Search Results for: Tim elkington

As we walked into Khiva, there was a palpable sense of entering a trading hub in a vast desert. These was a taste of dust on the air. This is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That said, much of the city now feels a bit like a film set, beautiful, but there to impress outsiders. Still, maybe that was always part of the game.

Once in Khiva, we visited a wide range of attractions, including the Ichan Qal’a, the ancient citadel surrounded by crenellated walls, the Juma Mosque, the Muhammad Amin-Khan Madrasa, the Mausoleums of Pahlavan Mahmud and Sayid all-Uddin, and the Madrasas of Islam-Khodja and Alla-Kuli, and the Tash-Kauli Palace.

For me, at least, there came a point where the architecture and decoration began to blur a bit, but the city is certainly impressive. Then, on the morning of Tuesday, 14th October, we walked through the city walls for the last time to head off across the Kyzylkum Desert – said to have red sands, though we reflected that they mainly seemed to be various shades of khaki.

Along the way, we crossed the River Oxus, aka the Amu-Darya, whose still vast expanse brought home the scale of the challenge Alexander the Great faced back in 329 BC when in pursuit of his enemies. But I tell the tale of what is happening in the second of my Substack posts, to be posted on Wednesday, 29th October.

Happily, we got to Bukhara with few losses along the way – but that is a story for the next post in this series.

I had long been fascinated by the history of the Silk Roads and the stories of the people who travelled along them, from Marco Polo to (more balefully) Genghis Khan. I had read books like Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game and much of Peter Frankopan’s magisterial The Silk Roads. All of which had whetted my appetite to learn (and see) more.

So joining an ACE Cultural Tours trip to the Silk Road cities in Uzbekistan seemed like a good idea. And a timely one, given the way that China’s President Xi is playing up Silk Road branding in relation to the digital, infrastructure and health aspects of his country’s Belt & Bridge initiative. These are themes I plan to cover this week in my Rewilding Markets channel on Substack.

In addition, I plan to do four posts on this site as a more personal (and briefer) series of blogs, one each on Tashkent (where our journey began) Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand. We arrived in Tashkent, via Istanbul, on Saturday, 11th October, and then departed for Istanbul and London again on Tuesday, 21st October. What follows in these four posts is brief summary of what happened in between, as we travelled the length and breadth of the country.

As I began to process the images of the trip, however, it strikes me that the overall impression given will be a bit glitzier than the reality sometimes was. So this seems like a good time – and place – to than our British and Uzbek guides, Steve Mastin, the tour director, and Muminov (said) Saijon, our local guide, who accompanied us throughout, but is normally based in Samarkand.

Before we set off, I knew little about Tashkent, I confess, though I do remember reading, as a teenager, the news of the massive earthquake back in 1966 – which destroyed some 80% of the city. It has certainly recovered, though the Soviet influence is still evident in various parts of the city.

We flew from Tashkent International airport to Urgench integration airport, en route to Khiva. And that’s the subject of the next post.

Because of intermittent rain, an artwork created by Holly Hallawell – who I had introduced to Gaia after she did an installation for Volans in Somerset House during London Climate Action Week – met Elaine and I as we entered Strawberry Hill House for the 2025 Flower Festival on 14th September. And this year, for the first time, Gaia had guest curated the festival.

Holly’s piece, shown above, was strung between two mangrove stumps, or pneumatophores. And driftwood – supplied by Gaia’s friend Adam (of Woodenzone) – appeared in many of the exhibits around the house and garden.

A bad workman blames his tools, so much we know, or have been told. In any event, I left my iPhone camera in the car, and assumed I had left it at home. So borrowed Elaine’s rather antiquated phone (one of my old ones) to take images as we went around – slightly agog. The calibre of the exhibits this year was remarkable, astounding even. But the quality of my images was somewhat reduced.

Still, wonderful to see the room that once houses the giant driftwood spider, Arachne, made by Gaia and Adam, now occupied by an exhibit celebrating David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – with the theme tune playing eerily in the background. Overall, the effect of the festival was whatever the positive version of haunting might be.

Elaine and I had a glorious five days away in the south of France, near Perpignan, with Gaia and Hania, Jake and Gene. Saint-Génis-des-Fontaines proved to be an understated delight – and the house we stayed in, owned by a cinematographer, was a fantastic home-from-home. Here are a few images from our time away.

P.S. Elaine and I got home easily, but what is not shown is the massive wildfire that interrupted the rest of the family as they headed back to Toulouse airport. A 2-hour journey turned into an 8-hour odyssey, as the region’s roads went into solid state. They missed their plane, so had to fly back via Munich, but returned in remarkably good humour.

Delighted to be the guest on the latest “Fossil vs Future” podcast (https://www.linkedin.com/company/fossil-vs-future/) with James Cameron and Daisy Nicholls. This podcast series features an ongoing conversation between James (a #climate change lawyer and advocate) and his goddaughter Daisy (a #sustainablefinance expert) about climate change and the transition away from #fossilfuels. 

Our subject is #demographics: a cause for panic – or a call for intergenerational collaboration? You can find the full episode on Spotify, Apple and YouTube through the links below:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/what-about-demographics-cause-for-panic-or-time-for/id1757613888?i=1000717356321

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/34EbShakG7VSQBVWLuQE00?si=2ad7fe86ab1f4950

YouTube: https://youtu.be/N3ZyECzdh5A