Boo!

Tonight is All Hallows' Eve.  The vigil of All Saints Day (tomorrow) (honoring the saints in heaven), and All Souls Day (the following day) (praying for those dead wandering about and still on their way).  Just in case you forget what it's all about this evening, while you're out howling at the moon.

Halloween may indeed have originated as the aforementioned religious vigil, or the vigil may have adopted, opportunistically, the customs of earlier Celtic festivals.

In any event, Halloween -- as any kid knows -- is definitely more than just another harvest festival.  The aroma of the grave hangs over the night.  The dead, the walking dead, the undead, the ghoul, the banshee, the witch, the warlock, and the just plain, old, vanilla-flavored ghost -- they all play a major part in tonight's revels.

The pumpkin?  Or more precisely, the "jack-o'-lantern"?  According to Irish legend, Jack was a guy who made a bargain with the devil that he would never be accepted into Hell.  Unfortunately, he wasn't admitted to Heaven either, and he forever roams the earth with a hollowed-out turnip -- yes, turnip -- lit up by an ember from Hell that Satan hurled at him in disgust.  We do things bigger in America, hence the replacement of turnips with pumpkins.

Halloween used to be -- at least in my provincial home town -- a day for children's parties (bobbing for apples, wearing cute costumes, and drinking unfermented cidar) -- and, of course, for trick or treating by candy-crazed urchins, kids often accompanied by their resigned parents.  In our more enlightened era, Halloween has become also an excuse for adults to join in covertly or overtly pagan celebrations, roaming the streets, usually inebriated and usually dressed far less innocently than were the skeletons, witches and princesses of our youth. 

No harm, I guess.  It's all in fun, for the most part.  And it's only one night a year.  But, if he had his druthers, this curmudgeon would happily hand the holiday back to the kids.

Under the Bosporus

The first time I saw Istanbul, I had arrived by bus from Beirut, through Syria, and across the long, flat reaches of Anatolia.  The bus came to its final stop at what was announced as "Istanbul-Asia."  In front of us was the Bosporus.  To go farther, to reach the more tourist-oriented "Istanbul-Europe," required a ride on a ferry.

I couldn't have been more excited.  A ferry from one continent to another!  A ride that, at least in my mind, left the Middle East behind and re-connected me to the more familiar world of European civilization.  But a ride that also displayed the stunning skyline -- domes and minarets -- of traditional Istanbul.  The skyline of a world neither Arab nor Christian, but, sui generis, Turkish Muslim.

The next time I visited Istanbul, the Bosporus was spanned by two graceful suspension bridges.  The so-called First Bridge was visible from the old city and, eventually, has come to seem an integral part of the Istanbul skyline.

And now, this week, Asian and European Istanbul are being knit together by an 8.5-mile rail tunnel under the Bosporus.  At first, the tunnel will serve commuter traffic, but eventually will also carry high-speed inter-city trains, integrating the European and Turkish rail systems.

For those living in and about Istanbul, construction of the tunnel, like the earlier construction of the bridges, represents nothing but progress.  For traveling romanticists -- like myself -- feelings are more mixed.  Would a high speed rail journey from Beirut that ended at Sirceki station on the European side of the Bosporus seem as glamorous to a young traveler as did my own arrival?  Would the journey still be remembered as intensely years later?

Hard to tell.  Maybe walking off the train into the heart of Sultanahmet -- the "old town" -- would be every bit as dazzling to the first-timer as the ferry ride from the Asian side was to me.  I always remind myself that many contemporary French denounced construction of the Eiffel Tower as a monstrosity that would ruin Paris.  Change isn't always bad.

And yet -- as convenient as is today's just-over-two-hour train ride through the Chunnel from London to Paris, it certainly lacks the excitement and sense of adventure of transferring to a ferry at Dover for the crossing to Calais.  And closer to home, I remember the excitement of the train ride to San Francisco, where we caught the ferry from the Oakland terminal to the Ferry Building across the Bay.  (Yes, the Bay Bridge was there -- the ferry crossed under it -- but the Southern Pacific for many years continued to use their own ferry, before eventually crossing the bridge by bus.)

I need to remember that for a young traveler, the first time he views a new place is always exciting.  And I also need to remember that, as we age, we always resent changes from a world we found exciting in younger days.  I loved my first visit to England, when you could reach virtually every small village by rail.  But nineteenth century writers lamented the loss of an earlier, pastoral and seemingly larger England, an England not yet knit together by rapid trains. 

Woody Allen got it right in his movie, Midnight in Paris: Every generation has its romanticists who envy those who lived in earlier generations.

