Bukhara

Uzbekistan is the country that just keeps on giving. Just in the past week i've seen ships in deserts, mosquitos on hotel bath towels, ruined cars on roads and museums in mosques.

I took a 22 hour train to Nukus which is in the west of the country in an autonomous region called The Republic of Karakalpakstan (what a name!) and befriended a few people on the train. Two old women kept feeding me tea and plov (a national rice dish) and two men were enthralled with both my Russian phrasebook and my ipod which they wanted to buy from me - until i told them the price. I also have a small travel book full of useful pictures that serves as a kind of international phrasebook. It has pictures of all the essentials for traveling (food, stuff in hotels, beer, condoms) and the two guys who were arguing over my ipod spent ages looking at a page full of seafood. Uzbekistan is double land-locked. A land-locked country surrounded by other countries that are also landlocked. Pictures of squid, crab and lobster looked alien to the men of Karakalpakstan. And i was reliably informed that The Pouges are better than The Killers who are better than The Beatles. Who knew?

The Republic of Karakalpakstan (sorry, it's addictive to say it) is completely linked with deperation and destitution. Nukus is a perfect example of a central Asian hole full of people who look as if they know they're living in the arse end of nowhere. I stayed in a hotel that had three bed dorms and shared a room with a small, stocky, bald middle aged man from Tashkent. He spoke no English but thanks to a combination of my Russian phrasebook, the hotel bar and his mobile phone we got on really well. His name was Islam and he phoned his English teacher daughter to translate some things for me that weren't in the phrasebook. Apparently Islam's son was in prison in Nukus and he was in the region to try and secure his release. We drank quite a lot.

That night we both got murdered by mosquitos. The next night we decided we should kill as many insects as possible before sleeping. Which is why i was stood on a bed swatting the air with a guide book whilst a man called Islam, wearing only trousers and vest, slapped another wall with a bath towel in a vain attempt to kill mosquitos in a hotel room in The Republic of Karakalpakstan.

But Karakalpakstan is home to two much more famous and interesting stories. One inspiring, the other depressing. Nukus houses The Savitsky Karakalpakstan Art Museum which was set up thanks to Igor Savitsky. He was an Uzbek artist at the start of the 20th century. Soviet Russia decreed that artists had to stop painting pictures that were abstract or depicted images that didn't conform to the new fantastical Stalinst ideals of the USSR. Any artist who didn't follow the new rules found themselves in Siberia or a gulag. Igor Savitsky collected and smuggled the art from Russia to his home and kept the forbidden paitings and drawings hidden in Uzbekistan for decades as a kind of Schindler for Russian modern art. Now there's a museum in Nukus with 30,000 pieces of art from the 1920s and 1930s that the world was never supposed to see. Of course, only a fraction of them are on display at any time but the story is as wonderful as the art is amazing and a few hours gazing at Russian art from the 1920s almost made Nukus a bearable place. Almost.

The other story linked with Karakalpakstan is The Aral Sea. The Aral Sea is a perfect text book example of humans fucking the world up for the sake of money. I went north from Nukus in a taxi and then a minivan to Moynaq. Moynaq was a fishing town in the 1950s and 1960s and sat on the shore of the worlds fourth largest lake, The Aral Sea. Now, the Aral is over a hundred kilometres away to the north. It gets smaller every year. Eventually it will disappear all together. This isn't an accident. This isn't a natural occurrence.

Russia wanted to increase cotton production within the USSR in the 1960s and decided the rivers that ran into the Aral Sea were a perfect freshwater supply, damned up the rivers and dug diversion channels into fields to irrigate the land. The result was that lots of cotton was produced (Uzbekistan is still the worlds second biggest producer of it) but the Aral Sea was left to wither away. Between the 1960s and 90s the water fell by a height of 16m. In those thirty years some shore lines saw the water recede by 80km. I stood on what was once the Aral Sea next to fishing boats that had been left to rust and decay and tried to do the maths. 80km in 30 years. About two and half or three kilometres a year. About 7m a day. You could probably stand in Nukus forty years ago and be able to see the water receding from the shore before your eyes. Worse was to come. After the fishing industry collapsed the reduction of the water meant less rain and more dust. This killed plant and animal life and caused huge health problems for the people. The weather changed to extremes causing summers to be desert hot and the winters Arctic cold. The whole area is depressing. Everybody who lives in Moynaq wants to leave and i didn't feel particularly comfortable wandering around taking pictures of stuff.

