In case you have not already heard, Missouri has legalized noodling this season. To mark the occasion as well as to make writing this update more entertaining for me and correspondingly more tedious for you, this will be one of the most obnoxious updates ever. I trust that you will understand that the overwrought melodramatic tone is the product of the intense boredom that has attended my protracted visa hunt over the past week (and which still continues) and not a symptom of incipient insanity.

In this installment you will find tales of binge watermelon eating, a pinky toe turned alarming shades of purple from Uzbek river parasites, surprise encounters with an Uzbek Richie Rich, a detailed analysis of the current state of my resurgent facial hair growth and its effect upon my aerodynamic performance, and the usual assortment of omnifarious bicycle mishaps. That is my ironclad Mikesbiketrip.com promise 2 U, my valued readers.

So . . . I believe we left with me boarding a Nukus-bound train from Beyneu. There is little to report from my twelve-hour train journey, the duration of which I spent in a horizontal position on a fold-down platform bench with my face one foot from the ceiling. Well wait - I was offered some green substance in a plastic baggie by the conductor - but I declined, so I would not place that event in the exciting category. According to my trusty guidebook, due to the color of the substance and its manner of consumption, the offered treat was most likely chewing tobacco (often cut with opium), a vice at cross purposes with the philosophy underlying Mikesbiketrip.com, as well as with my need to have my wits about me for upcoming money-changing transactions. The highest note in circulation here is worth less than one dollar, so changing money and verifying the count takes some time and concentration and concludes with you walking away with your pockets bulging with bricks of Som. (6-9-05) *

Once upon better times - prior to the heartless scheming of Soviet environmental manipulators and bespectacled socialist agronomists and irrigationists, who over steaming cups of black Russian tea (steeped in their Moscow samovars) charted the irrigation-induced death of the world's fourth largest lake - Moynac stood at the rim of an aquatic horn of plenty. Even now visitors are welcomed to this benighted wasteland with a town sign depicting fish leaping with a vigorous and watery gambol in the afternoon pitch and roll of the Aral Sea waters . . . but those waters and the bounty they once held have long forsaken the town. And indeed it was a rich harvest those waters once provided for the fleet of Moynac trawlers that were accustomed to plying the liquid expanse to rapaciously plunder and pillage luckless schools of the indigenous edible fish species. (6-10-05)

But as the Kruschev-ordered cotton-growing campaign progressed and waters from the feeding rivers from the Tian Shan mountains were channeled to irrigation canals that Moscow had scraped across the lifeless deserts of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea began to vanish - a result that the planners had known from the outset to be a necessary consequence of their grand socialist designs to render the desert into cotton crop land. As the waters dwindled and receded, and Moynac's time as a seafaring town approached its last quarter, one wonders what went through the minds of the Moynacians. It must have been unfathomable and debilitating shock, because boats, trawlers and all manner of fishing vessels simply were left stranded in the now bone-dry declivity that once formed the harbor waters of Moynac's Aral Sea port. It was odd watching cattle saunter with a bovine languor amongst the mummified vessels now forever twined with the dull monochrome of the dusty seabed, sepulchral in their abandonment. (6-10-05)

From Nukus I resumed the cycling sojourn, striking south into the Kizilkum Desert bound for Khiva. With the passing of the solstice and its attendant revelries and pagan mirthmaking, summer is upon us denizens of the Northern Hemisphere, and the season has brought wretched times, unrelenting heat, unslakable thirst, and the expiration of sundry forms of less hardy fauna and flora. The Kizilkum desert is a stoked furnace in the custody of a relentless bellows tender, and the firmament is an obliterating blaze of luminosity where the conflagration is coaxed ever higher and hotter. It was into this hateful crucible of light and heat - and both in extremity - that I and my bicycle ventured and quickly foundered. The vast dessicated desert expanse, forsaken by all save a raspy southeasterly gust that sought to retard and check my progress, left me conspicuous in my isolation as the sole object of motion within sight of the discernable horizon. As the afternoon advanced and my dwindling water supply assumed the temperature and taste of a witch's cauldron, I passed a motley assortment of odds and ends discarded in the desert sands, including an intact jet aircraft.

