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Published: April 18th 2016
Day 85 Tuesday 12th April 2016 – Khujand to Tashkent Today we are moving to another country, Uzbekistan, and our plan was to cross over at the border crossing at Kanibodom and go to the town of Kokand but before we knew it we were heading to the capital, Tashkent- so much for well laid plans. Started the day with our bags half packed waiting for the staff to arrive at our hotel so we could get our washing that we had given them yesterday, can’t really complain as they did do it for free. Zebonniso the owner of the hotel rocked up at 9 and organised a taxi to the border, but our taxi driver told us the border crossing (Kanibodom) we wanted to use is a bit tricky and is generally closed and that we were best to use the Oybeck crossing. Because of the weird shape of the country boundaries it meant if we crossed at the Oybeck crossing it would be a long drive to get to Kokand and virtually passing through the capital of Tashkent to get there so we quickly changed our plans and opted to stay at Tashkent and
Tashkent
Timur on his poor horsethen move onto Kokand. Quickly jumped on the computer and took a stab at a hotel on booking.com and booked it and took off. Our taxi driver was the same one as last time we stayed at this hotel and he was so happy to see us and proceeded to have a long enthusiastic conversation with us in Russian – if only we could understand him.
It was a 90 minute drive to the border of Tajikistan/Uzbekistan where he said goodbye to us like we were family which only made it harder to leave this fantastic country. Now the steps to transfer from Tajik to Uzbek are probably the most complex we have gone through so far, so here are the steps if anyone needs to follow in our footsteps.
1. A soldier will open the gates at the border and just inside is an office where you show your passport to a Tajik official who will check your visas.
2. Walk 100 metres to a building with a drive through that has a truck inspection pit, inside on the right hand side is a customs office where a guy will
Tashkent
Overview of the main market building record your passport details in a ledger. There is an x-ray machine here but it isn’t used.
3. You are now out of Tajikistan and walk another 200 metres to another office which is in Uzbekistan, through some gates and a guy will inspect your passport thoroughly before you can proceed.
4. Another 50 metres brings you to another building where we lined up with others for about ten minutes to have details of our passport recorded into a computer and a stamp added.
5. Walk through a building with a long corridor with small rooms off to the side. We passed one room which looked like a sick room with a man lying down, as we passed he jumped up and called us back it was like a quarantine area and in the small room was a tray of needles. After checking our passports he let us go with no needles required, thank goodness because I had no idea what I would have been jabbed with.
6. 100 metres further along and yet another building where once again we had to line up and again have details
Tashkent
What $200 US looks like in local currency of our passport put into a computer and another stamp.
7. In the same building was another room where we had to fill out declaration forms in duplicate. Thankfully if you ask the customs guys (who speaks a bit of English) you can get the forms in English. We ended up doing one in English and one in Russian. The guys here were actually very friendly for border/customs guys and although they grilled us a bit and wanted to look through our bags it was done in a friendly manner and not your usual stand over authoritarian way. Here they X ray your bags and you are officially in Uzbekistan.
8. Final step is another 100 metre walk to the final gates where a soldier inspects your paper work and you can walk free.
There was perhaps only a dozen other people going through with us so it ran fairly smoothly but still took over an hour. Once outside we were greeted by “Welcome to Uzbekistan” by taxi drivers wanting our fare, one of the men spoke English so negotiated with him including all the stipulations including this price is for
Tashkent
Blessed are the cheese makers two people. Best we could do for a ride to Tashkent was $50 USD, Lonely Planet claimed the 2 hour ride should be $30 but couldn’t get it. Should have walked on to the next group of taxis up the road but figured we just wanted to get to our hotel. Driver claimed he knew where our hotel was but of course he didn’t and our GPS came in handy once again. When he dropped us off and we paid him he tried to make out that the $50 was for only one person and we needed to pay him $100. Not once in our journey through Tajik did we get this sort of nonsense, but soon as we get across the border we get it again. We both simultaneously told him “NO” in the best of Australian ways and he gave up straight away, guess he thought it was worth a try, while we put on our backpacks and headed into the hotel.
