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 inexpensive 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.
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!