As I drew near the town of Biruni a tractor trailer slowed to a crawl in front of me, dragging a cloud of chalky dust in tow. In a synchronized motion corresponding to the rig's loss of momentum, the cab door swung open and the evening's host dropped down to the asphalt in a fluid motion choreographed with that of the rig, the door, and the now tension-amplifying clouds of dust. Several hours later I found myself reposing on the terrace of an Uzbek mansion in the latern's glimmer of a low-hanging moon listening to the patriarch of the estate speak into his mobile phone while inside the matriarch of the house was preparing my bed. Hours earlier, after we had made our entrance and introductions, he had led me down the cavernous hallway past blue-lit aquariums to the dining room decked with carpets, cushions, greek columns and a twenty-foot floor table laid with apricots, watermelons, cherries, cucumbers, tomatoes, peanuts, roasted apricot pits, bread, plov, and beverages of every assortment (hot and cold), including the inevitable chilled bottle of vodka. From what I could gather, the source of the family's wealth was drawn from the eldest son, who worked in Moscow at an occupation that was not subject to translation. (6-11-05) *

After dinner and the compulsory vodka toasts, my host inquired through pantomimic expression as to whether I needed a shower. But in fact, after piling in the truck with his sons, I realized we would be bathing in the nearby waters of the Amu Darya - a river that runs along the Uzbekistan/Turkmenistan border. While the shampoo and soap were making their rounds, I unknowingly was making the acquaintance of some wretched form of parasitic river life that inexplicably found my left pinky toe an attractive target. Had I known that those glittering currents were attended by such hidden perils and unnamed dangers I frankly would have been apt to foreswear the evening's ablutions. The remainder of the evening was spent lying on cushions watching the "Hulk" dubbed into Russian on the home theater system.

The next morning's breakfast consisted of boiling bovine milk and cream with chunks of bread for dipping. But after the previous night's ill-advised swim in the waters of the Amu Darya, I noticed that my toe had begun to turn unnatural and alarming shades of purple, and that there was blistering in the vicinity of a circular brown mark (what I gather was the entry point for the organism now feeding on me). All this, just as my health insurance was set to expire. I took a high resolution photo (far too disturbing to post) so that I will be able to show my doctor the cause of any subsequent ailments or complications should any develop (i.e. organ or brain failure and the like). (6-12-05) *

The brief ride from Biruni to Khiva took me past flowering orchards, rank irrigation canals, and alternating hot and cool patches of air. Once in Khiva, the erstwhile execrably swarthy slave-trading capital of the Silk Road, I met an intrepid elderly British woman travelling alone, who had elected to overnight at the same medressa as I. She was quite advanced in her years, with a shock of reedy tresses so delicately white as to have been only moments before dipped in pasteurized whole milk. Her skin was as elegantly lined as a discarded walnut shell, and her lively countenance hinted at a disposition that she held in fragile equipoise - one that was as matronly inclined to doling sweets from her well-provisioned smoked-glass candy jar, as to dispensing justice with her switch should the occasion require it. Although well into the twilight of her life, the darkening shadows cast by the nearing approach of the grim reaper were not yet capable of extinguishing the coruscating embers of life that glowed fiercly in her eyes, and which, by their residual heat, evidenced a youth that had raged like a bonfire. (6-12-05) *

The next morning in the cool respite afforded before the sweltering midday onslaught, I watched as the medressa staff glided and circled in the mellow light like ravens drawn to carrion while the old lady pecked lightly at her lavish breakfast - a feast far too extravagant for a person of her more modest metabolism. When she signalled her departure they swooped in to ravenously devour the remains of the nearly intact meal. Before she left Khiva she gave me a copy of "The Lost Heart of Central Asia," but politely declined my offer to give her in turn my copy of "Housekeeping" - a counteroffer that deeply embarasses me as I now recount it. We later met by chance in Tashkent at a budget guesthouse, where she was sleeping like an ascetic on a bed frame with no mattress. It was interesting to listen to her tales (spoken in the most pristine Queen's English) of her encounters with money changing rogues, innkeepers that would have put Thenadier of Les Miserables to shame, and the multifarious experiences of an ederly woman travelling independently on a pittance. I had hoped to have the opportunity to further harvest the fruits of her sagacity and add them to my own meager store, but our encounter was too brief, and her orchard too laden with an amplitude of knowledge for this lone fruit picker to manage the undertaking. (6-12-05)

Lads and lasses, should you ever in your travels alight upon Khiva, you will find a quiver of minarets piercing the desert sky with their tapering spires, sparkling blue-tiled medressas by the score, wood pillared mosques by the dozen, a fair sprinkling of travellers from foreign lands with their mouths agape, and in every alley, passageway and square, women and children dressed in garb of every color of light refracted through a prism. And in the evening, should you be out for a languid stroll in that hour of the night when the sun tires and its ochre rays begin to gild the town with a light coat of luster, with the crenellated walls, keeps and gates seeming to pine for the abstraction of the past, you would have to be suffering from a good deal of indigestion not to join in the nostalgic reverie.

Um . . . I'll try to finish this ridiculously tortured update tommorrow.(6-12-05) *

Khiva of old must have been an odd mix of barbarism and artistic refinement. In walking through the eastern town gate you can still see the cramped holes notched in the walls where slaves were sold, and the museums are full of displays of the imaginitive cruelty of the Khans. At the same time, all of the buildings evidence a flourishing of the arts - or at least ornamentation and craftsmanship. From tiled facades, carved wooden doors and windows, to the patterned ceilings, everything was incredibly ornamented.(6-13-05)