Night Train to Bukhara

It’s nearly 3:00 am and by the window of my “luxe compartment for two” passes a dozen meters of lighted desert. Beyond that stretches a night so dark it might as well be oblivion. The small bit of the world known to me is populated by scrubby brush that never reaches past knee-high. Occasionally, and mysteriously, the scene is broken by a pole lamp whose oasis of light, appearing solid- seems to approach the train rather than the other way around. At one point we seemed to sway though a sand storm, creating an uneven pizzicato against the window.

Our train seems to hail from the end of Soviet times and, I’m afraid hasn’t been cleaned much since. The luxury compartment boasts a television, a kidney bean shaped desk cloaked in a golden cloth, bunk beds and a bathroom. The bathroom is wonderful. There is a decent sized shower with a modern-looking curved glass door set in a white plastic frame, a regular, western toilet and a small pedestal sink. And about a decade of grime in the corners (without going in to too much detail, the state of the toilet seat nearly met my standard of the very worst toilet seat ever, found in a bar in The French Quarter of New Orleans). The compartment features shiny wood, jewel-encrusted ventilation holes in the door, decorative wall plates, a print showing a desert oasis, and a fanciful mirror with an etched skyline of Khorezm-inspired minarets and domes. There is a porter who brought us clean sheets and green tea. Being Lloyd and Erica, we found beers, although Lloyd had to wake up the bartender to get them. On his trip through the train to the dining car, Lloyd discovered that all the cars are sleeping cars, unlike the trains in China who, despite overnight travel, had both sleeping and regular passenger cars. Not all of the cars, however, were luxe.

When we arrived at the large train station in Urgench the folks working there, from security to railway employees, didn’t seem to be familiar with the type of ticket we had. Twice we had to show them that the ticket was for two people. The engineer who showed us to our compartment seemed to have trouble determining which was listed on the ticket. When he showed us the compartment, he had to remove a leather jacket from the closet in the compartment. I suspect that these luxe compartments are used so infrequently the train-based personnel set up camp in them. As with the domestic flight we took from Tashkent to Urgench, the train left exactly on time. My impression thus far is of a nearly obsessive punctuality in Uzbeks: all of our guides and drivers have shown up quite early (true, we were ready for them, as Lloyd is equally obsessed) and now two forms of mass transportation have been reliably on time. After American-based airlines and Amtrak it’s an incredibly welcome change.

I love traveling overnight by train. Simultaneously sleeping and reaching my destination meets my need for nomadism. The rhythmic forward progress is soothing. Unlike any other form of transportation, I have never felt the least bit of motion sickness on a train. Unlike most other forms of transport, I can read and write while traveling on a train. Once my body has adopted the rhythm of the train I can perform tasks that normally require stillness such as pouring tea or, in China, use the squat (in the floor) toilets.

Fantastic! We’re stopped on the tracks for some train-traffic reason and a thunder storm has just passed over us. There are brilliant flashes of lightening that illuminated a beautiful and untouched – if harsh – desert scape. The rain storm, ever more mobile, washed over the train and continued along its way. Thunder marches toward the horizon unfettered by landscape.