For travel and country facts: Uzbekistan
MURRAY'S DIARY for the complete story, UZBEKISTAN:
(12/07/2003) People are
pushing in the queue for the Aeroflot check-in desk at Schiphol airport so we
adjust as well and run for the third desk that is about to open. While we are in
the check-in process the Boeing 737 is replaced by a good old Tupolev, very
promising, will there still be parts for plains like this? Meanwhile the group
of goodbye-wavers is growing en the KLM stewardess starts a discussion with
Raymond about the transportation of our bicycles. Our strategy has worked so far,
simply wrap the bikes with carton en make sure that the wheels can rock and roll.
Its very international, who in the world wouldn’t know what a bicycle is and
how it works? And its way better than the KLM Bicycle box; although it is
clearly marked “Bicycles”, don’t expect everyone to know what’s in, the
airport staff in Asia will without a doubt open the box out of interest. The
supervisor of Aeroflot understands and can’t hide a laugh. “But what about
damage liability?” asks the KLM stewardess to the supervisor. He only raises
his shoulders. 1-0 for Raymond because the bicycles arrive in very good
condition and without any scratch, even after one baggage transfer in Moscow and
a very noisy, rumbling Tupolev.
On arrival just after 2:00
in the morning, a man is waiting for us to bring us to the guesthouse. Through
the internet I have found Airat who promised to make reservations at a
guesthouse and he wrote a “letter of invitation” for us that is still needed
to get a visa. Just for the record, he has organised a very exclusive trip
around Uzbekistan. We like our bikes better. Hopefully The Netherlands will soon
get in contact with Uzbekistan because citizens of the UK, France and Germany
don’t need a letter of invitation any longer. 25 dollars for Airat, per person.
| Raymond and me start laughing when we look at the Lada that is supposed to carry three bags of 55 kg en two bicycles of 13 kg each, not mentioning where we are supposed to sit and how the two drivers fit in as well. Don’t know who came up with the final solution to the puzzle but it fits if half of the bikes are in the open air and we are squeezed from four people into two. | |
At the first traffic light a police
car stops to find out where we are heading to. Have to say, even in The
Netherlands this doesn’t really looks solid. Maybe the wheels are bending
already and will we hit the ground in three minutes. “What an absolute
nonsense” Raymond says, “here we go”. We keep silent in the back of the
car when the police pulls us over. There’s so many stories about the police in
Tashkent, they are known for asking $15 for getting your passports back or
because there is something wrong with the visa. And indeed, we have to get out
and hand over the passports. The two policemen look somehow bored and skip
through the pages. They talk with our two drivers and we only pick up the word
“tourist?”. The next moment they return our passports, shake hands with us
and they disappear into the dark of the night.
It is already 4:00 in the
morning when we arrive at guesthouse Ali-Tur. “The owner is still sleeping
away his Vodka-day” explains the guard. “Every day at noon he starts
drinking with his friends”. That’s all okay with me except for the little
fact that he has forgotten to tell the guard we are staying at the guesthouse
tonight and that we might be in need for a sleep by now. Because the guard
doesn’t want to wake the owner, we decide to use our own airbeds and choose
the living room.
Tashkent is Tashkent,
nothing more than the reputation of an industrial city and Aeroflot uses its
airport. According our initial plans we are about to leave the city as soon as
possible. 30% of the population here is employed by the police and I think
I’ve found the place where they all come together. When we use the subway we
test our strategy of non-stop talking and never looking at them. Be especially
prepared to know where you go to and where to get off the trains. A green-hat
stops a man and from behind one of the pillars we can see that he has to get
everything out of his bags. The subway stations itself are beautiful and look
like temples. Very Soviet mostly, massive and wide scaled, finished to the
detail but somehow they are all in need of restoration.
The vodka-drinking owner of
Ali-Tur is now awake and studies our bicycles with a smile but it looks he’s
too hang-over to talk. “One for vodka?” he asks and points to our water
bottles. We can see the first example of the average four golden teeth that all
Uzbeki’s have.
It’s Monday evening and
the train to Buchara is ready to go when we arrive on the platform. We
disassemble the bikes to make them fit the train and move towards our coupe. 12
ours in a train for $8 each is an okay-price, but we hope that no one claims the
bed in our coupe where one of the bikes is stored. Raymond looks for the train
conductor en finds him in a coupe undressing his chest. Good position to get
some things done here! “Are all places fully booked?” asks Raymond. The
conductor makes clear that indeed almost all places are taken but he notices the
6000 Som ($6) in Raymonds hand and he is okay with keeping our coupe for just
the two of us.
