Neither of us really slept the night before and by 5 am I
realized that I’d ordered the taxi for too late. We should have been at the airport at 7 not
leaving for it. My text to the driver at
5:15 was answered immediately; we could go at 6:30. At 6:25 I started lugging the 60 kilos of brochures
and signs down to the guardhouse. I’d
never seen this guard before and he barely acknowledged my presence as I pilled
bags and suitcases at his post. A light
rain fell and I was dressed in the warmest clothes I had, in anticipation of a
snowy welcome in Tashkent. I was drenched
in sweat by the time everything was set.
The taxi showed up right on time, driven by a fifty year old
Malay with greying shoulder length hair that oddly gave him the resemblance of
being native American at that hour.
“You are always very punctual, Mr. Spencer.”
“That’s because I’m always late.”
And we were off to pick up Nodir. The convoluted KL highway system, largely
devoid of useful on and off ramps doubled the length of the trip. Nodir was just stepping on to the street from
his behemoth of a complex when we pulled up at 6:45. After a lengthy farewell with his roommate,
who had helped him carry his own mass of luggage, we left for the airport.
“What time is your flight?”
“8:50.”
“Oh!”
“Yea… You gotta drive like a fucking speeding bullet.”
“No problem. Will
think I am a Formula One, an F-1 race car.”
“Perfect.”
He delivered. Pushing
130 the whole way and punching out of the tolls with purpose. About 15 minutes out from the airport I noticed
his leg occasionally twitching, spasming, his hands tightly gripping the wheel,
arms flexing to push himself back against the seat. I had been touched by his unusual eagerness
to haul ass around KL this early in the morning but the truth was that this guy
just had to go. Badly.
He eyed a rest stop a few kilometers out and our eyes
met.
“Big tip,” I say.
“Ok,” he smiles back.
I had to get out of KL.
We had to make that flight.
______________________________________________________
The international transfers waiting area in New Delhi is not
meant to be occupied for 10 straight hours.
Should you ever find yourself in this situation here are
some possible activities:
You can get to know the security guy who wands you down every
time you go to the bathroom or drinking fountain.
You can play a game of chicken with said drinking fountain; after
all you have eight hours to wonder if the gurgling and rising acid level in
your stomach is from the water or simply hunger, dehydration and lack of
sleep. Only time will tell if any
previous experiences in the country have given you a resistance to Delhi Belly.
You can cram yourself onto the only two seats that are
missing an armrest divider and try to get some sleep. (Third row from the front
on the right hand side as you pass security.)
You can buy cigarettes under the table using US
Dollars. The tall guy in the black shirt
hands you a pack and then you meet him in the smoking room and smoothly palm
him a fiver, before exchanging pleasantries.
Cause you know, you have a lot to talk about. Like how much you both currently hate your
jobs.
You can of course, read.
However, I cannot recommend ‘A short walk in the hindu-kush’ by Eric
Newby. Good book, but you don’t want to
sit here reading about trekking in the great outdoors while stuck in a low
ceilinged, artificially lit box.
You can exchange USD for rupees with the guy in the red
jacket next to the pay phone. Note: he
will only give you hundred rupee bills, the vending machine only takes up to
fifties and those are no where to be found among the staff.
You can listen to your Uzbekistan co-worker talk with a
random stewardess (there won’t be any from your airline around) about the
inhuman aspects of the situation and how everyone is starving and unless they
get their shit together and get us some food, something violent may occur. This actually worked and an hour later we
were able to hand over some money in exchange for food and coffee. And then she invited us all to Rishekesh if
we find ourselves in the area again.
You can, by about the 5th hour realize that water
was a bad choice.
You can get to know your fellow passengers to the
grave. So far we’ve got one nice Uzbek
on his way back from Kathmandu. Sharing
a common destination, we are all fast becoming friends. I scored him a sandwich and coffee with the
food misadventure and I think he’s taking us out clubbing later in the
week. The rest of the occupants I can
only guess about, but the long-termers are a lone Mongol looking fellow with a
smooth mullet who walks with a gnarly limp, a family that is likely Pakistani
from photos I’ve seen and then a picture perfect young Arabic family. Dressed to impress and with facial features
that could cut stone. They seem to get a
lot of attention from the staff, everyone’s gotta be wondering what two
ridiculously good looking people and their adorable kids are doing stuck here
in purgatory.
You can, if like me you’ve been bumming around the equator
for far too long, daydream about getting to a temperate climate. Imagine that first rush of cold air, a few
snowflakes on your face and not being a dripping ball of sweat for the next two
weeks. Nodir has promised to take me to
a place where all my worries will disappear.
Usually a statement such as that comes with some caveats. Big ones concerning the flexibility of
certain moral principals, but going a few days without being a sticky mess
sounds like a good start.
