Taking Metternich's quip that "Asia begins on the Landstrasse" all too seriously, I have plunged myself deep into the heart of Europe's "Internal Other." Or at least I had plunged myself for a year before returning to my first love, financial controlling and credit risk management, in Budapest, recounting my memories retrospectively and in chronological order (and you know how much I love chronological integrity!).
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.
I rose early after my night at the cluuub and I walked to the airport to catch my flight with Tajik Air to Bishkek. It was a pretty decent and comfortable ride but I was one of 4 people on the plane so it felt kind of weird. But I had the opportunity to see the Ferghana Valley from the air and also pass over the Toktogul Reservoir while I sipped my free juice-like drink. Arriving in Bishkek I immediately knew how to solve my problems and not have to murder a taxi driver by hopping in the marshrutka outside for 200 som and then getting to the centre of the city, where I walked to a different hostel this time, owned by a Japanese-Kyrgyz couple and more decently priced. Also I think the wifi was better? I don't know.
After lapping up some lagman and a delicious Jibek Jolu beer (it tastes like the Granville Island Amber Ale*), that evening I went off to the Guys Fawkes Day celebration way in the south of town. The Southern BBQ was owned and operated by an American who went to Uzbekistan with the Peace Corps in 1992 and had stayed in the region ever since, originally working for British American Tobacco, and then Nestle, and then a few other organizations. He told me that due to the Uzbek currency being made nonconvertible sometime in the late 90s, there was a bunch of nestle chocolate eggs brought into the country but because they could not convert the currency they decided that it was not worth spending the marketing dollars to actually sell them so they took the loss and left them in some warehouse. I would love to find that warehouse. It reminds me of the Uzbek Cotton Scandal of the late 1970s, which is one of my favourite Soviet scandals and even Brezhnev's son-in-law was implicated. Fascinating!
I also met with a bunch of Aussie and Kiwi expats who all worked for a Canadian mining conglomerate and learned about that chocolate fiasco. The miners gave me a ride to my hostel in their taxi and told me I was staying in the absolute ghetto of Kyrgyzstan, which I naturally liked. They also said I had a “*&^%ed up accent” but I don’t even know what that means. I don’t have much exposure to the Australian dialect, apart from what is consistently and evenly disseminated in the form of “good times” at literally every hostel I have ever been to. Have you even seen the “I’m beached, bru” youtube series? I realise that it’s Aussies making fun of Kiwis but whatever, if “”*&^%ed up” means “100% articulate and well-enunciated” then sign me up. At least my ancestors chose to come to Canada.**
*LOL do you remember the Cafe Crepe at UBC that was open for like 5 months and was absolutely BUMPIN' in 2006? Like, it was THE place to be on campus because they served pitchers of Granville Island for $10 and everyone would go there and order beer but wouldn't get crepes and their ventilation system let out into the building our something and they got shut down because they were a health hazard and were full of drunk 18-21 year olds and they didn’t have a proper liquor licence? Was there ever a better time to be alive than the mid-to-late 2000s?
**lol do you remember when I was a park ranger at Christina Lake and several campers independently asked if I grew up in Australia? That doesn’t even make sense. If you’re looking for a lack of worldliness, look no further than literally everyone from Calgary.
Okay so I actually did have a reason to leave Dushanbe. I decided I needed to go back to Bishkek early was I was actually interested in meeting with some expats who worked for a publication there and they were hosting an open house night at a Southern Style barbecue in south Bishkek to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. So obviously I had to go for that, because if there is anything I love more than clubbing in Dushanbe, it’s…actually not Southern Barbecue, journalism, or Bishkek at all. I’m really not sure what the urgency was about but I did it. I bought a ticket on Tajik Air which is prestigiously known as being one of the airlines that is banned from the European Union over “safety concerns” or whatever. Ugh, nanny state, am I right?
For my final night in Dushanbe I met up with Ashley, the Brit who was working for some UN detachment doing whatever. No idea what people actually do, you know? He had a ballin' pad in downtown Dushanbe and I was to sleep on his couch. We were going to head to another British expat's place where we had shot after shot of revoltingly vile vodka chased down with a massive 5L jar of fruit juice from the market. There were two Americans who worked at the embassy teaching English and wanted to move to Canada to take advantage of all the sexual freedoms and Tegan and Sarah concerts. They loved Tegan and Sarah. I told them how crazy it was when I found out that Tegan and Sarah were—at this point they were expecting me to say “lesbians” but instead I said—“Canadian.” I was actually really surprised when I found out they were from Vancouver.