(15-07-2003)
Mubinjons
Guesthouse dates back to 237 AD and you can stay the night on a bed on the floor
for $10. Mubinjon himself spends all his money on the restoration of the house
that has been a family property for 5 generations. Amin is 25 and works for him
as translator when we register and as guide. He tips us to ask Mubinjon for his
rewards and without hesitation Mubinjon demonstrates how he ones run the 100
meter sprint in 10,4 seconds. He was in the Olympic team for the Soviet Union
but during the training just before the Olympics he damaged his leg forever.
Mir-i-Arab Medressa, 16th century
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Entrance to The Ark, royal town, in use between the 5th century till 1920 |
Kalon minaret, 1127 AD, 47 meters, used as watchtower and to throw criminals overboard |
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Amin is our guide for today. He arranges a car and driver and brings us to all ancient sites around town. He tells us as well about present Uzbekistan and about his plans to study political science in a foreign country. And now that we are loosing the role distinction of tourist and guide anyway, we ask him to translate some words that will be quite important for us, the Central-Asian Phrasebook doesn’t say anything about sugar, salt, diesel, chain oil, map of Ferghana Valley or sun cream. Back to the lowerlevels of Maslovs pyramid, we are in need for the basics.
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Buchara
best represents the
Silk Road on our journey. Its located halfway Xian (China) and Venice (Italy),
the outmost eastern and western trade cities of the network of roads that we now
name the Silk Road. Marco Polo must have been on this square where we are right
now, what a feeling! The square is called Registan, just like all trade squares
in the oases of the Silk Road. The palace of the Emir of Buchara is located at
the Registan. Its a massive fortress with thick walls. The living area is not
open for public but with a little help from our wallet we can take a look at a
place that is fully bombed in 1920 by the Red Army of the Soviets.
We leave Buchara with a
hanger with 7 Arabic wishes against the Bad Eye. A personal present from Amin.
Meeting the Uzbeki’s
A man moves towards us and
wants to shake hands with Raymond, left hand on his hart as a tradition for
expressing respect and sympathy for the other. Raymond replies with the same.
“Where are you from?” asks the man in Uzbek. “Gollandia”. “Aaaaah”
with a high tone that clearly expresses excitement. “Gullit, Gullit? Ajax
Amsterdam?”, Raymond smiles. “Gullit is finished.”, because there is
probably not a known word for career-retirement. There’s more men coming over
to join the conversation and the first man explains to the group that we are
from The Netherlands. Now the questions are about the bicycles. One at a time
the crowd squeezes the foam of our handlebars, swing the pedals, check the air
pressure in the tires, oh and yes, a saddle with a whole in the middle is indeed
strange, and finally they always find the bell. “Compass?”. “Yes, but
today North is West and tomorrow it is called South”, the compass gets
disturbed by the bike computer during cycling. The men laugh loudly and
translate this to each other. One asks where the shift stick is, moving his arm
as if he is in a car. Then, “Tourist?”. “No, business”, Raymond replies,
stupid questions will get stupid answers. Another is now pointing at the map of
Central Asia and Raymond names a few of the bigger cities and countries where we
are going to. He stops at China because the men lose their attention, probably
they have no idea where all of these places are. But then someone shouts
“aaaaaahhh” if Raymond translates China into Kitay. One of the crowd is
death and makes clear that Raymond will have a beard of a one meter when we
arrive in China. I reply that I will dress him up when he reaches one meter.
Some women are now joining the group. According to the Uzbek tradition I have not yet shaken hands with anyone but have exchanged a lot of nods. “Mush, mush?” (married?), they ask me with their index fingers in each other. Then one moves her hand on belly height from left to right asking if we have children. The average Uzbek has children that reach my own length at our age so I guess we don’t need a Spa resort to look younger. “No” with the same move and a nod. The conversation between the men is still continuing about the bicycles and what they cost and last but not least they exchange salaries. Raymond suddenly earns $200 a month, the average in Uzbekistan is about $30-$60 a month.
"Backgammon" "Frisbee bread"
We buy a frisbee-shaped
bread as lunch and wave goodbye to everyone. When was the time we thought that we
had much luggage with us... A boy on a bicycle next to us created more space
with a piece of wood across his carrier and with nails on top he keeps plastic
bags in place to the left and right that are at least the amount of kilos we are
carrying.
How warm these people are.
Not the cross Russian expression we expected. We only meet colourful people that
show us their golden teeth by laughing and who appreciate a joke. No sign of
cheating or fooling the tourist.
Sher-Dor ("Lion") Medressa at the Registan ("sandy place", ancient trade squares of the Silk Road) - Samarkand
(20-7-2003)This morning we have left Samarkand, here we go, first kilometers and first day.The wind is teasing us for 40 kilometers with a 7 Beaufort straight against, the road is endless and without any curve. If we look to the left its only dry and wide and on the background there are some sandy hills. What a surprise, if we look to the right it is exactly the same. What a disappointment. Short sticky plants and now and then a tree. The wind forces my bicycle to the right sometimes and my thought is that this is at least better than a move to the left under one of the many trucks or cars. Will this ever end, maybe change direction? We never reach more than 10 km/h, but... what is that... a Curve! After 12 hours cycling we are really tired of this desert en decide to search for a nice spot to camp, out of sight from the road.
