Author: 2suitcasesfor2years

Road Tripping Around the Wild Atlantic Way: Part 1 – Northern Ireland – Ballycastle to Londonderry or Dark Hedges, Seascapes, Whiskey and Stepping Stones

| 2suitcasesfor2years

We had hemmed and hawed for years about the best time to visit Ireland. The summer for sure, but the price of tickets to Dublin always seemed too steep in the high season. The Irish weather in April can be cool and wet, so we were thrilled when a good price on airfare popped onto our screen for a May departure and we planned a 16-day road trip around the northern part of the Wild Atlantic Way. It’s an epic journey along Ireland’s Atlantic coast that starts in the town of Kinsale in County Cork and runs along the island’s scenic coast for about 2,500 km (1,553 mi), passing through nine historic counties, before ending in Muff on the Inishowen Peninsula, a short distance away from Londonderry, Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and the city from which we chose to start our journey along the western edge of Europe.

But for us, for practical purposes, our version of the Wild Atlantic Way started 77 km (48 mi) east in Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, since we wanted to include a beautiful stretch of Northern Island’s Causeway Coast in our route south to Westport in County Mayo, Ireland.

The runway was still wet from a clearing morning storm as we landed in Dublin, and we took it as a promising sign for our days ahead. Within minutes of leaving the airport in our rental car, we were on a secondary road, way too narrow for the oversized trucks that straddled the yellow line, and were our oncoming traffic, as we cut through the countryside to the M2/N2. Following the highway north we crossed the River Blackwater and the border into Northern Ireland at Aughnacloy, where the town’s Wednesday market lined both sides of the main street. Since the United Kingdom with Brexit left the European Union in 2020 it has not been part of the Schengen Zone, and even though United Kingdom/Northern Ireland share an open border with Ireland, foreign visitors are required to apply for an UK ETA – electronic travel authorization, that is valid for two years, before entry into the country, and which they have to be able to show.

The countryside along the way was lush with the fresh greens of Spring, and flocks of sheep with newborn lambs playfully dancing about dotted the pasturelands. Near the Ulster American Folk Park on the A5 the landscape was particularly beautiful where the Strule River curved close to the road. Along the way we noticed some of the road signs to Londonderry had the London part spray painted obliterated. Historically the town was first known as Derry, but later renamed Londonderry after the town’s walls were rebuilt with the help of London merchant guilds after a clan rebellion burnt the city on 1608.

Entering the city, we were still on the east side of the River Foyle and headed to Ebrington Square to see the Peace Bridge. The plaza was the former site of a 19th century star shaped stone fortress, and HMS Ferret, an important World War II Royal Navy base during the Battle of the North Atlantic. Centuries earlier it was the location from which Jacobite Forces loyal to the recently deposed Roman Catholic convert James II, King of England, Ireland and Scotland, bombarded the city during the Siege of Londonderry in 1689. Since the 1530s when King Henry VIII broke ties the Vatican, practicing Roman Catholicism became illegal, and Catholic worship was suppressed as England and Scotland pursued a Protestant doctrine during the English Reformation. As a result, King James II was ousted from power by the Parliament of England, and the English throne was offered to his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William III of England. After a short exile in France, James landed in Kinsale with 6,000 French soldiers. He conquered Dublin and marched north with an newly recruited army of Irish and Catholics and the French force across the northern province of Ulster. The situation was different in Ireland where most of the population was Catholic and hoped that James would re-grant their lands, which had been confiscated from them by the English Crown after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649–53) and given to Protestant settlers from Scotland and England.

But fearing persecution, Protestant settlers fled to the safety in the walled city of Londonderry before James’ Jacobite army arrived and demanded their surrender. Cries of “no surrender,” bellowed from the walls and James’ troops stretched a blockade chain across the river to prevent provisions from reaching the city by sea. The siege of the city ended when a convoy of supply ships broke the chain across the River Foyle. It had lasted 105 days and saw the death, mostly through starvation and disease, of over 5,000 of the city’s inhabitants and refugees who sought shelter in the city. Eleven months later the English army of King William III decisively defeated James II’s Jacobite and French force at the Battle of the Boyne, after which James fled to France and never returned.  But it was the continuation of a series of conflicts in Ireland that have spanned over 400 years.

After the Irish War of Independence, 1919-1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty provided independence for 26 counties, mostly Catholic, which constituted the Irish Free State. While six counties, mostly Protestant, chose to remain a part of the United Kingdom and formed Northern Ireland. “Since the 1689 siege, an influx of migrants, especially during and after the great famine of the 1840s, had created a Catholic majority in Londonderry, and it was situated right on the border with County Donegal which was in the new Irish Free State. The town was now in the unenviable position of being a city with a Catholic majority on the border with a Catholic country but ruled by a unionist Protestant government,” that used ward gerrymandering to ensure that they maintained control of the local municipal elections and police force. This lack of Catholic political representation led to severe discrimination against the Catholic population all across Northern Ireland in housing, jobs, and voting rights.

Discontent with the system boiled to a head in 1972 when “Catholic nationalists in Derry organized a march to protest the British internment policy, but the military was called in with armored vehicles to shut it down. When protestors didn’t disperse, the troops opened fire with rubber bullets and then live rounds. Thirteen protestors were killed and 17 wounded in a tragedy known as “Bloody Sunday.” “The Troubles came to an end, at least officially, with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which created a framework for political power-sharing and an end to decades of violence.” For a travel blog this is a complex issue to address, but we feel that if we are going to visit a country or city we have a responsibility to know some of its history regardless of how difficult the issue might be.

The legal name of the city has been Londonderry since King James I granted it a royal charter in 1613. In 1984 the nationalist-controlled city council chose the shorter, traditional Irish name “Derry” to reflect the historic culture of the town before the British colonized the area. Derry/Londonderry the name depends on your “nationalist” or “unionist” views while others call it “The Slash” or “Stroke City” to avoid taking a political side. The city is also nicknamed the “Maiden City” by virtue of the fact that its walls were never breached during the Siege of Derry.

Today the only reminder of Ebrington Square’s past military use are a few walls from the old stone fort’s, along with a naval cannon, and a bronze sculpture of a young, uniformed sailor carrying a duffel kit bag, called The International Sailor, which honors the Allied service members and civilian merchant mariners who fought and lost their lives during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II.

Overlooking the graceful curve of the Peace Bridge and Stroke City across the river, the city takes full advantage of the beautiful site to host a series of festivals and concerts throughout the year. The pedestrian-only bridge with its two sloping suspension pillars and fluid curving walkway opened in 2011. The design of its pillars is meant to symbolize a reconciliatory handshake between two distinct communities and the winding walkway to be interpreted as the path to peace: never completely straight, involving twists, turns, and adjustments along the way. Over the years the folks of the city have embraced it as “a symbol of a new beginning here in Derry,” and “catalyst for change in the city.” A long list of dignitaries from around the world, including former United States President Bill Clinton and the Dalai Lama who have walked across the span to promote peace.

Heading back to the parking lot, we stopped at the Peace Pledge Tree in front of The Bakery Erbington across from a colorful street mural. The sculptural tree was the initiative of Co-operation Ireland and has over 400 pledges from schools, churches and organizations promising to support equal rights and a peaceful future.

The bakery was geared for takeaway food and only had a few stools along their window seating, but it did have a nice array of baked goods and a deli section for sandwiches and hot food options, so we perched along the window seat for a quick and tasty lunch.

Continuing on into the city I had to circle the block around our hotel several times and got our first introduction into the city’s various political and artistic street murals. There were plenty of spaces available but being a newbie to driving on the left, I was looking for a space big enough for me to pull into without having to try to parallel park.

The Holiday Inn Express Derry – Londonderry was our base for four nights to explore Derry and the Northern Ireland seascapes. We had tried to find a hotel in the historic center of the old walled city, but prices were high and parking was an issue. The Holiday Inn had secure discounted parking available across the street next to a Tesco Superstore, making stocking up on snacks very easy.  And it was only a 10-minute walk from The Diamond, the historic heart of Londonderry, and the central square around which the original fortified city was planned in the early 17th century. Amazingly, Derry is the only walled city in Ireland with its ancient walls still fully intact.

Keeping an eye on the weather forecast, we headed out early the next day to the Dark Hedges, an hour’s drive away. It’s a tunnel-like avenue of tall twisting beech trees, planted in the 1700s, that is very atmospheric, and a popular spot to walk through. It’s free, but parking along the street is prohibited and restricted to a cash only paid parking lot. Even though it was mid-week in Spring shoulder season, twenty minutes after we arrived at 9:00 AM it was noticeably busier. Our best advice is to arrive early or late to avoid crowds.

Continuing on we drove down Castle Street in Ballycastle, but missed an opportunity to capture a picture of the Holy Trinity Church at the bottom of the street. It is a small stone church built in the mid-1700s as a private chapel, that was perfectly framed by the colorful buildings along the descending road. We were intent on finding the Ballynaglogh Standing Stones in the graveyard at the Church of Ireland in Culfeightrin parish. We’ve had a fascination with the ancient megaliths since visiting the Calanais Standing Stones on Lewis and Harris Island in Scotland, several years prior. We thought it was unusual for a church to be built next to a standing stone, but in Ireland early Christian churches were often built next to standing stones to “Christianize pre-existing pagan sacred spaces and ease the transition for local populations.”

Heading back to Ballycastle Donna noticed the silhouette of the abandoned Bonamargy Friary and we stopped to explore the site. It was an interesting ruin, surrounded by ancient headstones, all tilting in different directions from slowly settling into the earth.  The friary was founded by the MacQuillan clan in 1485 and thrived for a century before it was destroyed in 1584 during inter-clan warfare with the expanding MacDonnell clan, who eventually seized control of the area in the late 1500s. Amongst the ruins a small group of teenage boys, still in their pinstriped school uniforms, amused themselves and us as they  attempted to climb the chimney of an abandoned outbuilding.

The “Black Nun” is an interesting legend associated with the site and tells the tale of Julia MacQuillan, a 17th century noblewoman and religious recluse who lived in isolation among the ruins. “Known locally as the “Black Nun” for her dark attire and solitary piety, she became famous for her local prophecies. According to tradition, she asked to be buried at the church entrance so visitors would walk over her grave, marked today by a distinctive round-headed stone cross.

Arriving at Ballycastle’s harbor we walked along the promenade that overlooked Fair Head and a wide beach called the Strand. Offshore a kitesurfer was enjoying the blustery winds that enabled him to become airborne as he crested the rolling waves.

Next to the walkway was a graceful sculpture of four flying swans called the Children of Lir. And of course, being Ireland, it relates to the old Celtic mythical tale of “King Lir who had four children—Aodh, Fionnula, Fiachra, and Conn—with his beloved wife before she died. The King remarried and the children’s jealous stepmother used magic to transform the four children into swans and condemned them to spend 900 years under the spell. According to the lore, the children found sanctuary just offshore on Rathlin Island, where they eventually returned to human form at the end of their lives.”

Across from the harbor buses were lined up and we feared the restaurants would be full of tour groups, but we found a small authentic local establishment called the Promenade Café, where we enjoyed a very good Fish n’ Chips lunch and an Aero Mint cheesecake that was so good. For the uninitiated, Aero is a local brand of chocolate bar that is unavailable in the US, and we have become quite fond of the mint version, and brought home a half dozen bars or so.

After lunch we followed the B15 along the coast west toward Londonderry and stopped just a few minutes outside of Ballycastle at the Portaneevy Viewpoint. Getting out of the car I was totally unprepared for the gale force wind that sent my hat scurrying across the grass. Yellow Gorse covered parts of the cliff face and occasionally we’d catch their scent of coconut in the air. In the distance was the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, a 20 meter (66 ft) long Tibetan style bridge that hangs 30 meters (98 ft) above the sea and treacherous rocks below. It was first erected by salmon fishermen in 1755. The name, from the Gaelic ‘Carraig-a-Rade’, means ‘The Rock in the Road’, an obstacle for the migrating salmon as they search for the river in which they were born. It’s a very popular National Trust destination and online prebooking is essential if you want to walk across the bridge.

Our ultimate destination for the afternoon was the Giant’s Causeway, only fifteen minutes farther west if we drove straight there. This stretch of coastline from Ballycastle to the Giant’s Causeway is known as the Causeway Coast of County Antrim and was amazing for the number of beautiful seascapes only minutes apart from each other and we stopped at every opportunity.

We were hoping to get a cup of coffee at Roark’s Kitchen along the quay at Ballintoy Harbour, but found it still closed in mid-May. There is limited parking around the harbor which is a popular spot for fans of the Game of Thrones TV show to walk along the shoreline at low tide to Dragonstone Beach.

The viewpoint above Whitepark Bay Beach had a spectacular view of rolling lines of waves crashing into the beach with the small fishing hamlet of Portbradden Harbour tucked under limestone cliffs and a receding coastline in the background.

We reached the parking lot at the Giant’s Causeway Visitor Center a few minutes after it had closed and watched the last shuttle bus of the day depart. The National Trust attendant assured us not to worry, less expensive paid parking was available at the The Causeway Hotel next door to the Causeway’s Visitor Center, and that the price of parking could be put towards drinks. It was a good deal that we enjoyed later in the historic lodge.

As it is a natural public coastal area the site is accessible 24 hours a day and in mid-May sunset was around 9:30 in the evening, which left us plenty of time to walk the 1.3 miles to the steppingstones. Going downhill was easy, but the long uphill climb afterwards was slower.

The estimated 40,000 distinctive hexagonal (six-sided) pillar-like columns which make up the causeway were formed approximately 50 to 60 million years ago by intense volcanic activity and the slow cooling of molten lava which created stress cracks in the rock to create their unique shape. It’s a remarkable seascape that left us in awe of the power of Mother Nature.

Legend credits the creation of the causeway to the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool), you have to love his name, who ripped up chunks of the Antrim coast and tossed them into the water to create a bridge to reach Scotland, where he planned to fight the massive Scottish giant Benandonner, who had been bellowing insults at him from across the waves.

The following day we explored Derry/Londonderry, walking first to Harbour Square, near the old Guildhall, one of Derry’s iconic landmarks. There stands a large bronze sculpture of three spools of thread that honors the thousands of women who made Derry’s historic shirt-making industry a global leader in textile production during the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a very pretty setting along the riverfront with the neo-gothic style Guildhall, that dates from 1887. The building also features a 144-foot-tall clock tower modelled after London’s Big Ben, and an organ with 3,132 pipes installed in 1914.

Across from the Guildhall are the ancient ramparts of the old walled city, which originally had four gates to the citadel with roads that intersected at the center of the town at The Diamond. But we entered the town through the Magazine Gate, added to the walls in 1865 to access stairs which lead to the cannon deck atop the ramparts and overlooked the Guildhall and Erbington Square across the river.

The 1.6 km (1.0 mi) long walkway atop the defensive wall was pleasantly wide and was a great vantage point from which to view the various parts of the city as we followed it completely around the old town.

One section of the wall overlooked Rossville Street in the Bogside neighborhood, where the tragedy of Bloody Sunday unfolded in 1972.

We stopped often to take photographs and detoured down various flights of stairs when our map showed other points of interest nearby.

Father around the city’s contemporary history was celebrated with a mural of the “Derry Girls,” a hit British-coming-of-age sitcom that aired from 2018-2022. The plot follows “four teenage girls and their friends as they navigate the universal awkwardness of being sixteen while attending a fictional Catholic secondary school against the heavy backdrop of military checkpoints and political conflict during the final years of the Troubles.”

Later the sunny morning seemed to symbolically turn grey as we walked through the area and viewed the thought-provoking street murals that memorialize community members lost during the Troubles, and are a somber reminder of the violence that hatred breeds.

“Derry features the Troubles on its official tourism platforms to frame its history as an educational journey from conflict to peace and reconciliation. Not to glorify the violence, but to showcase the local community’s resilience and showcase how the city has moved past decades of sectarian division to support “Peace Tourism,” which recognizes the Troubles era as an integral part of the city’s identity with a forgive but never forget philosophy while celebrating modern coexistence.”

Out again early the next morning we set off to see the Mussenden Temple and Downhill Demesne, on the western end of the Causeway Coast. It is a massive, grand 18th-century clifftop estate built by the eccentric Frederick Hervey, the 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry. The palatial Italian style villa, with 27 bedrooms, was built by the Bishop in 1774 , with inherited funds, on 160-hectares (400 acres) of land atop cliffs that abut the North Atlantic Ocean.

A walkway leading to the cliffs was flanked with two buildings that displayed his extensive collection of Renaissance art. The outside walls of this structure facing the ocean resembled castellated fortress walls with buttresses; this was an illusion to deter the French from invading Londonderry from along this coat, that the Bishop was apprehensive about. Interestingly the mansion also featured the first patented flush toilets, a considerable innovation at the time of the installation at Downhill.

A major fire destroyed most of the house in 1851, which led to a smaller redesign and rebuilding in the1870s. The Bishop’s heirs continued to live at the estate until the Irish War of Independence started in 1919 when they packed up everything and never returned. During World War II the mansion was requisitioned to billet Royal Air Force (RAF) servicemen and women, after which it fell into heavy disrepair until the National Trust stabilized the ruins in the 1980s when it acquired the site.

Along the 37 meter (120 ft) high cliff the Bishop built the Mussenden Temple, an iconic circular building modeled after the Temple of Vesta in Italy, that was used as a library and a retreat for the Bishop’s niece, Frideswide Mussenden, to enjoy the expansive view of the coast. It’s the only original structure of the estate still standing. Originally when it was built, the temple was about 10 meters (33ft) from the cliff edge, but coastal erosion now threatens its collapse and continual efforts are underway to stabilize the cliff face.

Heading east along the coast the views were as exhilarating as the day before and we stopped whenever there was a wide enough shoulder along the road before reaching The Wishing Arch. It was a well-developed site with a dramatic cantilevered viewing platform extending over the cliff and had a great view west of the sea arch and the coast looking back towards White Rocks Beach and Portrush.

Local lore believes that if you gaze through the natural stone arch with a pure wish in your heart, the crashing waves will carry your hope out to sea until the time is right for it to become a reality. Looking east, the ruins of a castle were barely visible.

Dunluce Castle was only a few minutes further along. Dramatically set on a rocky outcrop, only reachable across a drawbridge, the castle has a long history which starts in the 1200s when it was first built by Richard de Burgh, the 2nd Earl of Ulster. By the early 1500s the MacQuillan clan held the castle but lost it in battle to the MacDonnells, who established a small village next to it on the mainland. Though it was a relatively secure haven from attack, the castle was under constant siege by fierce North Atlantic storms which eventually caused part of the fortress to collapse into the sea in 1639. The small village was razed during the Catholic rebellion in 1641, but the fortress and the Scottish settlers who defended it remained unscathed. On the wrong side against England, the clan was evicted from their lands and the castle was left to ruin. Local Folklore tells that the kitchen of the castle “suddenly plunged into the churning sea, with a loud crack of the rock, as the preparations for a lavish feast were underway. All the cooks and servants were swept away in the crashing waves except for one young kitchen boy, who survived because he was sitting on a bench in the only corner of the room that remained anchored to the solid rock.”