Our room is fantastic but soon discovered that the entire city is without water till 7am tomorrow morning, which is just a tad inconvenient. The hotel supplied us with 2 large containers of
Tashkent
Statue of Timur on horseback water but it is funny how you don’t miss your water till the well runs dry. Can’t wash your hands, can’t flush the toilet, can’t have a shower- damn.
Went for a walk around the local area for a while working out where we were and exchanged some USD for Uzbek som. $200 USD gave us 587,000 som, which amounted to two small bricks of cash. Uzbekistan we discovered is a bit like Venezuela where you can get a 30% better rate for your cash on the black market than at a bank, but changing on the black market is illegal although widely done. When you change cash legally you get a receipt to prove a cash exchange so it is important to do a legal exchange at least once so that if you get stopped by the police you can prove where you got your funds from. Tomorrow we plan to go to the bazaar where all the money gets changed on the black market and hopefully get a better rate.
Wandered around town for a while before going to a bar late in the arvo and soon discovered to our horror how
Tashkent
Statue of cranes fighting expensive this country is. We will splurge on a good room but tend to skimp on food and drink when we can so it was a shock when we had to pay over $4 for a beer and $20 for a meal at a reasonably nice bar, so decided to head to somewhere that was cheaper. Moved onto a sleezy looking basement bar where the prices were not much better, and unfortunately got a feed there as well. For $40 we got 6 beers, a meal that came on a bread and butter plate and unsmiling and apathetic attention; by this stage we were really missing Tajikistan. We know that those prices aren’t that bad when compared to home but we have just gone through some really cheap countries and we have been living off the smell of an oily rag so it came as a real shock.
Back in our room we quickly had a war meeting and reassessed our plan and reduced our time in Uzbek and worked out a quick strategy to reduce costs; no more beer for me (Scott), especially if we can’t work out the black market.
Tashkent
Romanov Palace Day 86 Wednesday 13th April 2016 – Tashkent The hotel has a great breakfast and the water came back on early in the morning so things seem brighter. Reception gave us some info to help with the day’s business transactions that we would encounter so armed with this we headed to the Metro station. Note to anyone travelling by Metro the police search your bags before you enter, no big deal as there are no lines, make sure you are carrying your passport. The stations and trains are great with old carriages that look like they come from the 1950’s (it actually opened in 1977) and the stations really interesting. The price is 1,200 som for one token and that is for one way no matter how many stops. We are off to Chorsu Bazaar and loved passing through the different stations, especially Kosmonavtlar which as you pass through you are greeted by the faces of astronomer Ulugbek and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin peering at you. Unfortunately security paranoid Uzbekistan will not let you take pictures so you will just have to google images.
Got off at the markets and soon as you
Tashkent
Memorial in the park exit you are confronted by men wanting to exchange money but we are a little unsure as the police were standing right next to them. We decided to walk around the markets a bit to get the lay of the land and check out what food we could buy if we did not get a better exchange rate than the official one. The first hall was full of great fruit and vegetables, with a huge bread section at one end. The next part was in a UFO looking building with meat of every kind, salamis and cheese, with dried fruit and nuts on the upper level. Another area was plants and another souvenirs and yet another clothes and domestic wares.
After some time of constantly saying NO to the money exchangers we thought it was time to dip our toes in and ask the rates. We knocked a few back and finally after some discussion with one man got the rate up to 6,400 som to 1 USD if you were better at this or local you may get a bit more but had been told the best rate was 6,500 if you are lucky. We were
Tashkent
Art Market in the park taken to an older woman sitting behind a column who produced the cash from her lap hidden under an apron. We were warned to count all the money and check that no lesser notes were slipped in between before you hand your money over which is all pretty logical but when you exchange $US200 and get 1,280,000 soms in 1000 notes it is a bit daunting. We started initially by checking they were all 1000 notes and yes it seemed good then we looked at counting them and the man asked us to follow him into a shop with a money counter. All the restaurants, bars and shops seem to have them otherwise all the staff would be spending their time counting. He put a few of the bundles through the machine and they were correct and the other bundles looked the same size so we finalised the deal. Now at this point I should remind you that the official exchange rate we got yesterday was approx. 2800 Som to the dollar and now on the black market we got 6400 som to the dollar, which is over 100% better. That means that everything from now on costs half what
Tashkent
Orthodox Cathedral it should and that $4 beer is now less than $2. Apparently Hotels demand credit card or cash in USD so you cannot halve their costs but food, drink and transport can if you exchange on the black market. We have no idea how this works but as tourists were very thankful for it.
