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Day 1 in Uzbekistan since yesterday night’s departure in Istanbul until arriving in Samarkand today was quite something.
– Slept no more than 45 min on the flight because the crew insisted on keeping the cabin lit the entire time and doing meal service at the midway point = dinner at 2:30 AM.
– Waited at least an hour at Tashkent Airport to enter Uzbekistan because the visa desk in the immigration hall was closed when we got there!
Arriving in Tashkent
– Needed to get to an Uzbekistan Airways ticket office at the airport to buy a domestic ticket for later in my trip. The first employee I found, who spoke good enough English to help me find it, was more than happy to lead me there, but also told me straight up “I really hate my job”.
– The staff at the Uzbekistan Airways office told me to wait “5 minutes” in very broken English, but they just ignored me for well over 20 minutes while they sat there and counted their money and did other accounting tasks, so I gave up on that for now.
– I walk outside of the terminal for a few seconds and the entire group of waiting taxi drivers basically had their eyes on me already. My haggle skills are rusty, so I had to settle for a rip-off, and according to one of the only licensed cabbies there, it was “either you go with my friend for this price right now, or you can maybe do cheaper with those drivers over there, but those are gangsters…”
– I get to the bus terminal on the southern edge of Tashkent trying to get a ride to Samarkand, and I end up settling for a ride on a ‘Mashrutka’ bus to Samarkand. At this point my entire two weeks worth of travel funds in cash and my passport is in my carry-on, and I wasn’t going to leave that in the cargo hold or pull out all that USD to put it in my pocket and wave it around in broad daylight at a crowded bus terminal. So there I am dragging this suitcase into the passenger cabin of this rusty old Russian bus thinking it will surely fit under the seat or in the overheard – nope, had to sit with that thing in my lap for five hours.
Off to Samarkand by bus
– The entire journey was quite interesting because I obviously don’t blend in well with the locals, so here I am with 30 or so Uzbeks cruising down the very bumpy highways, with almost all of them (one babushka-type grandma kept having an annoyed look on her face everytime she looked at me) wanting to get to know more about me, but they kept asking me questions solely in Uzbek or Russian and there were only one or two people on the bus who spoke incredibly limited English. So I just sat there and tried to smile, while my confusion got all the locals giggling. Through a mixture of hand gestures, unbelievably broken English and pointing in a dictionary, it took the entire five hours to get through what my name was, how old I am, where I am from and listing which Uzbek cities I will be visiting, all of which got passed on throughout the bus, and whenever someone got on the bus later on, they’d ask something like “who is he?” and one of the other passengers would fill them in haha.
– My unwilling “brunch” (I never got breakfast and we didn’t stop for lunch) became 3 Clif Bars I had brought from home, and a piece of bread offered from my seatmate, a young mother whose toddler son kept sleeping while leaning ON me.
– I tried to catch up on sleep, but couldn’t, as I kept getting woken up by the speaker system either blasting out Uzbek pop music (imagine Western beats sampled from the 80s and 90s with Uzbek or Russian vocals, with the bus attendant coming through the cabin regularly to make sure the volume was turned all the way up), or the bus driver yelling into the microphone what the next city was.
– All in all though, I got from A to B only about three hours later than I had imagined, but for just 30,000 Uzbek Som (A whopping 3.5 Dollars). Despite the language barrier everyone on the bus were super friendly, kept asking “Thomas, okay?”, and the young bus attendant came up to me toward the end of the trip and with a heavy Russian accent said “I’m now you friend in Uzbekistan”.
– Here’s a pic of our bus at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere in the Uzbek countryside, getting a necessary fill-up of radiator fluid. I know what you’re thinking, why do I put myself through this? Well, I spent my day going through a landscape not many get to see, while spending time getting to know super friendly locals from a culture not many know of, and that’s why I like my vacations “weird”. Fun times.
Originally posted on my private Facebook account on October 21, 2017