Afterwards we headed for a late lunch in the small village of Bushmills, before continuing on to a whiskey tasting at Old Bushmills Distillery, the world’s oldest licensed whiskey distillery since 1608. We did not go on the popular tour of the distillery. If you plan to do so,  Bushmills highly recommends making an online booking ahead of time to secure your spot. Since we were driving we contended ourselves with a slow three whiskey sampler that included: Bushmills Black Bush – described as “A rich blend with a high proportion of malt whiskey aged predominantly in Oloroso sherry casks, offering deep dried-fruit and spice flavors: Bushmills 10-Year-Old Single Malt – aged in bourbon and sherry barrels, providing notes of ripe fruit, chocolate, and nutty malt, along with: Bushmills 12-Year-Old Distillery Reserve – matured predominantly in Spanish Oloroso sherry casks, with ex-bourbon barrels playing a minor, supporting role; it has notes of dark dried fruits like raisins, figs, plums, and sugared apricots, along with a distinct nuttiness resembling roasted hazelnuts, almonds, and sweet marzipan.”

I’ve never been one to wax poetic about wines or spirits, so it’s simply the aroma, taste and smoothness for me, and with that criteria the Bushmills 10-Year-Old Single Malt was definitely the preferred whiskey.

Taking a longer route back into Derry we crossed the Craigavon Bridge to see the Hands Across the Divide statue created by the local sculptor Maurice Harron. It was erected in 1992, twenty years after the tragic events of Bloody Sunday and depicts two men reaching out toward one another just about to shake hands “Reflecting the difficult, ongoing journey toward total peace, leaving room for future unity.”

It was a Saturday night, and we followed a youthful crowd up Waterloo Street, passing colorful facades and numerous traditional Irish bars with music drifting into the street, which have contributed to the lane’s designation as the hub for the city’s vibrant nightlife. The bars were packed with jubilant patrons, with the overflow gathering in small groups on the cobblestones. We eventually found the vibrant red façade of O’Loughlin’s Irish House bedecked with neon beer medallions advertising the drafts that they can pull. Surely, it was more touristy than any self-respecting local would dare step into, but it had live music and a warm, spacious interior that appealed to us. We didn’t order dinner right away, preferring to toast with our Gunnesses, and enjoy the music.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

Road Tripping Around New Zealand: Part 1 – Waiheke Island: Oysters, Wine and Seascapes or Learning How to Drive on the Left

| 2suitcasesfor2years

Why do we go where we go? It’s a dilemma for many of us. As nice as the many different regions of Europe are, it was time for something different. We had been avoiding the South Pacific for a long time, but a good deal on airfare to New Zealand that started in our home airport in Georgia was too good to pass up so we packed the neck pillows and booked that excruciatingly long 22-hour flight. In economy, no less – yikes!

Our early morning landing timed perfectly with a beautiful sunrise. We weren’t particularly keen on seeing Auckland, but we needed a low-key destination to recover from the jetlag and learn how to drive on the left-hand side of the road again, without immediately being thrust into city traffic. Somewhere along the line Waiheke Island popped onto our radar, and after a little research we determined that it would be a perfect and interesting spot for us to recoup, before returning to Auckland and starting our nine-day road trip around the North Island.

The Auckland Airport was easily manageable and after a good cup of coffee in the main terminal we proceeded to the Ride Share area which was only a short walk away, to meet our driver we booked through Uber New Zealand for the 30-minute trip from the airport to the ferry terminal. Didi Rider is also a popular rideshare option. If you have a larger group and a little more time there is the Super Shuttle which offers low, fixed rates to points across Auckland.

Landing on a Friday in mid-February, it was still the summer season down under. We weren’t sure how busy the afternoon ferry would be, ahead of the weekend. Fortunately, before leaving the states, we booked the 1:00PM Fullers360 Ferry departing from the Auckland Downtown Ferry Terminal on Quay Street; no last-minute walk-ons were allowed to board, as the time slot was fully booked. Island Direct also offers a ferry service from Pier 13 at the downtown terminal. The 21.5 km (13.4 mi) crossing takes about 40-minutes to reach the Matiatia Wharf landing on Waiheke Island. Folks wanting to take a vehicle to the island need to use the SeaLink car ferry, which departs from Half Moon Bay in East Auckland or the Hamer Street Ferry Terminal in downtown Auckland and docks at Kennedy Point on Waiheke.

The view of Auckland’s skyline was stunning as we headed across the harbor and Hauraki Gulf. Thousands of sailboat masts dotted the seascape and rocked with the waves. Sailing is a popular activity in Auckland and about 18,000 sailboats call the “City of Sails,” their home port. The Hauraki Gulf is a huge body of water with over 50 islands, of which Waiheke is the second largest with a land mass of 9200 very hilly hectares (22,734 acres). Surprisingly, Waiheke is the most populated of the island chain with nearly 9400 permanent residents, some of whom commute daily to Auckland for work, and about an additional 3,400 folks have holiday homes on it. It’s said to be more densely populated than the North and South Islands, but from our experience it felt almost uninhabited, as most of the homes across the island were well hidden in the island’s forested hillsides. And local tourism had pretty much stopped with the reopening of the schools at the end of the summer break several weeks earlier.

Boats anchored in Matiatia Bay bobbed up and down with the small waves that a strong wind had kicked up. Fair weather clouds scurried across the sky. The small harbor was reminiscent of coastal Maine with a red fisherman’s shack along the waterfront. On the wharf we picked up the key to a compact older car from Waiheke Car Rental, a subsidiary of Mint Car Rental, through which we also reserved a vehicle at Auckland Airport for the later part of our trip around the North Island.

Outside the ferry terminal was a Māori influenced sculpture by island artist Chris Bailey called Te Werowero. The statue is intended to act as a guardian of the island and challenges visitors to respect the environment and local way of life, wāhi tapu. It was a bit of a trek through a dusty parking lot to find the car: the air-conditioning worked so we were good to go, but I have to admit that I did open the wrong side of the car and was surprised there was no steering wheel in front of me, and that I’d be manually shifting with my left hand. With our mantra, “stay left!” and a “you’ve got this,” pep talk we set out. Luckily, there was hardly any traffic, and our lodging was only a short, five-minute drive away. We followed Ocean View Road, the main street which passes through Oneroa, Waiheke’s largest village, that has a small cluster of restaurants and shops along the street.

Our base for three nights was the laid back Punga Lodge where we enjoyed the sumptuous breakfasts and afternoon tea prepared by Diane and Rob, on the deck overlooking an old growth grove of native punga ferns filled with lovely song birds. Our hosts are a delightful couple whose company and conversations we enjoyed, and contributed greatly to our wonderful experiences on the island.

After settling in we headed to Big Oneroa Beach for a walk along the fish hook shaped coastline, before strolling through the village to have dinner at Obee’s, which has a nice view of the bay from its terrace. The local Waiheke mussels we ordered were delicious.

Decades ago, Waiheke Island was a counterculture haven with over 100 artists calling the island home. Gentrification soon followed but growth was limited due to the island’s lack of a public water utility infrastructure, which necessitates most of the households, restaurants, and hotels on the island to sustain themselves with roof collected rainwater funneled into large water cisterns. Some of the larger estate homes and farms on the island have chosen to drill expensive wells. During droughts folks can buy water from local tanker trucks that pump water from the island’s deep aquifer, and the local council operates emergency drinking stations where residents can fill 20-litre containers.

Wines from the first vineyard on the island in the early 1980’s were a success and more winemakers followed, drawn to the island’s Mediterranean microclimates and hilly volcanic landscape which affords an array of terroirs. The island is perfect for growing the red grapes for Syrah, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Malbec. Along with plantings of the white grapes for Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Viognier & Sauvignon Blanc.

Today there are over thirty boutique wineries of various sizes with slightly more than 250 hectares (618 acres) of vineyards across the island. Over the years many of the vineyards have produced award winning vintages which have put Waiheke Island on the map as a destination for wine connoisseurs, much like Sonoma Valley in California or the Bordeaux region in France. And on the island, there is small infrastructure in place to support the popular tours of the vineyards for folks visiting the island from the Auckland mainland just for the day that starts and ends at the Matiatia Wharf ferry terminal. For a formal tour with a guide try the Waiheke Island Wine Tour  or for a self-directed tour try Western Explorer: Waiheke Island Hop-on Hop-off Bus Tour. The Waiheke Bus Company also offers a local service with five routes that starts from the ferry landing and covers the most populated western side of the island, passing some of the wineries along the way. The Waiheke Wine Growers Association also has a nice interactive map that shows the location of all the wineries across the island.

There are not really any centrally developed shopping areas on the island, aside from the short strip of stores along the road in Oneroa, where multiple restaurants, a small grocer and a liquor store can be found. While the only supermarket is a Woolworths in Ostend, centrally located village on the island. Instead, small cafes and art galleries can be found unexpectedly at random crossroads anywhere across the island.

The next morning, we crossed the causeway over Putaki Bay and stopped to photograph some boats which were beached along the shoreline for repairs as we headed to the Waiheke Ostend Market. It’s the island’s year-round Saturday only farmers market, that is open from 8AM-1PM. Part social club and marketplace it is a spot where folks catch up with friends and island news while relaxing on bean bag cushions as they listen to a local band. It was not a particularly large event, but there were several stalls for coffee, breads, pastries and crepes, along with vendors selling books, ceramics, clothing, jewelry, and antiques. A downpour sent us into Take a Bite, Café & Pastries across the street for another cup of coffee as we waited out the rain. Everything in their display case looked delicious.

Afterwards we set out to explore some of the island’s northern beaches. The island is only 19.3 km (12.0 mi) long and varies in width from a narrow .64km (.4mi) at Oneroa near the western end the island to 9.65 km (6 mi) wide on eastern side of the island or “The Far End,” as islanders like to call it. An aerial view of the island reveals a squiggly 134 km (83 mi) coastline with multiple coves and 25 miles of sandy beaches.

Though it’s a slight exaggeration, there’s not a straight road anywhere on the hilly island, so it took a while to get between points on the serpentine roads. Sudden rain squalls occasionally interrupted our wandering, on an otherwise mostly sunny day. The views of the countryside were beautiful, but often the roads were too narrow to stop safely to take photographs. Wild fig trees full with ripe figs grew along the roadsides.

Our first destination was Sandy Bay Beach, a small swatch of sand surrounded by volcanic rocks, a with boat ramp. Continuing along the Great Barrier Road, we stopped at the top of a steep driveway that afforded a good view of Palm Beach and the north coast receding in the distance. Reaching the beach, we watched two sailors launch their dinghy from the shore and row across the calm water to their anchored yacht. A block back from the beach was the restaurant Arcadia, where we enjoyed a very nice mid-afternoon lunch.

By the time we reached Onetangi Beach later that afternoon the weather had committed itself to be brilliantly sunny. Stretching for about 2 km (1.25 mi) along the coast it’s the island’s longest and widest beach, with shell free sand that is perfect for the annual sandcastle building contest. It’s also a popular beach to arrange a guided horseback ride with the local stable Waiheke Waiheke HorseWorx.

A narrow road with limited parking paralleled the shady shoreline. Across the road from the water were several restaurants with outdoor terraces that were very busy with customers. On a hill high above the beach is the restaurant Casita Miro; it’s a festive place with great tapas style cuisine and nice panoramic views, that was highly recommended. Alas, it was a missed opportunity, which we unfortunately didn’t get a chance to dine at.

Later, back in Oneroa we celebrated Valentine’s Day with a seafood platter and local white wine on the veranda at  The Oyster Inn, which is co-owned by the New Zealand celebrity chef Josh Emett and his wife. Emett notably trained with Gordon Ramsay and was a judge on Master Chef New Zealand. As the restaurant’s name suggests, local Te Matuku oysters raised in the pristine waters of the Te Matuku Marine Reserve at the southeast corner of Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf are a prime feature on the menu. While we dined, we could hear the guitar of a valiant busker performing across the road, keeping his old hippie days alive.

The next morning, after another one of Diane’s fabulous breakfasts we headed out to explore the eastern part of the island, with two wineries – the Jasper Ridge Estate and Man O’ War Vineyards. The later was a recommendation by a friend of ours from the states who had recently returned to the South Island to care for her aging mother, and enjoys vacationing on Waiheke.

It was a gorgeous ride through rolling grasslands dotted with sheep, stream crossings over narrow one lane bridges, tunnels of tall mamaku fern trees, and our first kiwi crossing caution sign, warning of the nocturnal flightless birds that were reintroduced to the island in 2025. We never spotted one. Turning off Orapiu Road onto Cowes Bay Road we were suddenly on a gravel tract.

The island has a total road network of approximately 100, mostly paved miles, however a high percentage of them are compacted gravel, especially on the way to the Stony Batter Historic Reserve on the rugged north-eastern tip of the island. As the road rose the view transformed into a majestic panorama of land, sky and sea. To the east the Coromandel Peninsula, 55 km (34 mi) away, was a barely visible stroke of grey on the horizon.

At the entrance to the Jasper Ridge Winery the views of the seascape were extraordinary. Owned and operated by David Bishop and Derek Ireland, Jasper Ridge is one of Waiheke’s smallest wineries, with 4000 Syrah vines planted on one hectare (2.5 acres), where they craft very small, limited-edition wines. But they have earned a lot of prestige, having won awards with their first vintage in 2023 for their Single Vineyard Syrah, and 2025 for their Rosé and Pinot Gris. A rain shower forced us to take shelter briefly under the umbrellaed picnic tables overlooking the rows of grapevines covered with netting to keep the birds away from the grapes almost ready to be picked later that week.

Continuing on the road, we passed through a forest of tall Kauri trees, then dipped into a dry wash strewn with boulders and timbers carried down the steep hillside in a recent flashflood. Reaching the Man O’ War Vineyards, the road leveled out and the view opened to the beach along  Man O’ War Bay with folks swimming, and boaters motoring small dinghies ashore to visit the winery. The winery really is a destination venue, offering wine tours, fine and casual dining, and a kid’s playground. It even has a small white chapel for weddings as well as an adventure sports center that offers ziplining through the forested hillside above the winery, and into the forever happily after for the newlyweds. It’s a big, popular fun spot to visit, and the setting on the bay was quite pretty.

The tall straight Kauri trees, which can live for thousands of years, were noted for the strength of their wood in colony’s early shipping journals, and by the early 1800s Waiheke’s hillsides were being deforested and the wood exported to England to be used as masts for the Royal Navy’s “Man O’ War” warships, which is how the name Man O’ War was bestowed upon the bay. A favorite legend suggests that the masts of Lord Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, were made from kauri trees taken from hills of Waiheke Island.

Continuing on we headed to the Stony Batter Historic Reserve. It was once a World War II coastal defense installation to protect Auckland from potential Japanese naval attacks, and features three massive concrete gun emplacements. There was also an interesting boulder field we hoped to walk through. But we didn’t realize before hand that the parking was pretty far away as the access road to the site was gated, and required a longer walk and more time than we wanted to commit to. But there was one hillside next to the road that gave a feeling for what the larger site would have looked like.

Nevertheless, the views of vineyards and sheep-covered hills surrounding us were beautiful as we coursed back towards Oneroa with a plume of dust trailing behind us as we drove down Man O’ War Bay Road. Cresting a hill, we stopped at a lone bench along the road, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. But it did have a distant view of Cactus Bay Beach, a remote curve of sand only accessible by boat or kayak, that many “Waihekeans consider the perfect beach and, with nearby Garden Cove, a romantic place for picnicking.” Unfortunately, its land access has been blocked off by a private landowner. All the more to make it a special place, that requires more effort, to visit.

Our scenic drive that day reconfirmed our expectations of what lay ahead for the next part of our journey – that we were truly in an exceptionally beautiful part of the world. The next morning, we headed back to Auckland Airport for a different rental car to start our nine-day road trip to Cape Reinga Lighthouse, the farthest point north on the mainland, Hamilton, and the Coromandel Peninsula before flying south to Wellington.

Though we only drove 110 km (68mi) over the weekend, Waiheke Island was the most gorgeous place to learn how to drive on the left.

Stay left!

Till next time,

Craig and Donna

Samarkand, Uzbekistan: The Ancient Crossroad of Central Asia’s Renaissance or They Have the Best Bread!

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Upon your arrival to Samarkand, one of the first things you will notice is the huge number of informal roadside vendors, especially the folks selling loaves of bread from the trunks of their cars along the side of the road, or from wheelbarrows at every historic site. There is something akin to a great soccer rivalry here, not in which team you are rooting for, but in something far more essential to daily life in Uzbekistan. Whose bread do you prefer? While Tashkent, Bukhara, and Khiva all traditionally bake obi-non, a flat round loaf that’s decorated with intricate stamped patterns, in Samarkand folks favor their local variety of non, that looks similar to a bagel on steroids or a small tractor tire.

The dense loaves are beautifully glazed and baked to a golden color and typically weigh about 1.5 kilograms (3.3lbs) and taste delicious. I mean after being one of oldest continuously inhabited cities in Central Asia for over 3000 years, folks should certainly have a winning bread recipe! When we observed the amount of business being conducted along the roadsides we could only imagine that “Va nonni unutmang,” – don’t forget bread, is a common catch phrase in Uzbekistan when folks know you are visiting Samarkand, with the hope that you will return bearing loaves of the bread. The loaves are traditionally never cut with a knife but torn apart by hand and shared at the beginning of each meal.

The Afrasiyab Museum on the outskirts of Samarkand was our first stop. It’s a small museum but thoroughly engaging with exhibits displaying an array of artifacts uncovered in Afrasiyab / Maracanda.

Folks have lived in the Zerafshan River Valley region since around 1500 BC, eventually establishing Afrosiab, as Samarkand was originally known, on a large hill. Over the centuries it grew into an important trading and cultural hub ruled by a succession of Persian and Turkic rulers. By the time Alexander the Great captured the city in 329 BC it was called Maracanda. In 712 AD, Arab forces swept through the region and captured the city, cementing Samarkand as a premier center of Islamic culture that continued to gain riches due to its location on the Silk Road. This wealthy walled city survived until it was pillaged and totally destroyed by Genghis Khan’s army in 1220. It must have been a beautiful city as Genghis Khan spared the lives of skilled craftsmen and sent them as prisoners to Karakorum, in Mongolia, to build his capitol. Other prisoners were used by his army as human shields in their conquests against Tashkent, Bukhara, and Khiva.

The old city was permanently abandoned and today all that remain are its ruins which can be wandered through at the Afrasiyab Archeological Park which were uncovered by a succession of Russian archeologists through various digs from 1894 – 1970s; wall murals dated to the 7th century in the city’s old royal palace were discovered, along with the remains of an 8th century mosque.

Nearby was The Holy Spring of the “Three Religions,” an enclosed well at the base of the stairway to the Mausoleum of St. Khoja Daniel which overlooks the Siab River. The spring is uniquely cherished by Muslims, Christians, and Jews who visit to drink and collect its healing water.

