The Great Silk Road: At A Crossroads
An Editorial by Chris Istrati, TCA Feature Editor

The Great Silk Road stands at a crossroads. The road behind is one way and U-turns are forbidden. It is impossible to go back to the way things used to be. To the right, the road disappears into a desert of religious fanaticism, increasing repression, growing isolationism, border squabbles with neighbors, retaliatory visa regimes and security measures that restrict travel. To the left, the road curves into a wilderness of anarchy, lawless banditry, armed farmers harvesting poppy plantations, mafia cartels supplying the world’s heroin addicts, arms dealers providing weapons to separatists, terrorists, and thugs. On this road, travel is dangerous and tourists proceed at their own risk.

Straight ahead the road is under construction. Old sections are under repair, new stretches lead off into a future of promise and prosperity, an open road with measured miles, a highway that winds across deserts and mountains. This road offers vistas of incomparable beauty, settlements with fascinating cultures, historic monuments of human heritage and the potential for tourism to transform the region into a powerful economic bloc with political stability. In which direction will the new Central Asian republics travel? And what is the future of tourism along the new Great Silk Road?

Ten Years After The Fall
Ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the architects of the new Great Silk Road ponder these questions. Will the road less traveled lead to a dead end or become a travel destination? Will the forces of isolationism prevail and lock the door to foreigners or will the gates of this mythic land fling wide open for tourists? The romantic vision of the West has often invested these lands with the exotic allure of the East and a fatal attraction with bloodthirsty conquerors. In contrast, the East has often perceived western visitors as pillagers of treasure, philistines without appreciation for the subtleties of eastern culture, barbarians with an iconoclastic lack of taste. The East has still to meet the West on common ground.

Ten years after glasnost and perestroika, the Silk Road is a patchwork of potholed roads, broken at the borders of new independent nations that were once a single empire speaking one language. Though the Soviet Union denied access to this part of the world to outside tourists, the Silk Road was traveled by thousands of Soviet citizens who considered this part of the world their private playground. While Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan represented remote outposts of the empire, they were also seen as vacation destinations renowned for health spas, hot springs and idyllic sanatoriums lodged along lakes, rivers and picturesque valleys.

Mountain clubs and ski bases attracted young Soviets eager to test their mettle against the powers of nature. The fabled cities of Uzbekistan drew Soviet tourists with as much fascination as visitors are drawn today to the domes of Samarkand, the minarets of Khiva and the madrasahs and mausoleums of Bukhara. Less frequented, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan now offer a fascinating mix of history, nature and culture, once buried by neglect and only recently resurrected by the advent of free market economy.

The Potential for Tourism
Today, the Silk Road offers a vast opportunity for the enterprise known as tourism. The Silk Road still calls out to the fearless traveler, to the pious pilgrim, to the enterprising merchant, to the curious observer of human nature. Cultural tourism, adventure tourism, religious tourism, recreational tourism, shopping tourism, the opportunity to spend money on leisure activities - a commodity increasingly valued in the free world -these all have a new, unique field of play on the Great Silk Road of Central Asia.

Provided, that is, that the new independent republics of the former Soviet Union, the northwest region of China’s Xinjiang, and the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan can guarantee a modicum of comfort for travelers, reliable transportation services and political stability. The Shanghai Six nations – China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan – might consider the question of how to develop tourism to their mutual benefit by facilitating the flow of tourists across their borders, as well as address the threat to their national security by arming their borders to the teeth.

The knee-jerk reaction to a security threat from Muslim extremists has caused problems for the smooth flow of traffic across the Silk Road. Tourist vehicles cannot cross the borders of China and Uzbekistan into Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan. The governments of the region will have to choose whether to open this area and empower private tourist companies to develop travel along the Great Silk Road, or restrict the flow of that traffic. Conversely, private tour operators need to cooperate with the regional governments to maintain national security and domestic stability.

Wild or tame?
One of the questions implied in the development of tourism along the Silk Road, is whether an open policy will spoil the region. In a sense the attraction of the Silk Road lies in its raw, unspoiled beauty, in the timelessness of traditions that have resisted invaders through the centuries, in the thrill of uncertainty wondering what surprises lurk around the next bend of the road. Who wants twelve lane highways ripping down the desert, mountains dynamited into smooth skyways, McDonald arches in Nukus, neon billboards on the road to Tashkent, or garish Vegas casinos on Lake Issyk-kul?

Imagine hordes of pleasure seekers descending on the capitals of Central Asia, and you might understand the reserve that conservative governments might feel about tourism. These countries, with their predominant Muslim populations, do not want to fuel the sex or drug trades in exchange for western dollars or eastern yen. While private enterprise – capitalists and carpetbaggers oblivious to matters of taste – may want to grow rich on foreign capital, no matter the color or the means of its acquisition, cooler heads will want to regulate the growth of tourism on the Silk Road. As it happens, fences and obstacles already exist along the Silk Road to restrain the avalanche of mass tourism.

