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Tales of gold and riches, stories of warlords and shamans and fascinating, offbeat city stops are all woven through a luxury private train journey along the Silk Road. Follow along with Belinda Jackson as she makes tracks for the untapped beauty of Central Asia.
It’s 4.30am and my skin is burnt orange as I face the Door to Hell. By far the most bizarre – and therefore most popular – of Turkmenistan’s charms is its Darvaza gas crater, a well of natural gas that was lit in 1971 in an attempt to burn off “a little excess gas”. It’s still burning, here in the severe, Karakum desert, unquenched for the past 53 years.
Like moths to the flames, a small group of us is drawn to the 70-metre-wide fire pit to watch as flames roar and flicker; a scant fence does nothing to keep the foolhardy from standing at its lip. As dawn breaks, we retreat back to the train tracks and there waits the Golden Eagle. In the first flush of dawn, our 12-carriage private train resumes its journey tracing just one strand of the Silk Road, a web of ancient trading routes that sent silk to the West and gold to the East.
Slaves, paper, gunpowder and foods also travelled the route; words, beliefs, ideas and plague their intangible travel companions across more than 15 centuries. Here, in the deserts of Turkmenistan, it’s my second-last day on this private train tour of Central Asia – seven days ago, we’d set out from Kazakhstan’s former capital, Almaty, travelling through Uzbekistan and now on to curious and curiouser Turkmenistan.
By day, I rarely find myself in my Silver Class cabin – there’s always something marvellous to explore and locals to guide me. But when I do pause, it is a calm, timber-lined space with a doily-covered table, blue upholstered window seat, gold curtains framing scenes of farmsteads on a butter-coloured steppe, a towering fortress, a desert plain.
Each night, my cabin is transformed; the double bed is folded down, its light duvet and pillows fluffed, an itinerary of the next day’s adventures slipped under the door with weather forecasts, a note on currencies, the restaurants we’ll visit. I know when Ekatarina has been here, my Russian cabin attendant always leaves a fresh flower in a small vase.
At its full capacity, the train has 19 carriages carrying 85 people, but ours is a far smaller group, and we share our stories over pre-dinner G&Ts in the bar car, plan shopping forays into ancient markets, soak up the history in the little library stacked with train titles and histories before the next day’s explorations.
In Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s jewel, I find romance at the crossroads of the medieval world, in Registan Square. Here, a magnificent mosque was built in the 14th-century by Mongol warlord Timur, or Tamurlaine, for his wife Bibi-Khanym, who clearly loved turquoise tiles as much as I do. Since the 6th century, it has been a site for meetings and bazaars, workshops and executions, the imprint of the Mongol Empire on its beautiful face. Now, it’s the pin-up for Silk Road tourism.
The number of local tourists outnumbers those of us from abroad, but everyone wants the selfie, and so phones are handed around as Uzbeki women in their headscarves and long, colourful dresses and we jeans-clad tourists cement our new friendships with group photos, forever embedded in each other’s phones’ memories. All are well pleased.
Irreverently backed up against the outer walls of the mosque is the busy Siyob Bazaar, where I pick up a huge ring of the city’s famous bread. Dense, chewy and slightly sweet, the bread is baked in a tandir oven, and can apparently last three years – after which time it could be used as a blunt instrument.
In Bukhara, its 5th-century fortress walls are a backdrop for a dance troupe of girls in white, as they record a video to traditional Uzbeki music. Later, I’ll spy a shaggy, two-humped Bactrian camel standing innocently beside the picturesque walls of the Ark of Bukhara, its handlers swift to appear at the sight of a camera-wielding tourist.
In contrast, little Khiva’s deliciously crumbling mudbrick walls are just the place to hang your vivid carpets, hoping for a sale. Blood red or bright fuchsia, sky blue and the green of spring grass all are wrought into flowers and curlicues that are also embroidered across the cropped jacket I buy, redolent of the heat and dust of Khiva’s position between two deserts, the Karakum and the Kyzylkum.
This is my favourite of the Silk Road cities – in Khiva, I’m told the softest wool is from the neck of the camel. I’ll take two scarves, please and yes, the seller is correct. In its walled city, Ichan Kala, mystique is a curtained, outdoor café, where long, low cushion-lined daybeds beckon, an ornate retreat from the beating desert sun where I sip cold pomegranate juice.