Muslims call him the Khoja Daniyar, the Jews call him Dānīyyēʾl, and in Christianity he is known as Daniel, the Hebrew prophet who served the 6thcentury Persian King Darius who ruled an empire that stretched from Susa in what is now modern-day Iran to Egypt and beyond. Daniel is also the Daniel of the Old Testament, most notable for the biblical story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den. He faced death with three friends for not worshipping King Darius; they were placed overnight in a lion’s den but were saved by Daniel’s unfaltering faith in God. Witnessing this miracle, King Darius allowed the revered prophet to be buried after his death in a royal mausoleum in Susa. How the relics of St. Khoja Daniel actually arrived in Samarkand is a mystery, as some think the remains were brought to the city by early Christians, while others think it was by the decree of Samarkand’s famous medieval ruler Amir Timur, Tamerlane. One popular legend reinforces this theory – believing that after failing to conquer Susa, Timur was told the city was protected by the relics of St. Daniel. “Upon hearing this Timur decided to change tactics and negotiate with the townspeople about reconciliation, but on condition that he would take away part of the sacred relics to Samarkand. When the caravan carrying the sacred relics reached the outskirts of Samarkand near the Siab River, the camel carrying the relics suddenly dropped to its knees on the ground and refused to move until a miraculous spring with healing waters burst from the earth.”

The tomb for the saint’s relics is amazingly 18m (59ft) long to accommodate a relic that some believe grows larger every year, while others say it was Timur’s idea to hide the exact spot of the relics with the extraordinary length of the tomb to deter grave robbers from easily finding them.  It’s a tranquil place of pilgrimage for many travelers. Our next stop was the Observatory of Mirzo Ulugbek.

One hundred and fifty years after the Mongols destroyed Afrasiyab, Amir Timur oversaw the ancient city’s revival, growing like a phoenix from its ashes in the desert, and in 1370 called it Samarkand, and declared it the capitol of his Timurid Empire. It was under his tutelage during the14th century, later to be known as the Timurid Renaissance, that Samarkand became a center for Islamic studies, and the sciences that rivaled Bagdad’s past influence in the Islamic world. He indorsed a new style of architecture, where geometry and art intersected, and which would eventually bear his name, that featured Colossal Pishtaqs – towering arched entrance portals; vibrant blue domes – that featured cobalt and turquoise colored lapis lazuli glazed tile; intricate tilework – that featured geometric, floral, and calligraphic patterns; and a blending of cultures that drew upon Persian, Mongol, and Central Asian influences, all of which were connected through the Samarkand Silk Road crossroads.

Timur’s visionary influence continued for several centuries after his death, most notably in the scientific achievements of his grandson Mirzo Ulugbek, an accomplished astronomer.  He ruled Samarkand from 1409 – 1447 as a regent for his father Shah Rukh, before becoming the supreme ruler of the Timurid Empire. His reign only lasted two years before political infighting led to a coup and his assassination in 1449. It was during his time as the regent that he oversaw the construction of his observatory, a massive three-story structure featuring a 40m (131ft) radius marble sextant/quadrant, built into the ground to avoid vibrations, that he used to make highly accurate naked-eye observations to map 1,018 stars and record highly accurate orbital movements of the Sun, Moon, and the five known planets of his era, two centuries before the invention of the telescope. Ulugbek also calculated the length of the stellar year with unprecedented accuracy – 365 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes, 8 seconds, an error of less than a minute.

After his death the book of his work, the Zij-i Sultani, was smuggled out of Samarkand to Istanbul by his assistant who feared its destruction by religious conservatives. By the mid-1600s his work was translated by scholars at Oxford University and validated by telescope-using astronomers. He also established the first madrassa on Samarkand’s Registan Square which had a curriculum that prioritized mathematics, geometry, and astronomy alongside theological studies.


“Religion is scattering like fog, kingdoms are being destroyed,

but the works of scientists remain forever”

(Mirzo Ulugbek)

His admonition to trust science still rings true 577 years later. Sadly, only the inground portion of the sextant survived the building’s destruction immediately after his death, as it was buried in the demolition. Stones from the building were removed from the site, and used for other buildings, until it was totally levelled. The exact site was lost to history for nearly 500 years until Russian archaeologists used 17thcentury land deeds to rediscover the buried sextant in 1908. Across from the remains of the sextant is a small museum with exhibits explaining Ulugbek’s achievements and models of his observatory.

The historic sites in Samarkand were surprisingly very far apart and required transportation to reach, unless you are willing to devote hours to walking between places. This is the result of successive empires over the millennia rebuilding destroyed settlements nearby rather than on top of old ruins. This is very different from the feel of Bukhara and Khiva where the historic sites are surrounded by ancient mahallas, neighborhoods, only a few steps away.

Registan Square, with its three iconic madrassas famously facing each other, was our last historic stop for the day. The scale of the buildings was awe inspiring and considering the fact that every inch of them is covered in tilework is amazing.  The first madrassa on the site was built by and named after Mirzo Ulugbek in 1420 where several Silk Road caravan tracks converged in the center of the ancient city.  

It was a dusty lively spot, a “place covered with sand,” as is the meaning of “Registan,” with a domed traders’ and merchants’ bazaar, surrounded by awning-covered stalls of tradesman and farmers selling their crops. Of course, bakers were selling Samarkand bread, an essential food for caravaneers’ long journeys. With the construction of his grand madrassa Ulugbek gradually transformed the crossroads into a ceremonial and educational center, where folks gathered to hear royal declarations, news, and witness Islamic justice.

It stood alone on the plaza for two hundred years until 1636 when emir Yalangtush Bakhodur, who served the khans of the Bukhara Khanate, opened the Sher-Dor Madrasa directly across from it. With its name meaning “adorned with tigers,” the entrance is embellished with two lions with Mongolian-faced Zoroastrian-inspired suns rising from their backs to symbolize the enlightened mind, chasing white gazelles. This is very unusual for Islamic art as it normally prohibits using depictions of animals or human figures and reflects a short-lived regional relaxation of the rules in the 17thcentury when the Khanate of Bukhara ruled Samarkand. Twenty years later in 1656 the Tillya-Kori Madrasa was the final grand addition that centered the grouping.

Various shops now occupy the old classrooms. In one room an 11th generation tile artisan gave our group a demonstration of how the ornate tiles are cut and pieced together. Many of the intricate geometric designs have over twenty different design elements comprised of polygons, triangles, squares, rhombuses, and various multi-sided geometric stars, while others featured floral or biomorphic motifs or calligraphic scripts.

On average it took twelve years to complete each madrassa and required a massive workforce of thousands of skilled artisans and unskilled slave labor to convert raw material into the astonishingly beautiful buildings that define Samarkand. (Samarkand and Bukhara had notorious slave markets that operated for centuries. Successive Empires sold into captivity those captured along the frontiers of Persia and Russia by nomadic raiders or military conquests, to buyers across the Arab world, Central Asia, and India. While popular history focuses on exotic goods like silk, spices, and jade, slaves were also part of the Silk Road’s cargo and transported over thousands of miles along its trade routes).

With the discovery of a maritime route to India, Southeast Asia and China in the beginning in the early 1500s the importance of the cross-continent Silk Road caravans to Istanbul steadily declined. By the mid-1600s Samarkand entered a long period of reduced global significance and slow long economic decline. With reduced revenue from Silk Road caravan trade rulers could no longer finance their endowments of the madrassas and the financial aid they gave to support the students, which caused enrollment to dwindle.

Over time the buildings slowly fell into a state of disrepair from lack of maintenance. By the time the Russian Empire invaded the region the Silk Road Khanates were lacking the funds to buy the modern military weapons needed to defend themselves with any chance of defeating the Russians. The resulting defeats allowed the Russian Empire to force the Khanates to become protectorates, with the khans only symbolically ruling their domains. With the Soviet Union’s takeover of Uzbekistan in the 1920s and subsequently outlawing traditional Islamic education, the madrassas were closed. Rooms in the schools were used as offices, warehouses, and an ammunition depot, while the square was reserved for political rallies that promoted communist propaganda, mass veil burnings and trials of counterrevolutionaries. But the Soviets also began the restoration of the crumbling buildings.

The madrassas on Registan Square were the last grand structures built during Samarkand’s golden era. The historic and cultural achievements of this 250-year era is a time that Uzbekistan is most proud of and promotes as the most significant part of the country’s history which it has been seeking to reestablish after a combined 150 years of Russian Empire and Soviet Union domination.

We wrapped up the late afternoon with an unexpected wine tasting in an underground cellar featuring local wines made by Samarkand’s famous Bagizagan Winery. It was a generous tasting that offered six types of wine, brandies/cognac, and chacha, Uzbek grappa, paired with local cheeses, nuts, crackers, and seasonal fruit. The tradition of winemaking around Samarkand goes back over 2,500 years in the fertile Zerafshan Valley. A family of winemakers for over 150 years, their property was collectivized during Uzbekistan’s communist years but returned to them after Uzbekistan’s independence in 1991. We thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and the wines were very good.

The next morning, we were up early to walk to some sites that we passed while on our bus that were relatively close to the Hotel Royal Samarkand where we were staying, but not on our itinerary. Our destinations were the Amir Temur Monument and the Memorial of Samarkand’s Tigers, both of which were located along Registan Street. The morning sun was just cresting the adjacent buildings as we entered Bul’var Park, a long skinny stretch of land bounded on each side by University Boulevard. The walkway down its center was dotted with sculptures and fountains. Bird calls filled the air.

At the far end of the park was a statue of Amir Temur staring thoughtfully to the east. Farther along was a sculpture of Samarkand’s two guardian tigers. The Turanian or Caspian tigers historically symbolized royal power, but it also commemorates the tigers that lived along Central Asia’s river thickets until population growth in the region contributed to their extinction in the 1950s. Returning to our hotel, as we walked along Orzi Makhmudov St. we stopped to watch a restauranteur stack freshly baked somsalar into an outdoor display case. We met a young schoolgirl who was so curious about seeing foreign visitors on her street that she stopped to say hello. It was a charming moment of connection that warmed our hearts.

Joining our tour group after breakfast we headed to Gur-e Amir, ” the Tomb of the King.” Built in the early 1400s, it is the royal mausoleum of Amir Temur and his sons Shah Rukh and Miran Shah along with his grandsons Ulugh Beg and Muhammad Sultan. Also honored with a place in the tomb is Timur’s teacher Sayyid Baraka.

The courtyard’s grand entrance portal leading to a large ornate blue dome flanked by flat topped minarets became the master blueprint for an architectural style that was embraced across the Islamic world as Timur’s descendants continued to expand the Timurid Empire.

When Soviet archeologists decided to open Timur’s tomb in 1941 rumors went around Samarkand that disturbing the tomb would curse those who opened it, as the tomb is inscribed with a prophecy that reads “When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble.” Local leaders attempted to warn the Soviets, but the excavation team persisted. Opening the tomb allegedly revealed another inscription declaring “Whosoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I.” Two days later Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Apparently, Stalin believed the curse and quickly ordered Timur to be reburied with full Islamic burial rites.

Continuing on we traveled to Shah-i-Zinda, Samarkand’s famous necropolis that features a narrow avenue lined with eleven ancient, spectacularly ornate blue tile covered mausoleums, smaller tombs, several small mosques and several historical buildings. “Its name means “The Living King,” referring to a legend that one of the figures buried here, Qusam ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad was not truly dead but “living” underground.”  

According to legend Qusam came to Samarkand in the 7th century during early Arab incursions to preach and establish Islam. Attacked by raiding Zoroastrians he was beheaded while performing his prayers. “Rather than dying, Qusam picked up his own severed head, tucked it under his arm, and descended into a deep underground opening linked to paradise, where legend states he continues to live to this day.

This legend encourages pilgrims from all across the Muslim world to visit the site. His original shrine on the site dated from the 11th century but was destroyed during the Mongol invasion of Samarkand. It was later rebuilt during Timur’s reign and later as his female family members, wives, and nobles chose the site as their final resting place during the 14th and 15th centuries, turning Shah-i-Zinda into one of the most important burial sites in Central Asia.

Late morning when we arrived was similar to trying to enter the New York City subway system at 5PM, packed with folks queueing for the best spots to take photos. The necropolis is stunning, but it was nearly impossible to take any photos without other people in the picture unless we had our cameras pointed at the beautiful ceilings. In hindsight our suggestion would be to plan a visit at 7:00AM when it opens or visit later in the day when the tour groups have headed for dinner.

After dropping us off our bus driver had to park farther away, near the local hillside cemetery. As simple as it was it had its own elegance. Greeting us, our driver broke some Samarkand bread with us and provided some local cheese for lunch in the shade of the bus before we headed to our final destination in Samarkand.

It was a very hot afternoon in late April as we slowly walked up the hill past the Makhsum Baba Mausoleum. Built in the 1800s the mausoleum of the revered local awliya (saint) features a much simpler, less ornate Persian style architecture, and because of this it is often looked by folks.

Continuing on we took a brief respite in the shade of the market pavilions at Siyob Bozori. It has functioned as Samarkand’s largest and oldest bazaar since the construction of the Registan displaced the merchants that once kept shops there. It was filled with beautiful ceramics, breads, honey, nuts and spices, as well as textiles. Vendors eagerly offered samples, hoping to encourage a sale.

Next to the bazaar was the Bibi-Khanym Mosque, the façade of which was very similar to those of the madrassas on Registan Square. Our only critique of Tumeric architecture is that, while the facades are embellished with different mosaic designs, there is not a very distinguishable visible difference between the shape of the madrassas and the mosques. Though intriguing, visiting too many of them tends to be visually repetitious.

Its towering entranceway opened to a treed courtyard, at the center of which stood a very large glass exhibit case that held a giant marble pedestal carved in the shape of a book stand during the Timurid era. It was used to hold the legendary, oversized 7th-century Osman Quran that Timur brought back to Samarkand following his military campaigns through Iraq, as a prized war trophy and token of religious prestige for his royal library. It was a huge book that weighed 80 kilos (176 lbs) and required multiple assistants just to physically turn the massive leather pages for the Imans during religious services on major Islamic holidays when it was removed from the library.  The Quran was seized by the Russian imperial army in 1868 and taken to St. Petersburg. Upon repeated petitions it was returned to Tashkent in 1924 and is now displayed in the newly opened Islamic Civilization Center there. The ancient pedestal is also the subject of a local fertility legend that believes “a childless woman will miraculously conceive and bear children if she crawls underneath the giant marble book stand located in the middle of the courtyard.” Evidently this was done frequently enough to raise concern that the monument might be toppled, and the decision was made to protect it within a glass enclosure.

Built between 1399 and 1405, the mosque was a huge structure that suffered from numerous engineering deficiencies which resulted in it beginning to crumble as soon as it was completed. A major earthquake in the 19th century caused large sections of masonry to collapse; that along with a Russian artillery strike in 1868 hastened the already dilapidated complex’s demise. Though for a short period of time, in its heyday, it must have been spectacular.

We had a wonderful time in Samarkand. In hindsight we wished our tour had chosen a hotel closer to Registan Square, which would have facilitated exploring some of the sites we missed in our free time.

Tashkent, Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand were all remarkedly different. We had a great time in Uzbekistan.

Go for wonderful architecture of the Timurid Dynasty, but don’t forget the bread.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

Bukhara, Uzbekistan: A City of Culture and Style on the Ancient Silk Road, or Time Traveling in the Desert

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In mid-April 2026 we flew from Tashkent to Urgench on our way to Khiva. We were a month too early to take advantage of the newly operating “Jaloliddin Manguberdi,” a high-speed electric train that whisks passengers 1,020km (630 mi) across the country from Tashkent to Khiva in 7.5 hours with stops in Samarkand, Bukhara, Urgench, and Khiva.

We are not fans of bus trips, preferring to rent a car, and organize our own road trips so we can stop frequently, but the distances between the cities in Uzbekistan were just too great, and we opted for a group tour instead. Consequently, a couple of long bus journeys were part of the itinerary, such as the six-hour trip to Bukhara. While some folks used this time to catch up on their emails and texts, or read, I preferred to look out the window, level the horizon, and try to compose a few photos as the bus bounced along. Leveling the horizon was nearly impossible.

In this part of western Uzbekistan there is not a modern highway system. While the roads were decent, the “highways” were also local roads when they passed through towns, and the sights could be unusual: like the local butcher who had a freshly slaughtered cow’s head hanging in front of his shop; kids in their school uniforms walking to school in a culvert along the edge of a field as a cow grazed nearby; numerous new mosques under construction. In places, large ancient cemeteries lined the road. There were also many examples of Uzbekistan’s informal economy underway when we entered or exited a town, with folks selling the in-season fruits and vegetables, or honey, eggs, and homemade cheeses from their cars parked along the roadside. 

At rest areas, tandoors cast forth the wonderful aroma of freshly baked samsas. Passing through the town of Hazorasp, a large silver sculpture of a winged horse flashed by too quickly to grab a photo. This was the Tulpar, the legendary ultra-swift horse in Uzbek mythology. The town’s name “Hazorasp,” literally translates to “a thousand horses.” It’s taken from a folkloric legend where a herd of winged horses descended to the Amu Darya river delta.

We reached the Hazorasp Tumani bridge over the Amu Darya River, a narrow, two-lane steel and concrete bridge that closes to all vehicle traffic when a train crosses the bridge on railroad tracks that straddle the yellow center line. This event caused such a long wait, that our driver and guide made us hot tea and coffee in the shade of the bus as we waited in the queue, with other folks who were leaving their vehicles to stretch their legs, killing time before the train passed.

Our route paralleled Uzbekistan’s border with Turkmenistan and at a viewpoint overlooking the Amu Darya River our guide pointed out how much the width of the river had shrunk since his childhood during Uzbekistan’s Soviet era, when the river’s water was overdrawn to irrigate cotton fields, and that during the communist years there were an incredible 17 security checkpoints between Khiva and Bukhara, that everyone was required to stop at. Farther on the scrubland of the Kyzylkum Desert extended in every direction to the horizon.

One unusual thing that we noticed at the many gas stations we passed along our 443km (275mi) route to Bukhara were the concrete walls between the filling islands. The stations didn’t provide gasoline. Instead, they sold highly compressed natural gas for cars and trucks that had been retrofitted to take advantage of Uzbekistan’s substantial natural gas reserves. Occasionally, explosions during the refueling process happens, and the concrete blast walls are to contain the damage. Drivers using these facilities are also required to wait in certain no danger zones, a safe distance away from their vehicles. The stations are all connected via pipelines and frequently there are problems with their pressurization which results in temporary station closures and long lines at other facilities. If you are renting a car there isn’t any need to worry, as all rental cars in Uzbekistan run on gasoline.

Wide multi-lane boulevards greeted us as we entered the outskirts of Bukhara, a city of about 305,000 people. The roads were lined with newer three to five story buildings with a vast array of shops and services on the ground level and apartments above. And there was a good amount of western style advertising with billboards and digital displays marketing athletic wear, soda and banking services. There had been a large 12km (7.5mi) defensive wall around this Silk Road trading hub for over two millenniums, only succumbing to destruction when the Soviet Red Army bombed and shelled the city in 1920 before they forced Bukhara into the Soviet Union. Prior to this, the Emirate of Bukhara existed as an absolute, conservative Islamic monarchy, while being a Russian Empire protectorate, a result of Russia attacking the city in the late 1860s to end its and Khiva’s notorious slave markets that sold around 100,000 Persian and Russian slaves every year to other Islamic khanates in Central Asia, India and the Middle East.