But i did wander around. I saw the old fishing boats that have been parked together conveniently for tourists. I met Ahmet, a nineteen year old who said he enjoyed walking among the old boats so he could meet foreigners and practice his English. He said he'd never seen the sea and that his parents would speak about it as if it was a mythical place or a dream. I walked back to the bus stop along the dusty streets being part harassed by a school kid who simply kept shouting the word "dollar" at me. At the bus stop i was surprised to meet some happy people. Three men were swigging beer and laughing, joking and calling for me to join them while i waited 30 minutes for the bus to leave. They chatted and giggled about money, women, football and Guinness. It wasn't until the 30 minutes passed that i realised why they were so happy. One of them was the bus driver, the two others worked on the large bus collecting fares. They were leaving Moynaq. Why wouldn't they be happy?

After Nukus i got a shared taxi to Khiva which is an old small walled city that has been rebuilt and destroyed a few times and was once home to a slave market on the Silk Road. It's now home to hot sunshine, sand coloured buildings, mud brick homes, old wrinkly people saying "Salam" and skipping kids shouting "Hello". And French people. Middle aged or just plain old French people on tour groups are everywhere in Khiva gawping at the massive mosques, medrasses and minarets that have have been turned into museums and furnished with market stalls hawking crap.

Cars in Uzbekistan are different. They're either Daewoos (the crazy Koreans built a factory in Tashkent) or Ladas (they just don't die) and all of them have some kind of defect. Normally it's nothing too serious - a crack across a windscreen that looks like somebody threw a stone at it, gear fitted the wrong way, steering wheels that aren't aligned correctly with the steering of the car, speedometers that have a needle that just jumps around as if trying to guess the speed to the vehicle.

The car i was in today between Urgench and Bukhara sped through the desert landscape at a hair raising speed but i have no idea exactly how fast as nothing on the dashboard worked apart from the radio. As far as the car was concerned we didn't have any fuel and our speed remained constant at 0km/h. I was on the back seat sandwiched between the sizable frames of Jalal and his friend who only communicated through the power of grunt. Jalal was a friendly guy though. He kept offering me cigarettes, asking me how much a prostitute costs in England (he didn't quite understand how i didn't know) and falling asleep on my shoulder. At one point he called the driver to pull over in the middle of the scrub shrubby desert. We got out and walked over to a spot where a small commemorative stone had been placed with words and dates inscribed on it. There were mangled bits of car strewn around and you could make out bits of body work or engine. I looked at the date on the engraved stone - 10 September 2009. One of Jalal's friends had died in a car crash. We all jumped back in the car and drove at an unknown but stupidly excessive speed through bumpy rough desert roads in car with only one seat belt which the driver only used when we went through a check point. Uzbeks are instinctively friendly and linguistic chameleons (Uzbek, Kazakh, Russian, English, Karakalpak, Turkish, no problem) but from now on i'm getting the train.

Bukhara is the holiest city in central Asia and keeps a steady population of French tour groups but i've only really just got here and i've probably written too much. Then again, Uzbekistan is probably giving me too much. Thanks for reading.

Tashkent

I'm in Uzbekistan. New country, new cities, new people, new language, new money. I feel like i'm starting all over again.

I was still in Kyrgyzstan the last time i wrote on here. Osh was a dusty city with a massive market, lots of restaurants and a large hill in the middle of town called Soloman's Throne where Prophet Mohammed apparently once prayed. I got drunk for the first time in a long time gulping down vodka and beer in varying amounts with other tourists and travellers from my guesthouse. Kyrgyzstan vodka is not recommended. Even by the Kyrgyzstan vodka manufacturers. It's vile.

I met a Korean guy in my guesthouse who was also traveling to Uzbekistan and we got the wrong minibus and ended up at the airport but eventually found the way to the border and on to the city of Andijon further west. It was very obvious entering Uzbekistan that we'd entered a police state. There were checkpoints on the road where drivers were ordered to stop and show some ID. Police are an obvious part of life here. No free media exists and elections are always won by president Islam Karimov who has a firm hold on the leadership.

