Bananas Don't Travel Well

lovely TashkentWe had a lot of onward visas to take care of in Uzbekistan, and we didn't know how long it would take to get them, so rather than follow the logical order of things, which would have led us from Bukhara to the famed city of Samarkand, we skipped ahead to Tashkent. We figured this way we could double back to Samarkand if we needed to wait a week for a visa. We left Bukhara by night train. Like virtually all the infrastructure we encountered in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the train was Soviet, an exact replica of the one we'd taken from Tbilisi to Baku. We arrived in the early morning and treated ourselves to a credit-card break: we stayed at the Grand Hotel Tashkent, where they gave us a fifty dollar discount just for asking.

Welcome to UzbekistanThe border station at Hojeli, Uzbekistan had the ambiance of an abandoned gas station. There were several small concrete buildings with no glass in the windows, and a tall signpost that at one time would have been lit in bright neon welcoming visitors to Uzbekistan. It was lunch time, so we had to wait for someone other than the two guard boys to process our passports. The first boy, in boxer-shorts and a tank top was having a hell of a time playing computer mahjong. The second was very serious: in full combat fatigues, complete with AK-74 and body armour, he wouldn't smile and followed us as we noodled around and waited. It was hard to take him too seriously because there was a tatty cocker spaniel constantly at his heel. After about 20 minutes another guard came back from lunch. He wrote our visa and passport details in triplicate into ledgers destined to never be read and sent us on our way. This was it. We were in Uzbekistan, home of the great silk road cities: Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand.