Leaving Samarkand for Bukhara

We continued our journey on the Great Silk Road network, with an 8-hour bus ride to Bukhara (still Uzbekistan). Of course there were some stops along the way to keep us entertained, and Abdu shared lots of information about the region and about his experiences.

From Samarkand, we were entering an area that was historically desert, but since Soviet times, has been kept artificially green. In the early 1960s, water was diverted from rivers and the Aral Sea (Google “Aral Sea disaster”) to grow cotton—a crop that needs a lot of water.

By the early 1970s, almost all arable land in Uzbekistan had been transformed to cotton farming; very little land was used for edible crops for the people—Abdu has very dark memories of this time. It was all part of the Soviet government plan for cotton to become a major export. Strict production quotas were imposed (from a government far away in Moscow), and upon meeting the quotas, the level would be raised next year. It became physically impossible to do so.

Even after independence in 1991, Uzbekistan maintained its reliance on cotton production for export—well into the 2010s). As a college student, Abdu, who is 41, had to pick cotton between classes, and if he refused, he would have been expelled. Eventually, the government stopped this practice and gave people a plot of land for them to grow their own vegetables. His family is now working on getting permission to build a school for entrepreneurship for girls on the land his family received.

And so, the long drive passed pretty quickly, with stops at a family ceramics workshop (and lunch restaurant combo), and the archaeological ruins of a caravansary. Caravansaries were fortified lodging stops along the Silk Road, situated a day’s ride apart.Read more