2.
THE FOG OF VISAS
I have a friend who talks a great deal about all the things he is going to do: direct a play; paint; buy a house in Panama and he has never done any of them. I criticized him for never following through until the day I realized, listening to him speak of yet another plan, a criticism on the tip of my tongue, that I was actually criticizing myself. For years I had been thinking of recreating Ella Maillart’s 1932 journey through Central Asia, yet I had never done anything about it except invent excuses not to go. I can take the photographs, but I can’t write a book; I need a collaborator. I had tried to inspire a few friends and couldn’t get one of them to read her book. It was possible that I might never find someone who was as captivated by Ella as I was, who wanted to make the trip as much as I did. Was I going to continue to let fear hold me back? Maybe alone was only way to do it. Ella’s book, after all, was called Turkestan Solo.
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The idea for the trip began with a book club and my failure to read the fine print. What I thought was a commitment to buy four books over a period of years turned out to be an obligation to buy four in one year. The editions the club offered were beautiful but expensive, and as the year drew to an end I was desperately scanning the catalog for books I could afford or for which I was willing to pay dearly. Why I chose Frances Wood’s The Silk Road I am not quite sure. Put it down to a spontaneous fascination with Central Asia and Western China.
In reading the book, I discovered Ella Maillart, a Swiss adventurer, writer and superachiever born in Geneva in 1903.
Ella was an expert sailor, winning a spot on the Swiss sailing team for the 1924 Paris Olympics. Not only was she the sole woman on her team she was the only woman in the sailing competition.
She was an avid skier and worked as a skiing stuntwoman in a German outdoor film of the 1920s. She founded the first women’s field hockey team in Geneva.
An encounter with some Russian émigrés in Berlin inspired her first trip to Russia and the Caucasus in 1930. The publication of her account of that trip, Parmi la jeunesse russe, set her life on a new course as a travel writer and journalist.
Wood’s book mentioned Ella’s 1936 journey across China, over the Pamir Mountains to
Srinigar in British India, with Peter Fleming, the journalist brother of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, whom she had met when they were both working in Harbin, Manchuria. Both published books about the journey: Ella, Forbidden Journey and Fleming, News from Tartary.
At first Ella was simply the inspiration for a character in a screenplay I was planning to write. A man and a woman cross wild western China where Turkic warlords fight against the Kuomintang Chinese for control of the region. The woman is kidnapped by one of the warlords with whom she falls in love much to the dismay of her traveling companion, who is in love with her and has planned an elaborate rescue.
My ambition was greater than my discipline, and perhaps my ability. The screenplay never got past the research stage. It was in doing research that I read Ella’s account of her Central Asian trip, and in reading it another idea germinated and began to grow in my mind.
In July 1932, Ella set off from Moscow by train to the Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan, one of four republics – the other were three Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan– based loosely on “national identity” that Lenin had carved out of Central Asia in 1922· and there she bore witness to the disintegration of traditional Central Asian life as a consequence of Soviet economic and social policies.
She accompanied two Russian couples on their working summer holiday horse trek into the mountains south of Issyk Köl, the magnificent lake in the eastern part of the country. Forced to abandon her plan to then cross over the Tien Shan Mountains into Western China due to ‘political troubles” in the region, she instead headed for Uzbekistan.
I was seduced by her descriptions of spending time with the nomads on the syrt;** of the ancient Silk Road cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara; of floating down to Amu Darya, the Oxus River of antiquity, to Khiva, and of traveling to the Aral Sea by camel caravan. Her perseverance and enthusiasm in the face of Soviet bureaucracy, delays, thefts, changeable mountain weather, and primitive living conditions inspired me.
I decided I would not try to slavishly recreate her trip – some of what she did just isn’t possible anymore and climbing alone to the top of a 16,000-foot mountain and skiing down on makeshift skis didn’t thrill me. Her trip was six months, mine would be twelve weeks: a week in Moscow and on the train, a month in Kyrgyzstan, a month in Uzbekistan and the final couple of weeks maybe in Turkmenistan. I would travel with a spirit of adventure and keep myself open to any (non-life threatening) opportunity that presented itself.
I had no clear idea of what kind of book I would write, but like Ella I would pay special attention to women. What were their lives like in the now-independent republics nineteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What role did Islam play?
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The journey was going to require a lot more planning and attention than I had given trips in the past. I usually just bought a plane ticket, a guidebook and went, often not cracking open the guidebook until I was on the plane or had arrived in the country. By the end of the trip the book was dog-eared from being read and reread many times. For this trip I needed to obtain in advance at least three visas, two Letters of Invitation (LOIs), confirmed flight and hotel reservations, and a train ticket.
