KAMASHI, UZBEKISTAN, PART 2: A MOUNTAIN DRIVE TO THE KATTA LANGAR MOSQUE

The great philosopher Minnie Pearl (okay, so she wasn't a philosopher, but comedians tend to know more about life than a lot of people) once said, "Take the back roads instead of the highways."  I wonder why she said that? Had she been to Uzbekistan?

Because that's just what we did. If this isn't a back road, I don't know what is.

After we'd been entertained and fed at a home in what was already a remote village, we went out to the street to see a line-up of a couple dozen cars. Our tour company had arranged for private vehicles driven by their owners, residents of the village, to haul us up the mountain. They must have connected with every car owner for miles around to find transportation for all of us. (The tour company owner, who was on the trip with us, made a point of telling us that they'd worked on these travel plans well into the previous night, and that this side trip was unique to Fun for Less Tours and not something other tours did.) Four of us hopped into a five-passenger sedan being driven by a local man who spoke zero English. We put on our seat belts (where available) and headed up the road. Our friends were in other similar vehicles.

It was an exercise in trust, let me tell you.

We climbed steadily up hill on what was sometimes a paved road and at other times was just a road. The locals have their reasons for choosing alternate means of transportation:

It's not like we were in the middle of nowhere. Of course not.

The scenery was so stark. There was little vegetation, and yet there were homes and other structures along the road most of the time.


The nicest buildings were the schools, multi-storied, painted, and with glass windows. Clearly education is valued here. By the way, literacy is a whopping 98%!

After 20 or 30 minutes of winding, bumpy roads where we were eating the dust of the vehicle in front of us, we reached Langar, a more densely populated village than others we'd seen as we jostled up the mountain road:

The Katta Langar Mosque perches on the highest point, a plateau overlooking the village. It was built by a faction of Sufis in 1520.

Villagers were at the entrance to the mosque, cheerfully posing for photos:

 

A walkway very like a cloister connected the mosque to some other buildings:

We went through the portal . . .

. . . and into another world . . .

. . . where groups of men entertain each other (and foreign visitors) . . .

. . . by hefting impossibly massive stones . . .

. . . while they cheered each other on:

It was another "Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore" moment, one of dozens on this trip.

We weren't the only spectators . . . 

. . . who were taking and admiring pictures on their iPhones:

We turned our attention to the Katta Langar mosque, which at first looked like a ramshackle old building:

However, once we got closer, it got a lot more interesting. The ceiling over the mosque porch is a masterpiece of ancient Uzbek architecture, engineering, and woodworking:

An elderly man sat on a typical deep bench, watching the crazy Americans:

A few more men joined him later on, including a member of our group, who fits right in, except for the expensive camera around his neck, the backpack, and the tennis shoes:

What a kind face. I wonder how old he is?

Clocks show the five times for prayer. Note the banner in Russian on the right, a holdover from the Soviet days. Like the other Stans, Uzbekistan is gradually transitioning away from the Cyrillic alphabet:

Another Men's Bench (I never saw women on these) and a ladder leading to the attic/loft:

Inside the mosque, richly-colored rugs cover the floor . . .

. . . and ancient wooden pillars hold up the ceiling:

A tile mosaic band encircles most of the room. There is no painting here. Each color is a different piece:

Another mosaic band looks a little like crown molding near the top of the wall. This includes text, probably from the Quran:

The tile creating the mihrab is even more spectacular:

Facing the mihrab means facing Mecca, and individual prayer rugs are oriented that way:

Judging by the rugs, this window must have been on the same wall as the mihrab:

Through a window in the back of the church, we could see a domed building on the other side of the ravine. We later learned that it is a mausoleum, also built 500 years ago, and contains the remains of a powerful local sheik who died in 1545, two of his family members, a Yemeni sheik whose pilgrimage led him here, and an unknown noble--possibly the seven-year-old daughter of the great conqueror Timur/Tamerlane. Unfortunately, we did not get to visit it:

I enjoyed watching a little girl playing under a tree on our side of the ravine:

A complete restoration of the mosque was completed in 1870, but there are signs of ongoing improvements:

My adventurous travel companion:

Time to go. Cars were lined up like taxis at the airport, and we were hustled into them for a return trip to the village:

We were able to converse with this driver enough to get him to stop at this deep ravine we could view from the side of the road:

Rather than vegetation, the hillsides grew different colors of dirt:

We also stopped at this reservoir, marveling that there is water coming out of the hills above us to fill it:

There are a lot of things I'll never know about this place, but I know a lot more than I did before our trip. That's part of the fun of travel--the knowing and the not-knowing. How do you know what you don't know until you learn a little bit?