PLOV 5 - Helipad Traffic
PLOV
The lights from the hotel across way from us have kept me awake all night, and now that the sun has the decency to rise from its cavern somewhere in Afghanistan, they are turning them off, and I am so mad I want to set up a loudspeaker on my balcony to sonic-blast the Silk Road! by Minyoun with the sounds of the Chauffeurs à pieds.
Ah, welcome, friends, to PLOV, where a combination of poor nutrition, anxious thoughts, and next-gen LEDs keeps us awake from three til five-thirty, when we go down to the gym to run at Level Eighteen on the treadmill til we feel dizzy and nauseous! I, Bernard Soubry, am your host, and decidedly a Level Fifteen at best.
First real day of negotiations today. The plenary fills up early. People seem rested; the collective jetlag haze is easier. Lots of conversations in the huge, diamond-lit main hall; mostly around how there's nothing to drink around here. The coffee's apparently awful. The water dispensers in the venue are empty whenever I walk by them1.
I send myself out to collect intelligence. The usual MO for this kind of gathering is to hang out by the snacks, wait until the tables are filled, and ask two likely targets if they don't mind my popping my laptop down next to their glasses so I can write an email. Type some gobbledegook, listen at will.
(My colleague Beate taught me the first variation of this, which she, a six-foot-four German woman, can pull off in ways I can't. You go to the smokers' corner; there is always a smokers' corner in these venues. You ask somebody for a cigarette and stand there, looking out into the distance, as you listen to people saying things they would never say in plenary. If someone asks you if you want a light, you smile; say, no, thanks, I don't smoke. And then you walk away.)
Initial problems, though: this being my first COP in central Asia, I hadn't realized--most of the delegates here are speaking Russian. I might as well be walking through with earplugs on. The conversation washes over me; I plod my way from end to end of the hall, looking for something to grab onto.
New plan for tomorrow: make some friends who speak one of my languages. Figure out where the Latin Americans are, most likely. They'll probably have decent coffee, if nothing else.
At lunch we head out to the Expo Centre to see our friend Tanya, an expert in Asian cats of all kinds, present a side event on the small cats of the Silk Road. Tanya is kind and smart and an excellent leader in difficult situations. She looks soft-spoken until you learn how to hold her gaze. Then you learn she spends most of her times in the mountains, can shoot a bow from horseback, and starts sentences with "when my friends and I were being interrogated by the Iranian secret police..." The kind of friend whose life you both fear and look up to.
The walk over is long and twisted, so we cut through the grass over to the road. It's hot--temperatures have been going from four or five degrees in the morning to twenty by midday. The helipads in the middle of the lawn are twenty feet wide, freshly painted, hardly a Saudi helicopter on them yet. (Who needs two helipads? Who has helipad traffic?)
The ground is soft but gritty underneath; a cloud of dust puffs up when I step, lightens my boots by a few shades. There are trees and rose bushes planted in a hexagon pattern, but the soil looks like someone dumped the content of a bunch of dustpans into a pile.
Tanya (who else?) tell us that the conference centre--still unfinished, workmen tweaking away at things inside and outside even as we arrived--was built on top of soil scraped from the Tugai forest, near the Zeravshan river valley that unites Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The grass they planted isn't drought-resistant, either. The trees (leafless; unidentifiable to me) aren't native.
For decades to come, this parcel of town--helipadded, wraparound-balconied, fake-madrassa'd--will need a rowing basin's flow of water to try to keep doing what it is meant to do. Hard not to hear history rhyming with the tune of the Aral Sea. Hard to withhold judgement in a place like this.
I'm exhausted after the small cats talk. I have thirty minutes before my next note-taking shift, so I walk back to the hotel to take a nap, five floors above what used to be a desert. On the pond, two guys in crop tops are cutting through sheet-metal sunshine in racing kayaks, leaving no wake. I pass pared-back rhododendrons, unhappy ficuses. Dark drip tape lining every planted thing.
Keep hydrated, friends,
B
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I brought a water bottle with a filter that takes out bacteria and viruses, and I fill it at the bathroom tap. The team calls it--charmingly--Toilet Water. ↩
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