Just shy of the pedestrian only historic center of Bukhara, we disembarked from our bus, across from the Labi Hovuz, an ancient public square, dating from the 1620s, that’s centered with a large reservoir surrounded by a shallow set of stairs that lead down to the water’s edge.  Surrounded by centuries old mulberry trees, it was a popular spot for merchants from the caravanserais, and students from the nearby madrassas to relax in the cool of the evening. The pool was also a vital source of drinking water for the surrounding homes for several hundred years. There used to be many of these hovuz, pools, across Bukhara’s mahallas, neighborhoods, but they were also the breeding grounds for waterborne diseases like guinea worm and cholera, and they were filled in for health reasons during the Soviet years.

Dragging our suitcases behind us, we passed the Magoki Attori Mosque, dating from the 9thcentury; it was built above the ruins of an early Buddhist monastery and later Zoroastrian temple. Interestingly, before the first synagogue was built in the city, Muslims and Jews shared the temple but worshipped at different times. It is the oldest mosque in Bukhara, having survived Genghis Khan’s sack of the town in 1220, and a millennium of Bukhara’s evolving growth, which has left its entrance 4.5m (15ft) below the surrounding city level.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

We entered the inner part of the historic center of Bukhara through the Toqi Telpakfurushon, a long gate-like, multi-domed tim built in 1570, that was first used as the booksellers’ bazaar. Its narrow lane was lined with a variety of colorful stalls and workshops, and it is expected that tourists will bargain with the merchants for their best price. We passed through the Toqi Telpakfurushon many times during our two full days in Bukhara, but appreciated the beauty of the building most in the early morning hours as the city was awakening.

Just outside the far end of the bazaar was the Bozori Kord Hammam, dating from the 14th century. It is one of the oldest continually operating bathhouses in the world, where a restorative 30-minute massage can be enjoyed.

Our hotel, The Shahriston, was a few doors down. It’s a newer hotel built in 2018, that wonderfully retains the authentic character of the surrounding medina, and was conveniently, centrally located on Khakikat St, and within easy walking distance of Bukhara’s many historic sites. It also had a nice rooftop terrace for views over the medina’s Toqi trading domes and workshops.

After getting settled in our room, we headed to the Poi Kalon Complex, as the golden hour was approaching, and quickly decided that the rooftop restaurant at Kazan, directly opposite the plaza, would be the perfect spot for dinner and photos later. We made reservations.

The plaza is considered to be the religious center of Bukhara and is bordered with three buildings built between the 12th-16th centuries: Kalan Minaret (1127) replaced an earlier design that collapsed during construction; The Kalan Mosque was completed in 1514, ( it replaced an older 12th century mosque destroyed by Genghis Khan’s army in 1220); and the Miri Arab Madrassah, which dates from 1535.

The square was lively with vacationers, tour groups, and vendors offering balloons, photo services, and souvenirs. The architectural brickwork design of the 48m (157ft) tall Kalan Minaret is amazing. The minaret so impressed Genghis Khan that he ordered his troops to spare it as they totally destroyed the rest of the city when the Mongol army sacked Bukhara. It was also known as the “Tower of Death,” where criminals, political rivals, and unfaithful spouses were marched up the 105-step spiral staircase to the open rotunda at the summit and cast to their deaths. Though there is the legend of a Khan’s wife who on the eve of her execution was granted her last wish – to wear all her dresses. “People stood breathless as the woman jumped, but then a miracle happened as her wide skirts billowed out like a parachute and she landed softly.”

Purposefully designed to rival the size of Bibi-Khanym Mosque in Samarkand, the monumental entrance arch of the Kalan Mosque opens to a grand courtyard that can hold over 10,000 worshippers and is surrounded by 208 pillar-domed galleries. At far end of the courtyard is an octagonal brick pavilion that is the tomb of a revered imam, just before the iwan, an open front vaulted room, where the minbar stood. Sadly, in 1924 the Soviet regime in Uzbekistan closed the mosque to religious use and repurposed it as a warehouse. During those years the mosque fell into neglect and wasn’t partially restored and used as a mosque again until 1991 when Uzbekistan declared its independence.

Directly across from the entrance to the Kalan Mosque were the blue domes and façade of the Miri Arab Madrassah covered with fascinating intricate tile mosaics featuring geometric, vegetative, and calligraphic patterns. Some historians suggest that the madrassa was built to commemorate Bukhara’s decisive victory over Persian troops at the Battle of Gijduvan in 1512, and that the ornate craftsmanship throughout the building was financed by khanate when it sold 3000 captured Iranians into slavery.  The school was closed for 25 years after the Soviet Union took control of Uzbekistan, but was reopened in 1945 when the USSR government granted permission to the Miri Arab Madrassah to be the one official Islamic educational institution for Muslims within Soviet Union, hosting students from different regions across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Russia. Today about 56 new students a year are accepted into a 4-year course of study to become an imam.

Dinner later on the rooftop terrace at Kazan was a charming and unhurried experience and we lingered, watching the color of the golden hour across the plaza transition to twilight, as the size of the crowd on the plaza ebbed and flowed. The food was excellent. Unfortunately, as a functioning school, the restaurant does not permit tourists inside, but occasionally folks are allowed to step into the entrance portal and view the entry hall. However, during our research we found this interesting video tour of the Miri Arab Madrassah’s interior.

The next morning our group headed to Samonids Park, a large lush green park with a Ferris wheel and other amusement park rides, as well as shaded walkways through a nicely manicured landscape, on the outskirts of the historic area. We followed our guide down one of these lanes to the Mausoleum of Ismail Samani, the founder of Bukhara’s Samanids dynasty, (875-999).

The mausoleum is a highly decorated beautiful small structure, with all of its exterior and interior walls covered with intricate symbols and geometric relief patterns that resemble the design of woven textiles and basketry. It’s an effect that gives the building a highly textural feeling. The mausoleum is considered a masterpiece of early Islamic architecture. Through fate or luck, it is the oldest surviving Islamic structure in Bukhara, having been entombed in silt from repeated river flooding or, as legend believes purposely buried in sand to prevent Genghis Khan’s Mongol army from destroying it in 1220. Amazingly it stayed buried until Soviet Union archeologists rediscovered it in the late-1920s and found it in surprisingly good condition, due to the fact that it was entirely constructed with kiln-baked bricks, that resisted the erosive effect of repeated flooding.

Our tour continued through the park to the adjacent Markaziy bazaar, Bukhara’s central market. It’s a substantial complex with several halls and numerous vendors displaying their foodstuffs and offering samples. It is best described as a gauntlet of temptations.

Continuing on we came to the Bolo Hauz Mosque, built in 1712 across from the Ark of Bukhara. It was the official mosque of the emirs of Bukhara until the Soviet Union took over Uzbekistan. With the addition of an ornate 20-pillar wooden portico called an iwan in 1917, the mosque has a unique non-traditional façade. We had seen iwans earlier during our stops at the royal palaces in Khiva, where they were in the private courtyards, not on the front of a mosque. But it’s the perfect addition to accommodate worshippers in the hot summers.

The Ark of Bukhara was a heavily fortified citadel and palace within the extensive defensive wall that ringed the city. It enclosed the royal courts, living quarters and throne rooms of the Emirs. Along with housing for around 3,000 people, it also had mosques, a mint, a treasury, and a prison.

The unique shape of its curved towers and ramparts has been meticulously preserved and today the inner rooms of the palace are a museum detailing the city’s history. The view from the defensive wall back towards the Poyi Kalon Complex was also striking.

Twenty minutes from central Bukhara our group visited The Memorial Complex of Bakhouddin Naqshbandi, the 14th century Islamic theologian who founded the widely followed Naqshbandi Sufi order and was renown as the spiritual mentor to Amir Temur (Tamerlane), the ruler responsible for Uzbekistan’s Timurid Renaissance.

Over the centuries his once simple garden tomb at his home grew into a vast site that includes the dynastic necropolises of the Sheibanid, Ashtarkhanid, and Mangit rulers. Later additions included a mosque, minaret and madrassa. After Uzbekistan declared its independence, with the help of international donors, the country totally renovated the site which had fallen into disrepair during the Soviet era, in time for the 675th anniversary of Naqshband’s birth in 1993.

This was one of the first major opportunities the new Uzbekistan government took to reclaim its Islamic and Central Asian heritage after living under 70 years of communist atheism. Newer additions include a Sufi museum and theological research center, where translations of ancient Islamic texts are undertaken. Through the centuries it has become a revered pilgrimage site for folks from all across Central Asia and beyond.

Everyone was so friendly and eager to take photographs of us, and have their photos taken too, it was a very heart-warming experience. Our guide shared that for many people living in remote villages this was their first trip away from home. He spoke of a Central Asia folk belief which claims that three trips to the shrine equal a Hajj to Mecca, which underscored how dangerous the trek across the desert to Arabia was.

Afterwards our group headed to “the palace that resembles the stars and the moon,” Sitora-i-Moh-i Khosa, the summer palace of Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan, the last emir of Bukhara. The palace is poetically named for the emir’s wife, whose beauty he often compared to the heavens. Built between 1912 and 1918 by Bukhara craftsmen, the emir had sent to St. Petersburg to study western techniques.

While the exterior facades are traditional, the interior of the palace is a visually and texturally rich artistic expression that wonderfully overwhelms the senses. We mused that the flamboyant Las Vegas entertainer Liberace would have been right at home in its over-the-top décor. That speculation surely dates us as kids of the 60s.

The day we toured the site there were numerous crafts vendors, with fairly priced merchandise, set up along the garden paths and peacocks roaming freely about the park-like settings.

The emir only had a few years to enjoy his creation before fleeing the country after the Bukharan emirate fell to the Soviet Red Army in 1920. Fortunately, the communists appreciated the artistic merit of the site and preserved it as a decorative arts museum.

That evening under a clear night sky we enjoyed live piano music on the plaza around the corner from the hotel, at The Terrace Bukhara ECO Café.

On our last full day in Bukhara we had the morning for ourselves to wander around and explore. There are so many ancient madrassas in Bukhara, many of the smaller ones throughout the town have been or are in the process of being renovated into boutique hotels. And there are others in a state of semi-ruin, that have been stabilized enough to be safe for vendors to set up craft stalls in but remain architecturally interesting. The Abdulaziz Khan Madrassa (1652), located directly across from the Ulugbek Madrassa (1417), was an amazing example of this. Its monumental pishtaq, entrance way, had one of the best examples of a muqarnas, the intricate honeycomb-shape vaulted ceiling, found on madrassas in Bukhara.

Even though the domed ceilings above the vendors in its main hall were not restored, they were also stunning. In the courtyard large sections of tilework were noticeably missing.

Continuing on we walked through the medina to the Chor Minor Monument, a unique structure with four blue capped towers, which represent the cardinal points of a compass and the Samanids, Shaybanids, Karakhanids, and Manghits dynasties. Atop one tower is a sculpture of nesting storks.

They used to be a common sight nesting on the domes all across the city.  Their presence was enjoyed, with folks believing the birds brought good luck, peace, and domestic happiness.  Across from the monument was an antique shop that features all sorts of Soviet memorabilia.

Afterwards we headed to the Labi Hovuz plaza where we were scheduled to reunite with our group at the bronze statue of Khodja Nasreddin, a legendary folkloric figure who used his “sharp wit, humor, and feigned ignorance to outsmart the greedy, hypocritical, and powerful,” in front of the Nodir Devonbegi Madrassa for a dance and fashion show.

Nodir Devonbegi was originally built in 1622 to be a caravanserai but was repurposed when during its opening ceremony the khan inadvertently praised it as a madrassa. So be it. The front of the building is unusually adorned with an elaborate tile mosaic featuring a pair of stylized birds, mythical Simurghs, clutching deer and flying toward a human-faced radiant sun. This is very unusual for Islamic art as it normally prohibited using depictions of animals or human figures and reflects a short-lived regional relaxation of the rules in the 17thcentury.

Inside we were enthralled by a lively performance of traditional Uzbekistan dances in between the wardrobe changes of a surprisingly interesting fashion show by the internationally acclaimed designer Umida Kabilova, who gives a bold modern interpretation to ikat, a dyed patterned silk fabric for which Bukhara is known.

Afterwards we made a quick stop at the Khammam Sarrofon, a hammam built in the early 1530s. It is a cavernous space that had a heated floor, and was used almost continuously for over four centuries until the Soviets damaged it during their 1920 attack on the city. It was restored and served the community until the 1970s. 

Down from the hammam was the studio and gallery of the Ustoz Shogird Miniature Workshop, founded by Davlat Toshev, an internationally recognized artist who is known for his work on restoring ancient manuscripts. He was clandestinely taught the art of Persian miniature painting by his father during the Soviet era, when Uzbekistan’s cultural identity was being suppressed. In a desire to keep this ancient tradition alive he started mentoring students, many with learning handicaps, in the 1990s, eventually opening a school in 2018. It’s a beautiful space, and the demonstration of how to color silk paper by two of his students, with a member of our group participating, was charming. The artwork on the walls was beautiful. We couldn’t resist purchasing one for a souvenir. It was a really great experience that we highly recommend if you like art.

Toshev enjoys sharing Uzbekistan’s culture, so much so that his family offers a culinary workshop on how to make plov, the country’s national rice pilaf dish, in their home. It was our group’s last dinner in Bukhara, a festive occasion, and a great way to end our time in this intriguing ancient city on Silk Road.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

Tashkent, Uzbekistan: Historic and Cosmopolitan or Surprisingly Fascinating & Wonderful

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Uzbekistan is having its moment after years of slowly simmering interest; it’s exploding into a full-fledged tourist boom. It is exponentially growing from 1 million tourists in 2016 to almost 13 million in 2026, and with a modern infrastructure that includes the newly operating “Jaloliddin Manguberdi,” a high-speed electric train that will whisk passengers 1,020km (630 mi) across the country from Tashkent to Khiva in 7.5 hours with stops in Samarkand, Bukhara, and Urgench. The country is quickly becoming Central Asia’s most intriguing Silk Road destination, and with the recent opening of the state-of-the-art Islamic Civilization Center, Islom Sivilizatsiyasi Markazi, in March 2026, Tashkent will be of particular interest for tourists from the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The ATMs at TAS, Tashkent’s International Airport, were conveniently located next to the baggage carousels in the arrivals area, as were signs for YandexGo, the most popular ride-share service in Uzbekistan. Walking away from the ATM with about 2,400,000 Uzbekistani Som, roughly $200.00 at the rate of 1 USD = 12,000 UZS, we felt like newly minted millionaires. We were not able to link a credit card to the YandexGo App, but soon realized a twenty-minute ride across Tashkent to the Hotel Uzbekistanwould only cost 21,000 UZS. Outside the terminal we navigated our way through a gauntlet of taxi hawkers to a sea of ubiquitous white cars. In and of itself, white cars are not unusual in any region where you can cook an egg on a rock during the summer, but the fact that they were mostly American branded Chevrolets, not the ever so popular Japanese cars, was very remarkable. They are the result of a thirty-year-old joint venture between GMC and the Uzbekistan government-owned UzAuto Motors, and steep import tariffs on foreign cars, which has led to Chevrolet producing  95% of the country’s new vehicles.

The Hotel Uzbekistan opened in 1974 when Uzbekistan was still part of the Soviet Union, eight years after a April 1966 earthquake destroyed many of Tashkent’s centuries old historic neighborhoods where the one and two-story homes were made of adobe brick. The catastrophic event left 300,000 people homeless.

The Soviet Union used this crisis to transform Tashkent into a “model Soviet city” with wonderfully wide boulevards, open plazas, and earthquake-resistant buildings, deploying architects and laborers from across its republics to build a “showcase of socialist modernism and multicultural “people’s friendship.” The revival of the city mushroomed after Uzbekistan’s independence in 1991, and continues with a building boom that peppers the city’s modern skyline with construction cranes.

The style of the city’s new buildings constructed right after the earthquake is often referred to as Soviet Brutalist, an architectural style which features the love of concrete, and functionality over grace. And Hotel Uzbekistan was designed to be the centerpiece of the Soviet Union’s vision. For many years the building, with an open book profile designed to resist seismic activity, stood as the country’s tallest building, and was the premier hotel for international delegations to stay and hold conferences.

At the time its seventeenth-floor restaurant overlooked Lenin Square until the colossal statue of the Soviet leader was sent to the scrap yard in 1991 when Uzbekistan regained its independence, and replaced him with an equestrian statue of Amir Temur, an enlightened ruler who united the independent kingdoms of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Urgench during Uzbekistan’s 14th century renaissance, as the country seeks to reclaim its cultural history.

A thumping bass reverberated through the hotel, preventing any attempt of catching an early shuteye. Dressed again, we never intended to be Uzbeki party crashers, but we got caught up in the spirit of a couple’s anniversary celebration and enjoyed watching the band perform for a while. The hotel would be our base for three days to explore Tashkent before joining a group tour to Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand.

By 1970 Uzbekistan’s capital city was mostly rebuilt, and construction of Central Asia’s first subway system, a series of beautiful stations that were also designed to be utilized as bomb shelters in case of emergencies during the Cold War era, was underway.  The next morning, we set out after an early breakfast and worked our way against the morning crush of young professional ascending from the depths of the Amir Temur Hiyoboni station, just a block from our hotel.

The underground tunnel leading to the turnstile offered perfect acoustics for a young Uzbeki busker who played for the commuters. The Tashkent Metro now has four lines, and 50 stations along 70km (44 mi) of track. Rides at the time of our visit cost 1,700 Uzbeki Som (about $0.14 USD), and were easily payable at the turnstile with a tap of our credit cards.

We spent a good part of the morning riding between the stations that encircle central Tashkent, hopping on and off to photograph some stations that were noteworthy for their striking architectural beauty, that often resembled a formal waiting chamber in an elegant palace, before transferring to another line.

We eventually worked our way to the Kosmonavtlar Station, where the walls are beautifully embellished with tile portraits of early Soviet astronauts. Surprisingly, because of their dual use as bomb shelters, photography in the subway stations was banned until 2018.

We also visited the plaza above the station where we viewed another interesting monument to the Soviet Union’s space program, before we made a short excursion to Tashkent’s Museum of Applied Arts, only a few blocks away. Founded in 1937, the museum is housed in the former mansion of an Emperial Russia diplomat and has a rotating collection of over 4,000 Uzbeki decorative handicrafts, with examples of traditional wood carving called O‘ymakorlik, ceramics, embroidery, gold weaving, jewelry and musical instruments. In the museum’s traditional courtyard was a very atmospheric café where we enjoyed coffee.

Before descending back underground we detoured slightly to see a modern interpretation of Islamic architecture represented in the 1970s era facade of the Central Exhibition Hall of the Academy of Arts.

The 1930s built Alisher Navoi Grand Theatre, survivor of the earthquake, features a blend of classic European architecture with traditional Uzbek ornamental styles. Along our route we walked through many of the parks and green spaces that give the city a wonderful ambiance.

Back on the subway we continued on to the Chorsu Station, only a short walk away from the Chorsu Bazaar, Tashkent’s historical central market, whose history goes back 2000 plus years to the founding of Tashkent. The main hall’s futuristic dome, where meats, poultry and dairy products are for sale, dates from the reconstruction of the city after the 1966 earthquake.

