Booking it to Bukhara

As you may have guessed, my typical strategy when I enter a new country or region is to expend every available resource to get myself to the farthest and most inaccessible part of that country and then slowly work my way back, ideally in time for my flight out.  This is a little trick I picked up while treeplanting so that I’m not walking over trees I have already planted and wasting precious seconds in my planting time.  The problem when applying this sort of one-size-fits-all logic to travelling is that I am usually in a country with an unstable political character and even more unstable infrastructure so by the time I get to the edge of the country and know what it takes to get there I realise I have underestimated the underlying instability of my own emotional state and immediately start to panic when I look at how far away the airport is from where I am and I worry I’ll never make it back in time.  It’s these moments of desperation that I see the best of myself emerge. 

In terms of what I wanted to get out of Uzbekistan, I had a rough outline sketched: I wanted to see the Aral Sea, I wanted to see the Fergana Valley, the Afghan border (possibly a quick dip to see Masar-i-Sharif), and I wanted to see the great Silk Road cities of Bukhara and Samarkand.  Other than that, I assumed that the spaces betwixt would be filled with oily plov, gut-churning kymyz, a stay in a yurt or two, and a lot of heatstroke.  For some reason, I chose the night train to Bukhara to be the best way to start my trip.  I don’t know why.  I think if I were to do it all again I would have shot straight for Khiva and then Karakalpakstan and the Aral Sea, and I can already feel you agreeing and wondering in disbelief how I could be so stupid but I was a young man who was accustomed to making foolish decisions, so it made sense at the time.  In any case, I went to the train station to purchase a second class sleeper ticket on the Afrosiyob Express to Bukhara. 

I spent the day preparing for the journey and bidding adieu to Tashkent.  It had only been two days and I can’t say I had fallen in love with the place.  I ate some delicious love at the bazaar, and had been so overcome with heatstroke that I didn’t even notice how ridiculous it was when I was gifted a watermelon and decided to carry it around Tashkent for 2.5 hours, on the subway, to the internet cafe, to eat more plov, and then when I brought it to the hostel owner who said “thank you” politely and then went and put it with all the others. So many melons. I also purchased a bottle of wine that was labelled “Georgian Wine” but which I later learned would merely run afoul of Canadian liquor labelling laws and should actually merely be ‘“Georgian-style wine” which in itself would be a generous stretch.  After two or three sips, the wine was pronounced undrinkable and I gave it to some American the next day who said “thank you” but who knows if he wanted it, or enjoyed it, or pawned it off onto some other unsuspecting fool.  

I also purchased a pizza.  Pizza and trains and me are truly the golden trifecta of the modern era.  There is nothing I like more than sitting on a train eating a pizza that went cold a few hours ago and gazing out the window wistfully at the passing scenery.  Of course, when getting up to the station I was dismayed to learn that we needed to line up to get into the station and put all our baggage through scanners.  I Put my backpack in, which had the box strapped to the back.  As I waited for all the bags to be processed through the x-ray machine, suddenly there was some commotion and the security guard flipped the monitor around to face me and the crowd and she exclaimed, exasperatedly, “IS THIS A PIZZA?”, gesturing to the fluorescent outline of that perfect spherical disc of joy I was about to consume.  "Yes, it is a pizza” I proudly stated, grabbed my bags, and proceeded into the terminal.  I then hopped on the train, found my carriage, and joined my fellow travellers - an old Russian man who had lived in Uzbekistan, a young Uzbek man who was in the midst of practicing ramadan and who I must have horribly offended by not only offering pizza, but also pizza with bacon, and someone else who remains somewhat forgettable to this day.  

I spent a fair amount of time in the dining car too, not because i love the food (I actually almost always do) but because it has such a romantic allure.  There was nothing romantic about this dining car, but I could stretch my legs and have a bit of space to myself, and sit in solitude and reflect on the fact that I was on a train racing across the steppes of Russian Turkestan, and that this was probably the most comfortable I would be for the next two weeks. 

