My brilliant plan to get a ride from Tajikistan to Sary Tash, Kyrgyzstan and then to hitchhike on a truck to the Chinese border didn’t quite work out. We arrived in Sary Tash at dusk and were told that the Chinese border was closed for the next 7 days during their huge October holiday. I’ve dealt with the travel problems surrounding this time in China before but I never thought they would close the border! Apparently it only close the “insignificant” borders, leaving me stranded. I continued on to Osh (Sary Tash is little more than a truck stop) and spent a week sitting in my hostel bed updating my web site and gorging myself on real food again. Despite being in a Muslim town (and Ramadan in full swing) the restaurants were crowded throughout the day and I had no trouble replenishing my strength.
For a special treat click on the thumbnails below to see the employees at the guesthouse—one of whom recently proposed to me via email in a thinly disguised effort to get a green card! Unfortunately it was not the cute one.
Murgab is the main town on the Eastern end of the Pamir Highway near the Tajik, Kyrgyz and Chinese borders. We arrived in Murgab around lunchtime and our driver took us directly to the police station where we were ushered into a concrete office with a man in full uniform. We spent two hours in the office being threatened with jail before my travelmates gave in and decided to pay the $15 bribe to settle our OVIR (police registration) stamps in our passports.
Although our driver had a friend he wanted us to stay with we decided to stay at an official homestay which turned out to be incredibly nice. I slept in what seemed to be a dining room (next to another traveler who I’d never met before) and the other two slept in another large room. Most people in Tajikistan sit on the floor, hence the lack of furniture. This house had a gorgeous outdoor “shower.” It was more of a sauna, really, with wood floor slats and a large hot coal stove. We were instructed to take one bowl of cold water and one bowl of boiling water, mix them and then pour them over our heads. We hadn’t showered since Dushanbe and it was heavenly.
This home also had a outhouse on its property. Although it was only a small shack with a hole cut out of wood floorboards it was much more luxurious than anything we’d used in the past week. I came down with either a case of food poisoning or more likely altitude sickness—Murgab is at nearly 12,000 feet (3,650 meters) and we drove through passes higher than 15,000 feet—so I spent most of my time curled up on those floorboards. We stayed in town two nights, waiting until my Kyrgyz transit visa became valid. The price included two meals a day and the owner spoke a touch of English.
Here is a video I took of our driver while we were delayed at the police checkpoint before entering Murgab:
We arrived in Alichur with an hour or two before sundown so I went out exploring. I took wonderful photos of the local kids and the father and daughter I had tea with in their home. Unfortunately, this is the one memory card in my camera I managed to erase by mistake. When I got back to the house I learned that one of my travelmates had been sent out to look for me since I was a woman alone and it was almost dark. Staying with Rahima and her daughters was a great experience. She was a teacher at the town school and a transplant from Dushanbe who spoke passable English! It was wonderful to finally learn about our driver and the Tajik culture without pantomime.
I took down Rahima’s address hoping to communicate with her in the future. Amazingly, my friend David was traveling through Tajikistan recently and hand delivered my photos to her and a few other people in the towns along the Wakhan Corridor. You can read about his quest to find the people in my photos here at his blog.
At this altitude the nights were bitterly cold and we had drunk a lot of tea. The house was small with a narrow entrance hallway where the driver slept, the main room with the stove and a platform where we slept and a small room where the Rahima and her three daughters slept. The baby was colicky and up most of the night crying but I had trouble sleeping for other reasons—imagine waking up in a dark house at a high altitude and trying your hardest to go back to sleep instead of going to the bathroom. After an hour you give up and put on your clothes, boots, coat, hat and gloves. Once you find your flashlight you make your way outside and navigate the frozen dirt path to the public toilets a few doors down. You have to hold your flashlight to make sure you don’t step through into the pit (see the photo below) while looking out for any animals or neighbors.
Although there are a few official home stays that are approved by a Tajik organization we spent most of our nights on the road in the Wakhan Corridor and Pamir Highway with our driver’s friends. Navabad was the first place we stayed after leaving Khorog. We don’t know if we were actually in Navabad but it was the closest mark on the map to where we suspected we were. These towns aren’t written up in any guide books or on their maps and I was very glad that I bought a detailed map of the Pamirs from the Swiss embassy.
We arrived at dusk and spent the remaining daylight outside on the road watching the farmers walking home from their fields and playing with the children that quickly discovered us. The house we stayed in had no electricity or generator, which seemed to be the norm for the Wakhan Corridor. After dinner we sat around a low table with only one candle while a grandfatherly man wandered in and spoke to us for twenty minutes in a language we didn’t understand. Without electricity and only an old man and a crossstich Lenin to entertain us we were in bed by seven. We paid our host what we thought would be appropriate and were fed breakfast (stale bread and tea) and dinner (noodle soup).