Anyway, we hit the cluuuub hard. Like, so hard. We arrived at one of two clubs in Dushanbe and we danced our faces off. Well, at least I did. You see, the young expat community was so small that they all kind of had a bit of drama with each other as they did additional shots the drama escalated and they all sort of faded away. I, on the other hand, only cared about the Tajikistan Top 40 selection that the DJ was playing, and when Pitbull's "Give Me Everything Tonight" came on, it was me in my trout t-shirt (from Canadian Tire) and hiking boots, Ashley, and the two American girls on the dance floor dancing and I got so caught up that I screamed "This is it! This is the best night of my life! This is where my life peaks!" and it's true because everything has been kind of a depressing gradual decline ever since. Meanwhile, of course, the local Tajik elite were sitting in their booths smoking shisha and abstaining from drinking and lethargically watching with jaded eyes this exotic foreign entertainment that existed solely to please them. Best. Night. Ever.
Rather than go on to the next club, I knew when to bow out when I was riding high so I hitched a ride home with an Egyptian perfume salesman in a Mercedes SUV. Ashley had given me a key so I was completely in control of my own person, though evidently walking at night alone often meant getting extorted by the local police, and as much as I love that, I wasn’t about to compromise my $150 flight the next morning. Did I mention I paid for it in cash in an aviabillet office? I just reached into my bag and pulled out $150 and handed it to a lady who handed me a ticket. I don’t trust cash transactions one bit. How on earth was that an acceptable way of reserving my ticket? How did she know how many seats were available on the plane? How could I confirm that the ticket was even for a real plane? Was her Apple II computer even plugged in? So many questions.
Everything about this video sums up the night. I have no idea what that 5L jar of fruit juice was, but I have never felt more comfortable describing something as "sizzzurp."
I have almost nothing to say about Bactria, except that going there has given me so many options regarding clever posting titles that I wish something actually interesting had happened on my time there. I mean, I suppose once I woke up and realized the Pamirs were a non-option, I had all sorts of options available to me on my trip back to Dushanbe. I walked towards the market where I had been dropped of and a man started hollering at me from across the street. This is usually the best way to get my attention so I crossed and began to negotiate. I thought he had said 300 som, but he was actually only saying 30 som, and I was just in a tizzy ready to talk him down because I had paid 70 to get there and I thought it was unreasonable. Anyway, it turns out I was the unreasonable one and he was just trying to recoup some of his losses on his speedy trip to Dushanbe.
Or was he? I sat in the back seat with a young girl and there was an old man in the front. He dropped off the young girl only a half hour into the ride and then suddenly turned off the main highway and we started travelling down a dirt road. "Ahh, so this is where they kill me," I thought and immediately began to prepare for battle. I put away my iPod, and secured my camera and other belongings tightly in my bag. Then I laced up my boots and tested the amount of legroom I would require to extend my leg and boot the driver in the back of the head in order to cause enough commotion to crash the car and then leap out of it before it rolled of a cliff and exploded into flames at the base of the nearby ravine. But then we slowed down at a bus stop outside a tiny village and woman approached and handed the old man in the front seat a baby. They kissed, and then we were on our way, with the tiny cargo secured onboard.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?
On the way to Dushanbe we stopped at a local carwash, which was actually just the side of the road where two teenagers had buckets next to an irrigation ditch and would scoop up water and dump it on the car. The man explained to me that he was going into the big city, and you had to have a clean, fancy car. Who was I to disagree? The weather was warm and things seemed to be good. In fact, I started to think more and more what a terrible idea it would be to ever leave Dushanbe. It had almost every conceivable comfort I needed. Why leave?
Are you guys really into Canadiana? I thought I was but had no idea what “CityTV” or whatever is, but apparently it’s a thing from Toronto, which is a city in Canada, and the guy who started it was born in Kulob. I actually think that is Kulob’s main claim to fame. Being the birthplace of the founder of a minor Canadian TV station. I guess it’s better than being known as a world-renowned heroin trafficking point, like literally everywhere else in Tajikistan. Anyway, Moses Znaimer was born to some Latvian or Russian or Ukrainian parents (well, obviously the dad was Latvian because Znaimer) and my first though upon disembarkation in Kulob was that a town that sired such a tech-savvy individual might have internet. It didn’t. It also didn’t have any banks and I was conveniently out of cash. But even more conveniently there were herds of young men holding stacks of cash screaming “DOLLAR! EURO! ROUBLE!” at me and I absolutely love that kind of attention.
After changing some dollars with some local entrepreneurial teenagers, I headed to the market to see if I could scrape up the remaining bits from the plov trough for a modest dinner. I couldn’t. You need to get to the plov trough by 11:30 or you’re not eating at all. And if you get there too late, you get the plov that is sitting at the very bottom of the cauldron that is completely immersed in in cottonseed oil and it’s just not a good situation when you’re not totally comfortable with geolocating all the bathrooms in a 1km radius from you at all times. I wasn’t very comfortable in Kulob, but then again not even the dregs from the plov bowl were available to me.
