NOTES FROM AN AUTHOR
Caroline Eden
A SEMINAL TRIP TO CENTRAL ASIA KICK-STARTS AN OBSESSION WITH THE REGION, AND A WRITING CAREER
It was summer 2009, and I’d just finished working on the promotion of a hefty guidebook called Tajikistan and the High Pamirs for Odyssey Guides. I was moonlighting for the company, helping out with PR and marketing, while working as a bookseller in London.
When the guidebook was published I felt a powerful urge to go and see this small, mountainous Central Asian country for myself. I caught a flight via Riga to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. My ultimate goal was to get to fabled Samarkand, across the border in Uzbekistan.
Coming in to land at around 3am, I looked down over the wing and saw virtually no electric lights on the ground. In the arrivals hall, just two drivers were waiting: one with a sign for Oxfam, and one for me. I was alone, in my early 30s, and I felt the sort of nerves and excitement that come from arriving somewhere new, at night, with a handful of contacts and three weeks stretching out ahead. I had no laptop and a very basic Nokia phone. What followed completely shaped my life. And somehow, as I waited by the lonely luggage carousel, I sensed it would.