Khiva is an interesting town, with the walled city preserved as a heritage site, as people live and work in a town that’s over a thousand years old. Old buildings have beeen restored, Madrassas have been converted to museums, caravansarais been converted into hotels. Despite the increase in tourism, the city is still not “touristy”, and you notice that the city ha been preserved for the sake of heritage, and not so that it becomes a tourist attraction. What strikes a visitor to Khiva is how well planned the city is, with its wide open boulevards, and well ventilated buildings. The simple, geometric Islamic designs adding to its beauty and charm.
The old town of Khiva is a walled city. All buildings are brown, and were preserved or restored during the Soviet era. Most of the religious buildings were converted to museums and hotels. About four thousand people live inside the walled city, mainly working in the museums, hotels and various souvenier shops in the area. Outside the walled city lies the modern town of Khiva, which is a small provincial town where the Soviet-era planned neighborhoods are apparent.
Unlike Turkmenistan, where we were earlier, you hardly saw a security guard or policeman anywhere. Despite being exposed to tourists, people still genuinely friendly, and not looking to make a quick buck from the tourists. Khiva is a small town, and time and time again we were reminded of how friendly and nice people were. We were having lunch at a restaurant in the heart of the walled city and a group of young men came and took a picture with us. About an hour later we saw this group coming towards us excitedly holding a stack of what looked like postcards. When they came up to us we saw that they were photographs that they had taken earlier in the day with us. Immediately I was on my guard, thinking that they were going to try and sell the photos to us. However, all they really wanted to do was share the photos with us, and not sell us anything. Its hard to describe how horrible I felt after that incident. After having horrible experiences in Egypt, India and Istanbul with locals looking to con or fleece tourists, I was pretty jaded, and viewed any friendly move with suspicion.
After having spent the morning visiting the various monuments, we decided to wander into the new town and see what it had to offer. We made our way to the post office, a drab gray building where they were thrilled to bits to see us, and it seemed like no tourist, and definitely no Indian, had wandered his or her way to the post office (most tourists remain within the walled city). One of my fellow travelers collects stamps, and so we asked them to show us various stamps, and they were only too thrilled to oblige. With the cost of living really low in Uzbekistan, the stamps cost next to nothing and we bought several stamps each. Spying my camera, one of the workers at the post office wanted a picture taken of them, and then provided their address for me to mail it to them, “Khiva Posta”! After the post office, we wandered around some more, took a ride on a ferriss wheel, spotted the local football stadium, and found a place for dinner where once again the locals came to get their picture taken with the “Indian”, and were more than happy to serve us some succulent kebabs, shashlicks and pulaos.
With the influence of Persian and Arabic on both Uzbek and Hindi/Urdu, I was able to make out several words, which made it easy to communicate. For example, kagaaz is paper, dukaan is shop, hotel is mehmaankhaana, city is shaher.
People in Uzbekistan seemed more happy, open and outgoing relative to Turkmenistan, where everyone seemed a little more reserved, and more wary of the administration than the Uzbeks. The Uzbeks also held a fascination for Bollywood, and on several occasions I had people singing Bollywood tunes for me! One of them was this lovely college girl who stole my heart with her rendition of “Baazigar”!!
When you travel you realize how irrelevant language becomes. On my first day in Khiva, when I was wandering around, I played ball with a couple of kids and then ended up sitting with their fathers and grandfathers. Through gestures and brief phrases, one of the elders was able to communicate that he was a little kid when Lal Bahadur Shashtri, India’s prime minister at the time, had come to Tashkent and had died there. He asked who was the current President of India and was surprised and awed to hear that the President was a mussalman!
After two wonderful nights in Khiva we made our way to Bukhara, which is about a day’s journey by road. On the way, we saw several small towns which still retained their Soviet character. Drab blocks of buildings, with small gardens, and markets- all very uniform. Seeing them, I was actually reminded of Suburbia in the U.S., where capitalist developers created their version of Utopia, and rreplicated it across the country, very much like the Soviet Socialist experiment I saw in front of me.