Instead a small cafe above the market hall warmed up some chicken shashlik, prepared a chopped tomato salad, and fried up some of the tastiest french fries I have ever eaten. When they found out I was Canadian, they also sent over a convoy of young women to serve me tea and ask if I had taken a wife yet. I hadn’t. But I was more interested in some of the cookies that they were selling on the lower level, and I’m such a sucker for super-liminal marketing practices that I even bought some of the cookies without really liking sweet foods, and without any of the cookies coming in the shape of early-2000s mobile phones, which are my absolute favourite type of cookie and if you ever see one please contact me in the comments section.
After this tasty meal I set off to find a place to sleep, which I really should have done much earlier in the rapidly darkening daylight. There were two hotels that I knew of. One was going to cost $60 and I just felt like it wasn’t a good use of my money. It looked fantastic, don’t get me wrong. It was a massive concrete Soviet tower, looked abandoned, and had some sort of tracksuit store in the concourse level. Totally my scene, right? Well, similar to any respectable professional dancer I only had a few dollar bills stuffed into my boxers, so I could not afford $60. I walked down the street and found a much more plain hotel done in plaster and pinkwash and when the price I negotiated was something totally affordable by the kicker was whether or not i would be sharing the room. It depended on if anyone else showed up. Considering this was probably fairly an expensive place to sleep for the average Tajik, and there was literally no other reason to visit Kulob, I decided to play chicken with the tired and humourless hotel receptionist. I won, and ended up having the room to myself the whole night.*
That evening I took a walk around Kulob to discover that literally nothing was open. I thought perhaps the train station was a good place to check to see if it were possible to take the train to Dushanbe. It wasn’t. It’s barely possible to do anything by rail in Central Asia because the Tajiks only have a couple of spur lines that are offshoots of the new-Uzbek rail system because Soviet planners never anticipated a weird alternate universe in which the nationalities they created would one day split off and impose harsh visa regimes on one another. lol, idiots. Anyway, at the train station, which was next to a creepy abandoned theme park, I asked the simple question of “Is there a train?” which, if you ask me, is a totally rational question. A man demanded ID and that I go into a room with him. Hell no. I walked away and he started shouting and demanding ID. I said it was in the hotel and I would be right back and for some bizarre reason he believed me. Anyway, in case you’re interested in how the story ends, I didn’t go back.
*”The whole night” is an important time range qualifier because one I fell asleep on a Serbian train and I woke up with an old man using my ankles as a pillow. You never know when people just pop up out of nowhere.
** I also didn’t go clubbing at all in Kulob because I felt like the entire city was full of roaming militants and I’m just tired of that shit, you know?
I know that Dushanbe may as well be the be-all, end-all but sometimes it's nice to get out of the city. So why not head to the countryside in the south, which was a hotbed of rebel activity in the 1990s? My destination was Kulob*, for several reasons. One is that it's on the highway to the Pamirs so I figured that I could simply catch a ride there to Khorog. That's actually the only reason I had for going. It is also the 3rd largest city in Tajikistan, and I had such a blast in the 1st and 2nd largest ones that why not continue down the list? Furthermore, it was a major stronghold of Alexander the Great as the region of Bactria, and the delicious two-humped camels supposedly got their start here.
Little in the middle but she got much back.
Taxis to Kulob left from the very south of the city and it required a taxi to get to the collection point. In the parking lot I chatted with the taxi drivers to try to figure out the optimal rate to Khorog, and they told me it would be $100 just to get to Khorog. I did some quick math and realized that the trip from Osh to Khorog was $250 for 4 people, so like I would have to spend around $60 minimum after that. This was all hard to stomach because I didn't have a lot of cash on me, or access to future cash flows if I plunged myself into the Pamirs (or even if I stayed in Dushanbe, as ATMs were not exactly widespread and it seemed hard to locate hard currency). The other deciding factor was that the drivers all told me the roads were in such bad shape due to the snowstorm that there was no guarantee of getting through. Even a few days earlier I had met with some local couch surfers who told me that they were waiting on some French guy who was supposed to arrive three days earlier but seemed to be trapped in the Pamirs. Who knows what happened to him?
Anyway, I decided on Kulob because it was en route to the GBAO and I figured if I had the opportunity to hop a ride to the Pamirs I would take it and no one could stop me. I negotiated to pay 70 somoni (and it turned out that all others would pay that too) and shared a ride with an outrageous old woman, a 23-year-old biznezman (who had like 3 kids) and someone else but the driver and the guy in the front seat were fairly forgettable. The fact that I didn't get the front seat bothers me to this day but I got some pretty great pictures from out the window. Like pictures of people selling apples. And pictures of the enormous reservoir that supplies the country with something like 100% of their power 60% of the time.
