Steve travels #22: Beyond Bishkek
I received an ominous text message to my Kyrgyz sim card on Friday morning. Time was up on the initial pre-pay, and if I didn’t pay another $10, it would be cut off.
Since I loathe anything involving online credit card payments on my phone, I looked for an easier option: skipping the country.
Kyrgyzstan is sometimes called the “Switzerland of Central Asia” because of its small size ringed by mountains. Certainly not for its chocolate, probably not for its banks, but possibly also for its vast population of freely roaming cows. These mountains make travelling overland to its neighbours tricky, with fewer options than you might expect.
There’s a few ways to Kazakhstan, to the north, including the popular bus route to Almaty which I had done in reverse. To the east it’s possible to get to China through an outrageously high border crossing which is closed most of the year due to snow. And to even get to that crossing requires a permit to be in that part of Kyrgyzstan.
To the south, most of the border crossings to Tajikistan have been closed for the past few years due to some kind of dispute, although there is one that you can get to from Osh, itself a very long bus ride from Bishkek. But everything I hear about Tajikistan makes it sound like a lot of logistical hard work - there’s no real public transport, so you basically rely on shared taxis or a rental car, possibly with driver. The mountains are apparently beautiful, but I have seen beautiful mountains, and I’m itching for something different.
That leaves Uzbekistan, to the west, a country rich in history and culture: Silk Road, vast mosques, etc. But hot and desert-y. And no good for hiking.
There’s a night bus from Bishkek which actually goes through Kazakhstan, to satisfy afficionados of land border crossings. Given a tip that it might sell out, I taxi there first thing in the late morning and nab the last seat. I stock up heavily on snacks since I won’t have enough Kyrgyz, Kazakh or Uzbek cash to buy food when we stop.
I have a little bit of spare time, so race through the National History Museum in a wonderfully over-the-top rectangle of neo-classical architecture. I can’t absorb it all in the time available, but there are impressive iron-age cauldrons, a 1200 year old wooden saddle and stirrups, some beautiful 11th century pottery, and an excellent collection of more recent leather vessels for carrying fermented mare’s milk. The history of Kyrgyzstan mostly seems to be a sad one of being repeatedly invaded and forced to join various empires, from Genghis Khan to the Soviets, with not a lot of upside.
There’s a last minute hiccup on the way to the bus terminal. In the 15 minutes between arriving back at my hostel and ordering a taxi, a crane has arrived and started depositing large concrete blocks to cut my street off from the main road. It’s a stress I don’t need, but I’m much better at Yandex than when I first arrived, and smoothly reroute the taxi to a different pickup spot. Whereupon we inch along for ten minutes in the impossibly slow evening peak hour.
The bus journey begins predictably. I pre-emptively show my ticket to the driver to confirm I’m on the right bus, and find my seat at the very back, by the window, amongst a German family who seems confused and bemused by my presence. They keep checking my ticket, reluctantly agreeing that I’m in the right seat.
Then for the fourth time on this journey so far, I experience the bus driver making his way up the bus, pointing at me, and telling me to get my stuff and go. Sigh. What this time? I’m almost off the bus when he points to an empty aisle seat, next to an older lady. I don’t really want to move - windows are good for sleeping. But it’s not a question. It’s an order. I sit.
My seatmate shows me a nifty feature of these bus seats - in addition to reclining, you can slide the aisle seat a bit further into the aisle, for a precious extra ten centimetres of personal space. But we can’t get the seatbelt out from where it’s trapped, which keeps me a bit on edge.
It’s not an interesting trip, but it’s not a nightmare either. Mostly I keep the eye mask on and half-doze, but when I glance out from time to time, we always seem to be passing through small towns on a surprisingly well lit highway.
The first border crossing into Kazakhstan is orderly enough. The German family has, perhaps out of guilt, taken me under their wing and guide me through. The mother is half Kyrgyz and they have been visiting family. They’re very surprised that I have visited their home town of Heilbronn in the past - a very good friend from Lyon was from there, so Ellen and I visited them around Christmas 2005.
At 2am we make another food stop, and the bus drivers take a long break. None of the passengers are enthused by the idea of a midnight meal and after visiting the horrifying toilets, we shuffle back onto the bus and wait.