I amassed a small library of books on the region and unlike the Lonely Planet’s Guide to Central Asia, which I first opened on the plane, I read all of them before I left. One of the books I read was Ella’s memoir, Cruises and Caravans, published in 1942. Her revelations that she remembered little of her childhood, that she rejected the course laid out for women of family and material security, that “town occupations held no attraction, that “her life was rather miserable…[because she] preferred to live on hopes,” looking for something in her life but not knowing exactly what, and that she was lonely resonated deeply in me. I felt that in Ella I had found a kindred spirit.
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The quaintness of getting things done in a small town. I went to my bank to wire money for the Moscow hotel and the Bishkek train ticket only to discover that neither wire service nor exchange rates were available after 12:00pm. Not wanting to waste a trip, I decided to find out how much the international transfer was going to cost. Fifty dollars. The invoice from the Moscow travel agency confused Brenda, the bank’s customer service representative. The invoice listed a correspondent bank in Frankfurt, Germany, a beneficiary bank in Riga, Latvia, and a beneficiary, i.e. the travel agent, in Moscow. Brenda called the bank’s main branch in Albuquerque for assistance. As they conferred, she and the woman on the other end repeatedly referred to Riga’s country as Lativia, rather than Latvia. It sounded like they were talking about a pharmaceutical antidepressant or a laxative.
What a hassle. Maybe I could pay by credit card. Who knew where the money was going to end up with a transfer. An email respone from Moscow nixed that idea. No credit cards.
I ended up sending the money directly to the agency via Western Union. Fifty-seven dollars and faith that they had really booked me a room and bought me a ticket.
I felt a kinship with Ella as I worked my way through the visa application process. She ran around Moscow trying to organize her trip, cajole communist officials, secure the necessary paperwork and buy her supplies. I did it the modern way, by telephone and Internet from my home, but it was still time consuming and nerve-racking and increasingly expensive. The Kyrgyz visa was cheap at forty dollars, the Uzbek one was over a hundred.
Deciding what type of Russian visa I needed was a problem. The standard Russian tourist visa is valid for thirty days, but there were to be three months between my arrival and my departure. I had no idea how I was going to get back to Moscow and wouldn’t know until I was in Central Asia. I was told the best option was to apply for a three-month business visa that cost nearly three hundred dollars.
For the visa I had to submit a Letter of Invitation, proof of insurance, a confirmed hotel reservation and my flight itinerary. The application asked if I had any experience with firearms, explosives or nuclear devices; by what religious aliases had I been known; had I ever participated in an armed conflict; what countries had I visited in the last ten years and the year visited. All this for a country I ended up visiting for less than a week.
And then there was Kazakhstan. I was going to travel through it on the train, so did I need a visa for that? Yes, but what kind of visa was harder to ascertain. Tatiana, my efficient and helpful contact at the visa service in Washington, D.C., was having a hard time getting good information from the Kazakh consulate. She found out that transit visas were available, but they could only be issued five days before being used and were only issued at a Kazakh airport. She wasn’t sure what I should do and since she was having so much trouble actually reaching somebody at the consulate, I told her that I would call them myself.
The embassy website said the consular office was open from nine to twelve o’clock. The first four times I called I got a recording saying that the mail box was full and was automatically transferred to the security desk where no one answered and I couldn’t leave a message. On the fifth attempt, a deep voice without inflection, sounding like the Kazakh Terminator, answered the security desk phone and told me, “Call back after three o’clock. Extension 1-2-6, 1-2-7.”
Not knowing if three o’clock meant that day or everyday, and being unable to call back at that time on that day, I called the next morning. I got the Terminator again. He gave me the same message, not one word added, subtracted or altered.
When I finally spoke to someone in the consular office I was told that I could apply for a transit visa in advance and to be very accurate about the dates as it was only valid for five days. I printed out the application from the Internet, but there was no Transit option. In every space that asked where in Kazakhstan I would be visiting, where I would be staying, and the purpose of my visit I wrote TRANSIT and sent it in, hoping for the best. I had to reapply for a Tourist visa. Transit visas weren’t available in advance.
I submitted the visa applications in mid April and as mid July approached and my passport still had not come back I started to panic that it had been lost. One day I arrived home to find a thin Fed Ex envelope leaning against my front door. I breathed a little easier, until, that is, I looked at the Uzbek visa and saw that it had been issued for a week earlier than I had requested.
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