Silk Route Adventure: On Horseback in the Heart of Asia by Claire Burges Watson

Author:Claire Burges Watson [Watson, Claire Burges]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel
ISBN: 9780709080619
Google: FAJuAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: B085W7X5HY
Goodreads: 53502061
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 2007-03-31T21:00:00+00:00

After my coarse weekend, I needed culture and respectability, so I took my neighbours to see Swan Lake. The Opera House on Sovietskaya still wore a shabby grandeur; its imperial proportions deflected attention from peeling paintwork and a set that would be more fitting in a school nativity play.

‘Last time I came to the Opera, it was a disaster,’ joked Dinara. ‘One ballerina lost her tutu and another fell into the stalls!’

Second-row tickets were a tidy $2. The performance was patchy, unsurprising given the lack of funding, but the leading lady restored the dignity of the company. She was cheered at every turn by a gaggle of students from the ballet school who rushed up on to the stage with endless bouquets at the curtain call. We went back to the Opera House the following week to see Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. There were some strong voices in the company but the thwarted husband let the side down. Notes stuck in his throat as he reached the crescendo in the aria about broken love, possibly overwhelmed by the emotion but, more likely, simply too old for the part; he lost the tune completely.

Later that week I heard that there had been terrible snows in Mongolia. Hundreds of thousands of animals had died. Without their animals, I knew that the Mongolians had nothing: no milk, no meat, no dung and no felt for their boots, clothes or gers. The previous summer’s drought, which I witnessed in the west, had been the worst in sixty years. It had destroyed the grass cover and in several areas, plagues of Brandtii voles destroyed the roots. The animals failed to fatten up sufficiently. Heavy snowfalls, the worst winter for thirty years, had left most of the country under a metre of snow. Estimates reckoned that by the end of the winter, at least 3 million animals would die.

There was a report about the dzud on Kyrgyz television. The idyllic green hills had been transformed into lifeless tundra, pounded by a relentless cutting wind. The steppe was littered with carcasses, butchered by cold and famine, rigid limbs outstretched. Open, distorted mouths were frozen in their last gasp. One reporter had found a dead lamb curled up inside the carcass of a cow. Hundreds of skins were piled up against the sides of a ger and a herder lamented that for every animal he skinned, there were two more waiting in his yard. He couldn’t keep up, there was no meat left on any of his animals whose bellies were filled with dirt and grit. All he had to feed his animals was marmot oil mixed with tea, which helped the animals to pass the grit. The only animals which were well fed were dogs and wolves. The report showed ragged animals, ribs protruding through papery skin, trying to stand up to the buffeting wind. A horse was lying on its side, its only movement the slight rise and fall of weak, shallow breaths. A couple of mangy horses kept a nervous distance, one had a stumpy tail, the rest chewed off by a hungry mate.

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