Envisioning a Starry Night in Turkmenistan: A Traveler’s Dream
I’m wishing and imagining I was back there, in the blue of the night in Turkmenistan. I wish I was dog tired and wearing the same greasy clothes I’d been wearing since leaving Tashkent in Uzbekistan 1,000km and 7 days North. I wish I’d been cycling into a headwind all day, and I wish I could still taste the mutton shashlik I’d eaten with flat bread and washed down with tea from a bowl at a tea house hours earlier; while reclining awkwardly on a hand woven rug, my stiff legs ill equipped for sitting without a chair.
I wish I still had sand stuck in my beard and salt encrusted eyebrows. I wish I was cycling by the cool light of the moon because I couldn’t find any batteries for my head torch in the small shops that sold a little of everything but nothing that I wanted. I wish I was cycling blind, with my ears cocked for the Ladas and blacked out BMWs that bounced regardless along the lumpy road and had come dangerously close to hitting me earlier.
I wish I was alone and together with everything. I wish I felt like I’d pierced a void. I wish that I once again understood what was crystal clear to me then as I stood beneath a black velvet dome richly studded with diamanté stars. I wish I could see the warm orange glow of Sarakhs- the border town I was heading for- on the horizon across the vast flat expanse. I wish I was taking a rest beneath an elaborate Soviet bus shelter and listening to the sounds of the social wafting over a fence, catching the Russian pop music of a party that came and went with the opening of a back door as I sat like a lonely flanuer hidden in the darkness warming my numb fingers and drinking hot tea from my flask. I wish I could hear the drunken banter of the party-goers- spoken in the universal language of jocular youth- as I ate a full packet of cheap chocolate biscuits. I wish I was eating those biscuits with a hunger that a day’s cycling brings; jamming them into my mouth with grubby fingers and softening them with rude gulps of hot tea.
I wish I could catch a glimpse of the living everyday through lace curtained windows. I wish saw; a family lit by the ghostly light of a television set, a woman stoically eating dinner alone, a man falling from his car to his front door after too much vodka. I wish I could understand the fullness of the whole that I glimpsed in those slices of life. I wish it was possible to preserve the ephemeral world of universal truth contained in each little snapshot. I wish I had held on to the singular truth visible only to an outsider riding quietly past alone in the dark that night in December.
I wish I was rolling quietly out of the dark night into a military check point, startling young sleepy eyed soldiers in ill fitted trench coats and clumsy boots who took my passport to the chief for inspection. I wish I was stamping my feet to keep warm while I waited in commune with the young soldiers as we nodded recognition to the other’s unintelligible mumblings and shared the warm kinship of biting cold. I wish my heart sank as I was called to halt as I begin to push off only to swell again when a hunk of naan was pressed into my hand by the brick faced officer with the warm eyes of a grandmother who left the warmth of his hut to see the fool who owned the exotic passport and rode a heavy bike through the desert in the dark. I wish I could see desert foxes and rabbits startling into the scrub as I approached the town’s gates; gates that for millennia had welcomed traveller’s more virtuous than me as their caravans travelled the old silk road. I wish I could look up and see an airplane scud across the silver face of the full moon ferrying sleeping passengers from point to point above a world they’ll never really know and can’t hope to understand.
I wish I had arrived at the border just before midnight and I was hopefully asking a guy filling his car with cheap petrol at a pastel green petrol station for directions to a kaфe. I wish I was squeezing the last joules from my limpid legs chasing the two glowing red tail-lights of his Lada as he insisted on showing me. I wish my speedometer read 204km. I wish I was being led into a muddy courtyard to a hot meal, a floor in a warm prayer room, a steaming bowl of borscht, stout handshakes and vodka toasts with gregarious and generous truck drivers. I wish I was having the first hot shower in a week, and relishing it with a pleasure usually derived from other less innocent carnal activities. I wish I was sleeping a deep and dreamless sleep my aching body knowing the relative value and virtue of tiredness and discomfort after four days chasing across a country I will probably never go back to, but always fondly remember.
This sunny morning in Dublin, I wish I was out there on a starry night in Turkmenistan…