By the Whiskers of Kûrvi-Tasch(kent)

Did you read Tintin?  I did.  That’s a Tintin reference.  Yes, perhaps that reference would be more aptly placed in the Balkans, but, if I am honest, so too would Tashkent.  It’s incredibly difficult to pinpoint exactly where Tashkent is.  I mean, it’s definitely there, and I was definitely in it, but if you were to ask me where the centre is I would be hard pressed to point it out.  It reminds me of the outskirts of every major Soviet city I have ever been to.  And that’s the whole city.  I kept wandering around hoping to find the centre but I never really did.  I have taken at least two Urban Planning classes during undergrad, and I feel like it has given me enough familiarity with such favourite concepts as “Tower in the Park,” “Garden City,” and “Lollipops and Curlicues.”  Tashkent had all of these, just no core.

If you’re as into Soviet centralized city planning as I am, then you’ll know that there was a horrific Earthquake in 1966 and the local planners used this as an opportunity to redo Tashkent, historically a bastion of bourgeois and feudal power, in true Socialist modernism and Soviet idealism.  Or the other way around.  The two have become so intertwined it’s easy to conflate.  All grid, all decentralization, all the time.  No doubt, as I describe this, you’re thinking about Skopje.  Well you’d be right, except there was no massive horse statue with equally and unnecessarily enormous testicles (and an explicably missing penis*), so that’s where you’d need to drop the comparison.  

The first day in Tashkent was spent acclimating to the oppressive heat and trying to orient myself in the, well, Orient.  I was staying at what was considered to be the only “hostel” in Tashkent at the time and it had a nice pool in the courtyard where I chatted with a few Russian and Dutch people.  I then set off to explore the city, which was extremely difficult to do as no amount of map investigation could really ascertain for me where I’d find much of an historic centre, if any.  I hopped on the metro and had just as much fun seeing all the different themed stations as what was likely up above.  I did quite enjoy the metro stations but good luck ever getting a picture of these because they are so on edge about the potential for these photographs being used for terrorist intel.  I don’t even know enough about cameras or at all to frame a picture well enough to ever be considered for any sort of espionage shortlist, but I suppose at quick glance that’s neither here nor there. 

*Okay, we need to talk about the elephant [trunk] in the room here: the Alexander the Great on a horse statue in Skopje is very genital-presenting, but the designers were faced with quite the predicament when they needed to either put the full stallion genitalia on display, or save on the cost of steel by avoiding it.  In the end, they decided on half a penis, and two full testicles, so there is no way you can look at this horse and not think that they could have done this a better way.  No matter how you slice it, it would have been awful.  My advice is not to put a statue of a Greek leader in a Slavic city.  But who am I?

Tousle in Tashkent

Well, I can’t say I necessarily recommend flying to Tashkent at 3:30am but surprise! There’s literally no other way to do it. But let me tell you, the entire ordeal of waiting in Sheremetyevo for 8 hours until the the last group of Aeroflot planes - those bound for the southern former colonial possessions of the Russian Turkestan - is quite an experience that I have literally no interest in recounting or reliving.  What I remember about this particular time is that beer and basic food were expensive and everyone huddled around the massive vacuum smoking zones.  Pretty run of the mill, really.  

But what a primer for getting my emotions ready to deal with Uzbek border services and the lack of organization yet oppressive protocol-based order that President Islam Karimov had imposed.  After deplaning I waited at the visa desk for someone to appear, which took about an hour or so because - okay, stay with me here and try to appreciate that I honestly want to offer constructive criticism - they decided it wasn’t necessary to have the visa desk open during the hours that international planes were arriving from major hubs, presumably full of passengers requiring visas on arrival.  I want to be sympathetic towards it being 3:30am and all, but I feel like there is literally nothing that an Excel spreadsheet cannot solve, and I really think one of the Karimovs needs to simply ask me to help out with airport personnel scheduling and in exchange I would accept payment in not having to pay $70 for a Letter of Invitation and a further $80 or so for the visa to the country.  As the man looked over my application - “look over” being a fairly ambiguous and all-encompassing verb to really explain that he looked at it and saw it was a piece of paper and then proceeded to print out my visa, stick it in my passport and probably laugh to himself about how stupid I was to pay this much money to visit. 