We continued looking around and decided to try and exchange another $US100 but the next guys were sharpies and tried the scam of dropping a zero off the final figure hoping to confuse us so after saying NO two of them grabbed at and cornered Scott and started shouting and became really frantic for the deal, but we managed to keep our cool and got away with all our fingers and toes, after escaping decided to go back another day and find the original men.
Got the usual bag checks at the top of the Metro stairs and the one before the platform but here the police were more interested in us and asked for our passports one just looked at the stamps in the passport while the other was really examining Scott’s the one with mine got bored and
Tashkent
Spray painting a building passed it on as if that is enough and we were on our way.
After a quick stop to drop a few bricks back at the hotel we walked up to Amir Timur Maydoni which is like a square/park to see the statue of Timur (Tamerlane) on a horse which yes the horse’s old fella has been cut off apparently no one knows what happened to it but they left the substantial balls. I guess someone must have a large bronze horse penis as a souvenir of their visit to Tashkent. We continued through the park looking at a small market and then onto tsarist era Romanov Palace which is not opened to the public and also the senate building. After a long day of walking we decided to have a drink at an English pub (Bird in Hand) which should have been called the Moscow pub, the waitress pushed me out of the way even though there was plenty of room behind me and another waiter shoved a menu in my hand and said only Russian, to which we showed him our backs. Don’t mind that the menu is not in English but we knew his
was not going to be a friendly Bird. Believe it or not the next place we came across was an Irish Pub and the staff were friendly saying hello and immediately told us they had English menus. The food was pretty good and music great.
Day 87 Thursday 14th April 2016 – Tashkent The first mission is to get a visa for Kazakhstan and after breakfast walked a few blocks to the embassy to be greeted by a large group of people waiting outside with only a few being let in at a time. So joined a makeshift queue which seemed to be growing in front of us, so asked a man who was writing people’s names down on a sheet of paper but he was not interested in us. After about 15 minutes we walked up to the guard on the gate and showed our passports and asked if we were in the right queue and were told to wait beside him. Eventually he checked our bags and let us in, not sure if we queue jumped or what was going on but inside we faced another queue and
again people were trying to push in front of us especially one lady who kept smiling at us with a mouthful of gold teeth. Held our ground so she tried the man in front of us who was from the UN and he told her off so she moved back, it was chaotic. Eventually reached the counter to be told that we need an LOI for thirty days or we can just get stamped in at the border for 15 days, guess which one we chose, so tonight we will be cutting out parts of Kazakhstan from our itinerary. The thing that annoys us is that everything we have read states we do not require an LOI for a 30 day visa, but it comes down to the luck of the draw of who you get on the day at the embassy or at the border, and experience tells us that it is useless to argue.
With that decided, the next battle was to get train tickets to Samarkand which in every other country we have tried even if no English is spoken has been achievable; well not here. We walked towards the main station and went
Tashkent Railway Museum
Scott next to the 1949 Loco to go through the security to be told that we had to walk to the other side, saw a smaller building where we were told to go through the security on this side as we went to enter they pointed us back to the original security guards, this is getting ridiculous. They then pointed to another area that appeared to be for the slower local trains that stop at every station. Now I should mention that Uzbekistan has a superfast bullet train called ‘Afrosoiyob’, then a mid-speed train called the ‘Sharq’ and the local slower trains, so the country has amazing options to travel just nowhere to buy the tickets. Well we were getting nowhere fast so headed to a travel agency we had seen that had a picture of a train as well as planes on the outside but you guessed it, it was now closed for lunch. We were just about ready to rip our hair out, so walked across the road and sat in a café till it reopened. Now a little bit more relaxed enter the travel agency to be ignored and a sign saying bank – “what the??”, finally someone looked up and said yes
Tashkent Railway Museum
Shelley jumping for joy they were a travel agency but no they don’t sell train tickets you can only get them at the train station.