Yesterday we collected the kitchen items on the bazar and on
the way we have
found a petrol station with Diesel for our stove. Shampoo and one liter of water
each will make the bathroom. The radio plays local music on the background for
us. A lot of the local channels play western music as well and when we hear
‘Summertime love’ (boys boys boys, I’m looking for a good time) we wonder
if ever the video of this song has been broadcasted.
Tonight we will lock the
bicycles to a tree and put all of our luggage in the tent.
(21-7-2003) If you want to
stay out of the desert storms you need to set the alarm clock early. The wind starts every morning at
around 11:00. What a beautiful route today, we have left the desert behind us and are now surrounded by cotton, cotton, and more cotton. Its quite
late already and we are tired and hungry. The city is not really built for
tourists so we must see if we can sleep at someone’s house. “Hotel?” we
ask at the restaurant. Of course we know that there is no hotel and we try to
look innocent. Yes, it works. We are offered to stay at the cook. What follows
has all to do with ‘as long as they feel comfortable’. We get a whole bunch
of hot water that is especially prepared for us as a shower (was it obvious...)
and in the morning we share breakfast and the whole family waves goodbye when we
leave the ‘city’ of Dashtabad.
Meeting Uzbeki's, you'll never be lonely at lunchtime
(22-7-2003) “Can you see if something has gone loose or so at the back?”. I take a look. “Well, it seems more like a flat tire what you are feeling. Ha, 0-1 in the Muriel-Raymond flat-tire-competition.
Only
in about one kilometer
we see one tree that will
bring us shade to fix the tire. 1-1, apparently I have a flat tire as well. With
a pair
of tongs I remove 17
thorns of 1cm long from the outer tube. Not a bad score for the Schwalbe
tires, in each tire just one small puncture.
After
repairing the tires we still have
20 km to go till Gullistan, according to the map. In Gullistan we planned a
break for a day. The map we use is Hungarian which we bought in Amsterdam, but
we are already there. We stay in a sport hotel next to a tennis court where once
a year the national championships are held.
(24-7-2003) The road to
Almaliq is a good quality tar road, better than the torn road cover of yesterday
which was repaired in non-professional way and made us bicycle-sick, the variant
of seasick. And guess where we pitch the tent? In the middle of the cotton
fields. Nobody cares that we place our tent here, a man on a horse passes by
with lots of grass on the backside and nods kindly.
Endless cotton fields
Angren is an extensively
stretched city, or town. It is not easy to find a hotel, everyone points to
another corner of the street but in the end we are offered a full apartment that
we may not even pay for. The owner invites us to spend some time at his home but
after a short while the electricity fails and he takes us to another place, his
club /disco.
(27-7-2003) The distance to Kokand is 130km and we decide to split this up in two days, as well because we need to climb towards 2275 meters. We have named this our baby-hill as an exercise to get ourselves in good fitness, we haven’t really trained before we left. At the beginning of what looks like three U-turns above each other climbing the last couple of kilometers, we buy and eat another of the 50 water melons we have already absorbed en we tap fresh and cold mountain water. Luckily this is ‘biz gas’ (not sparkling), the only water you can buy is sparkling, not so nice for cycling. 200 Meters are taken away from our 2275 baby-hill by the just in use tunnel. Our sunglasses are replaced by headlights and on the back we place two lights that we have bought from the Police in Amsterdam when we got pulled over for a bicycle-light check. You can choose, paying the fine or paying for new lights, its up to you, Amsterdam rules. Its quite dark in the tunnel and the road is not yet tarred. At the entrance people are painting the bricks and halfway the one kilometer there are other people working in the tunnel. Even in the dark I can see them thinking... ‘Is it a bird... is it a plain...? Its two bikers!’. We must look like mine workers with our head lights. When going down we speed up to 40 km/h and could have easily done more if it wasn’t for the potholes. The kilometers run fast and we decide to continue to Kokand. A small disappointment of 20 km storm against us, in again a desert-like area, but then we are in Kokand. A personal record of 130 km in one day. During these 130km we’ve past four road-blocks. At the first road-block the police wants to try our dog-chaser with their well trained dogs, didn’t work of course. At the other three we are invited to drink Vodka. We have found the only real excuse one can make to refuse Vodka-parties: it doesn’t go together with cycling. If it would have been beer or so...
One of the thousand invitations for a tasty lunch |
The
central Asian Cuisine
A mixture of Russian and
local dishes make a pallet of choice. Our number one two pens of Shashlik Always
served with mutton (fat), a Frisbee bread and salad. The other day we asked for
Shashlik and the girl got shy and looked away. She knew the way to ask us: “muuh?,
bèèè? Pok-pok?” she asked, her eyes full of hope that we would understand.