Once through the visa desk I was stamped in to the country and I proceeded to the security gates, where I put all my luggage through a scanner.  The line I had chosen was under the firm grip of a young woman who was absolutely powerless in the face of my broken Russian, blond curls, and exotic charm.  She asked why I was visiting and told me all the good places to go and what to eat.  Then she sent me on my way to fend for myself as the usual flock of rabid and bloodthirsty taxi drivers descended on people leaving the airport.  If you’ve ever seen the Lion King when Scar gets swarmed by those hyenas, then you’ll agree the analogy is appropriate. 

I just know that this guy is about to hang up so he can piss me off. 

I fought my way through the taxi drivers and decided to walk away from the airport, partly because I was feeling claustrophobic, needed fresh air, and was not interested in getting into a fight with a taxi driver.  They, on the other hand, were very interested in getting into a fight with me, and several of them followed me down the road hollering at me out the window of my taxi asking me where I was headed.  Or they did that drive-by star where they hold out their hands and sort of shake then like they are holding a pair of large dice or horse testicles* in their hands and slowly shaking them open-palm and look at me like I’m an idiot for walking.  As it was 7am and I hadn’t slept at all and had been in transit for the past 15 hours, I was in no mood, so I just kept walking and ignoring them.  One followed me for such a long time that I very cathartically yelled at him to leave me the F alone which he begrudgingly did.  I then proceeded to walk in the direction I believed my hostel to me, which took a very, very long time, and I was wearing jeans and it all became very apparent that it was going to be a hot and uncomfortable day.  

*Don’t even wince, you know exactly what I mean.  

Carmina Burana Tower: a Kyrgyz goodbye

My last few days in Kyrgyzstan focused around visiting the Burana Tower and really not much else.  I had done a lot in Central Asia so far, albeit not nearly as much as I had planned, but for the limited ease of access and somewhat terrible weather, I felt like I had deserved a bit of a break.  So I spent lavishly on tea at a local teahouse called “Coffee Shop”, continued to lap up lagman at the little wooden house next to the stadium, and got really sick a couple of times.  

I also did make it to the Burana Tower.  Why anyone built this this is completely beyond me but I am so glad they did because I visited it on the most beautiful day and had a full view of the valley.  It makes no sense why anyone would build such a tower in the middle of the valley.  It’s not even that tall.  In fact I feel like it was a huge waste of resources and effort, but I was really happy I got to see it.  It was actually my favourite thing in Kyrgyzstan I realized, as I sat on a mound of dirt looking at the tower and the mighty Tian Shan in the distance on a crisp and sunny November morning.  There was also a a pair of youths bombing around the rough terrain on a motorcycle with a sidecar and I eyed them suspiciously and with envy.  One day. 

It was a nice way to spend the day before my departure from Bishkek, a city that slowly grew less and less enchanting for me.  But this has always been the case with me - I have a natural bias towards Dushanbe and the Tajiks and for some reason no amount of social conditioning can fix this.  This is me, and the first step is coming to terms with it. 

Trying to the find the airport was less of a nightmare this time around because I had already practiced on my trip to Osh, so I feel like these instructions and pictures will help others in the future stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were. Actually there’s not a tonne of value I can provide here.  You just go to the central boulevard thing and look for the sign (pictured).  Asking people probably won’t help much, and if I’m honest they have probably changed the whole process since I was there.  

Upon arrival at the airport I spent the last of my Kyrgyz currency on some tea and a beer and then boarding my Aeroflot flight back towards Moscow and ultimately the still warm and ever-lovely Budapest.  

