Across the desert to Bukhara 

Bright sunlight, pouring through the carriage window, wakes me as we approach Bukhara. The modern city of Tashkent has disappeared, replaced by a desert landscape of rocks, golden sand and parched earth. On the horizon is a shimmering lake as bright and sparkling blue as the sky above us.

At first, the only signs of life are rare clumps of brown grass and a distant stunted tree, and there is not a single blade of green even on the shores of the distant lake. Then slowly the telegraph poles running parallel with the railway line multiply, and we start to see cars, silvery in the sun, and men on horseback with coloured cotton jackets fluttering behind them. 

All change Kurgan

“Kurgan! All change! Kurgan!” 

Outside the window, the salty desert ends abruptly, and now there are green fields of maize and cotton. We have entered the oasis of irrigated land around a city. 

“ALL CHANGE KURGAN!” bellows the guard from outside our compartment. My mother is unravelling her security chain and packing neatly folded clothes into her travelling case. My biscuits have melted into a gooey chocolate brick that I bundle into my bag, before going into the corridor, now full of people dragging bulky cases towards the doors.

“Change here? We have tickets to Bukhara!” 

“Kurgan Bukhara,” the guard says cryptically. 

Is the train terminating early? Will we be stranded in the middle of nowhere? I rush next door to the girl we spoke to last night and ask her what’s going on. She explains that Kurgan is the nearest station to Bukhara, which is 12 kilometres from the railway. 

Keeping the ‘devil wagons’ away

I don’t understand all of what she’s saying, but it seems that Emir Abdallahad Khan, ruler of Bukhara in the 1880s, refused to allow the Russian ‘devil wagons’ into the holy city. When the first trains arrived at Kagan, the Bukharans were so fascinated they would crowd into the open carriages, waiting for hours for the engines to start. The Emir later changed his mind and allowed a branchline to be built between Kagan and Bukhara, but this is now closed. 

At Kagan, we drag our bags down onto the low platform, where we stand, dazzled by the fierce sunlight, among hundreds of people in swirling brightly coloured robes, the women in spangled headscarves, and the men with beards and swarthy faces. Past the station are putty-coloured mud houses, like those I’ve seen in pictures of Afghanistan; we’re only 200 miles from Mazar-e-Sharif. 

Surrounded by jostling taxi drivers, I start trying to fix a price for the journey into Bukhara. 

“Four shtuk,” says the foremost taxi driver. Shtuk means thing in Russian. Four things?

“What?” I ask him. “Four sum? Oh! You mean 4,000 sum.”

The driver laughs, flashing gold teeth behind a bushy beard. He has thick black hair growing on his chest and the backs of his hands. He’s the first really hairy Central Asian I’ve seen. 

“1,000 is normal,” I tell him. That’s what the girl from the train said. Behind me, my mother is clutching her bag and eyeing the taxi drivers nervously.

“How much is he asking for?” she hisses. “Because if you’re arguing over 10p again…”

“One shtuk per place,” says the driver. 

Away to Bukhara

“All right,” I say, and he leads us to a car in a sandy street by the station, then hurries off to find some more passengers to share the ride. A large and colourful insect is buzzing loudly and banging itself against the back windscreen. Robed youths with sharp Tajik features push bicycles laden with bundles of cloth down the street.

After a while, the insect goes to ground under my handbag, which I’ve placed on the back ledge, and the driver returns with a Bukharan family. The woman and her son cram themselves into the back with us, while the husband is under various bags and bulky packages in the front passenger seat. I look out the window at the wide Russian built streets, then as we approach the heart of the city, a warren of low, mud-walled houses.