Blog... Better with images: j2westcountry.tumblr/post/60971975547/saturday-3rd-august-six-days-in-uzbekistan Saturday 3rd August - Six Days in Uzbekistan Here is another daily account that should have been posted a long time ago. 1 Hastily unzipping the tent door to jump outside to use the toilet in a field is not a very fun experience when you’re right next to a busy road in Kyrgyzstan at five thirty in the morning. But something I ate the night before didn’t agree with me. I arrived outside the tiny Kyrgyz-Uzbek border crossing around one in the morning, so it was hard to find a decent place to camp nearby in the pitch black. Kyrgyzstan has been interesting, but my exit from here is well overdue, and I was very happy to be at the border to a new country. Kyrgyz people have been a mixture of the friendly and hospitality to just downright indignant and rude. The negatives experiences were mostly from the three weeks I spent in Bishkek, usually in the form of an angry driver who would purposefully drive close to you, or speed up to appear to hit you if you’re slow in crossing the road- all intimidation tactics. The nicest people I met were truck drivers or local people living in yurts high up in the mountains. One thing I found funny was that many people, when hearing I was from the UK, would immediately say the names of some fairly obscure British cultural figures, at least, not the most obvious ones anyway. In China people would say “Deveed Bekhum!” or “Quin Alizabet!” In Kyrgyzstan it was “Eltun Joan!” and “Artur Conan Doyal!” The Kyrgyz border staff were very friendly, they offered me tea as I showed them my passport and told them about my journey and the route I took in very basic English. They asked to look in one bag, but it seemed more out of curiosity rather than procedure. Impressed by the camping gear and solar panel, they smiled and waved me on my way towards No Man’s Land. “Depeshe Mod!” one of them shouted to me as I rode off to Uzbekistan. Uzbek customs were a lot more serious. There was no jovial quips or offers of chai, they wanted to check through every item in my possession and know exactly how much money I had in every currency. What a refreshing experience it was when I was released into Uzbekistan. Not because of the road quality or intense heat, there were no changes there. It was because of the sheer friendliness of people. Immediately there were shouts of “hello!” and “atkuda?”(Russian for where are you from) from all corners of these fairly remote country roads. People stopped their cars next to me, to ask me several questions in Russian, most of which I could only guess what I thought the answer should be. They would offer bottles of water and fresh fruit, and try to ask where I was going to give directions. At one point a mini-bus full of young women pulled up and demanded I have a photo taken with them (as seen on my facebook), then five minutes later screams were heard as my manic fan club passed me down the road. Cycling to the nearest town of Namangan, even with the kindness of strangers, proved difficult in 44 degree heat. Every time I cycled 5 kilometres or so I would have to stop to buy a new 1.5 litre bottle of cold water (I was going through them like a Soviet going through shots of Vodka) or dunk my whole head in the nearest stream or fast flowing gutter. Each time I stopped, people would come out of the woodworks and peer at my bike, asking me questions and wanting to shake my hand. It was unfortunate that I had fallen off my bike a couple of days previous in Kyrgyzstan and cut my hands, because Uzbek men really love to slap their palm into yours when they greet you. After a few hours of this I was forced to try and find quiet stretches of road to stop in, the kind greetings and intrigued inquisitions were getting a bit too much and I was wincing at the thought of another full-forced hand slap greeting. I arrived in Namangan around 8pm and found an old dilapidated Soviet hotel to stay in with air conditioning, as I could not possibly sleep in the heat. I changed money at a phone shop on the ground floor of the hotel building, where the kind shopkeeper had invited me in to enjoy his air conditioning and then watched my bike and bags whilst I checked the prices in the hotel. He told me that it had got as high as 50 degrees in the city that day, and that this week was especially hot, even for this region of the world. Hyperinflation in Uzbekistan means than every small shop like his will happily buy your dollars at a much better rate than the banks. There is as an issue of storage since one $100 dollar bill can be put into a wallet and takes up no space at all, where as the equivalent in Uzbek Som is in three big bundles of cash and takes up this much space: I ate Shiaslik kebabs for dinner then got an amazing night’s sleep in air conditioned room, the first I had experienced in two months of travelling through the summertime of Central Asia. 2 The next day was spent mostly in an internet café. My late awakening and the intense daytime heat made me opt for a night ride, so I was able to escape the majority of the 45 degree sunshine in a nicely air conditioned room. I set off around 6pm as it was getting dark, testing out some cheap flashy disco lights I bought for my wheels for this sort of nighttime riding, where there are absolutely no street lights. Uzbekistan made me realise that I really enjoy riding at night, especially when the weather is hot and there is little in the way of scenery. Whenever I was riding in the evening/night with Nick back in China, it was always the twilight and nightfall period I would enjoy the most, as I would always get a burst of energy around this time that would keep me going for a few hours. Around midnight I stopped at an outdoor restaurant for some tea, to stay hydrated. The owner didn’t charge me, then sent over a plate of melon followed up by two enormous peaches. Such hospitable people! I cycled through most of the night, through small empty country roads, with patches of land where there would be nothing, not even a farm for 20kms around me. The complete pitch black darkness made for some incredible stars, and the break stops were spent mostly gazing upwards whilst lying on the still-warm asphalt. I crashed (mentally, I didn’t actually crash my bike) at about 4am, and decided to set up my tent between some hedges and sleep in the last couple of hours before daylight. 