Up In This Bish

At this point, I was ready to leave Karakul.  Between my passive aggressive host, and the beheadings, and the needlessly intricate door regime, and the recent snowstorm that had engulfed the city, I was ready to take off.  The next morning I wandered down to the marketplace, ate a plate of fresh pelmeni, and walked back to the bus station to await my chariot to Bishkek.  Sometimes there is nothing more fun and psychologically cathartic than plugging in your iPod and zooming across the central Asian steppes in a snowstorm in an old Soviet bus.  Except when it takes forever to leave because someone needs to bring on about 50 burlap sacks full of potatoes and then you get stopped outside Cholpon-Ata by the police who come on and search every male and check every ID and all the baggage.  Normally I'd be all, "Ugh, let's go!" but I did feel safer afterwards knowing that the hat-trick killer was not on the bus. 

Back in the Bish I was pretty determined to visit the Osh Bazaar, eat a final serving of plov, and try that famed Kumyz that everyone just goes nuts for.  So, I popped by the Osh Bazaar and it was closed.  Then I wet for plov in a yurt at the Dordoy Bazaar and it was…atrocious.  If there is one thing I have learned about the arduous journey of plov, it gets much less flavourful and much more tough and muttony as you go north.  This was the case in that yurt in the Dordoy and the only way I could get myself out of the situation was to intermittently shovel spoonfuls of the unpalatable plov into a plastic bag that I always carry around (a little trick I picked up from my grandmother after repeated trips to the Kelowna Mall food court) and when the hostesses returned to ask how my meal was I responded, “delicious!”  Look, I know what you’re thinking, but this food wasn’t very good but the hostesses were so lovely and I was in a yurt, and I there’s a very real chance that while I may not like Kyrgyz-style plov the 5+ million Kyrgyz do so now is not a time to exercise my white male privilege.

After the plov incident I explode the market for exotic spices and kumyz and, let me tell you, kumyz could use a powerpoint presentation or two in marketing.  If someone asked me what a bucket of _____ looked like I would probably direct them to the dairy section of the Dordoy bazaar.  What I ended up buying in bulk, however, was honey.  The old Russian woman selling several variants gave me several soup spoons’ worth of samples until I finally was so overcome with diabetic shock that I just bought whatever this sorceress was selling.  I also got some spices - mainly berberis, chilies, and some variant of cumin - and they were fantastic.  I basically barged into the spice section and screamed, “How do I make plov?!!?!” and everyone immediately bolted to attention to scream at me their own preferred method.  In retrospect, after the Dordoy-yurt-plov-plastiv bag incident, I shouldn’t be asking anyone north of the Ferghana for advice on something so delicate but I wasn’t exactly in buyer’s market so I worked with what I had.  

Door Prizes

The American went out for the evening to eat with a local Uzbek family and opted to tell me I wasn’t invited.  I mean, that’s fine, I don’t expect to be invited anywhere, really (except everywhere in Central Asia, and the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe, and almost everywhere else I have ever been because apparently I wear some sort of sign that says “Please don’t let me die” in almost every conceivable language), but was it really necessary to tell me that I wasn’t invited?  In any case, it was cold and snowy in Karakul (you’ll remember me dropping the jar of kimchi on the icy steps, though I hardly blame the ice.  I blame my attempt at trying to have it all, and having it all at once.  It can’t be done!) and I was more than okay with staying in.  I was also warned that 3 severed heads had recently been found in the area, so I was fine with hunkering down in the safety (?) of this Soviet-era apartment and making a couple pots of soup* and get down to writing these postcards I keep accumulating. 

My host had warned me about the door, and he had warned me sternly.  To the point where I don’t think he actually trusted me with using the door.  He clearly trusted me around his belongings but he did not trust me with opening or closing a door.  Sure.  That’s fine, really, I’m not too bothered.  So anyway, let’s talk about this door.  It’s really important you understand my material circumstances and the general mechanics so that the story really comes alive for you, as it did for me.  It was actually a double door.  There was a large padded metal door on the outside that clamped shut with an old-timey skeleton key that turned about 4 times to lock all the bolts.  The key hold for this was accessible from either side, which meant you had to lock it with the skeleton key from the inside once you got home.  Then there was the second door, which was wooden (or else it wasn’t, but it was certainly older) and it clamped shut from the inside.  The reason all this clamping business is worth noting is because the doors were totally sealed from either side, and there were no cool tricks you could do with a credit card to break in.  In short, no one was going anywhere.  The inside door had a separate keyhole with a proper lock contraption.  Real keys too, none of that skeleton nonsense. 