After wandering through the rows of clothing merchants, where nothing has a price tag so bargaining is expected, we were enticed by the aroma of slowly grilling kebabs over an outside fire at Especialidad Pinchos. A smile goes a long way when you don’t understand the language and we were quickly seated outside and served a delightful lemon tea. The restaurant was the perfect place to relax and people watch. It felt as if we were in the audience of an old TV sit-com where good-natured chiding was going on, from the quips flying across the open-air restaurant. We mentally supplied the dialog: “Yasmina we are so busy, can you clear the tables faster?” “Now Zarina you might be the golden one and Bobur’s squeeze, but don’t you go telling me how to take care of my side of the cafe!” And so it went, their familiar back and forth continuing the whole time we were there as the women busily tended the day’s lunch crowd.

Wheel barrel vendors selling round, flat disk-shaped non coursed through the shoppers. These loaves of dough are traditionally decorated with a stamping tool called a chekich, before baking. We’ve read many rave reviews about Uzbekistan’s non but have found it’s best enjoyed when fresh out of an oven, as in our opinion it becomes a disappointing “eh” later. It’s definitely worth spending the time to find the central bakers in the market to watch them form the dough and then lean into the tall brick ovens to throw it against the side walls to bake. The result is heavenly.

Stairs rose from the market’s lower level to the gastronomical equivalent of Aladdin’s “Cave of Wonders.” Literally it was like a culinary temple, with vendors freely offering samples, it had us wishing we had rented an apartment with a full kitchen. The quality, variety, and abundance of the foodstuffs were amazing. It was difficult for the cooks in us to resist the temptation to buy a cart full of groceries, but we did and only purchased some dried fruit and pomegranate juice for a snack later.

After leaving the market we crossed the street into the Hastimom Mahalla neighborhood, in the Almazar District and walked along Zarkaynar Street. The lane was recently renovated as part of an effort to revitalize the maze of narrow lanes in the ancient quarter that lies between the Chorsu market and the magnificent new Islamic Civilization Center.

The street was pristine with new historical murals and buildings shining with their new facelifts, but it lost much of its authenticity in the process and felt a little too touristy.  Young boys were enthusiastically kicking a soccer ball back and forth down the lane until a neighborhood buvi, grandmother, put a stop to their raucous play.

Fortunately, as we walked deeper in the mahalla, smaller alleys led to traditional homes still made of adobe brick that share a communal courtyard called a sheriklikli hovli. It was down one off these lanes that we hoped to find Tandyr Samsa V Dome, a small family run bakery in a hovli that is acclaimed for their samsas, a savory pastry filled with meat, chicken or potato, and then baked in a traditional wood-fired clay oven called a tandir. We had a very difficult time finding it. In this labyrinth our mapping app got us close, but eventually we just had to try different lanes until we discovered the right one. Unfortunately, by the time we found the right hovli, baking for the day was over and the family encouraged us to come back earlier on another day. It was very late in the afternoon when we stopped at a small nondescript restaurant, with a plastic pullback sheet as a door, and one low table and cushions on the floor. The owner was delighted we stopped and shared his experience about working the United States for a short time, while serving his many neighborhood customers who came in to get their takeaway orders. Our meal was very simple, just kebabs and non, but it was delicious and memorable.

Afterwards we headed to the Hazrati Imam Complex, an ensemble of buildings around a large plaza that include the16th  century madrasah Barak-Khan, that is now a crafts center, the 19th century Muyi Muborak Madrasah, which now exhibits a collection of ancient Islamic manuscripts, and the Hazrati Imam Mosque completed in 2007.

They were built around the Mausoleum of Hazrat Imam, which had become a pilgrimage site. Hazrati was a brilliant 10th-century polyglot and local locksmith who went by the name of Kaffal al-Shashi before pursuing his religious studies in Baghdad, Mecca and Medina. Upon returning to Tashkent he became one of the town’s first local imams and received the title Hazrat Imam. Beloved, he came to be regarded as the chief spiritual protector and patron of Tashkent.

The complex is one of the few large open spaces in the Almazar District, and it’s a popular spot for local families to bring their children to learn how to ride bikes and fly kites.

Next to the Hazrati Imam Complex is the Islamic Civilization Center, a newly opened museum, “conceived under the vision and leadership of Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev in 2017. The Islamic Civilization Center was envisioned to be more than just a museum, but function as an international hub for science, culture and learning, combining the richest treasures of pre‑Islamic and Islamic heritage of Uzbekistan with modern digital technologies and academic research.” The center’s striking design took inspiration from the architectural masterpieces constructed by the Timurid Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The ICC was not on our radar when we planned our trip to Uzbekistan, but we were delighted to find that the center stays open until 10pm every day, and seeing that the queue for entrance into the museum was very short we spontaneously purchased tickets. Upon entering the building folks were divided into small tour groups determined by the language they spoke and then led through the exhibits with a bilingual guide.

It’s a huge building with over 2,000 historical items, manuscripts, and cultural artifacts on display, 743 of which have been repatriated from international collections, and a 45,000-book research library. It was a fascinating tour that lasted about two hours and ended in the Quran Hall with a dramatic multimedia event where sacred verses of the Quran were projected onto a digitally created night sky in the 65m (213ft) tall dome, directly over the treasured 7th-century Uthman Quran, and a holographic beam of light descends from the heavens to spotlight the manuscript, representing divine revelation.

Though the constitution of Uzbekistan defines the country as a secular state, there are some concerns about how heavily religious freedoms and activities are restricted and monitored by the government in Uzbekistan. The Islamic Civilization Center is part of Uzbekistan’s efforts to reclaim its history and Islamic heritage for the next generation, information which was repressed during the 67 years the country was under the Soviets Union’s control.

Exiting the building just before sunset, we had the opportunity to take some night photos of the dramatically illuminated building before enjoying dinner several blocks away at the Khan Ahmat, an upscale eatery.

The next day we set out to see the landmarks next to our hotel before exploring farther afield – the Palace of International Forums Uzbekistan, is a modern conference hall opened in 2009, marking the 2,200th anniversary of Tashkent, and the 18th anniversary of the country’s independence; the circular shaped State Museum of the Temurids, which houses a collection of artifacts relating to the 14th century ruler Tamerlane; the Yuridik Instituti (the Tashkent State University of Law) housed in a late 19thcentury building. It is one of the few examples in Tashkent of Tzarist Russia Emperial architecture to survive the 1966 earthquake.

Turning the corner past the school we entered Sailgokh Street, a wide, treelined 1km (6/10mi) long, pedestrian-only boulevard that links Amir Timur and Independence Squares, that’s locally known as Broadway. Sunlight reflected through party lights strung across the street that was lined with food stalls and outdoor seating. Behind them students from the university were challenging their professors to games of ping-pong at numerous tables along the sidewalk. Caricature artists whiled away the time waiting for customers to sit in front of their easels as parents watched their young children scoot about in electric toy cars. It’s a popular destination to grab an inexpensive meal or dine at one of the fancier restaurants along the walkway.

Surprisingly on this street in 1928 Tashkent was on the cutting edge of technology, when a crowd had gathered to watch the first-ever telecast showing a moving tram, made with a device called a Telephot, created and patented by Boris Grabovsky, a student at Tashkent University, and the son of the famous Ukrainian poet, Viktor Popov. Unfortunately, by 1930 he was forced by Soviet officials to stop working on television technology.

Farther along was a very attractive small royal palace built in the late-19th century and early Art Nouveau style in 1891.  It was the home of Grand Duke Nicholas Constantinovich who was permanently exiled to Tashkent by the Russian royal family for stealing valuable diamonds from an icon belonging to his mother, so he could lavish extravagant gifts upon his American mistress! Let’s talk about the punishment fitting the crime here. The entrances are flanked by bronze sculptures of deer and hunting dogs, a reflection of the Grand Duke’s passion for hunting. He was by no means a pauper during his punishment, and received a gracious royal stipend which he invested in cotton mills, a soap factory, and the city’s first cinema. To furnish his prison palace he was allowed to bring his collection of Russian and European artworks from St. Petersburg with him into exile. Using profits from his local business ventures he continued to acquire new pieces of European art, rare books, and priceless artifacts. Before his death in 1918, he graciously bequeathed his art collection and palace to the city of Tashkent, to become the foundation for the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan collection. During the early Soviet era the palace was used as a museum to display his collection but later was transitioned into an after-school activity center for young Soviet Pioneers. Sadly, the palace was closed for renovation when we visited.

Crossing under Sharaf Rashidov Avenue we reached the large reflecting pool of the Mustakillik Fountain in front of the building housing the offices of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, all the fountains we passed in Tashkent in mid-April were off. We can only speculate how stunning they must be when they are shooting water skyward.

A short walk away was Independence Square where more dry waterworks paralleled the Arch of Ezgulik, a 150m (492ft) long archway held aloft by 16 white marble columns and crowned with a beautiful sculpture of three giant storks circling a globe as they soar skyward. Storks are a prominent theme on the top of many important buildings in Uzbekistan, and in Uzbek folklore they symbolize humanism, peace and prosperity.

Beyond the arch, down a narrow evergreen-lined walkway, was the Monument of Independence, a tall obelisk with a globe atop it, the map of Uzbekistan chiseled into its center. At the base of the monument is a statue of an Uzbek woman cradling a baby, called the Happy Mother that “symbolizes the Motherland, national rebirth, and hope for a prosperous future for the next generation.”

Continuing on we entered Memorial Square where an elegant, long, open-sided wooden building stood, surrounded by traditional Navoi-style carved wooden pillars, called the Memory Corridor. It holds Memory Books which contain the names, inscribed in gold lettering, of over 400,000 Uzbek soldiers who died during World War II.

Across from it was a large statue called the Grieving Mother that overlooked an eternal flame. It was a very somber memorial and hardly a whisper could be heard from the observers.

Progressing along Sharaf Rashidov Avenue toward the Monument to “Courage,” we passed the Turkistan Concert Hall, where a stylized statue of a majestic stork is perched on top of a tall column.

Along the way we noticed that everywhere we walked there was a definite sense of “pride in ownership.” The city was immaculately clean. Street sweepers with traditional brooms called supurgi, made with bundles of twigs tied to a wooden handle, were always out and about, as were the city’s landscapers who seemed to be everywhere planting decorative flower beds and pruning. When they were done in one area, they packed up their tools and brooms and hopped onto a city bus to go to the next location needing tending.

The Monument to “Courage” is a gigantic statue of a family, erected in 1976 on the tenth anniversary of the April 1966 earthquake that commemorates the victims, as well as collective efforts of Tashkent’s survivors and the thousands of workers who arrived from across the Soviet Union to rebuild the city from the rubble. At the foot of the sculpture is a recreated fissure in the earth’s crust that is believed to be directly above the epicenter of the 5.2 magnitude earthquake that rattled the earth for 11 seconds and had nearly 1,000 aftershocks. Behind the statue is a wall of 14 stelae with stylized bronze bas-relief sculptures depicting the reconstruction efforts of the workers and volunteers who rebuilt Tashkent, from literally the ground up. 

A sidewalk next to the stelae leads to Museum of Olympic Glory and crosses over a bridge above the scenic Anchor Canal as it weaves through a quiet woodland before the museum.

Walking from Independence Square along Sharaf Rashidov Avenue to the Monument of Courage, and then following Navoi Avenue, and Mustaqillik Ave back to our hotel, the new design of this “model Soviet city” was particularly apparent with the wide treelined streets, and tall apartment buildings well-spaced apart.

On our last full day in Tashkent we took advantage of multiple inexpensive YandexGo rides and zipped across the city to various destinations. Our first stop, which we had passed earlier in the week, was Magic City Park, an open-air shopping and entertainment complex, that as the name suggests borrows heavily from the mouse kingdom, and seemed very out-of-place in downtown Tashkent. Mid-morning, we had the place almost entirely to ourselves, except for a girl’s dance group practicing their routine in traditional dress.

It was a quiet morning, and we enjoyed walking down a colorful painted and umbrella- covered street, making folks smile as we hammed it up in the mouth of Jaws!

Behind Magic City is Milliy Bog, a large open area national park with statues of important Uzbeks along lanes that lead to the Tashkent Museum of State History; the 19th century Abul-kasim Sheikh Madrasah, which once held a sacred relic of the Prophet Muhammad; the Legislative Chamber of the Oliy Majlis; the Friendship of the Nations concert hall; and the Shomakhmudovs Monument, erected in 1982, as a symbol of wartime generosity and unity.

The monument commemorates a local blacksmith, Shaakhmed Shamakhmudov, and his wife, Bahri Akramova, who during World War II adopted 15 orphaned children of various ethnicities. They were only a small portion of the over one million refugees evacuated from the Soviet Union to Uzbekistan to receive food and shelter, an event that caused many to call it “the city of bread.”

From there we traveled far across Tashkent to a beautiful park across from the Tashkent Television Tower that hosts the Museum of Victims of Political Repression. Along our route we passed many examples of older apartment buildings designed with that harsh “Soviet Brutalism” ethos, and only softened by Uzbek tile murals at both ends.

Life in Uzbekistan during Russian times was not easy and the museum documents the hardships and atrocities committed against the Uzbek people, starting with Imperial Russia’s colonization of the country, where the best farmland was given to Russian settlers, through the communist Soviet Union era. Many exhibits draw on information culled from the former KGB archives.

The blue domes of the museum purposely resemble an ancient mausoleum as the building is constructed over the site where the Soviets executed “enemies of the people” during the 1930s. Across the country over 100,000 people were arrested, and over 13,000 of them were shot. Trees in the park symbolically come from the gulags around the country where folks were imprisoned. During World War II ethnic groups that allegedly collaborated with the Soviet Union’s enemies were deported en mass to Siberia.

Outside, the man-made river that runs through the park is symbolically shaped like a Greek meander, to symbolize the eternal flow of life. Under the park’s tall rotunda is a nephrite tomb with the inscription in Arabic, English and Uzbek: “The memory of those who died for their country will live forever.”

Across the busy road was the Tashkent Television Tower, the tallest freestanding tower with a height of 375m (1,230ft) in Central Asia since its opening in 1985. To get to the elevators that take you up to an observation deck and revolving panoramic restaurant at 104m (341ft) above the ground we had to walk along a long corridor lined with models of other significantly tall television towers around the world, a display of archaic boom boxes, an abstract tile mosaic mural and the wax museum likeness of Michael Jackson and maybe the doubleganger of Melania Trump? The restaurant was enjoyable, though expensive for cake and coffee.

However, the views from the observation deck out over metropolitan Tashkent were fantastic, especially where we would see the shadow of the tower cast across the landscape.

We ended our evening and last day in Tashkent with a short walk to Besh Qozon, a tremendously popular, large, fun restaurant that is known for its Plov, Uzbekistan’s celebrated rice dish. The dish is traditionally prepared by men, and at Besh Qozon visitors are allowed to walk through open kitchen and watch the cooking of several different variations of the recipe being stirred in huge caldrons, and the continuous baking of fresh non.

The first known settlers in Uzbekistan were Persian nomads who settled around the oases in the vast Kyzylkum Desert during the in the 8th–6th centuries BC. The desert covers most of central Uzbekistan, stretching from Khiva in the western part of the country to Samarkand in the east. Many of these oases became crucial caravanserais, fortified waystations, to protect the camel caravans along the Silk Road. Others like Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva grew into rich influential regional seats of power called khanates.

 In 329 BC Alexander the Great spent two years marching across Uzbekistan in an exhausting campaign to defeat a Persian rebellion, and only left after what legend claims was a love at first sight romance with a local princess named Roxane led to a strategic alliance with her father. The legend of Roxane remains alive in Uzbekistan, with many distinguished families in the region still claiming their lineage from the marriage of Alexander to Roxane, before he set off to conquer India.

In the west we often associate the history of the Silk Road, a 6,400km (4,000mi) camel tract, with the travels of Marco Pollo across central Asia to China in the 13th century. But its history started much earlier in the 2nd century BC, when a Chinese emperor of the Han dynasty sent imperial envoys across Central Asia to establish formal trade routes and military alliances against the Huns. These agreements of safe passage resulted in silk and porcelain from China reaching the eastern-most regions of the Roman empire by 25 BC. On their return journey caravans took glassware, linen, wool and cotton to the Far East.

The Huns never invaded China, but did conquer much of Central Asia, and established a stronghold in southern Uzbekistan during the 4th and 5th centuries. Trade along the Silk Road ebbed and flowed through invasions and peace. Arab conquests swept through Central Asia, bringing the Arabic language and Islamic religion to oasis cities like Bukhara and Samarkand in the 7th–8th Century AD. The Mongol armies of Genghis Khan brought massive destruction to the region in the early 1200s.

By the late 14th century, the region was the central hub of trade and ideas at the crossroads of the known world at the time, and experiencing a renaissance of art, science, and Islamic architecture under the enlightened rule of Emir Timur. By the 16th century the successive invasions of Turkic and Mongol nomadic tribes had ended. The invaders from 92 tribes, as legend believes, had settled and intermingled with the local folk and established what eventually would be recognized as the Uzbek identity.

By the 16th century Spanish and Portuguese Navigators were mapping maritime trade routes across the Indian Ocean to India, Southeast Asia, the East Indies, and China. These nautical routes from Asia to Europe were significantly faster and safer than transporting goods via the Silk Road and trade on the overland route slowly diminished. Regional caravans still plied the deserts of Central Asia, taking supplies to isolated settlements well into the 1930s, but stopped when a growing road network ended the camel caravan era.

Without this international trade flowing both ways through Uzbekistan the armies of the Tashkent, Bukhara, and Khiva Khanates fell in succession from 1865 to 1873 to the technologically superior firepower amassed against them by Czarist Russian Empire in a drive to secure the region’s natural resources, mostly cotton, for the Russian economy. The Khanates retained figurehead monarchs, but all political and economic decisions were controlled by Moscow, which developed Tashkent as its administrative center. Czarist rule quickly forced all viable agricultural lands to be planted with cotton. This valuable crop, often called “white gold,” was then exported from Uzbekistan to the mills of the Russian homeland on the newly built Trans-Caspian Railway that connected Tashkent to the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. Train ferries then shuttled the freight cars across the water to Baku, Azerbaijan for the last leg of journey. Trains returned to Uzbekistan with colonizers from Ukraine, Belarus, and regions around St. Petersburg and Moscow, who displaced Uzbeks and were given the best agricultural lands. Until this cotton monoculture was forced upon the farmers in Uzbekistan the country was agriculturally self-sufficient but soon relied on imported grains from other regions in the Russian Empire.

After Russia’s communist revolution ended in 1922, Uzbekistan was incorporated into the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Communist authoritative rule expanded the cotton monoculture with extensive irrigation systems using water diverted from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, the source waters of the inland Aral Sea. This environmental mismanagement caused the sea, once an important fisheries resource, to lose over 90% of its volume and transformed the vital waterbody into the new Aralkum Desert within five decades.

Life in Uzbekistan during the Soviet communist era was harsh. While basic housing, medical and education needs were met, there was rampant underemployment, widespread poverty, lack of foodstuffs in the markets, and political and religious repression. During the yearly cotton harvests Uzbeks, including children, were forced to spend 15 – 60 days in the fields picking the “white gold.” Schools and universities across the country were closed, and even teachers, doctors and nurses were not exempt from participating. Refusal could result in the loss of your job or expulsion from higher education.