Travel on the Silk Road
Travel on the Silk Road has never been a smooth ride. But then that’s the fun part of it. The Silk Road is an adventure – an off-the-beaten track experience, an outside the box vacation that shakes the kaleidoscope of your world view, the thrill of a lifetime that saturates your life with new images and radical ways of thinking. Traveling on the Silk Road puts you in the same category as Marco Polo, the legendary traveler who journeyed from Venice to the pleasure domes of Kublai Khan. Though he set out on a shopping tour, his travel diary paints a fantastic picture of the culture and nature of medieval Asia. Today shopping tours along the new Silk Road offer the discriminating tourist real value for money in the form of handicrafts and art, from the carpets of Turkmenistan to the jade of the Taklamakan.

Religious tourism has been popular on the Silk Road ever since Xuan Zang, an intrepid Buddhist monk traveled the Silk Road from China to India and back in the seventh century. He might be considered as the father of religious tourism in Central Asia. Another hero of the faith was Rabban Sauma, a Turkic Nestorian Christian who journeyed from Kanbalik to Damascus with a fellow Mongol monk who became the archbishop of Nestorian Christianity. Rabban Sauma continued his journey to Rome where he enjoyed communion with the Pope and the kings of England and France. Over the centuries, pioneers of religion established outposts of ideology in oasis towns and monastic communities all along the Great Silk Road.

Today, religious tourism involves mainly a domestic market, from the myriads of the faithful who travel the hajj to Mecca every year, to the pilgrims who visit the mazars of holy men and Sufi saints. The ancient city of Osh has become the poor man’s Mecca, while the mosques of Uzbekistan and Turkestan attract believers from all faiths who gaze at the turquoise majolica tiles much as tourists admire the gargoyles of Notre Dame. Islamic proselytizers from Pakistan and evangelical missionaries from Korea, as well as Hare Krishnas, Mormons, and Bahais also pay their respects to the inhabitants of the Silk Road, bringing their currencies in religious ideas and convertible cash.

Travel on the Silk Road has become a lot easier since Marco Polo’s times. Air travel on major international carriers has opened up the region to all points of the globe. Road travel can be effected economically by rail, bus or car, though public transportation can often be slow. Many tour companies now offer four wheel drives and comfortable tourist buses are beginning to appear in the major capitals, though these will be affordable mainly to upscale tourists.

The Silk Road has always been a two way traffic, with streams flowing from all sides of the Eurasian continent. Today, the Central Asian republics are mainly oriented towards the West, seeking to attract tourists and commerce from Europe and the United States. However, tourist marketing in Central Asia could be profitably directed towards the East. According to a study conducted in 1994, Singaporeans made over 2.4 million overseas trips (Assessing Macro Environment Trends in Singapore: Implications for Tourism Marketers by Kau Ah Keng, “Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research”, http://www.hotel-online.com/Neo/Trends/AsiaPacificJournal/).

Despite the Asian economic crisis, Singapore and the Asian tigers still have the economic clout and the lifestyle disposition to spend leisure dollars on travel. Statistics for Taiwan, Korea and Japan would also show that these are markets with potential for developing tourism along the Great Silk Road. Japan and Korea have shown a marked interest in the Buddhist roots of their culture and have promoted the Silk Road in television documentaries and travel brochures. The nouveau Russians and Ukrainians with economic power still vacation in Central Asia’s lakes and mountain resorts, and this market offers another avenue for Silk Road tourism development.

Security along the Silk Road
The security of tourists has become a longstanding concern for the global travel industry. Since the Munich Olympics, tourists have become targets for terrorists in Egypt, Algeria, Israel, and on the Greek cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. In addition to terrorists, there are pickpockets, highway robbers and street muggers who also prey on the unwary tourist. This is a universal threat and not restricted to Central Asia. In one way, the Great Silk Road is one of the safest places to travel today, since hospitality is rooted in traditions that evolved over centuries of Silk Road caravan trade.

Ironically, the ancient Silk Road thrived when dominated by empires that provided security along a line of oases outposts and mountain forts. The Silk Road was birthed when Rome ruled the West and the Han dynasty dominated the East by defeating the Huns. When Arabs ruled Persia and the Tang dynasty stretched out to the Talas River, the Silk Road saw travel flourish and commerce between cultures prosper.

Today, though the security of Central Asia is still open to question, with the presence of US forces in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan restraining the threat of armed militants from Afghanistan, and with increased international attention focused on the area, the future of tourism along the Great Silk Road looks bright.