So opening and closing this door was just miserable.  It was a real pain to have to turn all the locks and as someone who is paid to find efficiencies in processes and ways of working, I felt like this was an unnecessary amount of effort to open the door.  I decided that I should just leave the skeleton key in the lock in the first door and leave the inside door ajar.  I mean, no one was getting in, I was going to be awake, the apartment was small, and I was actually worried that my host, upon returning, would be annoyed at how long it took me to open all the locks on the doors to let him in.  So efficiency won out and I left the door open with the skeleton key in the inside of the outer door.  Does any of this make sense?  So this was fine until the weight of the massive inside door forced it to slowly shut and trigger the lock to click and effectively close the door.  I tried for the knob to open it back up but I noticed THERE WAS NO KNOB.  THIS DOOR HAD NO KNOB.  OMG OMG OMG OMG OMFG THERE IS NO KNOB ON THE DOOR. 

Okay do you understand exactly what is going on here?  The skeleton key, which was on a key chain that contained the other keys to the inside door, was inside the lock and trapped in the airlock  between the doors.  And because the key was INSIDE the lock, no one from the outside with a skeleton key could open the door from the outside.  Do you have any idea what sort of panic wave flashed over me at this time?  Do you have any idea how many times I jumped up in the air tensely and hissing “OMI@&^%INGGOD I’M GOING TO KILL MYSELF!”?  I actually stopped breathing for about 8 seconds.  Seriously, a triple decapitation was preferable to this.   And while it would have been a little bit less hair raising if I had been given a whole evening to solve this, but he was due home at 9pm and it was 8:50.  I was hoping the gods of irony were smiling on me but then I realized that this situation wasn’t ironic at all. 

Now look, let’s just be clear: I’ve locked myself in a room before.  Twice.  Once was in some condemned house I lived in in Vancouver where I couldn’t stop tinkering with a lock in my room with a bobby pin and I accidentally triggered the lock to close and also break it and it had broken in the closed position and I had to send one of my roommates a frantic Facebook wall post asking her and others to come help me.  I ended up taking the door off.  The other time was in a much more modern facility at UBC when I left my keys in the outside of the door and it shut and autolocked and I couldn’t operate the lock from the inside because there was a key in it.  Durrr.  So I had to text a friend who lived nearby to come over and turn the key to open my door.  She also had like strep throat or something and this was the first time she left bed in a week.  Oh, I guess I also once locked myself in my car, and I have no idea how that actually happened but it was an American auto so who know what myriad things went wrong?  I had to scroll down the windows and shimmy out, then open the door with the keys.  Oh, and I guess I also locked myself in the bathroom at the Grand Forks Credit Union when I was 5 but, like, whatever. 

Annnyway.  Back to that Soviet apartment block in Karakul, Kyrgyzstan, where I was currently contemplating jumping out of the 3^rd storey window and ending this chapter then and there.  Drawing inspiration from the multitude of times I have locked myself into something, I thought about what I know about locksmithery.  What I gleaned was that locks can be dismantled, from the inside, with a screwdriver.  So I ran into the kitchen and tore it apart looking for some sort of tool, or flat ended knife (thank god the Soviets didn’t needlessly overcomplicate their lives with all that Robertson and Phillips nonsense).  The first drawer I found contained…a screwdriver.  I just thought, “Really?  Too easy.”  WELL IT WAS TOO EASY.  The screwdriver was too big to fit into the tiny ridges of the screws on the lock plating.  I instead tried a butterknife and was able to work the screws with ease.  The plating came off and revealed a complex and intricate lock system with a square hole for where a door knob would fit into if someone ever found it even remotely sensible to install a DOOR KNOB ON A DOOR.  But before we get ahead of ourselves with these ultra modern concepts in home design, the question of the square hole was standing in the way of me opening the door.  Almost instinctively, I thrust the larger screwdriver into the squarehold and turned it.  The spring on the lock released and the door gingerly swung open.  I grabbed the skeleton key and immediately began reassembling the lock, attached the plating, and fastened the final screws.  I returned all the equipment, washed the knife, swept up any bits that had fallen on the floor, then put on a kettle for some tea and tried to calm my shaky ass down. 