But, even making every attempt at objectivity, I still feel that the world loses something as it becomes ever easier to reach the most remote areas, as every major city becomes less distinct from others, when arrival in Istanbul (or Singapore, or Hong Kong, or Tehran) becomes little different from arrival in Los Angeles or New York.

But that's the way it is.  No one, including ourselves, is willing to resist changes that will make his life easier and more pleasant -- certainly not for the sole purpose of preserving his unique exoticism for the appreciation of jaded foreign tourists!

Ooops!

I visit strange foreign lands, and I hike at high altitudes in remote wildernesses.  I must be a total daredevil, an insatiable thrill seeker.  Right?

Ha!

I'm terrified of amusement park rides.  Not just those new coasters that twist and loop and spin you upside down, all in an apparent effort to turn your body inside out.  I'm talking about Ferris wheels.  I'm talking about carnie rides like octopuses and tilt-a-whirls.  I'm talking about anything that takes me up high, or that spins me around in a manner that could potentially hurl me some distance into thin air.  I'm especially talking about rides that remind me, while on them, that my life depends on some unknown carnival employee's engineering and/or mechanical skills. 

I've even wondered -- looking above me while riding -- what would happen if the cotter pin holding a carousel pole in place snapped.  Would I ride my horse off into space, Pegasus-like, on a death ride to oblivion?

But, yes, surprisingly enough -- I have in fact paid my money and forced myself onto roller coasters.  The old-fashioned kind, I hasten to add.  The kind that just goes up and down and around hairpin turns.  Not the kind that in any way forces you to travel upside down.  I've maintained my sanity during these occasional experiences because the ride is so fast and over so quickly that I don't have time to analyze the enormous variety of things that could go wrong -- at least, once the agonizing climb, dragged by a chain up the initial hill ("why am I doing this?  what was I thinking of?"), is over.

All this is prefatory to today's story about the roller coaster incident in Orlando, Florida.  The ride where the car stalled at the top of a vertical hill, suspended seventeen stories in the air.  The front of the car apparently reached the top of the hill in a roughly horizontal orientation; the seats toward the back, on the other hand, were hanging straight down vertically.  Those unlucky rear riders found themselves facing uphill, staring at the sky, but one look over their shoulder gave them a nice view of Earth from a height of 140 feet.  They were trapped for two hours before amusement park employees found some way to extricate them from the car and bring them safely down to earth.

Even worse for me than the ride, and the untimely stop, would have been the extrication.  How it was accomplished wasn't explained.  How it was done, I don't even want to contemplate.

Only one person was hospitalized, with neck and back pain.  I would have been hospitalized in the mental health care unit, foaming at the mouth and babbling nonsensically.

My steps in Central Asia*

With some trepidation, I approached the departure gate at Istanbul's airport on the evening of September 8, after two relaxing and interesting days puttering around the city. I was bound for Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and hardly knew what to expect. With relief, I spotted Maeve, a fellow trekker from an earlier trip, who greeted me with a hug and an incredible account of how her passport and visa had reached her at San Francisco airport only hours before departure.

So we were off, on one of Turkish Airlines's twice weekly flights to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. We landed at 3:45 a.m., were given a few hours to rest in a hotel, taken on a short tour of the limited sights of Dushanbe (an attractive, modern, Soviet-era city), and then driven into the Fann Mountains over perilous roads with breathtaking switchbacks. In less than 24 hours, I'd been transported from the urbane pleasures of Istanbul to a small tent in a huge, primitive, mountain wilderness.

I was one of twelve hikers -- all British except myself and Maeve. We were accompanied by a Welsh chief guide, a Tajik "translator" who also served as an assistant guide and jack of all trades, a couple of cooks, and a varying cast of "donkey boys," most of them teenagers, who handled our pack donkeys and pitched and struck our tents each night and morning.

Tajikistan, bordering Afghanistan to its south, is the poorest of the former Soviet republics. It's also the only one in Central Asia that speaks a form of Persian, rather than a Turkic language. Ethnic Tajiks represent an interbreeding of Iranian and Mongol peoples, but not all Tajik citizens are ethnic Tajiks -- there are plenty of ethnic Russians, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian peoples living in Tajikistan -- nor do all Tajiks live in Tajikistan. The ancient Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan have always been dominated by ethnic Tajiks, and Tajikistan long pleaded with the Soviet government, unsuccessfully, to transfer those cities to the Tajik republic.