______________________________________________________
10 Days Later
Ms. Gulia picks me up from the Hotel
Uzbekistan at 6 am sharp. We are going
from Tashkent to Samarkand for the day to give a scholarship exam for high
school students. It’s still dark and the
hotel lobby is empty save for one bellboy.
My plush lined dress shoes, a must have for winter here, echo on the marble.
Nodir is absent. Ms. Gulia (Think
‘gulag’ + ‘Julia’) is wearing a pink pea coat, possibly the only pink pea coat
in a country where all coats are black and all clothes are blue, black or
white. She is in her mid fifties with
mid length brown hair and doesn’t speak a word of English. At the time I knew one word in Uzbek and
three in Russian, her native tongues.
Not that we let that stop us from
having a full on conversation. I’m
assuming that she is as well versed in this sort of thing as I am.
“Доброго ранку. як справи?
“Good Morning, how’s it going?”
“Де це маленьке лайно, Nodir?”
“I have no idea where Nodir is,” I
shrug, then I mime using my phone, “нет (no) answer.”
“Ну, ебать. Я постараюся виклику."
She talks for a few seconds and then stalks towards the waiting car, “давай”
and waves me to get in.
“You have the materials, right?” I ask,
pointing at the trunk.
“так, звичайно.”
A driver, I assuming her husband, gets
out and helps me load the bags. This
education consultancy is completely run by the women of the family, two fiftyish
sisters, one girl my age named Maftuna and a guy of the same age who does the
IT, I think. When ever we are going anywhere with them, it seems always to be
one of the men of the family doing the driving, but even if we are going to eat
the men will not eat with us.
Not that driving here is any small
task. The roads in the city are all
wide, multilane affairs and the speed limit seems to be as fast as you can go
as long as you don’t slide out on a turn and can slam the brakes on with out
screeching to halt at cross walks. The
police are everywhere but speed is their last concern, so the general rule of
the road is don’t stand out. Your car
should preferably be white like 80% of the others and if not, then black or
silver. When you see a cop, whatever
song you are blasting (chances are it will be ‘La La La’ by Naughty Boy or a
track off the new Avicii album) should be turned down to a whisper and god
forbid you get stopped – just go with it and accept your fate. I heard
a story about one guy simply asking a cop why he was pulled over for no reason and
getting a two-week stint in jail. Apparently, it overall isn’t a bad
experience as everyone else is also in there on bullshit two-week charges.
After making a quick
U-turn and cutting in front of three lanes of oncoming traffic we lurched to a
stop in front of the train station just as the sky was beginning to lighten.
Following another
dually one-sided conversation in English and Russian with Ms. Gulia, Nodir
appears out of a taxi, smiling. Like so
many other times during this trip I hold back the urge to smack him firmly in
the back of the head and ask for an explanation. I glare at him soullessly. A uniquely human expression that crosses all
language barriers and am garnered with an explanation and a conversation that
will reoccur to often in the coming weeks.
“I am sorry. I do not hear alarm.”
{Glare}
“Really. I do not hear”
“Nodir, how many
phones do you have?”
{Puzzled look}
“You have three
phones, right?”
“Yes, but I set only
one alarm.”
{Glare}
“Should I set more
than one?”
{Sigh}
I turn away and head
towards the station entrance as he promises that it will not happen again. It would happen the next morning.
The train is the
pride and joy of the Uzbek transportation system. It’s Spanish built and looks like a high
speed train straight out of Europe with a long gently sloped nose on the front
and an interior that makes you forget that you are in the center of a region
that the world has forgotten about for the past century. That the tracks aren’t good enough for it to
go full speed is a minor detail.
The seats are
occupied by the typical mash-up of ethnicities that you find all over
Uzbekistan. For centuries, from
the time of the Silk Road, the country has been crossroads (and before that
anybody that could conquered it), leaving it today as the most amazing cultural melting pot that I’ve ever been
to. You see people who look completely Russian, Chinese, Uzbek, Mongol
and Afghan and every possible variation in between. There are beautiful
people and people that would make me shit myself if I saw them coming at me in
a dark alleyway, both male and female.
It takes
just over two hours on the express train to slide through the 400km of barren
farm land, occasionally backed by low lying hills between Tashkent and
Samarkand. When we arrive hazy clouds
are masking what little light the winter sun is giving off and the air is damp
and cold. It penetrates even the wool/cashmere
peacoat with camel collar and insulating vest liner I’d picked up a few days
before. We climb into a waiting car with
Maftuna, Ms. Gulia’s niece who had gone ahead to do prep work and head off to
breakfast at a café with pictures of the region’s historical places on the
walls, no one can place more than one or two of them.
