Nohur

On Saturday a group of us traveled out to a small town in the Kopetdag Mountains called Nohur. Again, not very sure how to spell it, but it's supposed to be a town that can trace its ancestry back to Alexander the Great's army, and it's particularly interesting to drive through. We traveled via four wheel drive for about three hours to get there.

To reach this town, you have to turn off of the main highway and start on a gravel and/or dirt road that winds through the mountains. It's quite beautiful, though some areas can lead to some rough driving. I'm not sure how some of the older, smaller cars are able to travel and not get stuck on the road. As you're driving through the canyons and valleys and winding your way up the mountain, there are cows that placidly plod along either side of the road. Then we turned a corner and there was a very large herd of sheep and goats that took up the entire road. As the herder tried to get them to part, another vehicle came from the opposite direction, complicating the situation further as it's barely a two lane road and there are rock walls on either side. By using the horn and slowly moving through the crowd, we were able to get through, but it was while surrounded by a sea of animals!

We wound our way to the village, which is nothing like Ashgabat. Most of the homes are mud brick, and locals use everything, including old car parts and scrap metal, in order to construct rough fences along the road. The houses themselves reminded me of the adobe houses from the Southwest part of the U.S. We wound our way through the village, which has tiny roads with high mud brick walls along them, probably dating back hundreds of years. It's obvious SUVs were not the intended users as we carefully made our way along.

While in the village, someone directed us to the local graveyard, which was like nothing I'd ever seen. On each grave there are horns, of either mountain sheep or goats, many of them painted bright colors. A huge cemetary was filled with these markers, one for each grave in the year. They were carefully tied to the top of poles to mark the gravesite. Our local driver told us that they are meant to represent the elements and offer protection and luck. As we saw similar horns above some houses in Ashgabat, I think that it may date back to pre-Christian traditions that are still used and observed here, which goes along with many of the superstitions in the region.

After touring the village, we drove out for another hour further into the mountains in order to see a waterfall. Though someone told us it would be cold, in a thick forest, and thundering, we did find a variation on this description. We hiked to the top of the waterfall after getting more detailed instructions from one of the local trucks we passed, and found some trees and fallen rocks along a small stream that led to the waterfall. The view from the top was breathtaking and overlooked a valley that was filled with brush and other greenery. It was a few degrees cooler, and had beautiful formations, even if not the "lush forest" we were told to expect. Strangely, while we were driving there, it looked kind of like the area near the black hills, until we saw the stone houses and other structures that were built there. The area around Nohur is truly a beautiful place.

Our last stop was to a carpet factory, where I broke down and bought, not carpet, but a looser weave of rug (and much cheaper). It was incredible to see as seven women squatted on a piece of timber and worked in conjunction with one another to make the complicated, hand made design on the carpet they were working on. The owner told us that one person can make approximately one square meter (approx 3 square feet) of carpet in a month. The amount of work that goes into a carpet blew me away. The colors and details, and the fact that everything is hand knotted, is rather hard to believe, especially as they were working on some carpets that were about forty square meters in size-- as big, if not larger, than many studio apartments.

Apologies for the brief description, but as things wind down, I'm beginning to be busy with packing up and making sure I have everything pulled together. I'll try to make a couple more entries describing some of the other experiences I've had in the last month-- but things have been really busy!