Friday 13th, a day late. But Bukhara is AMAZEBALLS!
Trains #18 and #19, taxi #4 Distance travelled from Shanghai 15,050 km.
I mentioned that I left Astana just as the World Nomad Games were starting. The BBC has a bit more to say about them and here’s a news item introducing them.
While I am sharing work by other people - quite some time ago, I was in Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi desert. I didn’t go out to the sand hills because I thought they’d be a bit too strenuous to enjoy properly. I’ve now watched Yan go out and think I made the right decision!
In my last post, I showed the historical centre of Turkistan. I can’t say I found much else to like. On my first night, I wander the area around where I am staying (I have an apartment, which means I can do laundry!), but the only food offerings are fast food, particularly burgers. I’ve had a fair number, so when I see a chaikhana, I pop in to see what they can do for dinner, and get some sort of meat and potato dish. It’s a lovely place to sit and drink tea.
The city itself seems a bit lacking in things that might attract tourists - no bars, barely even a coffee shop. Their big plan to attract tourists? The build a mall! Sorry, they build the Keruen-Saray multifunctional tourist complex which contains shopping malls, hotels, restaurants and a flying theatre, which has the audience in a flight simulator as they watch a film. This is it. I don’t know what it is when I investigate - the security man glares at me while the woman in the coffee stall dozes. You can see bits of the mall behind it.
I walk round the whole complex - there is a supermarket, a phone store, two big local brand stores (a third which is either already closed or is about to open, it’s hard to tell), an area with various amusements but not a single customer and line after line of empty shops. Even if it were thriving, I don’t know if it would bring in the tourists. There’s quite a nice artificial lake.
This whole area is a newbuild - the mall opened in 2021, and they are building apartments around it, which might provide it with a customer base.
With nothing more to detain me in Turkistan, I move on - backwards, actually. I leave not knowing how far I will get, hoping to make it back to Tashkent. First there’s a train halfway back to Taraz, to a place called Shymkent. I’m in the compartment on my own again, so I do something I should have done weeks ago - I bought needle and thread when I was in Dushanbe, and finally pull them out and repair my trousers, the seam of which had given way, almost from crotch to beltline.
I take a local bus on a semi circular drive around the centre of the city - it seems quite busy, and I spot several good looking coffee shops - to where someone on reddit had said I’d find marshrutkas to the border. I find the spot, the marshrutkas have finished for the day (it’s approaching 5) but I get a shared taxi. The border town is called Zhibek-Zholy - the taxi driver swears he’s going to Tashkent, “no Zhibek-Zholy” so I pay slightly over the odds. There are at least three adults and two kids in the back, with a bawling infant. Of course he doesn’t go through the border!
No matter - it’s an easy transition back into Uzbekistan, and the #69 bus is there to take me to a Tashkent metro station. It just happens that there’s a Bon! coffee shop at the station, so I linger there for a bit (they’re quite nice).
Walking to my hostel, I see a very busy restaurant so pop back for dinner, have perhaps the best mustava ever - it has a bit more spice than other versions I’ve had.
Basically they start by frying off some mutton, then add finely diced veges and potato, then rice, then a collection of spices. Water is added last. I didn’t fare so well with my main - it was called assorti, and the chicken leg and potato were nice. The various minced meats, not so much. I had not realised that there’s a pretty special interior, and they’re selling lots of wee cakes. I grab a few for later.
I’m back in the same area of Tashkent I stayed in earlier, so know there’s a beer place just around the corner. They do things a little different here - they won’t sell me a glass of beer, I have to buy a litre bottle, but I can sit in the bar to drink it. My first attempt at a poor does not go well - I have a glass full of froth. I don’t feel so bad when I see others have the same problem.
I have a leisurely start to the morning of Saturday 14th - my train to Bukhara doesn’t leave until 14:14, so I stop in two coffee shops on the way to the metro, and get to the station at about 1:00, with a plan to go to the cake shop there for the last hour. But my plan is foiled! The security man won’t let me in, because I need to go to Tashkent South station, this is Tashkent North. Of course, there’s a taxi man there to take me, quoting 100,000 som ($14) for the 6 km journey. He immediately drops to 50k, so I hop in.
I have booked at the last minute, about midnight last night, because I didn’t know if I’d make it to Tashkent. My preferred train, which has regular seats, had sold out, so I got the second to last berth on a third class sleeper - a Platskart. This is what an earlier train I travelled on looked like. The table folds down to form part of the bed base for the lower berth. I, of course, have an upper berth - as you can see, there is a shelf above it, and the bed is very narrow.
Initially, I am sitting on the lower bunk with its occupant - that’s the convention. At around 3, they bring the sheets around, and everyone makes their bed - my downstairs neighbour clearly wants to, so I wander off to see about some tea. The Provodnitsy - carriage attendant - is having trouble lighting the fire for the water boiler, but I find boiling water in the next carriage. When I return to my bed, my neighbour has invited the neighbours - three people sitting on her bed, so I have no other option but get into bed.
But I can’t. I have several goes at it, but I just can’t squeeze myself into that space. Other people are having trouble too, but they have friends or family to give them that extra push they need. I do find an empty seat in the next carriage which I can use for a bit, but the Provodnitsy there moves me on. So I stand in the vestibule for quite a while. Passing back through the carriage, my neighbour is now visiting the neighbours, so her bed is empty. I ask if I can sit - “nyet”. So, I stand in the vestibule at the other end of the carriage for hours (the journey is about 7 and a half hours). A bit over two hours before arrival, the Provodnitsy must have got wind of what was happening - he comes and asks if I want to sleep, offers to lift me into my bed. By this time, there’s not much point - so he gives me a small bag of sheets to sit on. Then he gives me a large one.
Not the best, and my day’s not yet over. In Bukhara, by the time I get off the train, there are very few people about, and certainly no bus to take me the 15 or so km into town. Of course, I’m approached by a couple of taxi guys, but I want a minute to think, get my bearings, get some cash from the ATM. They don’t leave me alone for a second. By the time I find neither the ATM nor my mobile data are working, they are the only two guys I can see - I’m at their mercy. I should have done some research into taxi prices, or remembered how quickly the taxi driver in Tashkent had halved his price - but when they said 360,000 som, I returned with 250,000 - they know that I didn’t know the proper price, and gouged me for 300,000. [On my return, I could use Yandex, because I had access to the internet, and it cost me just 19,000.]
Thankfully, Bukhara is so great that I freak out and use words like Amazeballs to describe it. More on that later.
Cheers!