Andijon is famous for markets and massacres. The Jahon Bazzar on Sunday mornings makes every other shopping experience i've had seem like a closed convenience store. It sells everything from boxing gloves to bullets, swords to salads, chairs to chimps. Everything. And it's huge. Unfortunately few tourists venture to Andijon to see the market or the friendly funny people as it's seen as a dangerous part of Central Asia after what happened on May 13 2005. President Karimov used the War on Terror to keep his grip on power by locking up (or just killing) any of his opponents or critics by labelling them Islamic fundamentalists or terrorists. Twenty local businessmen in Andijon were locked up in 2005 on such charges but their supporters demonstrated outside the prison and in Barbur Square in the centre on town. The police and army opened fire and killed between 200 and 1000 people - the exact figure is unknown.

But for all the police and the horror stories the people are huge hearted and always smiling, the streets are safe and the taxi drivers as manic as ever. Andijon was home to thousands of minivans that whizzed people to all parts of the city in cramped, hot and fast conditions. As we were there at the weekend the banks were closed so we had to change money on the black market. The current exchange rate is about 1850 Uzbek Sum to 1 US dollar but the highest bank note in Uzbekistan is 1000 Sum which makes changing 100 dollars a unique experience. Especially when the money changers stand on the street corner holding carrier bags full of cash. It took me ten minutes to count my money.

After a shared taxi ride i arrived in Fergana with it's large parks, dusty streets and another massive market. I stayed in an old Soviet hotel complete with peeling wallpaper and a lift that sounded like a tank. Fergana is a cosmopolitan little place with plenty of Russians and lots of ethnic Koreans who, for some reason, were brought here by the Japanese when Korea was a Japanese colony. It also has an open air disco nightclub thing right outside the hotel which pumped music for hours into the night.

Getting from Fergana to Tashkent at the end of Ramadan was a bad idea but eventually i found my way into the front seat of a shared taxi and we buzzed through the traffic and checkpoints to the capital city along roads that Kyrgyzstan can only dream of. I stayed in a guesthouse owned by a man called Ali who was always drunk on vodka or in the process of getting drunk on vodka whilst telling all the guests to join him and get drunk on vodka. Uzbek vodka is worse than the Kyrgyz variety. I slept in a dorm room with a Russian guy who walked around wearing his boxer shorts, way too much aftershave and not much else and played crap music as loud as possible on his laptop. I also met two monosyllabic Polish guys, a funny German, a Canadian know-it-all and a Pakistani who once visited Germany and had "twenty two girlfriends in twenty two days". Funny place.

Tashkent is an old gritty city with some new shiny buildings thrown into it. The metro doubles as a nuclear shelter and the trains rattle through the tunnels with their lights blinking making you feel like a spy in Bond movie from the seventies. There are also lots of signs around that say Tashkent 2200. I can only hope that it's not a two hundred year plan to modernise the city. It's a bit disheartening if you live here. As if the government is saying, "Yes, it's a bit of a shit tip now, but just wait two centuries. It'll be great."

I leave tonight on a train to the far west. Apparently there's plenty to see in Uzbekistan besides policemen and markets and checkpoints and vodka and dusty towns. At least i hope so.

Osh again

It's been a fun week.

I left Karakol behind in a minivan that, for once, wasn't jammed with people along the south side of the huge Lake Issyk Kol and then onto a drab town and into a Lada that bumped over roads and into a small town called Kochkor. Kochkor was a happy smiling place and the people seemed content and friendly enough but unfortunately they couldn't disguise the fact that their town was in fact a shithole with quite a few drunk men who insisted on stopping me and speaking Russian. The first thing i did was make plans to leave the next day. The next thing i did was find a tiny old hotel that was owned by a hairdresser and she proudly showed me a cold bare room, an outside pit toilet and a sink in the car park that used water from a old oil drum.

I'd arranged to leave to Lake Song Kol the next day with a jeep and a driver. The driver was huge Kyrgyz man and the jeep was a Korean 4x4 which had to be push started by two taxi drivers who were stood around doing nothing which seemed to be the main source of employment for the men of Kochkor. The 4x4 rumbled over dirt roads and mountain passes covered in snow until we arrived at the edge of the lake where i stayed with a family in a yurt for a few days. We arrived to find half the family packed and ready to leave the lake shore for the winter and head back to the warmer valley so there was a farewell family feast laid out in the large white felt yurt. Nobody even blinked when they saw me. It was as if i was a member of the family and they looked and talked to me as if they were saying, "Sit down, we've been waiting for you, have a cup of tea, here's a plate, munch on some goat meat and potato, wash it down with some vodka, do you speak Russian, don't worry, here's some fermented mares milk, it's tangy and it'll make your stomach bubble for a night, have some more vodka, have you got a camera..."

