Go forth and multiply: notes from an accidental fertility tour of Central Asia

For the traveller, the great uniting joy of all the countries of the former Soviet Union is, I have always thought, their taxis and their taxi drivers. Central Asia is no exception: a short trip in an Uzbek cab contains the same mix of lurching acceleration, cheesy music, lax safety regulations and good-natured skeeziness that holiday-makers usually go looking for in end-of-pier amusement parks. What’s more, there’s plenty of good natured chit-chat to be had, full of curiosity (“Whereabouts in America is London?”) and salty Soviet Army vernacular. But, as my girlfriend and I discovered as we moved from dented Daewoos to vintage Volgas on our way through Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, there’s one topic that tends to dominate the conversation: children. And, more precisely, why don’t you have any?

Early in our trip this summer, after hailing a modded-out Chevrolet in Samarkand — purple underlighting, vaguely Turkic house music vibrating the windscreen — I asked the driver — downy moustache, lopsided grin — what people do for fun in this Silk Road heritage town that’s so well-kept it feels almost anodyne. “We make love,” sniggered the young macho behind the wheel. Oh really? Was this a welcome sign of wildness in a police state? “To our wives. I have two sons and a daughter,” swiftly added the paterfamilias I had mistaken for a punk. “Don’t you have kids?!”

You can understand why a childless couple in their late twenties would seem like an anomaly. Central Asia is a young place: in Uzbekistan, where the average woman has her first child at 23, more than 30% of the population is under 14. In neighbouring Tajikistan, according to the World Bank, each family has 3.82 adorable children, which is just ahead of Kyrgyzstan’s average of 3.10 bundles of joy. By way of comparison, the UK and US manage only about 1.9 spoiled brats each per household.

There is an obvious reason for this: despite the Soviet influence, society across the region is largely rural and traditional — you need all the help you can get on the farm and you don’t stop until you’ve got at least one boy. But I think there’s another underlying cause too: the very land itself seems to be willing you to conceive. The fertility of the soil is a source of great pride: when taxi drivers weren’t holding forth about kids, they were giving a precise run-down on watermelon and tomato yields.

And this bounty extended to people, too: wherever we went, be it mosque, mausoleum or mountain, we were told of the endless procession of barren old maids (some probably as old as 25) who had finally had their diaper-changing dream come true thanks to the magical qualities of the location. We only had to sip from a spring or a pot of herbal tea before we were ensured that progeny were imminent if we so much as held hands.

It started on our first day, in the mausoleum of Tamerlane, the sixteenth century warlord known to European legend as a ruthless killer and to contemporary Uzbekistan as Timur, the enlightened ruler who made his country into a temporary superpower. Samarkand was his capital, and his burial place, the Gur-e-Emir, sums up his built legacy — opulence tempered with elegance, a cerulean dome above a cool marbled central chamber, plus a giant trough for pomegranate juice in the courtyard. As we paced around Timur’s enormous dark jade tomb, pondering the intricate gold patterning of the interior and the great emir’s contested contribution to world history, we did not expect the tour guide’s incessant flow of long-since-memorised facts and figures to break off into a disquisition on the potential benefits of our visit for baby production.

One of the great tricks of patriarchy has been to suggest that fertility is a problem for women alone. Accordingly, the magical watersource industry seemed mainly aimed at a female market, both at Job’s Well in Bukhara and at the spring by the tomb of the prophet Daniel in Samarkand. Maintenance for men was kept altogether more discreet: in the heart of Bukhara, the storied trading town that continues to indulge travellers’ secret Orientalist fantasies with its winding alleyways and magnificent mosques, shimmering jewel-like in the unrelenting sun, there is a bathhouse that has been washing locals and out-of-towners since the sixteenth century. After 20 minutes practising human origami on my arms and legs, the masseur Torik (19-years-old, no children, shame on him) placed a smear of spicy ginger-infused paste on my fingers, gestured at the towel around my waist and said, in Russian, “Your eggs. Rub. You and your wife will thank me later.” My manful yelps echoed through the ancient subterranean chambers of the humid hammam.

Likewise, traditional medicine has felt the impact of globalisation. We stayed that night in the home of a local yurt-making magnate, one of the unlikely beneficiaries of festival glamping. His sister, as hospitable and open as everyone we stayed with, naturally took an interest in the reproductive health of the childless couple sharing her roof. To get to the bottom of the problem she invited us to stand on a vibrating massage platform manufactured in the industrial city of Tianjin in China — in strict accordance, no doubt, with the strictures of traditional Daoist medicine — while she read our palms and pushed some new products on us. Thus I found myself, oscillating at seven thousand vibrations per second, faced with the hardest translation task of the trip: explaining to my bewildered girlfriend the benefits of multi-use sanitary towels made with Tibetan herbs.

While our hostess started unpicking layer after organic absorbent layer, explaining how the microbeads work in harmony with your body (I had found myself in David Lynch’s lost Bodyform advert), two of her children wandered in, bright eyed little girls aged two and four. Here, as our trip neared its end, was a final example of Central Asia’s greatest inducement to child-rearing: the endless parade of adorable bashful-brave little tykes who greet you round every corner with a wave and a perfectly enunciated “hello”. The avocado-fed toddlers of London, peering out from giant buggies like tow-haired tank commanders, just don’t have the same effect. I could detect within myself a growing sense of neo-colonial kinship with Madonna: who wouldn’t want to travel the world adopting a Benetton band of multiracial munchkins?

But good sense and prohibitive legal fees soon crushed that dream. And just as well, I thought, as we made one final early morning taxi journey to Bishkek airport (talk of children thankfully replaced by soothing Eighties pop). While our bags might have been full of the traditional exports of the trading nations of central Asia (pottery, silk, felt, dried fruits, unpalatable dairy products), it was those same taxi drivers we had been talking to, young men who had picked up their Russian on building sites and in restaurants, who represented the main export of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. They were back home, for now, but most of them had plans to return to Moscow, or Irkutsk, or Minsk, or wherever there were jobs to be had. In countries haemorrhaging young people, a high birthrate is a natural psychological response; for all of these men, personally, those children had been what they had gone away for, and what they had come back for.

The early signs are that we have managed to survive our accidental fertility tour without bringing back any unwanted baby baggage. But maybe all that holy baby-making water has had a lasting impact. Now, when I get in the back of an eerily silent late-night Prius to trek through the kid-free deserts of central London to the toddler-rich oases of its north-eastern suburbs, my first question to the stony-faced Uber driver is: “Do you have any kids?”