David Lewis wears a souvenir of his trip to Central Asia.

Spend your spring break on a beach in Florida? How about touring centuries-old sights along what was once the Great Silk Road in Central Asia? If you’re Prof. David Lewis, you chose the second option.

Lewis, who teaches in the College of Management, traveled to the nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan over spring break in March, blending his academic interests with his love of travel.

“I went there primarily for fun, but I also met with an institute,” says Lewis, who has traveled to more than 90 countries.

On his trip, Lewis visited the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategy, meeting with faculty there to share ideas. Lewis says that he’d like to co-teach a class with counterparts there in the future that would allow students to study at both institutions. The focus of the 5,000-student institute is on business and includes some smaller liberal arts programs, offering undergraduate and graduate programs, including an MBA.

Despite the distance between them, Lewis says, the school shares similarities with UMass Lowell, including its academic schedule of a fall and spring semester and two summer terms. Lewis, who teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in operations, says the institute has worked with UMass Amherst and plans to submit a proposal here to teach a summer course on Quality Management that would include an exchange.

Lewis says he made the connection with faculty at the institute about a year via an e-mail seeking an exchange of ideas. “I just love traveling and seeing things,” he says of the decision to meet in person. “They were available over spring break and so was I.”

While the meeting was a good opportunity to visit the region, Lewis’ trip wasn’t all business. The nations are known now as being former Soviet republics, but their rich history goes back centuries when they were centers of trade and education.

After Kazakhstan, Lewis visited locations in Uzbekistan. “It is interesting because it’s where a number of the Silk Road sites are located,” Lewis explains.

The Great Silk Road, the trade route that linked the West with China and other parts of Asia, ran through Uzbekistan, including cities that were founded by Alexander the Great and many that were later conquered by Genghis Khan in the 13th century. However, examples of that diverse history remain in the region in cities including Khiva and Bukhara. In those cities, Lewis was able to view architecture that goes back hundreds of years and art tucked away in museums forgotten in Soviet purges of the region.

Lewis’ itinerary also included Turkmenistan, a country rich in natural gas that still follows the old Soviet model. For this leg of his journey, Lewis had to have a guide with him at all times.

During the visit, Lewis camped out in the desert near a giant crater where a natural gas fire has burned for more than 30 years since an accident during natural gas drilling by the Soviets. “At night, it looks like an image of hell,” he says.

His stops also included major economic centers in the nations, including Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, where the very modern – “Lots of white marble; it looks like Las Vegas,” Lewis says – meets the very old in the form of marketplaces.

“It’s an ultra-modern city in the middle of the desert in a very traditional country,” he says, adding that the markets were particularly interesting to him. “I debated about buying a camel, but decided against it.”

One of the souvenirs Lewis did bring back from the trip is a Turkmenian rug, handcrafted in much the same way as a Persian rug. Known for the quality of their construction, the rug required a special export permit, he says. Another favorite memento of the trip: a tall, white sheepskin hat worn in the region by “gray beards.”

Overall, Lewis says, despite not speaking the language of any of the countries he visited and the past relationship between the Soviet Union and United States, “I was treated well as an American.” Frequently, he says, when people learned he is from the United States, they wanted to try their English out on him. And because of economic conditions (the exchange rate between American and Uzbekistan currency is 1,200 to 1, for example) and a wealth of frequent-flyer miles, spring break was “the perfect time to be there.”

- Christine_Gillette