I was humbled and amazed at the landscape at Song Kol and the people. There wasn't a tree or a sign of human life for as far as you could see apart from a few yurts and a dirt road. The family had no electric, gas or running water and slept on snug warm blankets on the floor of the yurt being kept warm by a stove fuelled by dried cow shit. I was kept entertained by watching an old man and his grandson patch the holes in a boat, the mother milk the cows and a little ten year old ride around on a donkey herding cattle. I spent the next day wandering and hiking by the lake, taking too many pictures, eating great food, getting my nose sun burnt and seeing an amazing sky full of stars.

The next day i headed south to a town called Naryn with the help of a manic taxi driver who drove like he'd just robbed a bank and kept stopping at rivers and streams to refill some water bottles and would then pour them into the engine to stop it from overheating. Naryn was a town that made you want to instantly leave. I stayed in a hotel that was either half built or half destroyed, it was difficult to tell which. It made Jack Nicholson's place in The Shining look like a theme park. The surly ugly woman in the office at the entrance showed me to a room and i gestured that the large window wouldn't close but would just gently swing open. She just walked out into the dank corridor and called the handy man who was scraping stuff from the floor. After a brief conversation the handy man walked into the room, took out two nails and a hammer and nailed the window shut. He looked at me as if to say, "Happy now?" and walked out.

Thankfully i found a B&B and a Spanish couple, Jaoquin and Issabella, who also wanted to leave Naryn quickly. The following day we spent 12 hours traveling to the wonderful town of Arslanbob through some ridiculously awesome mountain scenery. We started in a Japanese jeep driven by a friendly tour guide and then after lunch managed to find an old 1980s Audi (of which there are thousands in Kyrgyzstan - they all got sold to central Asia by Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall) which took us over some grizzly mountain passes on hobbled, cobbled and battered dirt roads. The driver only stopped twice during the whole journey. The first time because we got flagged down by some old men who were hunkered down by the side of their Audi. I thought they'd broken down. After a brief conversation the driver rummaged around in the glove box and found what the old guys needed. A shot glass. He handed it to them and we flew off again. The second time we stopped was because the axal, transmission and steering suddenly and quite abruptly decided to separate itself from the front right wheel which caused a bit of a noise and a slight panic as we were zooming along at about 120km/h at the time. Thankfully the wheel managed to stay attached to the brakes and suspension. The driver made some phone calls and told us somebody was coming from the nearby city of Jalal-Abad to fix it. We hitched a ride to a taxi rank in a village with the help of a BMW which seemed to be part powered by rap music and then a minibus and a another taxi eventually got us to Arslanbob and a cute little guesthouse.

Arslanbob is a great little village nestled in a valley between yet more Kyrgyz mountains and waterfalls and is most famous for the fact that it is home to the largest walnut grove on earth which locals harvest every autumn in huge amounts. I did a hike yesterday morning into the walnuts and the hills and met an old Canadian woman called Dianne. As a result i managed to hitch a ride to Osh with Dianne, her friend Judith, who was a former parole officer, their tour guide from Bishkek and a Russian driver who looked like a Bond villains right-hand man. We saw all sorts of places on the way (they were spending huge money on a 20 day trip through central Asia) and last night i stayed at a guesthouse in Osh with them, where a large group of Czech hikers couldn't understand why a young English man was traveling around Kyrgyzstan with two slightly eccentric elderly Canadian woman in an expensive German jeep. Neither could i. I like Kyrgyzstan.

And now i'm back in Osh which was the start of the Kyrgyz journey. In the next day or two i'll head west across the border and spend a few weeks in Uzbekistan which seems to be home to deserts and huge amounts of Muslim architecture. Kyrgyzstan has been a great country to travel in. It has amazing mountains and lakes, fantastic people, shit roads, knackered vehicles, more livestock than humans, its name has ten letters and only one vowel and as an independent country it's younger than me. It's been a very memorable place.

