See the Remote Sights

Would you chuck that luxury trip for one that goes beyond reckless extremes--and makes no promise to bring you back alive? A trip that leaves sanity, sanitation, and edible food behind? If so, you’re Ted Rall’s kind of gal or guy: “Totally nuts.”

Rall has excellent credentials for the role of creator, guide and guerrilla kommandant of Stan Trek 2000, a conceptual tour de farce of countries whose names end in “stan”: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan --areas that won independence when the Soviet Union broke apart in the early ‘90s. “It’s adventure travel for people who want to go where they’re not wanted; it’s not for the weak of heart, but for the weak of mind,” Rall says only half in jest. Rall, an award-winning political cartoonist, author and local radio talk-show host, says the idea began as radio satire and soon became an actual itinerary, with 15 people signed on and about 30 more on the cusp. (State Department travel warnings are in effect for Kazakhstan and Tajikistan.)

He said all this on a cell phone while driving the New Jersey Turnpike toward his New York condo overlooking Columbia University, which expelled him some years back for, as he put it, “doing too little work.” (Rall’s professors must have choked when their lackluster student won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy journalism prize for political cartoons in 1995 and then was a finalist for the ’96 Pulitzer Prize. He just won the Kennedy prize again for 2000.)

“I’ve had this weird central Asia obsession for years,” Rall, 36, explained. “My mom got National Geographic for me, and one issue had a glossy pullout photo of magnificent mountains in Kazakhstan, with text describing it as the most rugged, most remote place on Earth. I’ve wanted to go there ever since.”

In 1997 and 1999, Rall and a friend traveled “the stans.” They poked into places where Rall says he feared for his life, limbs and intestines, as parasitic insurgents struck from within.

When he was hired two years ago by KFI-AM (640), Rall says, he came up with “Stan Watch” “as a sort of satire--breaking news from countries nobody cares about. I wanted to make the point that Americans don’t care about foreign news or what happens overseas. I chose countries I thought they’d least want to hear about.”

But a funny thing happened to Rall’s intended put-down of the populace.

“I discovered I was wrong. There’s immense hunger for news from overseas. The ‘Stan Watch’ became the most popular feature on the show, a kind of cult thing. I get tons of mail from people who feel involved, compelled to go there.”

So Rall put together “an anti-tour tour,” a group of family, friends and listeners who would gallantly “do this thing that definitely should not be done.”

Why not?

“It’s dangerous as hell. We could be killed, robbed, kidnapped--these are all former Soviet republics, after all. There are Taliban terrorists everywhere . . . whole countries full of professional terrorists,” he says.

A staffer who answered the phone at Uzbekistan’s embassy in Washington, D.C., was not amused by Rall’s hyperbole. The man would not identify himself, but asked this pointed question: “Let’s say a friend calls from Uzbekistan and says he heard that kids are shooting other kids in American schools--and police are killing innocent people. He wants to come here but he’s afraid. Would you tell him not to come? Would you tell him to stay home? Of course not. It is safe. Also in Uzbekistan.

“We have the rich history, the cities 2,500 years old, the warm hospitality and unbelievable cuisine.”

And they have Yusup Magdiev, the embassy’s first secretary, who explains that Uzbekistan has very satisfied tourists who “come here regularly.”

For Rall, “the stans” are an exotic mix of Communist residue with Islamic fundamentalism, combined with Turkic cultures and a free-market capitalism so berserk on black market schemes that “you can buy your own nuke at a flea market for $1,200.”

Roughest of all are the border crossings, he says: “Routine ones take four to six hours. But you can easily be detained for a day or two, and shaken down by the militia for money, cameras, watches--whatever you have. When you run into police or any authority in “the stans,” you are totally in danger of being killed. The cops are corrupt, underpaid and mean. They earn their money with the point of a gun. If they choose, they can leave you with nothing--and there isn’t an American embassy or an American Express office for hundreds of miles. And no phone to call one.”

“To be quite fair,” says Bill Smith, 31, a Rhino Records executive who lives in Los Angeles, “I think Ted’s overstating it. He’s known to exaggerate almost everything. It’s part of his humor.” Smith plans to wed Rall’s sister-in-law Alice Chang in Uzbekistan, at a building so beautiful that “Genghis Khan wept when he saw it and refused to let his men burn it down.” Smith is going because “I think it will change my perspective on life . . . it may make me more conscious of what I have and more thankful to have it.”

The real point of the trip, despite Rall’s negative rhetoric, is the same thing that has motivated travelers forever: the search for the exotic, for adventure, for beauty.

“Hey, you’ll be in the most remote part of the world. You won’t see a Taco Bell or a 7-Eleven anywhere. You will see the romantic city of Samarkand, in Uzbekistan,” says Rall. “It’s astonishing--right up there in beauty with Paris, France. It was once the second-largest city on Earth, before Genghis Khan came in and killed everybody.

“And you’ll visit the Extreme Life Research Center in Repetek, Turkmenistan, smack in the middle of Kyzyl Kum (pronounced KIZZ-ilkoom) Desert. It’s the hottest place on Earth. Everything that lives there either bites or stings.

“And you’ll see hunters who hunt with golden eagles--birds with 12-foot wingspans that live on the banks of the high-altitude Lake Issyk-kul, in Kyrgyzstan. And then there’s the Kazakh Cosmodrome, where the Russians still send their cosmonauts up in space. It’s totally off-limits to outsiders, but I have special contacts. . . .”

Among the eager Stan Trekkers: Geralyn Mobley, 22, of Anaheim is an ardent traveler and a senior at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She doesn’t worry about danger, she says. “I trekked through Central America for three months by myself. I took those little local buses filled with live chickens all the way from San Jose, Costa Rica, to Tijuana, Mexico. My mom had a fit about it, but it was the best experience of my life.”

Tom Scalese, 61, a Laguna Niguel computer consultant, agrees. He attended a pre-trip meeting Rall held in Los Angeles, and found nothing to dissuade him from signing on. “Hey, it couldn’t be worse than an incident I went through in ’86 at Checkpoint Charlie in East Berlin. Or Vietnam, or upcountry in Thailand . . . or the Navy spy flights I flew out of Kodiak, Alaska.”

His girlfriend thinks he’s crazy and wants him to have his estate in order before he leaves, he said.

Milos Velechovsky 48, and his son, Johnny, 12, are “set to go,” says Velechovsky, a paleontologist from Dana Point who took his wife, son and 9-year-old daughter to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina last year as part of a Balkan tour.

The self-confessed travel fanatic and history and geography buff has seen 66 countries, and aims to “see them all.” Bad food? “You can get that right here at the drive-thru burger place.” Police checkpoints? “I typically see drivers pulled over on my way to Santa Ana each week. It’s not that different.”

The tourists will stay in what Rall calls “the best hotels available in each city,” because “it’s important to treat yourself on a trip this tough.”

Air fare is roughly $1,500, and he’s asking each person to bring $2,000 to cover food and hotels. “I make no money on this. My goal is to travel with people my wife and I can stand to be with for two weeks in August.”

Ted Rall’s Web site is at https://www.tedrall.com