One of the two guys I was traveling with in Tajikistan flew into Khorog a day early and met me at the airport. He had walked, but a nice petroleum businessman from South America befriended me on the plane and offered us a ride in his fancy SUV. Apparently when my friend arrived he simply walked down the main street with his backpack until a little woman named Gulnara grabbed him, led him to her house and started feeding him. With no real hotels in town things like this just work out. Our adopted mother was delighted to see more people and immediately began fussing over us.
The house was uphill from the main street through a small dirt alley about 6 feet wide. The street was lined with high walls and her bright blue door opened up into a small yard with a stream and pear trees. At the back was an outhouse next to the goat pen. This and the stream would prove interesting when going to the bathroom at night and I learned quickly to turn down tea after dinner. Our other friend arrived the next day and the two men were given bedrolls on the platform but I was given the honor of the bed in the corner. My back would have much preferred to sleep on the floor but I couldn’t be rude.
It was an interesting place to stay and since we didn’t speak Russian and Gulnara didn’t speak any English we just paid her a random amount when we left. Three people at that price should have been a pretty good amount of money for the family. She was cooking all the time and made hand made potato fritters. When we ate in the market (to see what it was like) the woman felt bad about her cooking and I had to eat some of both of the guys’ dinners to keep up appearances. Although she was a good cook for the region it was at this point that I pretty much lost all interest in food. I just could eat any more of those same three dishes. Not only did Gulnara make sure we were fed but she also dyed my eyebrows (without asking me first) and made her granddaughter wash my hair. Now that’s customer service!
It took me all day to get from Samarkand, Uzbekistan to Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The trip through the mountains was beautiful and you can read more about it here. The only real hotel in Dushanbe at the time was an old Soviet monstrosity and it took a bit of pressure to free up two “cheap” $10 rooms. At the end of each hall was a woman at a desk in charge of keys. She was often sleeping or watching TV instead of watching the keys and gave me disapproving looks when I slept in, as it disrupted her schedule.
Tajikistan has a number of rules for travelers including the need to register the police within three days of entering the country. The person I traveled with from Uzbekistan tried to register at the appropriate authority but was told to register at the hotel. We did but then ran into trouble when we got to the other side of the country and were told we were only registered for the time we were staying at that hotel. It all came down to bribes in the end.
The price was quite high for a room with no bathroom and no breakfast. It was also interesting that I paid $10 for my bed in a 2-bed room and my travel partner ended up paying the same price to share his room—it was priced per bed, not per room. This was the only hotel I slept at during my two weeks in Tajikistan—as far as I knew there were no hotels in the other towns I visited, where I stayed with local families. The home stays proved a much more valuable insight to the culture than this hotel, where I was invited to karaoke with French military wearing blue camouflage hot pants.
I looked back in time for the pose I wrote about Samarkand and was surprised to realize there isn’t one! How could I not tell you all about this historic place? Often times when there was something special I wanted to write about while I was on the road I would put it off until I had time to do the topic justice. All too often that meant I never posted.
This room opened up to an open air courtyard where most people in the hostel ate dinner family style. It was great for meeting new travelers and where I met my travel partner to Tajikistan. This was also where I ran out of sketchbook pages and you can see where I’ve started assembling a new book out of drawing paper I bought in Kyrgyzstan.
I arrived in Bukhara late after a long journey from Khiva involving four shared taxis and two buses (one of which broke down in the desert). Bukhara’s historic center is car-free so the taxi could only drop me off in the center. I promptly turned the wrong direction and got lost down a maze of narrow, crumbling alleyways. My bag was pretty heavy at this point and I was struggling to make it up any more stairs. Every low-cost hotel I could find was fully booked—something I found to be true throughout Uzbekistan in September. I ended up at a nice hotel and collapsed. For $25 a night (hotels ask for payment in US dollars in Uzbekistan) it was more than my total daily budget but I had exhausted all of my options and after traveling all day was sweaty, covered in dust and hungry.
The hotel was so clean I felt horrible staying in my own room. Not only did it have air conditioning and a bathroom—the bathroom had glass shower doors! It was the nicest hotel I stayed in my entire 14-month trip and probably the most expensive as well. Breakfast was served outside in the courtyard with a beautiful tea service.
I arrived in Nukus at dusk and soon found out that most of the hotels were full of tour groups. My taxi driver kept circling the city, trying to find me a place to stay. The only reason to go to Nukus is to go to Moynaq, where the Aral Sea used to be. Its not a tourist town at all and it was least welcoming town I have ever visited. The boutique hotel was cute but for $15 I got a room in the back with no windows and an alarming amount of decoration. Try sleeping under all that pattern!
The owner tried to throw me out when I tried to bargain the price down but I managed to calm him down so I could recover from my pre-dawn flight from Kyrgyzstan. In the end I paid the overpriced amount and was promptly given a roommate! It turned out to be a woman I’d met at my hostel in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan a few weeks back but whom I got along splendidly with. Most people hate Tashkent because of the old cement communist architecture but that’s precisely why I loved it. At least the $15 included breakfast!