Over one-hundred years of combined Russian Empire and Soviet rule ended in 1991 when Uzbekistan proudly declared its independence as the Soviet Union was dissolving.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

Gran Canaria: Sunny, Volcanic & Diverse

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The cone-shaped summit of Mount Teide poked through hazy blue clouds. At 3,715m (12,000ft), it is Spain’s highest mountain, it’s not on the Iberian Peninsula, but on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. For centuries, the iconic landmark was the first sight of land for sailors returning from the newly discovered Americas.  Now tourists get the pleasure of seeing this majestic peak after flying 2,170 km (1,350 mi) south over the Atlantic Ocean from Barcelona to Gran Canaria Island, 280 kilometers (175 mi) off the coast of southern Morocco.  

Our desire to flee the hot and humid weather of the southern United States, which usually lasts until beginning of December, coupled with a reasonable airfare, was the catalyst for the trip. And escape we did, initially to Andorra, that beautiful small, isolated microstate in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Our day had started hours earlier in the chilly mountain predawn as we fled the cold Andorran mountains, that the week before received an early November covering of snow, to Gran Canaria. The Canary Islands’ third largest landmass in the eight-island archipelago, is often referred to as the “land of eternal Spring.”

Driving south along the GC-1 from the airport toward Maspalomas, the island’s Montañas Sagradas mountain range dominated the inland view. Though Pico de las Nieves, the tallest peak in the range, is only half the height of Mount Teide, the mountain range’s sheer austere ruggedness was beautiful, and so close.

Our destination for nine days: Taurito, on the island’s southwest coast, one town over from Puerto de Mogán, and Club Cala Blanca,  a stunning apartment-style hillside resort, with views of the ocean and a black sand beach, folks in the pool, and not a snowball in sight. This would be a very liberal interpretation of a staycation for us, something unheard of until now in our travel vocabulary.  Usually, our lengthiest stay in any one place is four days, but we used this opportunity to also get some dental work done while enjoying a region blessed with over 320 sunny days per year, and weeks of cloudless skies. The island chain’s perfect year-round weather is the consequence of the aptly named Canary Current bringing cooler water from the North Atlantic Ocean south around the islands. This moderates the hot winds, known as the Calima, that blow west from the Saharah Desert. This perfect meteorological balance provides Gran Canaria spring-like conditions year-round, while refreshing trade winds that blow storms in from the Atlantic Ocean get blocked by the mountains and keep the northern part of the island wetter and greener with forests, than the southern part of the island.

With favorable weather year-round, Gran Canaria’s high seasons are geared to Northern Europe’s holiday and school vacation schedules, rather than seasonal weather changes. The island’s shoulder seasons run in the Spring from March to May and in Autumnfrom September to November. We were delighted there were fewer tourists about during our visit, as it made finding parking much easier.  The only drawback was that some of the restaurants were only open on weekends.

Ironically, on our first full day on the island we headed off early to see the dentists at the Clinica Margarita in Maspalomas, where, over the course of three visits during our stay on the island we had an extraction, fillings, and a crown replacement. We gave ourselves enough time that morning to enjoy part of the coastal road, Carr. Mogán, from Taurito to the Playa de Amadores in Puerto Rico. The Playa de Amadores was a beautiful white sand, crescent moon shaped beach that looked so inviting, with plenty of folks enjoying the sea temperatures that still averaged 22C (71.5f) in mid-November.

Heading to the GC-1 highway we passed the Anfi Tauro Golf, a strikingly lush green 18-hole golf course, surrounded by arid hills void of vegetation. It’s one of eight golf courses found across the island, but their presence is often protested by environmental groups because of the amount of irrigation water pulled from the local aquifers to keep the fairways verdant, on an island with limited water resources. The golf industry defends itself by noting that approximately 80% of courses in the Canary Islands use treated, reclaimed wastewater. Still environmentalists argue that producing this reclaimed water is energy-intensive and a better use would be to divert the water for agricultural use.

We embrace dental tourism because visiting the dentist in the United States is outrageously expensive, with dentists wanting to have their patients leave their offices with a set of Hollywood choppers, and the corresponding bill. I’ve often felt that when dentists in the states looked at my teeth, they calculated that they could retire early if I got all the procedures they suggested. We found Clinica Margarita online and were impressed from the start by the initial emails from Rebecca, the patient care specialist, to the services provided to us by Dr. Álvaro Martín Mingorance and Dr. Vibeke Lorentsen, in their state-of-the-art clinic. They have a very professional team, and the cost was much less expensive than having the dentistry done in the United States.

Rebecca was also quite nice in offering tips on local restaurants to try. The first, the Bar Aridañy Montaña Blanca, was right around the corner. It was a small neighborhood restaurant that was bustling with activity at lunchtime, with folks enjoying their meals. The décor was simple, but the waitress was welcoming, the atmosphere perfect, and our tender fried calamari paired with the locally brewed Tropical beer, fabulous!

Afterwards, we headed to the promenade that overlooks the Dunas de Maspalomas, across town, several miles away on the coast. Walking down Av. de Tirajana, we noticed that news crews were setting up to cover an event, that we later learned was the Gay Pride Walk, part of weeklong activities of Winter Pride Maspalomas. It’s a yearly event and one of the major LGBTQ+ autumn festivals on the European calendar.

The dunes, with their origin in the Ice Age, are an amazing vast track of ever shifting sands, shaped by the trade winds, that cover over 404 hectares (1,000-acres), and separate the town from the sea. It was a photographer’s paradise with unlimited compositions. You can even plan your own Laurence of Arabia experience riding camels across the dunes with Camello Safari Duna Oasis.

Staying home the next day, we lounged on our balcony, watching cyclists and rollerskiers pump up the long incline of the coastal road, before driving down into Taurito for lunch.  Four large tourist hotels with clubs and a casino, along with the massive Lago Taurito Water Park,dominate the approach to the beach. Street parking was limited even in the quieter November shoulder season, though the waterpark was still open this time of year, and there was only a handful of tourists enjoying the amenities all to themselves. It looked like a wonderful place for families with children to spend an activity-filled day.

At the head of the beach was a short promenade lined with a few shops and restaurants that only had outdoor seating. We chose one with the most diners, always a good sign when in doubt. The black sand beach under towering cliffs was very beautiful.

From our balcony the next morning we watched the sunrise cast the morning clouds a pastel pink against the soft blue sky. On the calm sea a flock of gulls trailed the wake of a fishing trawler heading back to Puerto de Mogán to offload its catch.

We are not really inclined to sit still for too long, so that Sunday we headed into the mountains to browse the weekly Mercadillo de Teror, 87km (54mi) away on the northern part of the island, slightly over an hour drive. The weather along the coast was very pleasant as we followed the GC-1 past the cosmopolitan city of Las Palmas. With a population of approximately 384,000, it is the largest city in the Canary Islands and is the co-capital (along with Santa Cruz de Tenerife) of the autonomous Spanish archipelago. Las Palmas’ importance dates back centuries to when its harbor, the Puerto de La Luz, was a vital resupply point for maritime expeditions during Spain’s Age of Discovery in late 15th to 17th centuries. Over the course of hundreds of years, the port has become an important shipping hub in the global economy, and today connects the island to 510 ports in 135 countries. This global connectivity has contributed to making modern Las Palmas a vibrant, energetic city with a diverse multicultural population that’s made up of folks from Spain’s former colonies across the globe, northern European expats, and long-established Asian merchants. The sailors, traders, and vacationers that came liked the weather, and stayed if they could. We originally made plans to stay in Las Palmas; however, this idea changed when we decided to devote more days to getting our dental work done. Disappointingly, we did not have time to visit the city properly. But what we’ve heard and read about the city sounds intriguing, and it’s just the right excuse to return to Gran Canaria one day.

The GC-1 is an excellent 4-lane highway that connects towns along the coast, but once we turned off it to head into the island’s mountainous interior our journey slowed on the narrow serpentine roads, with limited opportunities for passing, and we crawled at a snail’s pace when stuck behind a campervan or worse, a pack of cyclist.

Arriving to Teror mid-morning, we were fortunate to find one of the last parking spaces in a grassy lot several blocks downhill from Calle Real de la Plaza. Calle Real is the main lane through the town’s historic center and is lined with traditional brightly colored Canarian homes, that have carved wooden balconies over the street. The calle ends at the plaza around the 18thcentury Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pino, which was built on the site where tradition holds the Virgin Mary appeared in 1481 to a group of shepherds in a pine grove. The town quickly became an important religious site, with an Episcopal Palace, and the Cistercian Monastery to support pilgrimage activities. The octagonal yellow tower on the corner of the basilica represents the architectural style of an earlier church that was on the site.

Across from the church at the far end of Calle de la Diputación, is a stepped cascading waterfall that’s lined with parallel stairways that connect the lower and upper historic quarters of the town. Most importantly they lead to the Cistercian Monastery, where the sequestered nuns sell convent-made truchas de batata (sweet potato pastries), bollos de anís (anise rolls), mazapanes (marzipan), and mantecados (shortbread) through a torno, a revolving wooden turntable built into a wall cabinet, with doors on both sides to keep the nuns hidden from view.

The street market totally encircled the church and was packed with shoppers strolling among cheese makers, food stalls, craft stands, and clothes racks. Cheese is our weakness, and being able to sample a variety of the artisanal cheeses Gran Canaria is famous for landed us in queso heaven. So interesting are the cheeses made on Gran Canaria there’s even an official Cheese Trail that folks can follow, to eleven cheesemakers located in three regions across the island. These artisans produce cheeses from the raw milk of goats and sheep. And to help folks pair a locally vinted wine with the cheeses, there’s an official Gran Canaria Wine Route, theRuta Del Vino de Gran Canaria, that explores the different terroirs of eleven vineyards hidden in the rugged volcanic landscape of the mountains across the wetter northern part of the island. Here the winemakers grow around forty different varieties of grapes, that have adapted well to the island’s 14 distinct microclimates. Twenty-five are local varietals such as the red grapes Listán Negro, Tintilla, Malvasía Rosada, and the white grapes Marmajuelo, and Malvasía Volcánica whose purity and longevity are unique in the world and recognized under the DO Gran Canaria designation. We could have bought a suitcase full of cheese, but we restrained ourselves and only bought a wedge each of goat and sheep cheese, and a bottle of red wine.

Photographs from official Gran Canaria Wine Route, and the Ruta Del Vino de Gran Canaria, courtesy of The Gran Canaria Tourist Board.

By the time we left Teror the sunny morning had vanished as we followed a road that zigged and zagged as we drove higher and farther into the mountains. We had originally planned to go to the mirador atop Pico de las Nieves, but the weather was fickle and changed with each curve around the mountainside. Altering our plans, we continued on to Artenara, an hour’s drive still deeper into the mountains, on a route that took us through the towns of Valleseco, and Lanzarote. Along the way we noticed many cars parked precariously along the side of the narrow road as it passed through woodlands. These cars, it turned out, belonged to families that were foraging in the forests for wild mushrooms and fallen chestnuts; it’s a traditional activity that has been passed down through Canarian generations for centuries. In one town the sale of a fine stallion was being finalized with a test saunter along the side of road.  Unfortunately, that afternoon the clouds were low in the sky, and the views from the miradors we stopped at, while interesting, vanished into the misty horizon. We could only speculate how spectacular the panoramas would be on a sunny day.

Reaching the outskirts of Artenara, the highest village on Gran Canaria at 1,270m (4,170ft) above sea level, we stopped at Mirador De La Atalaya which had a nice view of the old colonial town’s church framed with trees against a mountainous background.

As we crossed the town square a sudden down pour sent us scurrying into the Iglesia de San Matías, where the warm light of the cathedral’s stained-glass window helped take the mountain chill off the day. Initially the temple was a small hermitage built in 1630, but after going through a long period of deterioration and ruin, the current three-nave temple was built in 1870, with the construction of the towers being completed in the mid-twentieth century. The beautiful murals in the church are the last works of the painter José Arencibia Gil, a Gran Canarian who, sadly, died before finishing them.

Up from the church was the Mirador de Unamuno that overlooked the deep volcanic Caldera de Tejeda, a massive basin stretching 28km by 18km (17mi by 11mi), that’s ringed with rugged peaks, steep gulleys, and several of the island’s iconic sacred rock formations, including Bentayga and Nublo Rocks. The mirador is named after the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno (1863-1936), who described the panorama as a “petrified storm of fire and lava”. If only the day had been sunny for us! There were, hopefully, signs the storm would clear.

Volcanic eruptions that started 10 million years ago and lasted to 20BC created the island’s dramatic peak, ridges and ravines.  Before the Spanish arrived in the 1400s the Montañas Sagradas were home to the cave dwelling indigenous Guanches, a Berber people, whose priests conducted seasonal solstice ceremonies in the majestic mountains. The mountains’ Spanish name refers to the importance of the snowcapped peaks as a life source of water on the arid island. This snowy resource was critically important to the island’s early settlers, who shoveled winter snowfall into pits and dams called neveras, an early island infrastructure project that started in 1694 by order of the Catholic Church. These small reservoirs were built on the northern, shady sides of the steep ravines that never got sunshine so the collected snow would melt slowly and be used for drinking and watering crops. “The snow was collected by laborers using wooden shovels and wicker baskets, making real mountains of snow. It was then put into rectangular boxes of wood or cork, stacked in rows in the neveras, then covered with layers of straw.” In Las Palmas ice was delivered in panniers wrapped in straw and covered with blankets, from the Pico de las Nieves snow pit by horseback, a six hour journey across the rugged mountains. The ice was used to lower the patient’s temperatures during epidemics of yellow fever and cholera, as well as “chill the beverages of the upper class.” The need to carry ice down from the mountains lasted until in the early 20th century, when electrical refrigerators were brought to the island.

A short distance from the mirador was the Ethnographic Museum of the “Cave Houses” of Artenara, a cluster of three cave dwellings, that had their origin with the pre-Hispanic troglodytes that originally lived in the rough caves dug into the volcanic rock mountains. Over the centuries the caves were improved, and were occupied until the early 1990s, when they were bought by the town council to become a museum. All things considered these modern caves looked pretty comfortable, if you could ignore the lack of indoor plumbing. Nearer to Las Palmas there are several other troglodyte sites across the island, including Barranco de Guayadeque, Quatro Puertas, and Poblado de Acusa Seca, and Cuevas del Rey, all places to consider visiting if you’re into cave dwellings. Afterwards, we stopped next to the church for lunch at Arte-Gaia Restaurante BioTasca, a small rustic tavern with only a handful of inside tables, but on sunny days their seating spills out onto the plaza. They had a wonderful menu featuring local Canarian dishes and wines.

Past Artenara we started our loop back to the coast on GC-60 which took us by Tejeda, a whitewashed hamlet, that’s considered the prettiest village on Gran Canaria. It’s set dramatically near the towering pinnacle of Roque Bentayga, a 1,404-meter-high volcanic rock formation, that served as a sacred sacrificial site for the island’s ancient Guanche people.

Finally, the clouds broke during our descent along a never-ending set of switch-back curves lined with soaring rockfaces on one side and plunging gorges on the other. The afternoon now offered the first views of how dramatic this violently hewed mountainscape actually was, after spending the earlier part of the day seeing its features softened in clouded light. There were not nearly enough miradors to stop at to soak in the tremendous views that transfixed us.

Rebecca’s tips for where the locals go took us past the luxury resort Lopesan Villa del Conde, that was purposely built to resemble a traditional Canarian village, complete with a façade of a church with belltowers.  Farther on, the Meloneras Golf Club beautifully overlooked the ocean and the wide Playa de las Meloneras beach. Before we reached the El Senador Restaurant & Beach House on west end of the Dunas de Maspalomas promenade, near the Faro de Maspalomas lighthouse. Mid-afternoon tables with views of the beach were open, and we spent a delightful time just sipping our drinks and people watching.

We ended our day with an early dinner at La Tapita Los Jose’s, an upscale neighborhood tapas bar far from the Meloneras beach areas. The food and local wine were very good, the vibe relaxing, another good recommendation.

On the opposite hillside across from our hotel, we could see pedestrians walking along a road that curved up the hill, but we never saw a car. This was part of coastal road (GC-500), a quick route with wonderful views, that used to connect folks in Taurito to Puerto de Mogán, until 2017 when several dangerous rockfalls from the towering coastal cliffs above the road forced the local authorities to block the road permanently with a substantial wall that folks can walk to, but can’t climb over. Recently funds have been approved to excavate a tunnel between the two towns to speed transit.

Deciding to have lunch in Puerto de Mogán we needed to get on the GC-1 for a convoluted route that required us to drive east for several miles before doing an U-turn, and then driving west again past Taurito to the exit for Puerto de Mogán. A trip of twenty minutes that will be reduced to seven with the new tunnel.

Puerto de Mogán started as a poor fishing village, where men pushed their small boats into the surf from a rocky shoreline, until a major redevelopment project in the 1980s constructed new apartment blocks designed to look authentically old, the breakwater, and a marina with over 200 berths.

New hotels and the half-moon shaped Playa de Mogán, constructed with sand imported from the Sahara Desert, soon followed. Today Puerto de Mogán, with its whitewashed homes and lanes shrouded with blossoming bougainvillea, is considered Gran Canaria’s prettiest coastal village. Some folks call the town with its small bridges over several narrow canals, “Canaria’s little Venice,” but it’s more a phrase coined by an over-zealous travel agent, than based on reality. But still, we thoroughly enjoyed wandering along the harbor, and through narrow hillside alleys of the historic quarter to the Mirador de Puerto de Mogán for a fantastic view out over the town and sea. It would be a great spot to see the sunrise.

On Fridays the town hosts Gran Canaria’s largest weekly market, with roughly 250 vendors that sprawl out across the town to the marina, and along the harbor wall. Parking is challenging in the small town, but ferry services to Puerto de Mogán from the coastal towns Arguineguín, Anfi del Mar, and Puerto Rico, are a stress-free option that many tourists utilize.  

On the last day before leaving Gran Canaria we headed to the Mirador del Balcón, on the island’s western coast, 54km (34mi) away. An hour’s drive without stopping, but what is a day without a journey that’s just as nice as the destination? Our route took us west to the end of the GC-1 then north on the GC-200 through a wide dry valley covered with endemic Cardonal cacti and tabaibales shrubs, native plants that tolerate the semi-arid environment well. Clusters of yellow-trumpeted, wild Esperanza also dotted the landscape. Native to the Americas, it found its way to Gran Canaria centuries ago and is now naturalized across the island.

In Mogan, the Molino Quemado, Burnt Mill, a 19th century windmill towered above the road. There used to be nearly 100 windmills across the island that ground toasted grain into “gofio.” Often called the Canary Island’s “superfood,” gofio is a whole-grain, stone-ground product, with a nutty flavor, that retains the nutrients of the entire kernel: it is served like mashed potatoes, in soups as a thickener, or kneaded with honey and nuts into Pella, round dough balls. The mill is used now as a heritage museum, and has a nice café, surrounded by a quirky garden filled with Alice in Wonderland-sized everyday items.

As we drove higher into the mountains a scene with a classic farm windmill reminded us of the American Southwest, and views down the steep ravines revealed oases of greenery, where farms straddled the streambeds.

Farther along intriguing stratum of rainbow-colored rock at the Los Azulejos de Veneguera Nature Preserve called for further investigation and we scrambled a short way up a gully. The colors of the rock were the result of volcanic action millions of years ago when supercharged hot water and gases permeated and altered the minerals within the rocks.