Leaving Uzbekistan, I watch as entire families pick cotton in the late afternoon, fathers holding their babies up to watch our smart, blue train sail past, the driver’s long too-oooot lingering in the still, warm air. The cotton fields peter out as we enter the sandy Karakum desert, which cloaks more than two-thirds of Turkmenistan. Camels stroll through a desert littered with clumps of dehydrated grass and crawling shrubs – the snow-dusted mountains and laden apple trees of Almaty seem a world away.
Turkmenistan lives up to its reputation as one of the world’s most cumbersome countries to enter. A host of rigidly uniformed customs officials boards the train with a giant, metal machine. For the next four hours, it will whir and stamp our passports in a marvellous display of antiquated bureaucracy.
My last stop on the Golden Eagle is also the most peculiar in a whistle-stop tour of peculiarities – even dwarfing the falconry show in Almaty, where a wolf-hunting golden eagle swoops so low over our heads, it gives the perfect centre part.
Fifty kilometres from the Iranian border stands the capital of Turkmenistan, Ashgabat, aka the “Las Vegas of the Karakum”. In four hours of driving its broad, eight-lane streets, I see only two people, both gardeners tending the immaculate lawns and trees. On seeing us, they melt swiftly into the greenery, clearly aiming to avoid us. Ditto, the eight-lane freeways are devoid of cars.
Packing tip: bring your biggest sunglasses – the hot, Central Asian sun is hard on this desert city of white marble. The story goes that Ashgabat would look like any other concrete Soviet-built city except its first president, Saparmurat Niyazov, aka Turkmenbashi “the father of the Turkmen”, clad all its buildings in white marble, simply because he could.
It’s ironic, then, that Turkmenistan’s stories are told in its jewel-coloured carpets, stacked up for sale in a shop forgotten even by its owner. Free from the seller’s patter, I run my hands across the motifs, which tell the stories of tribes and amulets, spirituality and identity.
Mine is a special trip; the Golden Eagle Luxury Trains’ entrepreneurial founder, Brit Tim Littler, is onboard and the crew, many of whom joined the staff when the company first started running the rails a decade ago, are beaming. So, is he a mad train tragic? I ask over dinner on the train. Tim hesitates before replying.
“No, but I did organise the train society at my public school at age 12,” he says. “I must have been very precocious.”
Tim first joined the family’s wine trading company, which explains the thoughtful, exploratory wine lists on offer, but with his co-founder, the late Marina Linke, spent decades combing the train cemeteries of the former Soviet empire, rescuing and rehabilitating diesel and steam engines to create his own rolling stock. He takes us to a graveyard in Almaty, his hands gentle on the great black engines, and sympathy for their neglect rises through my body.
The company started operating rail tours through Eastern Europe and Russia, running the first private, luxury steam train along the Trans-Siberian railway in 1996. It now concentrates on its European, Indian and Central Asian journeys.
If you’ve ever travelled on Russian trains, you’d recognise the structure: each carriage has two attendants, who tidy our cabins each morning, serve meals and at a pinch, bring me tea, delivered in fine china pots bearing the company’s golden, double-headed eagle logo.
That eagle-eye attention to detail continues throughout; each morning, we breakfast on the train, watching villages and orchards pass as fruits, eggs, a choice of caviar and charcuterie are served; and each morning an offering such as kasha, a Russian buckwheat pudding stained purple by the addition of tiny bilberries, or pancakes stuffed with sweet tvorog, a fresh farmer’s cheese found on all good breakfast spreads in Central Asia.
In the cities, I cement my passion for Uzbekistan’s national dish, the rice and lamb crowd pleaser of plov. I rejoice in its juicy dumplings called manti and appreciate the mastery of good shashlik – which country doesn’t have a meat-on-stick variation?
One evening, a barbecue dinner is served on the platform of Bukhara’s old train station; the chefs seem to enjoy the chance for some open-air grilling, instead of working culinary miracles from the tiny kitchens onboard. But the evening that everyone is talking about is the train’s famed caviar dinner – Beluga and Osetra caviar from the Caspian Sea is served from enormous, silver tureens, blinis and sour cream hot on its heels, followed by bottles of J. Lassalle champagne.
The decadence almost takes my breath away as our train continues to ride the rails; beneath the bluest skies above the empty plain, by the impossibly vivid mountain waters of the Big Almaty Lake in the Tian Shan mountains, past the towering walls of turquoise tiles that clad mosques, madrassas and mausoleums.
A theatre for warlords and shamans, for steppe empires and the home to the Great Game, where Britain and Russia fought each other for influence in Central Asia, the Silk Road is meandering, intriguing, occasionally infuriating and always rewarding – we are simply the latest travellers following its path.
This feature was originally published in Issue 7 of Dream by Luxury Escapes.
