Uzbekistan Day 2

– In downtown Samarkand (a city of half a million people), I managed to run into someone from the bus ride yesterday, what are the odds? 

– Went into a local shopping mall in order to exchange money, and I stumbled upon a female sales clerk who spoke near-fluent Swedish after living in Stockholm for 8 years. I wasn’t expecting to end up speaking Danish with locals on this trip, but this place sure is full of surprises. 

– According to my guidebook, foreigners aren’t allowed to buy domestic airline tickets outside of airports, however there’s plenty of ‘Aviakassa’ airline ticket agents not directly affiliated with Uzbekistan Airways all over the towns here for the locals. I took a shot at getting my flight back to the capital in two weeks at one of these, and although it was necessary for the Russian-speaking salesman to download the Google Translate App (I have a phrasebook for Central Asian languages, with phonetically written local translation of useful English words, but take a guess how bad I am at pronouncing Uzbek), and it worked out! The app couldn’t properly translate “is the ticket confirmed?”, so thank goodness there was an E-ticket number on the receipt for me to crosscheck online. During the booking process the guy asked me for my Instagram profile, so I got a one-way to Tashkent on a Soviet-designed turboprop that Uzbekistan Airways is the only operator of worldwide, AND a new Instagram follower. Sweeeeeeet! 

Exploring Samarkand

– I figured I’d save the price of a taxi in the afternoon by crossing the heart of the Old Town on foot. I don’t mind just wandering a little off-track, but I got lost so often that I had to get a taxi anyways haha. 

– A short while later my first experience with actual public city-transit in Uzbekistan was jumping on a crowded minibus for a couple stops, a ride so short that the driver didn’t bother taking the smallest banknote I had and having to count out all the change. Free rides are the best rides. 

HIKING in ANCIENT SAMARKAND

– Just before sunset, I spent a good hour or so hiking across the hills of the ‘Afrosiab’ archaeological site north of the city centre, an excavation of what used to be “Markanda”, Samarkand’s 2,000+ year old origins. The entire site has more goat herders than actual ruins (just take a look at the picture below), is not signposted although mentioned in guidebooks, and technically isn’t meant to have visitors, but the official museum leaves the back gate open. At the other end, one of the very few ways in and out of the site, appears out of the blue a cemetery belonging to a mosque adjacent to the Afrosiab site, which I needed to cross to get out. A construction worker repairing a pathway at the cemetery was baffled to see me, yelled at me, put his arms in an X and said “closed”, referring to the mosque, and pointed to the two corners where there were entrances to the mosque and said “police”. From my position all I could see was people walking on the street a few blocks away and figured I’d be alright. Well, he wasn’t wrong about the police. It was quite easy to read their body language – “how the heck did you get in here?”. I had to play the dumb tourist card to stay out of trouble, and fortunately they just laughed it off. 

– The otherwise excellent bed & breakfast that I stay at has suffered intermittent power loss all throughout the evening, and of course the blackouts started while I was using the restroom…it’s been stabile for the last hour without the back-up generator, but I’m just crossing my fingers that they don’t need to start up that loud diesel generator in the courtyard in the middle of the night. 

– I’m leaving Samarkand tomorrow and heading west to Bukhara, so with another 4-5 hour bus ride across Uzbekistan on the schedule, tomorrow will surely not put an end to the eventful days here. 

 

Originally posted on my private Facebook account on October 22, 2017.