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www.groovekorea.com / February 2014 52 DEsTInATIOns Edited by Josh Foreman (joshforeman@groovekorea.com) A hunt for culture becomes a quest for ca sh After inserting my card at the UNB’s ATM, the machine buzzed until the screen read “ no means.” I am certainly not rich, but I do have a few means. Story by Jean Poulot / Photos by Stefan_fotos M y notebook had 100 blank pages left. The last entry, written a few months before in Panama, listed the places I was thinking about visiting next: Papua New Guinea? The Solomon Islands? Laos? The Trans-Siberian, again? The Silk Road? The Silk Road. I was heading for Uzbekistan. The beginning of my trip proved less than silky smooth. The Tashkent airport looked like it had not been renovated since the fall of com- munism. The emblematic machine of capital- ism, the ATM, was nowhere to be found. At the bank, I changed a few U.S. dollars, kept for emergencies, into Uzbek “som,” enough to take a bus downtown. In my money belt, I had 60 euros, four not-so-crisp $20 bills and around 40,000 won. The airport tourist office recommended a cheap hotel, the Shosh, conveniently located walking distance from the train station. My plan was to travel to the cities along the Silk Road not on a camel, but by train, to Samarkand. “Silk Road” is a misnomer, as there were ac- tually many ancient routes and detours linking China to the Mediterranean. It was the original superhighway for shipping goods between Asia and the West. Along the Road, traders traveled through Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Persia. Silk was a major good, along with spices, artifacts and technology. The most fa- mous trader was Marco Polo. Samarkand was the largest market on the old Silk Road. It was pilfered by Alexander the Great and, 1,500 years later, Genghis Khan. Marco Polo described it as a very large and splendid city. That was my reason for going there. My plan was to visit the very large and splendid city, cross the Kyzyl Kum desert to Bukhara, with its turquoise-domed mosques and fortress, and from there push north toward the Kazakh border. I would follow the Amu Darya river to the Aral Sea before it dried out. The Shosh wanted to be posh with its black- and-white neo-art-deco style. Businessmen in suits wearing heavy jewelry on their wrists haunted the lobby, sipping cocktails, accompa- nied by women who, judging by their outfits, were not their wives. Their short dresses and body language indicated they worked at the ho- tel, and not as maids. As I checked in, the front desk clerk, dressed in a maroon polyester suit with frayed lapels, swiped my credit card several times in the ma- chine. Front and back. Upside down. Not a good sign. As a last resort, he wiped the mag- netic strip of the card on his frayed left sleeve. But the reader refused to accept the card. “Cash?” he asked with a scowl. “Nope. Do you have an ATM?” “No ATM machine here.” I usually like to point out the redundancy in the phrase “ATM machine” (the “M” stands for “machine”). This time I let it pass. “The banks are closed now. You can try to- morrow.” There’s something about the word “try” that connotes pessimism. Threadbare on the Silk Ro ad
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