Stopping at the Mirador de San Nicolás provided us with a sweeping view of the La Aldea Valley all the way down to Los Caserones and the sea. Descending into the valley revealed its lower slopes were covered with white-tarped greenhouses. Farmers here mostly grow tomatoes in the rich volcanic soil, but cucumbers, bananas, zucchinis, and tropical fruits are also grown in the fertile valley.

Parking was limited at the Mirador del Balcón, but we only had to wait a few minutes before a space opened up. The dramatic overlook is cantilevered out from the cliff face on a section of the coast with towering cliffs, and spiking peaks nicknamed the “Dragon’s Tail.” If you look over the glass railing, waves crashing against the rocks are a dizzying 350m (1148.29ft) straight down. The views up and down the coast were breathtaking. It was a good way to end our time on this wonderfully engaging island.

In hindsight we should have stayed on the island for a few more days, using Las Palmas as a base to explore the northern inland region and coast.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

Road Tripping Through Andorra: Fall Foliage, Snowy Mountains, Shopping and a Spa

| 2suitcasesfor2years

Ever since grade school, where my history teacher displayed a large rollup chart of Europe unfurled in front of the classroom, I’ve always had an interest in maps. They were proof that a world existed beyond my town. Amid that patchwork of countries were small swatches of color that looked unintentional, like drops of paint that hadn’t been touched up and absorbed into the colors around them. These oddities, it turned out, were Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Malta, and Andorra, the largest splotch of all. They were small medieval-era feudal states that kept their independence through alliances, and existed as protectorates or as dependent territories for a while. Over time, treasuring their independence, they have chosen to remain independent microstates.

That map and watching the television reruns of the pioneering broadcast journalist and explorer Lowell Thomas’s High Adventure program on the weekends sparked within me a curiosity about the world that, thankfully, has never faded.

“You’re going where?” our friends asked. “Andorra. It’s a small, beautiful country in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France.” “We’ve never heard of it!” A fact I imagine Pliny the Elder also expressed with “where in Hades is Andorra?” and could explain why, even though the area of Andorra had Roman military posts since the 2nd century  BC to thwart hostile Northern tribes from crossing the Pyrenees, it was not included in his writings about the Iberian Peninsula in his voluminous Natural History books.

After landing in Barcelona and renting a car, we followed route C-16 north and headed to Llívia, another oddity on the map. It’s a Spanish exclave in the Pyrenees, near Andorra, that is totally surrounded by France, the result of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, signed in 1659, that ended the 24-year Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). In the treaty, Spain ceded 33 villages in northern Catalonia to France, establishing the Pyrenees Mountain Range as the natural border between the two countries. Llívia, however, was officially granted the status of a town back in 1528 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (aka Carlos I of Spain). With this loophole in the treaty, Llívia was excluded from the treaty’s transfer clause and became a unique Spanish exclave surrounded by France, only 168km (104mi), a 2.5-hour drive from Barcelona.

In early November our ride through the countryside was still graced with autumn colors. Our route plateaued onto the Cerdanya, a wide fertile plain surrounded by mountains that separate Andorra from Llívia, and we got our first glimpse of peaks covered with a light dusting of early snow. It was overcast and colder than we expected. It rained occasionally. The sun came out brilliantly, only to disappear behind storm clouds. It was that type of day.

It was once a small village until the Romans colonized the area in the 1st century BC and named it Llívia of in honor of Livia Drusilla, the influential wife of Emperor Augustus. The outpost’s importance as an administrative and commercial center on the Pyrenees frontier grew when gold was discovered in the Cerdanya valley. On the outskirts of the town, archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of a substantial Roman forum and temple. Unfortunately, time restraints prevented us from climbing to the ruins of the Castell de Llivia, for a panoramic view of the town. The hilltop has been fortified since antiquity. The last castle stood until the French King Louis XI ordered it destroyed in 1479. We consoled ourselves with a hot lunch, and a glass of vermouth, interestingly garnished with olives, by a fireplace at El Jardi, a small tavern.

The shortest route into Andorra, without tolls, was along the N-260 which would have brought us into Andorra through its southern border with Spain and then straight up the Gran Valira valley to Andorra la Vella, the capital and the country’s largest city. But we chose a slightly longer route deeper into France along the N-20 where we hoped to cross the steep mountains along the N-22 and Andorra’s CG-2 into the northern part of the country, but our plans required a U-turn when we reached the exit, and found the road closed with traffic barricades due to a landslide that blocked the route further along in the mountains – a  traffic condition that our map app did not show.

We had hoped to reach our hotel in Andorra la Vella before sunset, but our plans were now akilter and we needed to backtrack to the intersection of N-20 in Ur, France, where a whimsical sculpture of a winged rhinoceros stood atop a small hillock in front of a Carrefour supermarket. Fortunately, the morning’s clouds had given way to a glorious sunny afternoon. Just south of Andorra’s border was La Seu d’Urgell, Spain. Crowned by its hilltop cathedral, the city looked intriguing. Little did we know at the time that the city and its church were an integral part of Andorra’s history.

Surrounded by steep mountains, darkness descends early in the Gran Valira valley that shelters Andorra la Vella. The city, Europe’s highest capital at 1,023m (3,356 ft), straddles the Gran Valira River, and is a convoluted zig zag of one-way streets that hug the mountainside, but we found our hotel, the NH Andorra La Vella, relatively easily. They had a limited number of paid parking spaces, which we found very handy. After dropping our bags in the room, we went out to explore the city that was bustling with nighttime shoppers. Shopping seemed to be the national sport for visiting couples, if the number of folks carrying shopping bags on the street is any measure.

The hotel was conveniently located near Salvador Dali’s the La Noblesse du Temps, The Nobility of Time, a surrealistic sculpture of a melting clock draped over a gnarled tree, that is meant to be interpreted as a “commentary on the fluidity of time, and time’s inescapable mastery over humanity.” The artwork stands in a small plaza at the foot of Avinguda Meritxell, the shopping mile, a pedestrian-only gauntlet of upscale duty-free shopping that starts in the capital and continues into the neighboring town of Escaldes-Engordany.

We followed the flow and window-shopped. The aroma of roasting chestnuts and sweet potatoes filled the air as we wandered. Chestnuts yes, but we hadn’t seen sweet potatoes being offered as street food before during our travels in Spain and Portugal. Their traditional popularity is tied to the autumn Catalan festival of La Castanyada, which is celebrated around All Saints’ Day in early November, when the nutrient-dense tuber was roasted to sustain families through long night vigils and religious services honoring the dead.

With a population of 27,000 in the capital, and 84,000 folks and over 1200 shops countrywide, Andorra has approximately one store for every 70 residents, one of the highest store-to-citizen ratios in the world. The duty-free shopping concept was developed in the 1950s to help Andorra’s burgeoning tourist industry that centered around skiing. This didn’t really take-off until car ownership exploded across France and Spain and folks made road trips into the country to stock up on inexpensive alcohol, cigarettes and luxury goods that were heavily taxed in their countries.

In early November, sunrise was around 07:45 AM, but with Andorra la Vella being located in a narrow valley surrounded by steep mountains, the first rays of sunlight didn’t brighten our hotel room until 10:30 AM.

We had breakfast at Santagloria Coffee & Bakery, where we indulged in wonderful pistachio cream filled croissants; it was extremely budget friendly. We then set out on a pathway along the Gran Valira River to explore the city. We followed it through riverside parks and plazas until we found a sculpture of a colorful large espresso moka pot. You have to love a country like this that embraces whimsical art.

We then circled back and came across an interesting sculpture installation in Plaça Lídia Armengol called the Seven Poets. The artwork created by the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa, consists of seven pale yellow figures, sitting cross-legged on tall, slender poles. The meditative figures represent the unity of Andorra’s seven parishes and are appropriately installed in front of the country’s parliament.

Up a steep sidewalk from there was Plaça del Poble, a massive rooftop plaza built atop a architectural complex that houses government offices, and a multi-level public parking garage. It was a popular place for families to bring their young children with small bikes to pedal around safely. It also had a nice alternative view of the Seven Poets and access across the Rambla Molines bridge to the 11th century. St Esteve of Andorra Church.

Afterwards we looped back down Av. Meritxell, and wandered through the large multi-level Pyrénées Andorra department store. Offering the widest selection of merchandise under one roof, along with a gourmet supermarket on the top floor, it is considered the flagship shopping destination in Andorra.

Later we continued past Dali’s melting clock, and the often-photographed Pont Andorra la Vella bridge, and a modern sculpture centered in a roundabout on the way to the Caldea Spa.

The unique piece of contemporary art is called the Calidea i la Dama del Gel. It’s a collaborative work by the Andorran sculptor Ángel Calvente Gutierrez whose Calidea figure was inspired by myths and legends of water. While the Dama de gel, the Ice Lady, created the Catalan artist Philippe Lavaill depicts a mythological sylph on a horse.

Housed in a slender eighteen story, 80m (262ft) tall glass pyramid finished in 1994, the Caldea Spa is one of Andorra’s most notable landmarks, and the tallest building in the country.

As we neared the tower a dramatic glass walled swimming pool cantilevered out from the building’s side, over the Valira d’Orient River. Funnily, only the swimmers’ bobbing legs as they stood along the glass wall were visible from our perspective on the street. Across the street we glimpsed, through a window, a quartet performing for the residents of a senior’s home. We didn’t want to participate in any spa activities, but we did have lunch in their restaurant that overlooked the lush inviting pool.

Afterward, as we returned to the hotel, we walked around a sports complex where other retirees were enjoying tennis lessons on a beautiful sunny autumn day. For dinner that evening we joined the long queue, a few doors down from our hotel, in front of the Crepería de la Rotonda, a hole-in-the-wall takeaway window. It is popular for its delicious and inexpensive crepes, one of the best values in Andorra, and for the uniquely entertaining customer service style of the owner, who has an Instagram account with 140,000 followers. Think Seinfeld’s soup Nazi character.

Visigoths controlled the area of Andorra after Rome fell in the 2nd century AD, a period in which Christianity continued to spread across the peninsula. Later it was under the control of the Kingdom of Toledo, then the Catalan Diocese of Urgell. In the 700s Moors crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco and conquered a significant part of the Iberian Peninsula. North across the Pyrenees Mountains, Charlemagne, Charles the Great, ruled as King of the Franks, and united most of western Europe into the Carolingian Empire.

Tradition believes Charlemagne granted a charter to the Andorran people as reward for fighting with his troops against the Moors near what is now Cerdanya, the wide fertile plain surrounded by mountains just to the east of Andorra in modern-day Spain. With this charter the area of Andorra fell under the rule of the Catalonian Counts of Urgell, and became a territory in the Frankish Marca Hispanica, a military buffer zone established after the failed Moor invasion of France. Andorra was one of twelve Marca Hispanicas created in the Pyrennes Mountains by Charlemagne, but the only one that wasn’t eventually absorbed into France or Spain but survived as an independent country through crafty political machinations. In 988 the Counts of Urgell traded their Andorra territory to the Bishops of Urgell for land in Cerdanya. All was peaceful for 100 years until the Counts wanted to reclaim the territory. Seeking to avoid a war with the Counts, the Bishop of Urgell asked the Lord of Caboet for protection, to which he agreed in return for co-sovereignty of Andorra in 1095, establishing the country as a feudal protectorate with the signing of two treaties called Pareatges. Through various Royal marriages over the centuries this side of the co-sovereignty and feudal protectorate survived various wars, revolutions, and changes in government and is now held by the current President of France. The co-sovereign of Andorra has been a ceremonial title since 1993 when the country’s first democratic constitution was ratified.

Andorra pretty much survived through the centuries as an isolated, subsistence farming community by growing grain crops (only 2% of the mountainous terrain is arable), trading wool or cheese with nearby Catalan towns, and smuggling goods between Spain and France. Many of those ancient smuggling routes through the mountains have now been mapped and incorporated into a 275 km (170 mi) long network of popular hiking trails, that draws tourists to Andorra in the summer. These trails were especially useful during WW2 when they were used to smuggle weapons to the French resistance, and help downed Allied airmen and Jewish refugees escape Nazi-occupied Vichy France into neutral Spain.

During the early 1930s Andorra’s population was estimated to be under 10,000 as waves of emigrants fled the country to pursue better opportunities abroad. This population crisis threatened the existence of the country. It was a pivotal decade for the country, but things improved substantially when the FHASA (Forces Hidroelèctriques d’Andorra) hydroelectric plant project was conceived as a catalyst for modernizing the country and spurring Andorra’s economic growth. It was a massive infrastructure project that electrified the country both physically and metaphorically. The surplus power was exported via high-voltage lines to Spain and France, establishing a crucial, steady stream of foreign currency revenue for the tiny Andorran economy. The dam’s construction also brought the first paved roads to a country that until then relied solely on walking and pack animals to navigate the steep terrain, providing a vital connection for the isolated country that’s too mountainous for an airport or train connections to the outside world. Workers that came from Spain and France brought new ideas with them, which resulted in the Revolution of 1933, led by the Young Andorrans, a trade union that called for political reforms and the right to vote for all Andorrans. The country’s new banking sector grew with this influx of wage earners and also benefited substantially from the surge of refugees, from both sides of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, that sought shelter in the country. The unregulated banking sector grew for decades and was recognized as tax haven for wealthy individuals to hide accounts. This continued until 2015 when a large Andorran bank was accused of being used primarily for money laundering, and international pressure forced immediate reforms and regulations to the country’s financial institutions.

The country’s new roads ended the centuries of isolation and now allowed it to promote itself as a unique tourist destination in the Pyrenees Mountains that offered duty-free shopping, as well as skiing. And a flourishing counter-culture that allowed access to cinematic films and literature banned in Spain during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, only a short drive away from Barcelona and Madrid. Andorra’s first ski resort, the Pas de la Casa–Grau Roig, opened in 1957. Today there are four modern ski resorts in the country with over 303km (187mi) of slopes, that can be reached by ski lifts that can swiftly transport up to 156,000 skiers per hour to their summits.

Surprisingly, Andorra only has 270km (167mi) of road of which 198km (123mi) are paved, and 8.2km (5mi) of tunnels to connect its communities in the steep mountain valleys. This includes the Envalira Tunnel which connects northern Andorra to France. With an elevation of 2,052m (6,732 feet) it is the highest toll tunnel in Europe.

During our short time in Andorra we tried our best to see as much of the country as possible. For our first day trip from the capital, we followed the CG-2 north through the towns of Encamp and Meritxell in the spectacular Valira d’Orient river valley to Canillo, where we found the Petit Mercat, a small café still open in the off-season. Their coffee was good and they had a nice selection of premade sandwiches. From the parking lot across the street, we could see the terrifying height of the cantilevered observation deck of the Mirador Roc Del Quer jutting out over the valley, our ultimate destination.

But first we wanted to see the Pont Tibetà Canillo, a modern steel, Tibet-style footbridge that is over 600m (1970ft) long, and is suspended 150m (490ft) above the Vall del Riu. We knew the bridge was closed this time of year, but we wanted to see it as the views of the mountainside along the long walk to the bridge were very nice. During the warmer months there is a shuttle bus from Canillo for hikers, as there is very limited parking along the shoulder of the road.

Farther up the mountainside there was free parking a short walk away from the Mirador Roc Del Quer;the shuttle bus only goes to Pont Tibetà Canillo. Here a 12m (40ft) long glass observation deck seems to float dizzyingly in the air 500m (1640ft) above the town of Canillo and the river valley below. The views up and down the valley were fabulous.

At the far end of the mirador is a sculpture of a fearless man contemplating casually on the edge the abyss. Perhaps the figure is contemplating his ancestors, nomadic hunter-gatherers, who first entered Andorra’s valleys as the glaciers retreated at the end of the Ice Age. It’s called El Pensador, The Ponderer, and was created by the Argentinian sculptor Miguel Ángel González in 2016.

There was still enough snow on the ground from an earlier winter storm for Donna and I to make snowballs and playfully throw them at each other. The afternoon was sunny and delightfully warm enough to eat outside at the site’s restaurant, that doubled as the ticket office.

Continuing in the car we drove over the mountaintop, a beautiful drive through autumn colors, that descended into Ordino, and the Valira del Nord river valley.

The next day we returned to Ordino and drove along the CG-3 until we took a spur road into the Parc Natural de la Vall de Sorteny. We had hoped to visit the Mini Jardí Botànic, an alpine garden that features over 300 species of Pyrenean flora, including medicinal, edible, and endangered endemic plants. Unfortunately, it was too late in the season and the road to it was gated. But nearby we could hear animal bells echoing in the crisp mountain air and we spotted horses grazing in a frost-covered meadow.

Returning to the main road we ventured past the small village of El Serrat to the Ordino Arcalís Ski Resort where preparations were under way to open the slopes later in the month. With its north facing slopes that peak at 2,625m (8,612 ft) the resort has the longest ski season in Andorra and is popular with freeriders – those who enjoy the adventure of skiing in the resort’s backcountry powder. The views from the resort were pretty impressive too.

The big disadvantage of traveling in the shoulder season is many sites, restaurants and  hotels are closed, as was the case with the high mountain road past the Ordino Arcalís Ski Resort that ends at the trail head to the Mirador Solar de Tristaina, a massive circular, suspended metal ring built atop the Peyreguils peak on Andorra’s border with France, that servers as a sundial. With an altitude of 2,701 meters (8,861 feet) the mirador offers panoramic views of the three Tristaina glacial lakes and the Ordino valley. During the warmer months it can be reached via the resort’s Tristaina Gondola.

On our last full day in Andorra, we headed north along the CG-2 again. Past Canillo the road rose steadily above the valley floor through El Tarter, and the Grandvalira Ski Resortto Soldeu, the northernmost town on the CG-2 in the Valira d’Orient before the highway splits to the CG-2A, the entrance of the Túnel d’Envalira that leads to France, and the old serpentine CG-2 that winds through the mountains.

This route crests the highest road pass in the Pyreenes at 2.408m (7900ft) above sea level, a vertical ascent from Andorra la Vella of 1,294m (4245ft) in 25km (15mi) before reaching the small, isolated town of Port d’Envalira, on Andorra’s frontier, where the Pas de la Casa, part of the Grandvalira Ski Resortthat connects the mountains slopes from Canillo to Port d’Envalira with a huge interconnected network of ski lifts, The resort is popular with beginning and intermediate level skiers for its gentler slopes.

Heading back through Soldeu, the views looking down at the valley surrounded by steep mountains covered with a light snowfall were amazing and we stopped frequently to take photos as we headed to the Vall d’Incles, a tranquil valley with rolling meadows.

The valley is also the primary gateway for the Andorran Camí de la Transhumància, the traditional moving of livestock up into high-altitude mountain pastures in the spring and then back down to the valley floors in the autumn. The seasonal herding of livestock here is a UNESCO-recognized heritage practice that preserves mountain biodiversity and ancestral shepherding traditions. The valley was also an important transfer point for Andorran smugglers to offload the contraband they had carried from France across the Port d’Ingles mountain pass.

After parking the car at the far end of the valley, we had hoped to do a short hike a little farther up the valley to the Pont del Travenc, an old stone bridge across a mountain stream. Unfortunately, melting snow rendered the track a muddy mess and we contented ourselves with a picnic in the parking lot.