I can’t
say much about Samarkand as a city, but it’s certainly seen better days. There’s not anything bad about it but all the
action and the population has moved to Tashkent. What Samarkand does have going for it though
is some pretty amazing historical sites and so after giving a scholarship exam
to about a hundred secondary schoolers we did a site seeing blitz through the
town. I can’t be bothered to write much
about two of them, they were well worth it but just take a look if you
want. Registan, was the heart of the city back in the day and
consists of three awesome madrasas facing each other. Then, the Shah-i-Zinda is a collection of masoleums concentrated along a narrow
winding road on a hill, very cool in person.
By far
the most interesting place was the masoleum for Tamerlane,
known as Amir Timur in these parts. He
was basically the founder of the country and an all around bad ass. If you ask an Uzbek they will tell you of how
he built pyramids out of the skulls of his opponents and was also an amazing
ruler who ushered in a golden era. There
was a curse put upon his tomb and when Stalin sent archelogoists to open it on
June 21st, 1941 they were warned… They went ahead with the excavation and on
June 22nd the Germans attacked the Russians. But anyways, it is the single most beautiful
room I have ever been inside. Pictures
certainly don’t do it justice and words can’t do much better. It has a high vaulted dome with perfectly
soft lighting to illuminate the walls which are covered with intricate designs
and arabic writing (which to the untrained western eye might as well be
designs) done entirely in blue a gold. I
could have sat there all day. It is the
kind of room that the moment you walk into it, you can tell that for lack of a
better word, it is holy. It envelopes
you in a sense of peacefulness that few places can.
Following
our final stop at the Shah-i-Zinda, which involved sitting in a small dark room
and listening to a cleric chant for the healing of a family member in exchange
for some bread, we boarded the train and zipped back to Tashkent. Ms. Gulia’s husband greets us and offer’s me
the front seat now that the car is fuller with the addition of Nodir and
Maftuna, I know better than to refuse so I climb in and start to put my seat
belt on which elicites a chorus of ‘No’ in russian from the driver. He shakes his finger at me smiling, points firmly
to himself and then gives me a thumbs up.
I am informed by the backseat that it is quite rude to wear a seatbelt
while riding shotgun. The driver must
wear one by law, but for the passenger to do so is a sign of disrespect that
you are so untrusting of his driving abilities to think you could possibly get
in an accident. When in Rome.
In the
heart of Tashkent is a large circular park with a tall classically posied
statue of Amir Timur riding a horse. It ringed by a wide four lane roundabout
and on the other side of that are various important structures. There are several imposing stone buildings
making up the national university, a circular domed museum devoted to the life
and conquests of Amir Timur, a brand new ‘Congress Center’ for meetings with foreign
dignitaries. It’s a striking marriage of
white columns and black glass and the dome is crowned with two herons straining
their necks skyward. Next to this symbol
of everything that Central Asia is striving to become this century is the Hotel
Uzbekistan. It too is in its own way
striking. A striking ode to the horrors
early 70’s soviet architecture and is trying to prove that some things can last
unchanged, indefienitely. The façade is
one that only a mother could love and words escape me trying to describe it, so
here. The
interior includes a marble floored, low ceilinged lobby with oversized
chandaleir; the honorable Café Vienna with teal wallpaper and a long center
buffet table; and rooms that have never been updated with balconies that come
complete with empty vodka bottles.
It was
into the Café Vienna that we found ourselves walking after saying our goodbye’s
to Ms. Gulia, Maftuna and family. A
few hours before the lobby would have been filled with wedding parties of
brides and grooms taking photos as it was every day during our stay and now
looking around the restaurant, we had been transported into some scene from a
Russian mob movie. Two monstrous
gentlemen with slicked back, oily hair sat at a small table to our left
sporting black shirts, expensive leather coats and voices so deep I couldn’t
even tell they were speaking Russian at first.
They chain-smoked, did work on a bottle of vodka and devoured a couple
of mayonnaise based salads. Behind them
a half dozen Uzbeks, short and wide with bowl cut hair, all in leather jackets,
and in their mid-thirties sat hunched over bowls of soup at the near end of a
long table, not speaking much and glancing around all too much. To my right couple of guys in matching white
and blue tracksuits were animatedly doing something with an iPad propped up in
the middle of the table. At another a
man sat with ear buds in, skyping. Apart
from his laptop, the table held a shot of vodka and a tall beer to his right, a
full ashtray on his left with a thin smoldering cigarette resting on the
groove. In the mornings a sign requested
that patrons not smoke during breakfast but that sign had been taken down and
it was now open season, a slight haze drifted around the room. We ordered bowls of Borsch and Shurpa with
the requisite plates of bread and Nodir poured us all half cups of tea as is customary
to show that we were in no hurry and there would always be more.
This job can be very taxing.
Struggling for nearly every waking moment to communicate with non-native
English speakers, endless headaches caused by a multitude of cultural norms
colliding and the toll of almost constant traveling gets trying on the best
days. But there are also many moments
like this one, sitting around the Café Vienna in the Uzbek national hotel when
all you’re thinking is Wow. I’m in Uzbekistan.
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