Central Asia, as we learned, is really a stew of various nationalities that once roamed willy-nilly about "Turkistan." It wasn't until Stalin's time that an effort was made to carve the Turkistan region into various republics, each dominated by a distinct ethnic group. The effort was only partially successful.

Tajikistan was, unsurprisingly, once part of various Persian empires. Like Persia, itself, it was largely Zoroastrian (together with local minor religions) until the Arab conquest forced Islam on the people in the seventh century A.D. Since then, it has been part of whatever empire was dominant in the region, ending up with the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Present-day Tajikistan, independent since 1991, has inherited a few modern cities from the Soviet era, along with reasonably good health and education systems. The vast majority of the land, however, is dominated by mountain ranges -- notably the mighty Pamirs in the southeast and the Fanns (actually an extension of the Pamirs) -- where we did our hiking -- in the west.

The Fanns, although perhaps small in size compared with the Pamirs proper (highest peak, Chimtarga, is 18,000 feet), to me appeared awesome in their jagged silhouettes and plunging valleys, in their sweep and vistas, and in their virtual emptiness. We hiked roughly six to seven hours a day, usually from a lower campsite over a pass and down into the next valley -- usual elevation gain between 2,000 to 2,500 feet. We camped every night, except for one night about half way through the trip when we reached a small village and stayed in a "gite," or primitive hotel, several hikers to a room, sleeping in our sleeping bags.   We met one other party of hikers -- an Israeli couple -- and a few shepherds tending flocks of goats and sheep.

After eleven days of hiking, we finally emerged on the opposite side of the mountain range, bid our local staff farewell with the usual presentation of tips and participation in orgiastic singing and dancing before a giant bonfire, and were hauled back to civilization in the morning by two vans that, happily, rendezvoused with us as planned. Our destination was Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, not far from our mountain point of egress, but ethnic disputes had closed the local border crossing. So we drove five hours north to Khujand (née Leninabad), a pleasant city, where we visited a market, checked into a tiny (but honest-to-goodness) hotel, and had much-needed showers!

We crossed the border the next day -- a fantasy of bureaucratic delights -- much filling of forms and stamping of documents. The crossing had been projected to take three hours, and we all felt oddly delighted and relieved that we were in fact able to cross the national border -- between two countries that used to be fellow states like Oregon and Washington -- in a mere two hours. We drove another five hours south to Samarkand through endless fields of cotton  (Uzbekistan is the world's second largest exporter of cotton, after only the United States.  The Soviet government, unfortunately, drove the fields to partial soil depletion by setting ever higher annual quotas, with no crop rotation permitted.)

I don't want to be harsh on Samarkand. Samarkand is a remarkable city with an amazing history. A history nearly as complex and power nearly as great -- during its heyday under Tamarlane -- as  Rome or Florence. The problem, from a tourist's perspective, is that -- unlike Rome or Florence -- its antiquities were reduced virtually to rubble by the passage of time, repeated earthquakes, and Soviet distrust of ethnic pride in local history. Once again, the Soviet government created a modern city -- a very attractive city -- but didn't do much, for many years, with the historical monuments.

But in recent years, Uzbekistan has done an amazing job of rebuilding the ancient mosques and madressas, with their characteristic blue barrel domes and complex ornamentation. Exhibits show the "before" state of the ruins, and explain how the buildings have been accurately rebuilt. Unfortunately, to me, reconstructed buildings in the midst of a modern city are beautiful and instructive, but they lack the feel and smell of history. I could never ignore the fact that most of the work to create what we were viewing had been done in the past twenty years.

In any event, we were given a very satisfactory tour of the city by a native of Samarkand, an ethnic Russian whose grasp of history and architecture seemed several notches above what one generally expects in such tours. After two nights at a pleasant small hotel, with meals in an open courtyard over which loomed the blue dome of a major mosque across the street, we took the train to the capital city of Tashkent, some 3½ hours to the north. A quick afternoon tour of Tashkent (about which I had the same complaints as I did about Samarkand), a final group dinner at a local restaurant, a fast night's sleep -- and we found ourselves saying goodbye to each other as we flew back to Istanbul, and thence to our respective homes.

Not only a wonderful hike, but an opportunity to get a quick introduction to a part of the world about which I knew very little indeed.  I have an urge to return -- if not to Tajikistan itself, at least to the general region of Central Asia.
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A selection of photos will be available for viewing for the next month on Facebook, regardless of whether the reader is a Facebook member. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151940762454602.1073741839.761679601&type=1&l=4bb84c1e1b

* Half-hearted apologies to Alexander Borodin.