#4 - My first pomegranate

Uzbekistan, 2012

I was leaving the ancient city of Bukhara, one of the most picturesque places in Uzbekistan and a perfect example of how to develop a modern city around historic buildings while preserving its character. Even the soviets were considerate in their era, keeping their communist grids away from the historic centre. Nothing looks out of place in Bukhara and many of the buildings have stood unmodified for almost a millennium. If you ever get the chance to go there, it's well worth your time.

I decided to try doing a car share from Bukhara to my next stop, Khiva. My host gave me a lift to a service station on the outskirts of town. Here I found several dozen men hanging around in the car park, leaning on their cars and attempting to solicit passengers to fill their cars. Armed with a piece of paper with 'Хива' written on it and the amount I was prepared to pay, I wandered around until somebody made an approving grunt.

I sat in the car while my driver went about finding more passengers. However after about 15 minutes things started getting a bit heated outside and one of the other men started getting aggressive with my driver. They were shouting in Uzbek and I couldn't tell if they were just fooling around or not. A moment later the man threw my driver against the side of the vehicle, still shouting at him. He then shifted his attention to me, speaking loudly in Russian (most people assumed I was Russian). He made hand gestures to suggest that my driver had been drinking and beckoned me to get out of the car.

Slightly startled, I considered making a bolt for it, but ultimately decided to stay put. I figured that I was probably overpaying for the journey and my driver had just got into a "friendly" scuffle with another driver who was jealous. At least that's what I told myself.

Eventually my driver managed to locate another three passengers to squeeze into the car with us and I found myself wedged between two portly gentlemen in the back. We weren't on the road for long though before we turned off the main road and onto a narrow dirt track. I had no idea what was going on, but the other guys seemed unperturbed, so I decided not to worry about it. It turned out that we were making a short stop at the driver's house to pick up some additional cargo. He also brought out a bag of pomegranates that he said (I think) he'd grown himself and handed one to each of us.

Back on the road again, we quickly left civilisation behind and headed out on our 470km journey across the Kyzyl Kum desert. Early on in the journey my fellow passengers began a game of guessing where I was from, but didn't speak English so were reliant on my equally non-existent Russian. After a long succession of 'nyet's we eventually got there, as one of them guessed Angliyskiy and I nodded 'da'.

Despite the language barrier, one thing I did pick up on was that we were low on fuel and needed to find a petrol station. This wasn't helped by the pot-hole riddled road, putting us on a serpentine path on an uneven surface, quickly burning off fuel. The landscape was vast and barren. We saw few other cars on the road and passed nothing. When eventually we did reach a petrol station, it turned out to have no fuel.

We trundled on, but after another hour went by it was clear that we were now running on fumes. The others had gone deathly silent and I sat squashed in the middle, clinging onto my pomegranate. If we broke down here it would probably be quite serious and I suspect it'd be a long wait to find alternative transport.

Thankfully we eventually were able to refuel though, and after a very long journey (it was probably around 8 hours in total) I made it to Khiva, exhausted and relieved. Once I found a hotel, I celebrated by cracking open my pomegranate and pondering why I didn't just take the train.

#3 - A rough landing in Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan, September 2012

Last summer I decided to travel alone across Uzbekistan for 10 days, in a bid to educate myself on a part of the world that I knew very little about. This entry covers my arrival into Uzbekistan.

You may remember that at the time, a poorly researched American film called "The Innocence of Muslims" sparked widespread (in some places violent) protests across much of the Muslim world. On the day that I was due to travel, the protests showed little sign of abating, however the Foreign Office suggested that they'd yet to hit Uzbekistan (a country where 90% of the population are Muslim). As a precaution, I registered my movements with the Foreign Office, then headed to the airport.

I flew to Uzbekistan via Moscow. My flight was filled with mostly Uzbek families, who all seemed to be returning from Russia with new flat-screen TVs and PCs, all as "hand baggage". I watched in bewilderment as a man made numerous futile attempts to cram a 32" flat-screen television into the overhead compartment.

Uzbekistan Airways: Good luck

My arrival into Tashkent (the capital of Uzbekistan) was a decidedly miserable experience. Landing at 3am, it took me over two hours to get out of the airport. By the time I made it outside, I was desperate to get to bed. Blearly-eyed, I staggered out into the morning sun to face the throngs of eager drivers, all looking for their first fare of the day.

After some half-hearted negotiation, I was shown to a car. The driver spoke only a few select phrases in English, so he spoke to me mostly in Russian, hoping that I'd understand. I did not. As he fired the engine up, music suddenly blasted through the stereo at a volume that would make astronauts stationed on the ISS jump. "Why do I recognise this song?" I thought to myself, before the unmistakable lyrics of Euro-pop abomination Aqua slapped me unceremoniously across the face: "I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie wo-o-orld. Life in plastic, it's fantastic!". Great.

Any hope of my driver turning down the music evaporated as the third Aqua track came on. Occasionally we slowed down as he tried to solicit business from passing pedestrians. This was a little alarming at the time, but I eventually discovered that you can't really hire a taxi in Uzbekistan, you merely hire a seat in one. 

As we arrived at my hotel, the driver pulled up across the road from the entrance gate. "You want to change money?", he looked at me expectantly, "I give you black market rate!". Now... I vaguely remembered reading something about this in a travel guide. It had either said "never change money with taxi drivers" or "take advantage of changing money with taxi drivers". I was fairly sure that it was the former, so I gave the man $200 (US dollar) and in exchange he gave me a pile of money about four inches thick (not an exaggeration). I was too tired to count through hundreds of notes, so I merely flipped through them to check that they were all indeed notes.

Just some of the money that I was given by my taxi driver

After a short nap, I decided to venture into Tashkent. This was it, I was finally in Uzbekistan!

The first thing I noticed about Tashkent was how foreign it felt. This might seem like an odd statement to make, however there are two good reasons for this: 

1. Thanks to a brutal massacre instigated by the Uzbek government in 2005, there are now next to no foreign brands in the country, with the exception of a few Russian and Korean ones. Consequently there are no recognisable hotel chains, fast food companies or fashion outlets in the country.
2. The Uzbek language is incomprehensible unless you know Russian. Most things seemed to be written in modified Cyrillic, so for example, the city of 'Khiva' is written 'Хива'.

Tashkent is a nostalgic throwback to Soviet times. Drab concrete buildings line the uniform grids of streets. At night the roads are illuminated predominantly by starlight. Fading propaganda slogans adorn every façade, while the ubiquitous police patrol the streets below. 

I spent half a day trying to buy a train ticket to get out of Tashkent. Initially I couldn't find the railway station, as it was cunningly disguised as a government building. I then couldn't find the ticket office. Nobody I spoke to could speak English and none of the signs contained information that I could understand. I eventually found the ticket hall hidden around the corner, quite a distance from the station. Unable to read any of the signs at the counters, I joined three incorrect queues before I found one that led to a counter willing to sell me a ticket.

Exhausted, but victorious, I left the station in search of dinner. Little did I know that the following day I would find myself wearing a burka and getting invited to a wedding....

To be continued