Suddenly at just after 5am, we arrive at the Uzbek border, and suddenly it’s pandemonium. Everyone wants to be off the bus NOW including my seatmate who is NOT HAPPY about how long it takes me to get my stuff together and starts pushing past me. In an instant the energy of the bus has gone from dozy to panicky. I don’t quite understand, but I get swept up in it as I frantically grab my things together.
My stuff is a mess of snack bags that I never even opened, and warm clothes bags that I only used for lumber support, and not at all optimised for the task of grabbing and running which is what I now do. It’s as if there is a herd of charging bulls around the corner and everyone’s going for their lives. Everyone, no exceptions, is doing at least a brisk walk, and many are at a trot, pushing past each other as they race, I assume, to get to the queue for passport control. There are hundreds of cars waiting on the road, as well as buses and trucks, and lots of people (local traders? farmers? I don’t know) carrying large bundles of goods on their backs. Some of the bundles might be wool, but really I’m guessing.
Getting through Kazakhstan exit control is smooth enough, and I’m still trying to figure out where the fire is. Again I get swept up in the throng of people pushing and racing through the no-man’s land between the two countries to get to Uzbekistan passport control.
It doesn’t seem particularly busy here, and there are plenty of border officials to process the masses. Here I make a critical error and go through the automated e-passport line, apparently reserved for Uzbek nationals. The computer says yes. The offical at the end says no. For a final determination, he hands my passport to a disembodied voice in a box from where I periodically hear, in strangely echoey tones reminiscent of the Cone of Silence “blah blah Australia blah blah”. After a long time, the answer comes back: no. Start over. This time, the human says yes, and I’m through.
Arriving in places like this you have a few competing needs, all of which would be easier to satisfy if you did the others first. You need to change money, but you don’t know what a fair exchange rate is. You can’t look it up, because you don’t have a SIM card, which you can’t buy, because you don’t have any money. This would all be easier with less likelihood of being ripped off in town, which you can’t get to because you don’t have any cash. I discover a secret stash of Kyrgyzstan money which I convert at what turns out to be a terrible rate, buy a SIM card, and find a taxi driver. I could wait for my bus to make it through the border and rejoin it to the Tashkent bus terminal, and taxi from there, but I’m just a bit over all the boarding and unboarding.
They say that Uzbekistan taxi drivers are cheap but have no idea what they’re doing. The latter certainly seems to be true. I show him the Google Maps directions to my hostel, which he seems to need to ask several passersby to explain to him before he’ll accept the fare.
Then he finds another passenger to join us, which confuses me, and when a friendly Russian and English speaking passenger from the bus tries to help, she can’t understand what I find so confusing about this. I ask the other passenger how much she’s paying for the ride, which she finds hilarious and doesn’t answer. In the end, I accept my fate and off we go.
Since the driver has no idea where he’s going, he has me leave the maps directions open on my phone. Which works for a while, until he suddenly stops on a wide boulevard with the hazards on, grabs my phone, crosses the road and disappears for 10 minutes.
When he comes back, he now has the Google Maps directions open on his phone. He is giving very strong indications that this is the first time he has ever used a phone mapping app. The phone is reading out the turn instructions, but as we get closer, he manages to keep making wrong turns and not noticing. Eventually, I have to use hand gestures to tell him where to turn, and we do make it there just after 7am. I’m not even a little bit surprised that the repeatedly advertised “24 hour check-in!” of the hostel manifests as a snoring woman on a couch who grouches “check-in 2 o’clock” and goes back to sleep.
Tashkent itself looks great. One of those places I knew almost nothing about. The only reason I’d even heard of it was because I once set “what is the capital of Uzbekistan?” as an obscure tie-breaker question for an EMS camp trivia night, and was surprised how quickly Paul Murphy got it. (Hi Paul!)
It’s such a nice change from Bishkek, which more than a few travellers have described as “Almaty, but worse”. I’ve traipsed all over it and never found the good bit. It’s just a bit of a charmless heap of busy roads, random piles of rubble and half-built projects punctuated by the odd super modern development, and a lot of people going to pretty desperate lengths to get by.
Tashkent, on the other hand, feels immediately classy and wealthy. Wide, well-maintained roads. Grand buildings that have been around for a while and kept up. The first lawns that I have seen in a month. And to be fair, every city looks better at 6:30am, when there’s no traffic and just a few dog walkers and people having relaxed road-side catch-ups. But there is clearly money here on a scale that Kyrgyzstan has never had. Let’s see how it feels after a couple of days here.