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.

Taiwan is part of China

After breakfast, a shower and a quick rest, we set out for the Chinese embassy. Their visa office was devoid of any decoration, but it was efficient: application forms were set out on a desk, pens were provided, and people approached the window in typical Asian mob formation. The consular clerk received applications behind bullet-proof glass and communicated through a microphone that kicked in with a two-second delay whenever he spoke. The atmosphere when we arrived was very tense, with the clerk barking prefix-truncated orders at the mainly Uzbek applicants and tapping on his microphone with his pen whenever he grew impatient, which was every few seconds.

We filled out our forms and joined the fray. Chris took charge: “I'll do the elbowing, you bust out the Chinese,” he urged. I wasn't so sure; we'd written on our applications that we'd never been to China, and I was hesitant to invite questions. But finally, feeling brave, I approached him with my visa questions in Chinese. He stared at me, very seriously, and asked where I'd learned to speak. “Taiwan,” I admitted. He paused to fix me with a steely stare. 'Oh shit,' I thought, 'he's going to deny our visas.' When after a few more seconds he still didn't say anything, courage welled up in me somehow, and I took a big risk: I threw the party line at him. “Taiwan shi zhongguo de yi bufun” (Taiwan is part of China). Another few-second pause, and then it worked! He broke into a genuine laugh. The worker bees processing applications behind him all looked up and joined in. The tension on our side of the window seemed to dissipate as well. So we got our Chinese visas, our passports handed back later that day through the locked embassy compound gate as if it were feeding time at the zoo. We found a very decent Korean restaurant and celebrated with beer and kimchee that evening.

You don't need that kind of letter

I called ahead to the Tajik embassy and spoke to the Consul. “Do I need an invitation letter?” I asked. “No,” he replied, “you just need two copies of your passport and two photos.” (Letters of Invitation are basically pieces of paper that you buy from a travel agent giving you permission to get a visa; many former-Soviet countries require them.) He also told me that the visa would cost $50 for same-day service.

We arrived at the embassy gate at 9am the next day. Entry to all of the embassies in Tashkent is controlled by Uzbek guards. These take two forms: those who would rather be posted somewhere less boring but at least are resigned to performing the task at hand, however slowly; and those who take their power very seriously and are make it their duty to be as unhelpful as possible. The ones at the Tajik embassy fell into this latter category.

We walked up and made our presence known. The guards didn't speak any English and pretended not to hear us at all. There was information written in Russian on a board, but we had no way of knowing what it said. So we just stood in what looked like a line of 7 or 8 people forming and waited. But it wasn't long before it became clear how things worked. A steady stream Mercedes Benz's and Range Rovers began to drive up and park by the gate with their engines running, while their owners jumped out to bark something in Russian to the guards, who would open up for them. We had seen this kind of preferential treatment before, but not so overt or from so many people. Meanwhile, the number of people waiting in line had grown considerably. Finally, a very nice woman waiting in line with us volunteered that she spoke English. Through her we discovered that you had to put your name on a list kept by the guards (not posted anywhere visible), which we now did, but we lost our lead by doing so after everyone else had arrived. Soon, it was nearing 12:00, when the consulate closed for the day, and it was becoming clear that we wouldn't be called before lunch. So I asked the helpful woman to ask the guards if we could go next, as we'd been there before other people on the list. This got us in, but it turned out our timing was bad: just at that moment a Russian woman, who'd earlier driven up, snapped something at the guards and been let in ahead of the line, came out. She snatched our passports from my hand, snarled something in Russian back to the Consul, before turning to us: “you need me, I am Pamir Travel representative.” Chris went on the offensive, grabbed our passports back and pushed me in toward the Consul.

Inside, he looked at our application materials, shook his head and said, “you need a letter—not an invitation letter—a letter from an official travel agent. There is only one in Tashkent.” He picked up his cell phone and a few minutes later the same woman came in. It was no use arguing that he'd told me just yesterday that a letter was not required: he'd clearly been told not to process us without involving her. So we grudgingly agreed to pay her fee of $30 apiece to provide form letters of “visa support” on our behalf. Three hours later, we met her at the embassy, only to find from the Consul that— despite what he'd said the day before—the visa fee was not $50 but $100. Again we argued that his tune had changed, overnight, but she was standing right there and he wouldn't budge. Chris and I took a time out, walked outside, and decided that we didn't need to go to Tajikistan that badly after all. The whole affair stunk, and we really didn't want to give our money to the Pamir Travel woman. So we got our passports back and walked away.

In the end, it was a relief: we would have been hard pressed to get through the mountains of both Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan before winter set in, and it made our remaining time in Central Asia much more relaxed. We later met other people who'd run into similar problems with the Tajik embassy but persevered: they all seemed to have a good time in Tajikistan, but agreed that the visa process was corrupt. Another person we'd been in email contact with, who lives in Tajikistan, wasn't surprised by our treatment; he observed that corruption was rampant in all levels of officialdom in Tajikistan and that international community is largely sitting back and allowing it to happen. But for us, it also highlighted the thin veneer over the role the mafia plays in Uzbekistan. Tashkent did not impress us at all: the city is a model of Soviet “grandness,” with every avenue wide enough to host a military parade, no real center, and nowadays a large contingent of rich Russians whose wealth is flaunted in stark contrast to the rest of the country.

