A Silk Road journey by rail packs romanticism and glamour | Canada Voices

It was the loveliest of mornings, the air warm and still, the waters of Kyrgyzstan’s Issyk-Kul Lake as clear and biting as a glass of vodka. There were no boats and not a soul around, only the blue-grey mountains on the far shore, faint as a memory. I stripped off my clothes and jumped in, ducking once, twice, three times, under the brackish water.

I had only just buttoned my trousers when a shepherd appeared, his herd of goats nibbling at the grass in a break of thorn bush. He was nonplussed to see a sopping wet, half-naked man before him, and looked sheepishly aslant from under his conical hat. “I came on the train,” I said, as some kind of explanation. Still, I dared not linger, because the train, the Golden Eagle, that had borne me out of Kazakhstan to Issyk-Kul, would very shortly be carrying me onward into Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.

Golden Eagle’s Republics of the Silk Road journey provides a two-week, multicountry escapade for lovers of long rail journeys, excellent food, Islamic architecture and glamour. The ambiance on board the Golden Eagle is lush – champagne served in singing crystal glasses, carriage attendants make up the room twice a day and the waiters sport bow ties and waistcoats. The romanticism of rail travel is all attitude – famous-name trains such as the Orient Express have instilled plenty of expectations, from tuxedos to murder, to a kind of unobtainable opulence. On this 14-day rail journey, there are several inescapable realities: plenty of rocking during the night; the water not always piping hot; the WiFi not always working. Yet, travelling over the high steppe, we were ensconced in greater luxury than Genghis Khan, Tamerlane or any of the kings and despots who ruled over the ancient Khanates of Central Asia had ever experienced.

And, in another way, it was more casual than one might assume. I’d read the train company’s brief about “smart dress at dinner,” and brought along a suit for the evenings; I was the only one to do so, and spent a lot of time feeling overdressed. There were some 60 of us passengers, representing all continents. English was spoken on board, although it didn’t hurt to know some Russian. In the evenings, the smell of supper would carry through the carriages: fillet mignon in jus, pork loin in mushroom sauce, crab legs, blini with caviar, borscht with chili vodka and a cadre of pastry desserts, all of them improbably made in the narrow, sweltering kitchen.

I took many of my meals with Dr. Tom, the on-board medic (not a member of staff, but there to provide any required assistance and advice over the journey), and after supper each evening, we would sit in the bar car and listen to the resident pianist perform. It is harder than it appears to play with the train going 60 kilometres an hour. When he gave me the chance to try, I had to hang onto the keys for dear life against the sea-swing of the room.

From Issyk-Kul, we travelled overnight to Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, and from there to Bukhara, an old city of mud brick and tiles of turquoise and blue, the colours of heaven. There was something intensely moving about those ancient buildings, their tiled facades like the dry skin of a speckled lizard. Bukhara was a citywide shopping bazaar: silk robes, curved daggers, wooden owls, carpets and ceramics; everything seemed for sale. One passenger purchased a three-metre, intricately carved wooden pillar, the likes of which hold up sagging roofs across Central Asia. “They’ll send it to my home,” she said, when I asked if it would fit in her cabin. The only question was which one: Sweden, Connecticut or Virginia?

Time, over a long train journey, becomes somewhat elastic. The effect in that environment – always fixed, always moving – can become something like a sustained coincidence. You encounter again and again things you did not expect in a world that is increasingly familiar. You reach for your old shirt in the same armoire, and out the window is a faraway mosque, its dome as blue and round as a painted fingernail. You order your regular drink at the bar while outside blue lightning winds over the steppe like a seam of azurite through a dark ore. You lie on your day bed reading, and pause to see an octet of camels marching nose to tail over a rise of dune.

That was the case one morning in western Uzbekistan, when the sun broke over the Kyzylkum Desert, an expanse of muscovado sugar rolling into the distance. We were under way for Khiva, and there was an Australian-ness to the wide open spaces, to the dearth of population, even to the houses, which were squat bungalows with tin roofs and dusty verandas. Or maybe it was down to the Aussie guests at breakfast, muttering “bloody hell” into their Froot Loops and fig jam.

We reached Khiva, on the Turkmenistan border, by early morning. It was as busy as it was during the Khanate, when it was a peak trading post on the Silk Road. As much international business is being conducted by the local hawkers now as then, their trinkets on every flat surface, while they call out in French, Spanish, Russian, Italian and English. A cacophonous music of flutes, zithers, drums and lutes, bellows of camel and the copper-smiths hammering out teapots, rounded out the remaining air, giving the city a preserved, kept-on-ice feel. I didn’t want to be impressed by this hubbub, but every view was undeniable – a boxy mosque topped by a curvaceous bulb, a sinuous alley that sizzled with roasted meats, the great tuberous unfinished turquoise minaret, immense walls of blue tile work that draw the eye with a hypnotic-like psychedelia.

Tim Littler, Golden Eagle’s founder, had joined us in Bukhara, and we ate lunch together in Khiva. I asked him about the technicalities of the train: border crossings, speeds, line changes. “It’s about understanding that things operate differently in Russia and Central Asia,” he said. “As in, ‘The answer is No; what’s the question?’ Once you get into that kind of thinking, almost anything is possible.” Golden Eagle today operates in India, Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia; expanding into China and Africa are the next prospects.

The idea of the Silk Road can feel like a gimmick – a commercial attachment to the past. Yet each country we entered, though distinct, truly did carry that old trading route deep in its soul. There is something of Tibet in the architecture, something of India in the jewellery and dancing, something of Italy in the food, something of Arabia in the hospitality; a medley of the wider world both exotic and familiar, strange yet comforting. We left Khiva at dusk, moving eastward toward the Tajik border. I read in my cabin and watched the world slip easily away. The dawn would find us someplace bright and new, but the darkness revealed nothing but a few distant lights, stars on the horizon. I drew the curtains, settled into bed and was rocked to sleep.

If You Go

The 14-day Golden Eagle Republics of the Silk Road journey makes six departures a year and begins in both Almaty and Tashkent. The next departs in the spring of 2025 from Almaty. Shared cabins start from $35,000, inclusive of all food, amenities, gratuities and off-train excursions.

Both Almaty and Tashkent are reached most easily with Turkish Airlines. Arriving to the region a few days early allows not only to adjust to the time change, but provides an opportunity for a pre- or postdeparture tour. In Almaty, these can be organized through Visit Almaty; in Tashkent, through Uzbekistan Travel.

The writer was a guest of Golden Eagle Luxury Trains. It did not review or approve the story before publication.