The next morning we were on the road, back to Barcelona before sunrise to catch our flight to Gran Canaria Island to relax in warmer temperatures that hovered around 22C (72F) during the day.

We had a wonderful time exploring Andorra in the November shoulder season. It was slightly colder than we expected, but we had sunny days, and there were surprisingly few cars on the road outside of Andorra la Vella. Though the country is only 2.5 hours from Barcelona, it often gets overlooked as a destination, but there is plenty to do, beyond shopping, if you like hiking and skiing. The concentration of so much gorgeous scenery in one small country is amazing, and inspiration enough to plan a visit.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna

P.S. Andorra has excellent international bus service to the airports and train stations in Barcelona, Spain and Toulouse, France. As well as a reliable local bus service with 7 routes that connect all the towns and ski resorts in the country.

Cambodia: Life Along the Mekong & Tonle Sap Rivers or A Beautiful Country Full of Surprises

| 2suitcasesfor2years

In the golden morning twilight, the skyscrapers of Phnom Penh gleamed like a set of gold capped teeth revealed by the broad smile of a person awakening to a spectacular new day. It was the consequence of a torrential monsoon storm, with I swear horizontal rain, the evening, before that abruptly shortened an otherwise delightful happy hour on the sun deck of the RV Mekong Pandaw. Overnight as we sailed to Phnom Penh the storm cleared the sky for a beautiful sunrise. Our cruise had departed Ho Chi Minh City three days earlier during the last week of September, which was nearing the end of Southeast Asia’s monsoon season, and the mornings were heavily overcast until today.

The forty-eight passenger river vessel is a classic shallow draft, teak and brass finished riverboat, based on historical designs of colonial era river ships that once plied the waters of the Mekong Delta and southeast Asia from the late-1800s to the 1930s, and was built specifically for the luxury river cruise provider Pandaw. We had signed on for their Four Country 21 Night Combo Cruise, which would take us up river into Cambodia, then connect us with flights to Thailand and the resumption of the cruise, on the smaller Pandaw RV Laos downriver from the golden triangle, where the borders of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos meet along the Mekong River, in Chiang Khong, Thailand.

Waiting for us as the boat docked along the city’s quay on the Tonle Sap River, just upstream from its confluence with the Mekong River, was a row of rickshaw tricycle taxis or cyclos, set against Phnom Penh’s rapidly expanding skyline dotted with construction cranes. In times past, the cyclo was the predominant mode of transportation around the city but now are mostly used by tourists for scenic tours that weave through its streets.

We whizzed through traffic past the National Museum to the Royal Palace of Cambodia, a richly ornamented grand palace complex built in the 1860s, on the site of an earlier citadel, for Cambodia’s royal families. The palace’s architecture leans heavily on influences from Ankor Wat, a massive 12th-century religious monument that is Cambodia’s most famous attraction.

The palace’s formal and ceremonial buildings feature golden spires atop steeply pitched stacked roofs, orange in color to symbolize prosperity, with highly decorated upturned finials and gables that characterize Khmer architecture. The spires on the rooftops represent Mount Meru, the sacred center of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology.

The grounds also have several large pyramid and cone shaped sandstone stupas carved with elaborate high-relief sculptures of gods, floral patterns, and legendary creatures. 

Across the site are sculptures of fearsome mythological animals depicting Naga (seven-headed serpents), Singha (guardian lions), and Kala (fearsome faces), which symbolize protection, power, and the bridge between human and divine realms. There were also some interesting ancient murals depicting significant events in the country’s history. And surprisingly several tranquil spots to rest and contemplate.

By midmorning that day in late September the temperature was in the mid – nineties, 35C, and the humidity was terrible. Some relief was found in the shade of the central market where some folks sought out the post office and a pharmacy while others wandered through the tightly packed clothing stalls. We didn’t find the shopping particularly interesting, but the flower market with its vendors making floral temple offerings of maali (garlands), and Kantong (small bowls made of banana leaves containing flowers, incense, and candles) was colorful, and intriguing. The Cambodian art of Lotus flower folding is a cherished, ancient art form where the green outer petals of a lotus bud are meticulously peeled back and folded, creating intricate, rose-like shapes that symbolize purity, devotion, and enlightenment. The market was beautifully full with these floral displays that represent a spiritual offering to Buddha. The ritual of daily offerings placed in home shrines and pagodas to honors ancestors, bring blessings, and symbolizes enlightenment, and is ingrained in the culture of Southeast Asia.

The market was also a good place to watch life go by on the street, especially the scooters and the configuration of families they seemed to effortlessly carry.

It’s always great to escape to an exotic new destination and see only the good stuff, but there’s always history. Cambodia’s recent history is difficult to ignore, and we encountered it later that afternoon we went to the Choeung Ek, “Killing Fields,” memorial near Phnom Phen. Horrifyingly, these areas and their mass graves were all across the country between 1975 and 1979 when the Khmer Rouge regime under the leadership of Pol Pot killed nearly 2 million people, roughly 25% of Cambodia’s population, through forced labor, starvation, and execution. At the height of this nightmare, folks living in the country’s large towns and cities were forcibly relocated to rural labor camps to work in the fields. There the regime targeted the country’s city dwellers, professionals and intelligencia. The cruelty of the regime was relentless, with children brainwashed to execute their own parents. All in a delusional vision to create an agrarian utopia.

The terror didn’t end until Vietnam invaded the country and installed a pro Vietnamese government, after brutal Khmer cross border attacks. Following the collapse, many former Khmer Rouge leaders were eventually brought to justice, with major leaders being jailed in 2014 by a United Nations-backed tribunal. The murder of the county’s teachers, engineers, and doctors fundamentally halted Cambodia’s development for decades as other countries in the region prospered. The trauma of those years has marked a generation of survivors with untreated PTSD. Today, over 60% of Cambodia’s population is under 30, with no direct memory of the atrocities committed against their families. After all that, it is amazing to see how far the country has come and how welcoming the folks are.

That evening on board a troupe of traditional Khmer dancers and musicians performed. It was an intriguing evening watching several Apsara dances, a style known for its slow, graceful, and highly symbolic hand gestures, that through motion depicts spiritual devotion, as well as to illustrate the Reamker (Glory of Rama), a 16th-17th century Cambodian epic poem that is an adaptation of the Indian Ramayana, that blends “Hindu cosmology with Buddhist themes of karma and dharma. It follows Prince Preah Ream (Rama) and his loyal brother Preah Leak (Lakshmana) as they battle the demon king Krong Reap (Ravana), who kidnapped Preah Ream’s wife, Neang Seda (Sita).

The next morning at sunrise our boat left the quay and headed upstream on the Mekong, the start of a journey to explore rural Cambodia, to the riverport town of Peam Chi Korng where we traveled by tuk tuk to an outlying pottery village. That early in the morning the river was busy with small ferries taking folks to work in the city, as long-tail boats raced by colorful shanties that reached down to the river edge.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Here we visited a family that made large decorative pots and vessels as well as ceramic souvenirs that are sold in Phnom Phen, and a traditional charcoal burning ceramic stove called a Changkhran Lao that’s wrapped in metal to help it keep its structural integrity. Our guide was doing a wonderful job eliciting smiles from the families’ elders as we sat on long wooden benches and listened to a translated presentation.

Behind, younger children had also gathered to watch their visitors, and giggle as kids do, only to be silenced by the wave of the speaker’s hand. Later he demonstrated how quickly a pot could be created by hand coiling, and his son demonstrated climbing a palm tree for our group.

A small local passenger ferry pulled up alongside the RV Mekong Pandaw the next morning after we docked in Kratie to transport us to Koh Trong Island across the river. It’s a small tear-shaped island in Cambodia’s Kratie province that is the home to fishermen and farmers who tend rice paddies and pomelo citrus orchards.

The islanders also promote an authentic community-based tourism initiative that offers homestays and bicycle rentals. The monsoon flood waters on the lower part of the Mekong River had begun to recede weeks earlier so our ferry dropped its boarding ramp onto a steep embankment in front of the island’s elephant guarded Santheati Baram Pagoda, and a cluster of small basic shops. Outside the temple a small group of kids were kicking a soccer ball around as an orange robed monk walked nearby.

Villagers warmly greeted us as we walked along the island’s only lane for a short distance to view the community’s unique stilt homes that are purposefully built to be lifted by the men of the village, and moved when needed to avoid flood waters.

A small caravan of tuk tuks took us to the Kbal Koh Pagoda on the north end of the island, the first on the 10km (6mi) loop which circles the island. Built in the early 1800s, the historic pagoda is surrounded by banana trees and is located across from the verdant rice paddies that run down the center of the island. The simply adorned pagoda gracefully showed its age with a weathered patina courtesy of the numerous monsoons it has withstood. Behind the temple, nearly obscured from view by banana trees, was a row of brightly colored steeple-shaped burial stupas, mausoleums, called chedi.

On the grounds in front of the temple were two statues of sacred white elephants and various Bodhisattvas, compassionate helpers, on the path to enlightenment who stay in the world to assist others. Along with other sculptures depicting Buddhist Protectors and Guardians whose fierce looks deters negative powers. A multiheaded Snake Being called a Naga King guarded the stairway to the pagoda to protect the Dharma, the Budha’s sacred teachings.

Nearby a young man guided a cow along the path, and teenagers played volleyball on a hard packed dirt court. Farther along a man fished from a low bridge over a stream that flowed through the rice fields. These vignettes of rural life were the charm of Koh Trong Island and Kratie province.

That afternoon back in Kratie we explored the town on our own. Just down from our docking was the Krong Kracheh Pagoda, an important community center where the town’s lay people can study Buddhism. It’s quite a pretty temple known for its pink walls and is surrounded by several grand stupas that are the final resting place for several generations of post-Angkorian royalty.

Two blocks away from the temple was Kratie’s central market, a huge, covered pavilion that occupies an entire city block. Think of a Costco super store on steroids, with merchandise of every sort stacked floor to ceiling along aisles as wide as a single shopping cart, operated by nearly 100 different vendors. This is an authentic, vibrant local market, there’s nothing touristy about it. If you can’t find what you need here it probably doesn’t exist.  The outside of the building is surrounded by numerous fruit and vegetable stands piled high with produce. Truly a vegetarian’s paradise. Fresh fish and seafood is also abundant as well as fresh poultry and meat. Some of the vendors kept these things cool under ice, while others swatted flies away from the exposed offerings. The smoky grill stands along the street stay open late into the evenings.

The narrow beam and shallow draft of Pandaw’s river vessels make visiting many remote areas along the Mekong River feasible, but north of Kratie the river becomes unnavigable to cruise boats all the way to Vientiane, Laos, adistance of roughly 850km (530mi) due to shallow waters, ever changing sandbars, numerous rock hazards, and the massive Khone Waterfalls, located near the Cambodia-Laos border.

While unsuitable for larger boats, this section of the river is the perfect habitat and a protected zone for the Irrawaddy freshwater dolphin, an endangered species. With a big bulbous head and short dorsal fin, they look significantly different from saltwater dolphins. Sadly, there are only an estimated 117 Irrawaddy dolphins left in Cambodia, but the population has been rebounding in recent years due to enhanced conservation efforts. Fortunately for us a large group of dolphins live in several deepwater pools near the town of Kampi, just north of Kratie.

Viewing rural life along river has its advantages, but traveling by bus to Kampi did provide us with a different perspective. We passed motorcycle vendors laden beyond belief with merchandise, young monks walking along the shoulder of the road as they returned to their monastery, homes on stilts, and all sorts of traffic violations that would incur huge fines in the states.

Reaching the dock in Kampi we were divided into several groups to board small boats. Our boatman was very friendly and made sure we all wore the required life vests, but he wasn’t particularly diligent about balancing the weight on the boat for an even keel and we got underway in a rather tipsy fashion before our group of eight took the initiative to redistribute the load ourselves.

As we traveled to the dolphin pools the Mekong widened, and houses along the river edge disappeared. It was a lengthy boat ride and wonderfully tranquil, as we trailed our fingers into the cool river, passing kayakers paddling, and getting closer to nature as we reached the dolphin pools which are adjacent to the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary. The reserve is Cambodia’s largest national forest, and with roughly 500,000 hectares (1,235,527 acres) it’s Southeast Asia’s largest lowland evergreen forest, and the home to 400 different animal species, that includes Pileated Gibbon, a herd of wild Asian Elephants, Malayan Sun Bear, wild cattle, Sunda Clouded Leopard, and Great Hornbills to name only a few.

The dolphins were very elusive, and we sat quietly in the boat for quite some time before a pair of dolphins gently broke the surface of the water a distance away for a brief moment. We are not sure how many different dolphins we saw, but their surfacing became more frequent, though they were extremely difficult, almost impossible to photograph. Still the experience was very entertaining. Across Southeast Asia and Cambodia the dolphins are considered symbols of good fortune and prosperity. Many folks living along this stretch of the Mekong River also believe that the Irrawaddy dolphins are sacred, protective spirits, and reincarnations of their ancestors.

Later that afternoon, we set sail downstream back along the Mekong toward Phnom Penh to moor overnight and then continue upstream the next morning on the Tonle Sap River to visit the silversmith workshops and Buddhist pagoda in Chey Odam. This section of river was lined with colorful shanty houses, and occasionally the minarets of a mosque or a church steeple protruded from the riverscape. 

The ping of a cacophony of unsynchronized hammers surrounded us as we walked along Chey Odam’s main street which paralleled the river and is lined with metal workshops of various sizes. Across the river on a distant hill, we could see the stupas of Phnom Phreah Reach Throap, a sacred mountain that was home to Cambodia’s royal capital for nearly 250 years until 1866.

This was the most touristy of places we visited with each workshop having displays of their craft for sale. But it was still interesting as the skilled artisans create everything by hand using hand-hammered repoussé and chasing techniques, crafting intricately decorated brass or copper plates and bowls to Betel sets, and silver jewelry. We thought the prices were fair, so we shopped for our young granddaughters. Of course, credit cards were accepted.

Geese waddled freely along the road as our group walked to the outskirts of town. We seemed to become a group of pied pipers as we swept up a band of children that followed us to the Moni Sakor temple. Reaching the pagoda, and with smiles all around, the kids suddenly lined up and sang the Cambodian national anthem.

It was a rustic temple with a collection of Buddhist sculptures and colorful stupas on its grounds. While we rested under a shade tree one of the small girls in the group entertained us and her friends by making cat woman like claws on her fingers with yellow trumpet flowers. Across the road a three-wheeled flatbed motorcycle vendor went door to door selling fresh produce, and un-iced fish and meat in the morning sun.

Later that afternoon after sailing upriver the crew tied the boat to trees along the riverbank outside the small town of Kampong Tralach and lowered the gangplank to a line of waiting oxcarts. Our traditional mode of transportation through the town to the Kampong Tralach Kraom Pagoda that was a local tourist initiative, that helped the drivers buy their own ox and cart.

I walked ahead to take some photos of the line of oxcarts. Several had passed by already, but there was one stubborn beast that refused to move until one of the carts behind him tried to pass by. Suddenly it seemed to be a chariot race, with whooping and hollering as the two oxcarts lurched forward. As fun as it was, the folks in the back of the carts held on tightly, worried that they would be shaken out of the speeding cart like fortune sticks.

The jolting ride ended with a circling of the carts, in front of the beautiful monks’ dwelling, in the courtyard of the Kampong Tralach Kraom Pagoda. Though the real attraction of the site was the old Buddhist temple located behind it, that wasn’t particularly well-maintained. Like the two other temples we visited days earlier the exterior of the pagoda showed the challenges of building maintenance in the heat, humidity and monsoons of Southeast Asia. On the raised terrace surrounding the pagoda were a collection of folk-art style sculptures depicting Buddhist protectors and guardians that gave no hint of the treasure that awaited us inside.

The temple’s interior was astonishing, with every surface of the walls and ceiling covered in beautiful murals depicting the life and teachings of Buddha. This hidden gem struck us as being the Cambodian equivalent to the Sistine Chapel! Fortunately, this temple was open when we visited, but it made us wonder what we missed at the other two which were not.

That evening our boat stayed tied to the riverbank, and we had a bonfire in a vacant lot nearby where the crew had invited a few of the townsfolk to join us. With wet kindling from an earlier rain, it was a smoky affair, but folks’ spirits weren’t dampened and there was a lot of joyful dancing. 

The next morning, we continued cruising north on the Tonle Sap River. The high riverbanks from the earlier part of our trip now disappeared as the river broadened into a wide floodplain that covered the roads. Only the telephone poles along their edge offered guidance to where they were. Fast long-tail boats were more prevalent now as scooters were stored away on higher ground until the dry season.

Here homes on stilts are surrounded by monsoon floodwaters for six months, from June to November when the Mekong River expands 45-fold, overflows and forces the waters of the Tonle Sap to back-flow into its lake. This in turn forces it to expand in size 4x from its dry season size of 3,000 square kilometers (1,200 square miles) to 15,000 square kilometers (5800 square miles) and cover the surrounding countryside with flood waters to the depth of 9m (30ft) or greater.

The weather since our departure from Phom Phen had been rather unpredictable, with overnight rains and heavy morning mists and cloudy afternoons, but today the weather was brilliant and the river was café au lait colored, and extended to the horizon all around us. The tranquility of watching this broad waterscape and sky change throughout the next two days was one of the trip’s serene pleasures.

We sailed past villages with temples and mosques. The number of mosques surprised us, but there has been an Islamic presence in Cambodia since the 10th century and today Muslims compose three percent of the country’s population with the majority concentrated along the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers.

More of the small sampans we passed now were covered and appeared to be floating homes, with small children aboard and cooking platforms at the rear. Fishermen set their nets with the help of their wives.

We anchored in the lake offshore Chong Khneas, a Vietnamese refugee floating village near the mouth of the Siem Reap River. It’s a fully functioning community with a floating school, church and markets that get paddled between the homes. That supports itself from fishing on the lake and tourist tours. It started in the mid-1970s as a safe haven for migrants in Cambodia to avoid persecution from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

Though many of the refugees have been in Cambodia for two generations they have a precarious legal status that denies them citizenship and the right to own land, and cuts them off accessing any state sponsored social programs, forcing them to live in floating homes or marginalized, informal communities. This is due to a deep-seated historical prejudice between the two countries which have often been in conflict with each other. Sadly, the beauty of their floating village makes it too easy for visitors to overlook the complexity of their situation.

Nearby on stilts was a Buddhist temple surrounded by flood waters. During the dry season it is partially accessible by land when you follow Rt63 south from Siem Reap and then walk across a wide sand bar, but now we needed the local boatmen to ferry us over.

From what our tour guide explained, this was the first time a group of westerners had ever visited the temple where young monks are sequestered away to study the teachings of the Buddha. Through our guide’s translation the monk answered questions from our group and with the wave of his hand blessed us with sprinkles of water from a Kusha grass stick. Outside, the boatman’s young son entertained himself by jumping from one boat to another.

Earlier that morning our guide was admiring the day and the clouds floating over the lake and said, “there will be a nice sunset tonight.” His prediction was right on, and it was the perfect ending for our adventures in Cambodia.

Till next time,

Craig & Donna