When dirt doesn't matter anymore

Our third visa attempt, at the Kyrgyz embassy, went without a hitch, and we left Tashkent the day after, backtracking to Samarkand. We took a bus—very cheap but the air conditioning wasn't working and the windows didn't open, so it was a long seven hours. Travel in Uzbekistan tends to be slow because of all the police checkpoints—more than in any other country we have visited so far.

In Samarkand, the tourist season didn't appear to have ended, and it was difficult to find a room. We ended up taking dorm beds at a guest house that had been recommended to us. The shared toilet was a stinking pit in a fiery dungeon with a raging open-flame furnace; cockroaches congregated in the shower; and the beds were saggy with springs poking up in all the wrong places—yet it had a great atmosphere and ended up being in many ways the highlight of Uzbekistan. The owner was incredibly welcoming and served cheap communal meals that brought people together. We met lots of great people there; others just like us who'd gotten there on their own steam were beyond caring if the toilets stank. There were lots of cyclists: a French couple heading east on the Silk Road, an Isreali couple going the other way, and a Dutch woman cycling solo. We also, by chance, ran into our friend Nicolas, whom we'd met in Georgia and Azerbaijan. He had ended up spending a full three weeks in Baku waiting for the weekly ferry to Kazakhstan, which broke down as soon as it showed up. (Thanks to Bora, the Turkish engineer we'd met through couchsurfing, he'd been able to stay for free and avoid running through all his cash.)

Some things can be too clean

splendid architecture, but...Samarkand itself was a bit of a disappointment, probably because so much has been written about its romance. Samarkand is perhaps the most famous of Central Asia's Silk-Road cities. It was Tamerlane's capital, a cultural and intellectual center, and he and his grandson Ulughbek invested considerable wealth in the city's monuments. Though they are, without a doubt, the largest and most impressive in central Asia, we felt that the Soviets had done a lamentably thorough job of removing the soul from them.

Registan mosque ceilingPaul Bowles, in his forward to Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue, wrote: “...landscape alone is of insufficient interest to warrant the effort it takes to see it. Even the works of man, unless they are being used in his daily living, have a way of losing their meaning, and take on the qualities of decoration. What makes Istanbul worthwhile to the outsider is not the presence of the mosques and the covered souks, but the fact that they still function as such.” We had exactly the same sentiment at the Registan, Uzbekistan's greatest architectural monument and tourist attraction. It consists of three huge, tiled medrassas forming three sides of a square that once hosted the city's main marketplace. Now, the market has long since moved to the modern Soviet town, taking all life with it. The medrassas have been restored to suspiciously perfect condition. After paying a hefty entrance fee, one is subjected to constant heckling by souvenir hawkers that set up shop in the many cells within, seriously detracting from the experience (even in Egypt, the vendors were kept outside the gates). While the mosque inside the Tilla-Kari medrassa with its detailed gold-leaf interior and dome is an undeniably beautiful work, it is no longer in use except as a tourist attraction.

I was reminded of the crumbling Roman columns in Damascus. Corinthian columns are a dime a dozen in the Middle East and on their own would these would have simply been poorly preserved examples. But these ones had true atmosphere, marking as they did the end of the long covered souk, surrounded by market stalls and passed through by thousands of people each day. The Registan, though a superior feat of architecture, was sterile by comparison, a testament to the efficiency of Russian empire-building.

Not entirely soulless

pilgrimsmausoleum tileworkThough most of Samarkand's other mosques, medrassas and mausoleums similarly left us cold, we were pleasantly surprised by the Shahr-I-Zindah mausoleum complex. We entered the back way, walking through a graveyard overlooking the city. Many of the newer tombs had laser-etched photographs on them, such as we had seen in several places since Azerbaijan. Eventually, we came to an avenue of majolica-tiled mausoleums, most of them 15th century tombs of Ulughbekh's relatives, although the principal tomb is supposedly that of a cousin of the Prophet Mohammad. Though not nearly as grand as the city's other monuments, the tile work here incorporated colours and designs we hadn't seen elsewhere, and the complex was filled with religious pilgrims. Here, we saw the first evidence of Chinese influence we'd encountered in the artwork: circular tiled designs, and frescos that resembled Chinese landscape paintings. The best part was that since we'd come in the back way, we had accidentally avoided paying the entrance fee. We noticed only as we walked out the front door, past the ticket collector; both of us instinctively passed by without a glance, as if we owned the place. After weeks of being shortchanged and ripped off, such small victories can be really gratifying, if a bit childish.

Time to move on

A couple of days in Samarkand was enough, and we headed back to Tashkent with Nicolas by bus. The sweaty six-hour ride seemed all the worse because our backtracking made it the third time we'd traveled this route, and when you are traveling as far as we are this tends to matter a lot. In Tashkent we tried to get Kazakh transit visas—taking the bus through Kazakhstan would have been the fastest route to the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek—but at 11:45, when we were two spots away from the top of the waiting list, the Consul came out for a smoke break that lasted until closing time at noon, and we realized that we'd had our fill of visas and red tape. We'd also just about had it with Uzbekistan, so we booked a taxi ride straight through the Ferghana valley to the Kyrgyz border for the next day. It was a splurge, but we had discovered that there were no buses through the narrow corridor that links Uzbekistan's slice of the valley to Tashkent and the rest of the country, and it would have taken several connections to get there on our own steam. What we didn't bet on was that Ramadan was beginning, and our driver was one of the faithful. Like most people that day, he was in a very bad mood, and we started to wonder about the impact of widespread fasting on traffic accident statistics. But we made it without incident, crossed the border without any hassle, and by late afternoon had caught a marshrutka into Osh.