Raymond wanted muuh-Shashlik. I took it as it was and only found out the next
day that she was talking about animals. Then there is Plov (Russian), a mug full of baked rice with carrot and meat. Very new to us is Camca (say Somsa), very nice for lunch. It’s a pack of flower filled with meat and onions, also (as all the other dishes) served with tea and Frisbee bread. |
Watch out for
the white pieces of mutton, simply remove them and eat your way to the bottom.
We eat a lot of Lagman, a kind of noodle soup with meat and all sorts of
vegetables. The quality really depends on the cook. Sometimes there is more
noodles and almost no soup, more like a pasta bolognaise. We have heard about a
pasta dish called Besh-Bahmak, but haven’t tried it yet. Tea, tea, tea is the
description for this region, if you don’t like it, better learn to like it!
Along the route there are so
many people inviting us for ‘chai’ that it would take us at least 4 out of 6
hours cycling to answer all the invitations. The tradition is to throw the tea
back in the pot three times before you serve it.
For those who plan to go to the Fergana Valley, I hope we may advise you never to go to hotel Qoqand. In the very rare occasion that there is water in the room, it’s hot only, very hot (of course the toilet is connected to the cold water pipe…). Never mind the dozen of Cockroaches who compete with you to get in bed first, and also never mind that the room lock works only after you have tried to lock it for 5 minutes, that the hotel staff occupies the balcony where you had hoped to relax with a cold beer, and that when you leave they ask you only about 10 times for the key of the room. What on earth do we want with their key!! The cities in the valley are all the same with the bazaar as the main attraction. With the exception of Margilan. Maybe we are just spoiled by Samarkand and Buchara (but there it’s the same price).
Margilan is a small village that runs a
traditional silk factory, it's quite impressive to see how the silk comes from the
cocoons and how the painting and weaving process works. The factory employs
around 200 persons that is partly mechanised. Along the route to Kyrgyzstan we see a lot of grapes and a lot of
beautiful coloured flower gardens.
We are getting closer to the
border crossing and from there it will only be 20km to Osh (Kyrgyzstan). It’s
almost a straight line to the east…
Dream on, in the real world
you will get stuck at the border crossing, this one is not for tourists. For the
exit-stamp in our passport we need to go back, up north and then to the east
again, that’s around 60 extra kilometres on the meter but it was worth a try
to go straight. The
customs officer looks really hopeless and he wants to help us, but can’t let
us trough. Alternatively we are offered a chair and table where we have lunch.
At around the hottest hours of the day (48 Celsius in the sun) we leave for the
last 60km.
It’s 11:00 and it’s
coffee time! The first nice coffee spot we find is at the beginning of a
driveway. When we start building up our kitchen tools a man passes by and asks
what we are doing. ‘This is our stove and we are preparing coffee.’, we
answer. ‘Aaaahh… my home, my home’, he replies and insists that we drink
coffee at his place. Our coffee is almost ready but if we reject the offer it
brings bad luck to his household. On the other hand it is believed that offering
and sharing tea and food to trespassers brings luck to the family, even if we
only take a small piece of bread or a sip of tea. We feel like we are on a
pilgrimage. Luckily we don’t have to come up with a solution, the man runs
away and comes back with a
pillow-like cloth to sit on and with a handful of peanuts, raisins and some
apples. Luck to all of us.
Our next break is on the
pavement of a shop, with the intention to take a few sips of water (it’s very
hot) and move on. Not in central Asia. The shop-owner has noticed us and she
brings us a bottle of soft drink. We thank her very much and absorb the whole
bottle in a Guinness record time. We offer to pay for it, but again, not in
central Asia. Another gives us choice of melon and off we go, to the next
pit-stop with all hospitality? Well not a pit-stop but a police road block. The
policeman is very interested in our passports and where we are heading for. When
China comes in the pictures he grabs a water melon of the ground and offers it
to us. Unfortunately it’s a 10kg water melon this time and he understands that
it’s difficult to carry that on top of our luggage.
Our last fan of today along the route before we go into Kyrgyzstan is a man of about 50 years old, driving a car. He adjusts to our speed and urges us to stop for a few minutes. He really wants to have a talk with us and share some tea. We kindly reject the offer and apologise a hundred times each since we want to cross the border today. Oh no, not again bad luck to a family? No, he finds an alternative. He gets into his Lada and drives along our route. After 5km we notice him waving at the other side of the street. He found us a nice spot in the shadow and he is ready to chop a melon (that’s the third melon offer today) for us. Okay, overruled by hospitality here. He knows that The Netherlands has windmills and water dams, it seems he’s an architect. When we show him the postcards of the Netherlands we brought with us, he chooses the windmill to keep. In fact, he wants both our wind mill cards.