3 I woke up with some farm girls laughing from the side road at the half naked British guy lying in a see through tent with no flysheet. Clearly the tent was less concealed than I thought it was in the pre-dawn darkness. The distance covered in the night made up for the lack of sleep, so I felt still felt good, but when the summer heat started setting in properly around 9am, I knew I had to get to the next small city to find somewhere to sit out the midday sun. Some nice guys gave me a Muslim hat to wear when I stopped to buy some water, which I wore on the way to town, much to the delight of people waving` at the side of the road. I arrived around 1pm, exhausted and dehydrated in the city of Kokand. After cycling around for a while I came across a fairly cheap hotel and decided that I might stay one night here. I hadn’t made huge distance that day, but I had made enough in the night and would hopefully be able to cross the border to Tajikistan the next day. The evening was spent walking around the city admiring the different architecture and atmosphere that Uzbekistan offered compared to other Central Asian countries. Kokand in particular is a very clean and grand looking city, with buildings looking fairly new but not modern, with an ancient charm about them. Uzbekistan is certainly better at presenting a clean and prosperous image of itself than other Central Asian countries, and has done the most to remove as many traces of the Soviet rule as possible (the ugly parts, at least). The signposts are in Roman script rather than Cyrillic, the eye-sore uniform buildings have been removed from city centres and the buildings which represent the traditional Muslim Turkistan culture have been cleaned up, renovated and emphasized. Uzbekistan is an impressive place in parts, although there is still much room for development. I walked around taking in, thankfully looking like less of a western tourist without my overloaded bike attached to me. I ate a delicious Borscht soup for dinner with bread, salad and kebabs. The heat had got the better of me again, so I slept pretty well that night. 4 The next day was a slow movement from city to border. I left fairly late to avoid the midday sun again. As I was leaving on my bike, as people recognized my tourist status, everyone started waving and saying hello again. The kindness of Uzbek people in the Fergana region really is astounding. Even the crazy people are hospitable. I stopped to talk to and take a photo of these two kids: Then I was called over to take a shot of this guy in his underpants, who started posing: He then came over and started offering things for my journey. Like this plastic parrot: He then offered me a large coke bottle filled with dirty brown street water. See that crusty bit of bread he’s holding? I found that he’d snuck that under my saddle later on: Nice guy, the kindness was all there, but he wasn’t. On my way out of the city, after meeting the generous man in his underpants, a car that wafted out nice cool air from behind the windows, pulled up nearby me with a man who introduced himself as Yunus. He was a local Kokand person had lived in London for a few years. He wanted to show me around Kokand. I explained that I had to get going, as I needed to get to Tajikistan. He gave me his number and said to call him if I had any problems. Later that day, after a few hours of riding through hot wind as the landscape began to change from agricultural land to a more sparse desert land, I realised that I had taken a wrong turn and was heading to the wrong border crossing. There were two to Tajikistan, both not too far away from each other, but one was closed due to lack of activity. I was heading to this one. It was lucky that just as I was asking a local about this, Yunus called me and was able to translate. I took a hard right and began my 30km detour. A few moments later there was a small bang noise, and I looked down to see that not only had my back tyre blown out, but four spokes were now broken. The terrible road conditions of these farm areas had finally beaten my back wheel. It was just at this point getting dark and I was too exhausted to deal with it. Thankfully a local farmer helped me out and showed me to a tiny mechanic shop. The shop said they could fix it overnight, and the farmer said I could stay at his brother’s house, who spoke English. His brother showed up drunk with gold teeth shining from his mouth and was quite overbearing, with minimal English. He said he was the local Russian teacher and reminded me a lot of Jaws from the old Bond movies, but it was very kind of him nonetheless to let me stay at his house. I left my bike at the shop and the farmer took us in his car to his inebriated brother’s house. 5 When I woke up at 5.30am just to go to the bathroom, I did not expect the brother to make the abrupt appearance that he did, as I was stumbling back to my bed on his living room floor. It was apparently time to go already, and the original farmer picked us up in his car to take me back to the shop. The shop was closed but they dropped me off and said they would come back in 10 minutes. I never saw them again. Fair enough I thought, they didn’t owe me anything. When the mechanic did arrive, communication proved to be an issue. With no sign of anyone who spoke English in this tiny town other than Jaws and his brother, I decided to take Yunus, from the previous day, up on his offer of help and call him. All I wanted was for him to help translate for me, but it turned out they didn’t have the right tools to fix my bike, so Yunus told me to wait and that he would pick me up with my bike and drive me back to Kokand. Before I could argue against it he had put the phone down, and appeared about an hour later. He offered to drive me back to Kokand and show me around if I stayed one more day. I thought what the hell, why not enjoy one more day in the pleasant town. Yunus then went on to be a ridiculously hospitable host for the day. The extent of things he offered me, all because he said he was treated well the UK was absurd. He found a bike shop, fixed my bike, treated me to lunch, took me to get a haircut, bought me a new t-shirt and towel, took me to a water park, treated me to dinner and then paid for half my hotel room. He also wanted to find me a masseuse for my muscle pains and a dentist for any filling I might need, but at this point I had to tell him to stop. Every time I tried to offer him money he refused telling me I was a guest in Uzbekistan. It was only the hotel where I had to insist that I pay some of it, as he had been paying for everything all day. An amazingly generous guy, Yunus is the perfect example of how spectacularly welcoming Uzbek people can be. 6 The last day of my first leg of Uzbekistan was nice and simple, as Yunus drove me back to the village where he picked me up, so I could finish the last part of my journey to the border. The border crossing was fairly simple and similar to my entrance into the country. The guards checked all my bags and were thorough on the Uzbek side, whilst on the Tajik side they made me fill in one form, stamped my passport and waved me on my way. Tajikistan is nice enough so far, but with visa issues looming over me, it is hard to get into the comfortable swing of cycling every day. My five days in Uzbekistan showed some of the warmest hospitality I’ve experienced in my life, let alone this trip, and I am really looking forward to going back there.
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 23:17:02 +0000
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