The drive was actually beautiful and I have since resolved to return to Tajikistan. I love Tajikistan more than you may believe, and while it was glaringly obvious that much less cash was allocated to the non-Dushanbe regions of the country for simple things like roads, there was a magic to the geography, both physical and human. Lots of apple vendors who decided to set up shop at inopportune switchbacks, and large Kamaz trucks turning at inopportune moments, and people in souped-up Ladas aggressively and impatiently passing us at inopportune and really quite dangerous places. It was all magic, and I loved the trip.
Dushanbe face, Qurgonteppa booty.
We stopped to pray at a town just near the turn off to Qurgonteppa (a hotspot for heroin trafficking, rebel activity, and cotton farming) and then just before Kulob we dropped off the lady and her three bags full of fresh persimmons at the market. She thrust 4 persimmons in my hand and I said “No, please. No.” I am sorry but I do not like persimmons. Have you ever seen the Simpsons episode where Homer buys a farm and throws all the seeds he can on the ground and then fertilises it with radioactive waste and then tobacco and tomato seeds cross-pollinate and they create tomacco? That is what I feel a persimmon is and tastes like. I have no way of proving this but I don’t think that changing my mind at this stage in life is an option.
*Okay, so in Hungarian the "ly" sound is a "y" and so in Russian I could not remember if Kulob was pronounced with a "K" or "Kh" and with a "l" or a"ly." So you'll understand my problem when I called it "Khuyob" instead of "Kulob" and everyone laughed at me. Get it? No? Okay, so Kulob is the name of a city in Tajikistan, and "Khulyob" in Russian would basically mean…Dickville.
I really wanted to soak up the Tajik magic and get into some Zoroastrism so I went to Hissor, which is a town not far from Dushanbe and heavily banks on a local fortress as its chief tourist attraction. It's nice and stuff, but they need to stop thinking that fixing old fortresses with new bricks is a good idea, because I like looking at old stuff, you know? Anyway, as always I attracted a tonne of attention in Hissor because I have no idea where I am and what I am doing at the best of times and my Russian is so bad that people just laugh at me and wonder how I have made it this far in life. The fortress was a few kilometres south of the main part of the city, so I walked from the bus depot along the main street and enjoyed the beautiful warm weather. In the area where the bus depot parking area gradually transitions into a marketplace, a man with a large wheelbarrow walked up to me and asked me if I was from Hungary. I said technically yes, I had come from Hungary, and he told me that he had lived there in the 1970s as a soldier. Can you imagine how bumpin and sexually liberated Hungary must have been in the 1970s? Especially when you are coming from the Tajik SSR? I was kind of jealous of him because coming from rural Tajikistan as an occupying power to 70s Hungary must have been like a free passage to the West.
Cool, casual pic at the Hissor fortress.
The grounds around the fortress were cool enough but the procurement department of the heritage restoration ministry had made some seriously ill-informed choices when they selected the brick for restoring, as it was that weird plastic-looking brick that you see in garbage suburban homes that will likely fall down in the coming years or turn into a ghetto if you’ve ever watched “End of Suburbia” at an impressionable age and since then given up on any hope for humanity and have since been preparing for the coming Apocalypse. There were some cute kids wandering around the fortress who screaming at me to give them money, but I liked the market in Hissor the most. It was so full of life and energy and animal carcasses and sassy young tweens yelling at me and telling me to buy these fantastic sheepskin vests and different Chinese-made that I had zero interest in purchasing.
Cool, casual sheepskin vest.
Anyway, southwards towards Hissor two young women passed me on the street and asked me to marry one of them. So the first thing I did was get to an internet cafe to update my Facebook status to "Rory is enjoying being a "hottie" in Tajikistan.”* Achievement unlocked. Furthermore, in the marshrutka coming back from Hissor a teenager kept staring at me and when I finally looked over he asked in Russian, "Are you from Moscow?” Looks like 18 years of living in Grand Forks is finally paying dividends.
*omfg I remember the evolution of Facebook so well. Do you guys remember when the Facebook wall was a single editable text field? Wasn't that so strange? And then they allowed you to start writing on your own wall, and then it became a status update in which you had to qualify something after the verb "is" (as though simply being isn't enough work for most of us) and then a bunch of intolerable people formed a group that was some sort of petition to send to Mark Zuckerberg to remove the word "is" from all status updates so as to allow people creative expression (because evidently the great unwashed weren't simply content with simply being anymore). Then FB went as far as to allow you to comment on others' posts on your wall, and then finally not only like something, but like a comment. All you have to do is click "like" and you're engaging in user-generated content. You're basically in marketing. Get you.
