Pain Spotting
Danny Boyle reports from Uzbekistan
Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting and The Beach, travels to Uzbekistan - the land that comitted 'ecocide'.
Arriving at Tashkent airport at 4 am, one of the first things I noticed was shoes. Our connection, a burly soldier with the build of an Uzbek Olympic wrestler, yawned and pointed us towards passport control. I looked down and saw that, at odds with his camouflage kit, were twinkling black plastic disco shoes.
Intrigued, I noticed that the junior lost luggage advisor had made her own footwear, or rather customised it by nailing wooden blocks to the heels. Later in the morning, I spotted another woman balanced on the highest heels I had ever seen outside of a porn film, and businessmen with beautifully turned up toes, which pointed the tips at their owners’ noses.
And later still, as we boarded an Anatonov 24 – an ‘egg-beater’ propeller plane – the airhostess wore shoes reminiscent of a Roxy music album cover. But perhaps by this time I was following my interest in Uzbek shoe fashion in order to distract myself from something I had heard about Russian pilots: that prior to takeoff they fully clasp their vodka glasses with their fists, so, as they toast to the success of the flight, there’s no chance of the clink being heard by passengers over the intercom. Na Zdovorie!
Out the window the buildings of Tashkent trickle into sand.
Once upon a time Uzbekistan and its neighbours were the centre of the world. Until Vasco de Gama discovered the sea route to India in 1498, Central Asia was the Silk Road connecting the trade of two great economic and cultural powers, China and the Ottoman Empire. It was Shangri-la, the land of dreams, the birth place of civilization and the stomping ground of Tamerlane of Samarkand, Genghis Khan and Atilla the Hun who marched back and forth juggling empires and atrocities. The Silk Road blew away hundreds of years ago but it took Soviet occupation to really bury this part of the world in the sand.
We’re on our way to Karakalpakstan, which you won’t have heard of. It’s an autonomous republic in the north of Uzbekistan. And the town that we’re driving to, Muynak, is at the end of the road. It might as well be at the end of the earth. Muynak was once a thriving town with a large fishing fleet, nestled on the shores of the world’s fourth largest inland sea. But those shores are now over 150 km distant, and the sea itself has shrunk to 20% of its original size. Where there was water, there are saline flats on which no harvest will grow. Salt and pesticide blow into town from the desiccated sea bed. The people and their fleet are stranded.
The biblical quality of the disaster in Muynak, the replacement of water and prosperity with drought and desert, is dryly acknowledged in a saying that has developed in the town: that God, having blessed the area with wondrous nature, fell out of love with the people and sent them Russian engineers instead. These engineers rerouted the Aral Sea’s source rivers to service ‘white gold’ - cotton production on a scale that only the Soviet Empire could conceive. The industries that rose alongside have now vanished, along with the Soviet Empire that imposed them.
Like a dog expecting a kick, Muynak is a town that hugs the ground. No building is higher than one storey, except a long-closed cinema which is two. If you could be bothered to kill yourself, you’d find nothing worth jumping off. Expectations, morale, motivation are all as low-lying as the architecture. It’s tangible – you can see it in the faces of the men who sit in the street, watching boys drive the cattle out to graze. Given the poverty (and the government tariffs) one can understand why there are no cars, but there are hardly any bicycles either. I remember hearing in Havana that the week after the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba’s only source of oil disappeared, China sent three million bicycles on two container ships. No such initiative here.
And then there are the stranded skeletal remains of Muynak’s fishing fleet. Under a bleached and breathless sky, the boats list, landlocked. It’s their stillness that is so strange – you see their shapes, and your mind expects them to be floating, bobbing. Your ears expect to hear waves slapping against hulls. But these hulks, tattooed with Cyrillic names, are silent and frozen. Sand completes the surreal and counter-intuitive scene, in the way that the shapes of the dunes provide an echo of waves and water.
But the best way to appreciate the scale of the catastrophe in Muynak is to undertake the drive to the distant Aral Sea. Five hours in a four-by four, driving across what should be a sea bed, should be under a hundred feet of water, but instead is dust and scrubs and reeds.
Fitting the dreamlike aspects of the landscape, I am told a story that belongs in a nightmare. It describes what was once an island in the Aral sea, but is now somewhere in the salt flats. When surrounded by water, the island was the home for Soviet experiments with Anthrax and biological weapons. There are two versions of accounts about what happened next. The first, more optimistic, is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Americans came, saw what was there, and cleared it up. The second is that the Americans came, saw what was there, and fled. Either way, according to the story: “You could walk to this island right now, except that any mutated life that survived the Russians and the Americans might walk right back with you…”