Silk Road Journey: Sometimes you have to travel far to find what is near

I came back different

My 8 year old son Sid wrote a diary on our trip together through Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in April this year.

We read it a lot.

To him it’s a chance to giggle at funny moments. For me it’s an crucially important reminder that sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near.

We smile and laugh as we recount playing army men, muddy faced, hiding in the bushes and ambushing each other with our stick guns. Our epic 2 hour pooh sticks battles, snowball fights, wrestling matches, daddy translating menus with animal noises, ice balancing, rock throwing with village children and when I lost 6 games of dinosaur top trumps in a row.

Travelling the Silk Road had been a long held dream for me. To be able stand where the likes of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Marco Polo one stood and to see these seldom seen and far off worlds and ways was, initially, the biggest drawcard.

The thing is, it ended up being so much more than just ‘a trip’.

With four young children, work and everything else that ties in with being a ‘responsible’ adult unfortunately it comes with a bit of a disclaimer. We all then seem to sign up for a life of spinning plates, constantly saying “wait a sec” and whizzing about doing all these grown up and parenty things that we’re told we’re supposed to be doing?

One afternoon on the trip we were sitting all alone on a hillside at the ruins of ancient Penjakent, which was once one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the Silk Road. A massive eagle was circling goats nearby scouting the herd for the weak or young. Sid and I spent hours making up and singing funny songs in fits of laughter imbetween watching the eagle above in awe.

I began to think. Had it taken a train, underground, three flights and a marshutka ride to give me a ‘kick in the goolies’ style reality check?

Throughout the trip the words “wait a sec” or “hold on” didn’t exist. That brought with it, a sense of proper joy. Sid couldn’t have cared if we were in Tajikistan or Taree. We were together and we had the luxury of the greatest possession of all; time.

We hiked throughout majestic areas like the Seven lakes, Iskanderkul and the remote Yagnob Valley, the site of Stalin’s forced migration and virtually untouched by the outside world.

We were racking up 30000 steps a day, breathing mountain air, having amazing experiences staying with Tajik families and eating only food sourced from the mountains, backyard or lake. I felt alive!

On one hike in the Fann mountains seven lakes we walked to the 7th lake of Marguzor, the majestic Hazor Chashma. We were at about 2500 metres altitude, just the two of us in a place that couldn’t of felt further from home if it tried.

Then the faint sound of a shepherd boy guiding his herd down the mountain grew louder. I felt like I’d been teleported into a passage of the Alchemist. In some way, Sid and I had followed our own omens to be there at that specific place on the globe and that pinpoint time. It just began to feel like everything we did and everywhere we went had purpose. That we were on our own ‘kind of’ pilgrimage. Travel had meaning and we were finding our own destiny just like the young shepherd boy, Santiago, did in the book.

The boys two younger siblings, the youngest no older than five, descended the steep, rocky mountain for their goats to drink at the lake. An initial wariness from both sides ended up in a mass snowball fight which was enough to break down any language barriers or cultural divide. Sid wrote in his diary:

“After the snowball fight the boy showed us how to use his stick to get the goats to move the right way. We gave the goat children some of our sweets from England. Their faces went all funny like they had never had a sweetie before.”

The diary is full of refreshingly heart warming and innocent anecdotes like this, unjaded by the hustle and bustle and responsibility adulthood brings.

Like when he taught Padida, Choru and Latofa how to play UNO, eating dried fish with heads on, playing with Chickichaka the puppy dog, when Mahinos showed daddy how carry water on his head and he got soaked, riding the donkey and shouting “ick ick” to make it go, the shepherd showing him his gun to keep the wolves away and of course, his epic top trumps victories.

As with most of our way through Tajikistan, it was full of these sorts of experiences. Postcard like scenery, head turning moments, people living by ancient, time held practices and very rarely a tourist in sight.

The Panjakent Uzbekistan Tajikistan border reopening in 2018, Uzbekistan becoming visa free in 2019 and Tajikistan relaxing policy to an evisa system has seen this area, only now, opening up to tourism for the first time in centuries. A combination of its proximity to Afghanistan and the scaremongering that goes on in the mass media sees many not even consider this region an option.

Unfortunately we are becoming less trusting and as media concentrates its energies on the darkness in the world it’s hardening peoples hearts and forcing us all into playing it safe. There is really so much good in this world and we found it in spades over our journey.

I think to our stay in Margib with Sabuddin and his family. Sabuddins dad; aged, frail and barely able to move, out in the absolute bucketing rain collecting me cuttings from his fruit trees to take home. A truly wonderful man.

Also, at the same time, I’m finding myself confused and at odds with western society and our own personal reasons for being. Why do we need to have ‘time off’ or to travel to provide this valuable commodity of time to those we love.

It’s a dead set cert they’re out there on some far away planet laughing at us darting about in our little tin boxes, pinging emails on our flashy little rectangle screens, spending the majority of our time away from those we are closest to just so we can fill our surroundings with ‘stuff’.

Is that it? Surely there’s more? Is that what we do year in, year out, about 70 odd times and call it a life?

We are extremely fortunate in the lives the western world provides us but part of me gets really jealous when I think of the families we stayed with. Very little in the form of possessions or wealth but far from time poor and with a huge strong suit in togetherness. They simply ‘get it’ that we are human beings, not human doings as we have weirdly and unnaturally been programmed to live.

I reckon we all just need to ‘be’ a whole heap more.

We got back from our adventure through a part of the world so rewarding in so many ways. But I came back with a much bigger prize. A stark realization and reminder what really is important in life and what surely isn’t.

I came back different.