth. From Holy Bukhara it ascends...' Central Asian saying.

Looking out upon this arid setting, feeling the heat of the searing sun, buffeted by the relentless headwind, we bid farewell to the Turkmenistan. We've crossed the Uzbek border and change is embodied in a profusion of 'Dopys', the traditional hat of its people. Embroidered with stylised motifs, a sea of four cornered skullcaps bob before us, perched on the heads of money changers who wave calculators and wads of dog-eared currency aloft, in eager welcome to Uzbekistan.

Soon, desert gives way to cultivated fields. Beautifully kept Uzbek family homes line the roadside, centred around the shade of grape trellised courtyards, backed with orchards and enclosed by heavy but ornate wooden doors. Alive with droves of shrieking children, our tandem is met with smiles, waves and handfuls of apples, freshly shaken off trees. Women, their mouths filled with gold teeth that glint in the sun, wear multi-coloured headscarves and dresses, flashes of colour as we pass. Pausing in a small village, we sample a delicious bowl of 'laghman', thick noodles in a meat and vegetable soup, dunked with sesame sprinkled bread and gulped down with green tea - the perfect fuel for the day ahead.

Pushing on through the afternoon, finally the shapely skyline of Buchara's mosques and medressas are visible, rising dramatically from the surrounding cotton fields . After our long haul from Ashgabat, we imagine ourselves every bit as eager to reach to this fabled city as the caravans of traders before us. Wheeling our way through its narrow streets, awesomely shadowed by aqua-blue domes, we look up to its magnificent medressas - Islamic academies - and their intricately tiled archways. In the sixteenth century, this tangle of alleyways and covered markets bustled with silk laden camels whilst the city's caravanserais - travellers' inns - teemed with traders, exchanging their well-travelled wares.

Finding lodgings in a traditional home, we venture up the hundred and five morbid steps of Kalon Minaret, the Tower of Death, from which criminals were once flung. Before its surrender to the Tsar of Russia in 1868, Buchara stood as feudal city-state, walled in from the world around, the notoriety of its leaders as renowned as the splendour of its mosques. Brutal Emirs advocated a thriving trade in Russian slaves, ruling over their subjects with tyrannical fervour and religious zeal. In those troubled times, the forbidden city of Buchara was no place for strangers.

Back on the road to Tashkent, our only fear today is the barrage of Russian trucks and convoys of Turkish semi-trailers that hurtle by. I admire the more gentle pace of horse drawn carts, manned by age-old grandpas, a portrait of burnished faces and wispy beards, long quilted coats, leather boots and grimy dopys. Their world seems timeless. Co-piloted by wide-eyed grandchildren in faded baseball caps and ropey singlets, they place a hand on the heart and smile as we pass. There's little else to see. A horizon that seeps into haziness, canals choppy with diving children and the darkened vaults of tyre repairers; yet there's a charm to the landscape that makes for peaceful riding. An expanse of featureless cotton fields reflect the lingering strains of a Soviet system, in which Uzbekistan devoted itself exclusively to cultivating this raw product. Its knock-on effect has been disastrous both environmentally and economically, in its unsustainability and the lack of value-added exports. Returning the land to more self sufficient use, such as fruit and vegetables, is one of the many tasks the country faces since independence.

For all the architectural splendour of the Silk Road cities, it's perhaps the 'choyhonas' punctuating the highway that reveal the true pulse of this land. The quieter of these atmospheric tea houses, with their quilts and cushions for impromptu naps, seem almost too sleepy to offer more than a few skewers of shashlik kebabs, crates of chilled Coke and of course bottles of vodka, a legacy of colonial times. Fringed with fruit sellers, lazily presiding over stockpiles of watermelon the size of bowling balls, these havens of shade make perfect pit stops for weary cyclists. Others are more lively affairs, offering jangling outdoor music, hectic with bus loads of stiffened passengers. Sitting at low tables stained with tea, we eye their enormous woks of steaming 'plov', the national dish of rice, meat, sheep's fat and carrot, immersed in clouds of smoke wafting from smouldering charcoal grills. A stream of bystanders gather to admire the bike, pouring over our maps, insisting we toast shots of vodka to friendship and drunkenly hugging us goodbye.

As the sun sinks deeper on the horizon, the landscape is bathed in the golden, tranquil light of the late afternoon. Weary-looking farmers trundle home on three wheeled tractors, heaving trailers crammed with tomatoes. Silhouetted against the sun, a child sweeps a scythe in a gleaming ark and a family crowds around a picnic of tea, bread and fruit, a herd of cows tethered nearby. Camping in fields and orchards, we forge on through meandering valleys. Breaking away from cultivated land, the road snakes parallel to the Trans Caspian Railway line, whose steel trail we have followed since Turkmenistan. We ride through a Soviet-style town of leafy boulevards and a string of smaller villages, running alongside a concrete water channel in which we stop to bathe. The day is long and in a border confusion typical of a region carved up by the Soviet Union, we loop into Kazakhstan for an hour, where roadside kids seem rougher and laugh raucously at the tandem.

Two days later we close in on the outskirts of Tashkent, leaving the peaceful ambivalence of the fields behind, merging into the concrete sprawl of the capital city. It's the end of this dusty stretch across the cotton fields and cultivated plains of the Uzbek people. The turbulent histories of their Silk Road cities have inspired us and their mellow choyhonas have proved perfect respites from the midday sun. Soon, we will climb towards the high pastures of mountainous Kyrgyzstan.