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.