Karakol

This week i've seen blue lakes, gold toothed doctors, dead headless goats and white mountains.

I was in Bishkek staying in a guesthouse in an apartment block run by a Muslim who was having a hard time trying to stick to the rules of ramadan and occupying his time harassing an American girl. Bishkek is a sunny tree lined city with friendly people and Soviet style buildings, parks, squares and statues. It also has corrupt policeman everywhere who try to search you and steal your cash and is home to the funniest collection of T-shirts With Random English anywhere. The following are the pick of the bunch.
Remember My Name, You'll Be Seeing It Later
No Money No Crisis
Save Me
My Boyfriend Appreciates Me
No Romance Without Finance
You Were Never My Boyfriend

August 31st was Independence Day and was celebrated in the morning at a racecourse with a game called Ulak-Tartysh. Ulak-Tartysh is a very old game and unique to central Asia. It involves two teams of four on horseback, two raised pits and the carcass of a dead headless goat minus its entrails. Yes, you read that right. The aim of the game is to pick up the goat carcass and then throw it into your teams pit whilst blocking, stopping and preventing the opposing team doing the same thing all of which takes place on horseback in a field in the sunshine in front of a few thousand people, TV cameras and the president himself. It's as crazy as it sounds. We saw two games of this and it is a brutal sport with horses and riders colliding at speed all the time. The riders have extreme strength and skill - imagine riding a horse and bending down one handed to pick up a dead goat hook it under your leg, ride around and then take it with both hands and throw it into a raised pit whilst four other men are trying to grasp and take the goat and push and shove your horse with theirs. It's a bit like rugby. Except it's on horses and the ball is really very different. I'm thinking that an email campaign to the IOC for inclusion in the 2016 Olympics should be started soon.

Public transport in Kyrgyzstan is also a little crazy, although thankfully no dead goats have been involved yet. All buses seem to be minivans which all have the same schedule - they leave when they are full of people. I waited a while at a bus station and went to a one street town called Cholpon Ata on the shores of the huge Lake Issyk Kol. Cholpon Ata is famous in Kyrgyzstan for its beaches and Russian and Kazakh tourists sitting on the sand by the lake trying not to look fat and spending lots of money doing it. I joined them and looked poor, skinny and English. I thought i'd get a suntan. I almost got hypothermia. It was freezing. None of the Russians or Kazakhs seemed to mind at the gale blowing across the lake or the drizzle falling from the sky and that night my rumbling stomach problems that i've had since Kashgar became serious bowel problems and i left the next day to the town of Karakol in search of medical care.

The minivan to Karakol would've made me laugh if i hadn't have spent the whole journey trying not to throw up or shit my pants. The ignition didn't have a key but simply had a screwdriver wedged into it. A screwdriver was also the weapon of choice to open the boot, first to turn the lock then to prize it open so you could put your bag inside. As we were zooming along, the drivers door would randomly open without warning and then be quickly closed by the driver again as he was changing gear, talking on the phone and overtaking a tractor. In Karakol i found a doctors clinic and wandered around aimlessly clutching my Russian phrasebook and looking as sick as possible. A pharmicist took pity and showed me to a stern looking Russian woman doctor with gold teeth who thought that i could speak fluent Russian and immidiately bombarded me with questions and words that meant nothing. I pointed at my stomach and tried to point to the word "diahrea" in the phrasebook. She snatched it out of my hands and pointed to the word "rabies". I shook my head. Then she pointed at "encephalitis". I assured her as best as i could that i didn't have any sub-tropical mosquito diseases. Eventually she found the word "diahrea" and after poking my stomach a bit and pointing at more words she charged me one dollar and wrote a load of Russian on three pieces of paper and gave them to the friendly pharmacist. I don't know what they put in Russian/Kyrgyz medication but within two days i was bouncing off the walls and taking solid visits to the toilet again.

Karakol sits in between the eastern edge of the lake and two mountain ranges. On a clear day the snow capped peaks seem to surround the drab unassuming town and i spent two days hiking up and down a sunny valley filled with trees, a white water river and immense wonderful white-topped mountains. I'll be here for a day or two more and then head west trying to avoid dead headless goats, vans held together with screwdrivers, fat sunbathing Russians and, of course, rabies.