for my ten day passover vacation i went to central asia! the first
hurdle was getting a visa in advance for uzbekistan, which still has an archaic
soviet-style multi-purposeless-step expensive visa application process. once
that was figured out though, it was actually remarkably cheap to get there!
i flew first into bishkek, the capital of kyrgyzstan. the airport,
manas international, has been a major staging area for the u.s. military
efforts in afghanistan. bishkek is a nice little-feeling city of about one
million people. kyrgyzstan is arguably the most forward looking of the stans –
for example westerners don’t even need a visa to visit. interestingly though,
it is also the –stan most friendly to its soviet past, arguably because it was
a relatively poor area that benefited significantly from being part of the
ussr. bishkek itself was built by the soviets, evidenced by its wide tree-lined
boulevards. the soviet legacy has its drawbacks too though – for example kyrgyzstan was left with more than its share of radioactive waste. i arrived in the
middle of the night and hung out at the downtown ala-too square as the sun
rose. my first order of business in bishkek was to attempt to procure a visa
for tajikstan to be of use later in the trip. i searched all morning for the tajik
embassy, for which online directions were sketchy at best. finally found it in
a nondescript house in a residential neighborhood, marked only in cyrillic. got
the visa easily! everything in kyrgyzstan is in cyrillic and i was quite lost
most of the time. slept in a hostel room with, among others, an old russian guy
who had a multiple drug resistant tuberculosis-style hacking cough. despite the
cool outdoor weather, the room was kept so hot that everyone could wear no more
than briefs to sleep. i think i’m getting too old for the hostel thing. bishkek
had a really nice coffee house chain called sierra and some excellent cheap
korean food. there was a gargantuan outdoor market called osh bazaar, where
they were selling everything from sheep heads to the local delicious homemade
delicacy of brown fermented carbonated mare’s milk with chunks.
i then headed west, across the border into kazakhstan (after showing up
at the marshrutka/shared taxi station and waiting for five hours for the
vehicle to fill). along the way we swiped another vehicle at high speed,
sending it into the ditch behind us. arrived in taraz, kazakhstan at about 9pm,
and wandered around looking for a place to spend the night. in the main square
of the town i met some tobacco-spitting high school boys, one of whom spoke
english and accompanied me on a walking tour of the expansive town until we
found a hotel two hours later. kazakhstan is rich, thanks to oil. i saw more
stretch hummers and escalades there than in the rest of my life combined. rich
but traditional - there were also kids riding horses through downtown taraz.
next day grabbed another marshrutka (shared taxi) to shymkent, kazakhstan, and
then to the uzbek frontier. a seemingly-nice non-english-speaking uzbek woman
who was heading in the same direction ostensibly took me under her wing in
shymkent, offering to share a series of taxis and shared-taxis to the capital
of uzbekistan, tashkent. well, lets just say she ended up conning me. last time
i ever trust a woman, jklol.
crossing the kazakhstan-uzbekistan border was one of the more chaotic
processes imaginable. little old women can push! the uzbek customs forms are
labeled only in cyrillic. there are some very aggressive “paperwork ladies” who
presume you’ll be hiring them to fill out your forms for you and will grab your
passport without your acquiescence; after some pushing and shouting i was able
to retain my passport and escape them. instead i got some help with the forms
from the uzbek woman who i didn’t yet know was conning me (she also expected me
to help carry her luggage – should have seen it coming). i was also approached
by an uzbek soldier who gruffly demanded that i log into my phone and hand it
over to him. after some protestation, it was realized that he just wanted to
delete a photo that i had taken outside the building an hour earlier which they
must have caught on their ever-vigilant security cameras.
once into uzbekistan, it became clear that the woman was conning me
when she wanted to continue sharing a taxi on my dime. so i got another taxi to
tashkent. this english-speaking driver guy also ended up being a bit dishonest,
dropping me off well short of the agreed-upon destination and demanding the
full fare. he followed me into a metro station, shouting into my face about his
kids who he claimed would be going hungry that night because i gave him $1 less
than agreed upon for taking me less than half the distance agreed upon. a crowd
formed, including a gaggle of uzbek police officers, and that was my
introduction to uzbekistan.
then came the tashkent metro. uzbekistan is a police state. there are
government people everywhere, watching everything. if you so much as glance at
the single map that is in every metro station or say something (or don’t when
asked something), they’ll know you’re not a local and demand to see your
passport, and examine its every detail for the next 15 minutes. they will also
ask you many personal questions, which you will feel as though you must answer
as they are police and you are in a police state. the questions will likely be
in russian and you will sort of have to guess what they are asking and act out
the answers. then once you are in the metro there are cameras watching your
every move. you may be incarcerated for taking a photograph in a metro station.
the best part though is that all this only costs 20 cents per ride!
read part 2 here
read part 2 here
