Notes from a small landlocked Central Asian Country…

September 15, 2015 Babe 0 Comments

Yuvah Noel Harari’s Sapiens is a cracker of a book! Of course recommended by Useless Husband, the half with the intellect and taste to pick something like this up while I’m still with Ahab’s crew wondering what Melville was on. I swore I would never read a single book again after 5 years of being academically bludgeoned into reading lists and tutorials, but find myself today, poring over a book, with someone I can finally talk to  (and not some stodgy professor who leaves me feeling illiterate).

I’m only through 50 pages or so of it, but drawing some early conclusions of how adept and adaptable we Homo Sapies have been in staying alive, building new things, thinking up new ideas and traveling to new places…while bringing about the extinction on some of the most majestic creatures we will never have the privilege (perhaps not a bad thing) of encountering.

So I suppose in my usual Sapien-centric way, I’m thinking of my own not so epic, (but potentially ecologically devastating) journeys on this planet. If I were to mark my own Cognitive Revolution with leaving home for the first time, to an education system that posed more questions than answers, where understanding (or accepting the lack thereof) was more important and prized than knowing, I suppose I’m now just a little past the Industrial Revolution with much of my 20s and 30s trying to forage and then grow my own food. I took two suitcases of ill fitting clothes belonging to my mother, invested overdraft money on some decent jumpers to keep me warm on a cold, climate unlucky little island where I went to university. I left home again, one suitcase less  to Cambodia and then to Congo, Thailand (add one spouses and suitcases growing exponentially) and now in Tajikistan with spouse, suitcases and two bicycles. I’ve come full circle, still with my mother’s clothes that finally fit me like a glove (and back in fashion!)…with the very same moth-ball smelling jumpers in tow, worth every pound of my student overdraft account.

Sapiens talk of our frighteningly amazing ability to bend the environment we are in to our will, all in the name of survival. And so I lamented in Phnom Penh and now in Dushanbe, like so many tiresome people of my age, conservationists, Grand Design fans and tree-huggers, the architectural extinction of beautiful collapsing buildings, the quaint stories they tell of a life of table cloths,  polished silverware, poor plumbing, terrible heating and asbestos poisoning. Stalinskis and their tall ceilings now a supermarket, Khrushevskas and their small WC turned into telecommunication buildings and our Capitalist apartment then reserved for loyal communists surrounded by three mesh covered, gaping building sites ready to herald the 21st Capitalist Century.

But enough if this ill-conceived rambling. The previous entry was our weekend away to Lake Iskandar (Iskandarkul) and Sarytag village over the vertiginous Anzob Pass. Even the most hurried photos taken from a bumpy car was pretty spectacular. These photos here are from an afternoon in Istaravshan in Sughd province. We have moved to Tajikistan and loving every moment of it!