Khujand's Invisible Hand

The next morning I rose early and was prepared to take in all that Khujand had to offer.  Unfortunately it was cold and rainy, so I stuck to covered markets and ultimately found myself in the Khujand Bazaar which was absolutely incredible.  My first purchase was a package of cheap cigarettes that I was going to use to casually bribe police officers in the event they wanted to harass me and extort money from me.  I had seen this method work before so I thought that I could easily smooth any situation over by oooly pulling out a pack of smokes, offering one out, and taking one for myself, then lighting it and proceeding to smoke.  I have never done this before, so it took me forever to get the process down, but I had seen people do it countless times and it looked so effortless and cool, that I figured i could nonchalantly manage this.  I couldn't.  I was so bad.  I couldn't look casual or cool to save my life.  And I spent an entire day pulling out the cigarette pack and slamming on end down really hard on the table so as to pack the tobacco further into the cigarette as I've seen really cool people do at hostels, but when the time came for me to practise pulling out a cigarette to pretend to smoke, I realized I had tapped the package the wrong way and that all the tobacco had come out the other end - lolz whoops. 

I then grabbed a lunch at a fantastic outdoor plov cafe and a pot of tea that was absolutely delicious.  I witnessed a funeral procession go past my table and I sipped tea and stared ahead at a young family and an old couple that sat adjacent to me and envied the soviet chic style of one of the older Tajik men that I likely rightly assumed to be a Pamirian.  

The Panjshanbe market in Khujand was pretty bumpin'.  It was built by Stalin in the 1930s and it was absolutely incredible.  I am guessing Stalin, and the others who actually believed in the early days, had the grand notion that they could quell the rampant feudalism of the khanates of Turkestan by instituting a command economy and hiring several Soviet technocrats to give illumination to Adam Smith's invisible hand.  And yet, here we were, 20 years after the Tajiks formally opted out of the Soviet Union and decided to rekindle its love affair with a feudalist economic model and recapture its place as a queen city of the Silk Road by selling hanging meat carcasses, honey, rough-grade toilet paper, spices, Chinese textiles printed with bad English, build-your-own-iPhone kiosks, piles and piles of cookies shaped like cell phones*, and countless other bounties of the harvest and goods cheaply produced in Chinese factories.  I suppose that during the communism there would have also been a lot of great products available, but it's really amazing to see how they bounced back after an 80 year dip.  

Speaking of embrasure of the market economy, I went to the local museum/fortress where there was a youngster selling vintage postcards, which is actually my number one weakness.  I also buy packs upon packs of them and they sit in a shoebox in my room and I vow that when I am one day rich enough to buy picture frames, I would arrange them in some artistic fashion and put them up in my house because they are all so nice.  The ones I was interested in formed an incomplete set of traditional dances of the Soviet Union, printed in 1950, one card for each nationality.  Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Lithuania were missing, which is a shame and I've since vowed to track down the remaining cards.  The kid selling them fancied himself a local biznezman and could clearly tell I was a complete sucker and he was not willing to budge on price.  They were really only a few somoni and I was feeling like such an orientalist grandee that I felt any price was worth it to continue to amass a collection of miscellania from around the globe.  I happily paid and these post cards have formed a very core part of my refrigerator aesthetic ever since.  

I really enjoyed my time in Khujand, and I actually would have enjoyed staying and exploring more of the Fergie-Ferg, but Dushanbe was calling me, and I was hungry for the Pamir Highway, which is basically what everyone is really after when they end up in this part of the world.  So what stood between me and the Dush was the Istarafshan Pass, and all my research indicated to me that there was absolutely no way around it**.  I did a couple more tours around the city and ate as much amazing plov as I could, then planned for my passage to Dushanbe.  The Istarafshan Pass is something that I really had high hopes for.  Why wouldn't I?  It bridges the two largest cities in Tajikistan.  It connects the fertile Ferghana Valley with the capital district and the vast cotton fields of the south.  It just makes sense that it would be the safe bet in a country with breakaway regions and a south ravaged by civil war in the 1990s.  But instead, my journey to Dushanbe pushed me, emotionally and physically, further than I am normally willing to go.  

*I have such a sordid history with these cell phone cookies.  They are actually one of the great White Stags of my travels.  I first encountered them in a village high atop the Lesser Caucasian mountain range in a small store selling all the basic necessities.  I thought they were absolutely ridiculous because they weren't even shaped like a flip-phone (which is a strong indicator of where I was at in terms of being up to date with technology at this point) and yet ever since I have been obsessed with finding these cookies everywhere I go. 

**Okay, so there IS a way around it but the secret is you have to go through Uzbekistan and the Uzbeks and the Tajiks currently aren't talking because a bunch of Tajiks live in UZ and a bunch of Uzbeks live in TJ and the Tajiks sporadically and arbitrarily threaten to cut off the Uzbek water supply and the Uzbeks threaten to block off rail access to the Russian market.  Isn't that wild?  Have you ever been to Osoyoos, BC?  I have, like, a hundred times, and there is nothing more beautiful and inconvenient than the Anarchist Summit.  When you're driving up it you think, there must be another way around this!  Well there is, and it's through the United States.  Literally no one was thinking about Osoyoos or my commute to Vancouver from Grand Forks when they drew the border between the United States and British North America.  No one was thinking about how I would have to navigate this post-colonial world and what a burden it would be for me.  And now here I was in Tajikistan and Stalin's 1915 essay about nationalism in the Soviet Union was inconveniencing me.  Not to mention the millions of people who regularly commute between the two largest cities in Tajikistan and who are not permitted to travel via Uzbekistan where the Soviet-era railway runs to connect.  And don't even get me started on Mauritania, where French engineers had to drill into granite for several months to build a railway from the coast to a copper mine in the interior and they couldn't build around the grant deposit because the tip of it went into Spanish Saharan territory and some member of the French delegation insulted a member of the Spanish royal family at the Berlin Conference of 1884/5 and as a result the French were not allowed concession rights in that tiny stretch of land.  And now Africa has to just deal with these arbitrary borders and consequent infrastructure.  Isn't post-colonialism so interesting?  I really only notice and reflect on it when it inconveniences me, and that's always a mind-bender because almost everything about colonialism was constructed to indirectly benefit me.