Today is going so well we have given up and will get the hotel reception to write a note of exactly what we need and go back to the station tomorrow. Today has been a bit of a road wreck so we probably should have gone back to our hotel room and pulled the doona over our heads and gone to sleep but we decided to go back to the Irish Pub to drown our sorrows. Yesterday the pub was great, but tonight it was a disaster, it took twenty minutes between drinks, we had multiple staff meetings where they were screaming at each other and customers demanding refunds. Nearly walked out several times but stuck with it and ultimately we got a reasonable feed and a few beers before returning home. Today had been a bit of a disaster and felt everything went wrong but know with every bad day you get many more good day so we were looking forward to something better tomorrow.
Day Tashkent Railway Museum
Close up of the huge wheels 88 Friday 15
th April 2016 – Tashkent
It is amazing the difference a day makes. Yesterday didn’t go so well, so first thing this morning we got on the net and did our research and found a website for a travel agent nearby that we couldn’t find yesterday (despite walking around for an hour). The woman on reception was able to give us proper directions to it and within fifteen minutes we had walked to it. Olga from Avantours was so great and was able to not only organise our train tickets to Samarkand but also a couple of other connections and also give us some info on a tour we were considering. Paid on Mastercard and left feeling so happy that we didn’t need to face the sh#t fight down at the train station again. Returned to our room so we could now book a hotel in Samarkand for tomorrow night before heading out for a celebratory lunch.
Decided to get ourselves some Plov for lunch which is sort of a regional dish and comes in lots of variations. We had wanted to go to a recommended restaurant on the other side of
Tashkent Railway Museum
View from the drivers cabin town but it was getting late so went to one down the road. Plov is fried rice with vegetables including carrot, chickpeas, other unidentified vegetables and a sprinkling of sultanas and a topping of tender lamb/mutton on top. Ours also came with a quail egg on the side but there is lots of variations on this meal. Perhaps one of the nicest meals we have had on this trip but it is a large and heavy feed and if you are vegetarian you may get it without the lamb as I think they throw it on last from a separate dish, but you would need to check.
From here we decided to walk off our lunch and headed off to visit the train museum which was a good 45 minute walk away. The police presence in this city is phenomenal and there is a policeman about every 50 metres, none paid us any attention but they are everywhere. Yesterday they blocked off all the streets so a huge convoy of black Mercedes could roar through the streets, and we sort of guessed it might be the president going out for lunch, but today they were still everywhere,
maybe waiting to see if he might want some more plov.
The train museum is located predictably near the train station and is actually a great collection of Soviet machinery. There is some incredible steam and diesel locomotives here but a bit of a shame that they are not maintained a bit better and that they are not in working order. It would be fantastic to see some of these engines working again, although most are way beyond that ever happening. Bought back fond memories of the first train museum my father took me to as a child and it was great clambering over them all. I have attached a photo my brother Stephen sent to me at the end of the blog of that memorable day back in the 1970's
It was a hot day and it was a long walk back to the hotel so we decided to take the metro. We both just love the metro in this town as it isn’t crowded, the trains run every 5 minutes, the train stations are sensational and the carriages look like something from Fitz Lang’s movie Metropolis; if you ever come to this
city you have to do the metro.
At 5 we walked back to the travel agent and picked up our train tickets and organised the tour we were interested in before going out for a celebratory drink. Still feeling very full after our lunchtime plov so opted for a few drinks at a bar before returning home to pack. Yesterday we felt like nothing was going right but today everything fell into place. Travel is like life, you get your good days and your bad, when you get your bad days don’t freak as a good day is just around the corner. Tomorrow we are heading to a place we have both dreamed about visiting for a very long time, we just hope Samarkand lives up to our expectations.
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Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
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