About 5 minutes later I heard the buzzer and opened the door for my host, who asked how things were.  And super casually I responded, “Oh good, did some reading” while my eye caught the screws and plating on the door where fresh paint had chipped away and the screws had been put in the wrong holes so the brush strokes didn't line up and all four just seemed to glare at me, taunting me, as if to say, "We're going to tell" and I broke into a sweat thinking, "omg, omfg, he's going to see the paint chips.  HE'S GOING TO SEE THE PAINT CHIPS."  I really can't handle all this stress.  I would actually rather die than have to go through that ordeal again.**

* I told him I would probably only go get some soup to make and he had said "If you eat any of my food you will have to pay for it."  Uggghhhhh.  All I wanted was a package of chicken noodle soup from the local shop, and the shelves were almost completely barren except for some amazing Russian bean soup, so I really came out on top here.  

**I wrote this passage in 2013, assuming I’d post it shortly, but I am now re-reading it in 2016 and I am absolutely riddled with anxiety.    

Uyghur, Please!

I had a couple days to spend in Bishkek, and since you know I am actually not interested in spending another second of my life in Bishkek ever again, I decided to go to the Issyk Kul, which is a bumpin’ summer getaway for cost-conscious Russian families.  It was early November, so thankfully I wouldn’t have to compete with these Russians for places to stay so I took a bus to the town of Issyk Kul and then hopped into a marshrutka that was going around the rim of Lake Issyk Kul to Karakul on the other side.  The view out the window of the marshrutka was unbeatable, except I couldn’t see it because I was in a completely inopportune area of the marshrutka and it had curtains and I ended up talking to an American Peace Corps worker who occupied the majority of my time with conversation that was…peppered with condescension to say the absolute least.  

The Road to Issyk Kul

When we finally reached Karakul it was dark.  I had hoped he would know of some cheap accommodations and he only knew of a couple of families that took in people but it was took late to contact them (it was 5pm) and that I should probably stay with him.  I didn’t totally want to, but I figured it was a good option.  He had two enormous 5L jars of kimchi that he had just made and was bringing back, and we had taken a taxi to the apartment.  When he was helping an old lady out of the shared taxi he handed me the two jars and and i was struggling to carry it and my bags so in attempt to get a better grip on the jars and the bags, one of the jars popped out of my grip and onto the ground and smashed, sending up a heavy waft of sour, spicy garlic.  He was not happy.  I wasn’t happy, but here we were, unhappy.  

Some beautiful mountain scenery and the charming taxi economy

He gave me a room to sleep in and I hit the bed fairly hard, exhausted from a long trip.  The next day I planned to explore the city and find some acceptable accommodation that would allow me to breathe and manage my own affairs.  This wasn’t possible, as he took me to some village where he taught Korean (-?  He wasn’t even Korean.  I must admit I admire his linguistic prowess) and I was free to wander around, which I really enjoyed because Kyrgyz villages on the threshold of winter’s embrace are quite beautiful.  I met the family he had stayed with when he first moved there, and we enjoyed some tea and cookies.  I couldn’t quite understand the mothers’s Russian, no doubt a fault of my own incapabilities, but my host helped by yelling at me the same words louder and aggressively in Russian. Thanks.  I believe this is along the lines of “saying it louder and in English” in theory.  After I helped the mother pick apples and then took a walk up the hillside to survey my domains.  

Fun stove

I then met my caretaker after his lesson and we returned to Karakul.  Okay, is it weird that I say “washroom”?  Because every time I said I needed to use a “washroom” he looked at me in a strange way and said “You’re not going to find one of those here” which is totally fine by mean I will pee literally anywhere, but then after I asked again a few hours later he finally said, “What the @#$% is a washroom?”  Ugh.  

I asked to buy this but was told there is no guarantee it works and therefore the seller felt it would be an unfair transaction.