Day 559

Tashkent this summer is all fountains and flowerbeds and sprinklers and slightly unfortunate new architecture, and I bought an old coke bottle of fresh mulberry juice from the bazaar and wandered through the parks and boulevards drinking it and thinking that the Peace Corps are right to do it for two years. I feel like I'm only beginning to get the hang of things here,that I'm balancing on the edge. And I'm going home tomorrow, and it's not enough time.

Home from home.

Crossing the border to Uzbekistan felt like coming home. I had a stupid grin on my face all the way to Tashkent, and I rode the metro to my hotel which stopped at all the most bizarrely-decorated stations (astronauts and chandeliers forever) and I bought samosas in the bazaar and when I walked into the hotel one of my best Tashkent friends was there fixing somebody's bike, and all was right with the world.

Then I went to look for things and found out that the main Uzbekistan Airways booking office has moved the cafe with decent wifi (cafe. singular. Freaking Dushanbe has more wifi hotspots than Tashkent, which is at least three times the size) had closed and my UCell sim card, worth its weight in diamonds now tourists are forbidden to buy at all, had been blocked and my taxi driver tried to grope me and I would've bought a flight ticket to leave this evening were it not for the fact that no one knows where the bloody ticket office has gone.

And then I bought a drink and received a single teabag and a piece of bubblegum as part of my change, which is possibly my favourite Uzbekistan quirk of all (I have wrangled thirteen-odd currencies in the past six months and the Uzbek sum is still the most inept I have to encounter; guys, your biggest bank note is now worth less than fifty cents, suck it up and print bigger ones already) and I'm reluctantly forced to admit that I still kind of love this stupid place.

I do really need to find that ticket office though.

Pamir highway post goes here.

If I ever finish writing it. Timely blogging is beyond me, apparently.

Famous in Tajikistan

I spent this afternoon being interviewed by a magazine called "Women of Tajikistan" after being ambushed by a couple of journalists outside the Uzbek embassy. For some reason (possibly my expression of beatific joy - exiting a Central Asian embassy, visa in hand, often provokes this) I stood out as a Person Of Interest and so I spent two hours in the office of this publication (which must have a remarkably broad editorial scope if it is interested in the thoughts of random tourists) being quizzed over the weekly circulation of newspapers in the UK, the London public's reaction to the burqa ban in France and what my message was to the Women of Tajikistan. The interview took place partially in Russian so heaven knows how it turned out; when a translator finally turned up ("Why are there no women like Margaret Thatcher in the British parliament at the moment?" was giving me difficulties, not just because of the language) we got sidetracked into an extensive argument over whether global warming exists so I'm not sure how much that helped. At the end of the interview, the journalist apologised profusely that editorial policy didn't allow them to put foreigners on the front cover, otherwise I would, he assured me, be there like a shot (I have never, ever been so grateful for editorial policy). I still have zero idea as to what I did to excite so much interest, as foreign tourists aren't exactly uncommon here - OK, so Paris Dushanbe ain't, but it's not Mogadishu either), but I am extremely pleased that Central Asia continues right to the end to be a Bit Odd.

Osh

We decided to risk the overland trip south through Osh to Tajikistan, as things seemed to have calmed down a lot. No trouble and the town centre is much the same as it was when I visited a year ago, but the approach roads are lined with burned-out shops and houses, the anti-Uzbek graffiti mostly painted over now, and there are fields filled with UNHCR tents in the outskirts. I don't know how this can be fixed.

Carpets that I love

Shyrdaks are Kyrygyz felt carpets, traditionally found adorning the walls and floors of yurts. As you can perhaps tell, the designers are fairly unconfined by any notions of matching colours or taste, so the dilemma for the discerning shyrdak shopper is whether to spend hours (days) hunting for a vaguely tasteful specimen that might fit into some pre-exisiting colour-scheme at home, or just embrace the madness and go for purple-and-orange piece that carries a risk of seizures if you look at it for too long. If I had my own house they would be my floor-covering of choice in every room.

Yurting holiday

Dawdling in Kyrgyzstan is an almost entirely pleasant activity, even if its object (to wait out the violence down south) is somewhat less so. The reason for this is primarily because it is so easy to engage in said time-wastage in yurts up in the Kyrgyz mountains, which flicked in a day from spring to summer - morning drizzle gave way one day to bright afternoon sunshine that hasn't let up since. With this in mind, I coralled a trio of Swedes (travelling with Swedes is great: you learn the best Norwegian jokes) and we hired some horses and a guide to disappear for a few days into the hills in the centre of the country, where yurts sprout like mushrooms and there are ibexes (how do you properly pluralise an ibex? ibices?) on the mountain ridges and marmots (not marmosets. This caused a certain amount of confusion for a while) running shrieking at your approach.

I really can't get enough of the mountains here. Even when the horses are intransigent (Kyrgyz horses know damned well that foreign tourists have imbibed too much animal-welfare nonsense to follow the single piece of advice that constitutes riding instruction in these parts ("just hit it") with much conviction, and take full advantage of this, with the result that you frequently find yourself stationary in a patch of wildflowers for extended periods of time with the horse stuffing its face and you prodding it cautiously the whip, vaguely worrying that an RSPCA inspector is going to pop out from behind a rock and do you for animal cruelty, while the guide disappears over the horizon. Or possibly that's just me.) and the "saddles" appear to have taken their notion of comfort from a medieval torture chamber, everything feels fresh and bright and clean, with the high still covered with spring flowers and dozens and dozens of meltwater streams running off the hills. Wandering around the valley one evening I suddenly remembered what one is supposed to do when faced with a multitude of small streams and a large supply of flat stones and mud, and spent a very happy couple of hours damming and diverting several streams, and anyone who doesn't fully appreciate how supremely satisfying an activity this can be is probably dead inside.

Unlike the last time I was horse trekking here, this time we weren't particularly going anywhere, so we would do a bit of riding in the morning to get some nice views, then come back to the yurt, which is always very much a working place as well as somewhere for tourists to crash, so there were always small armies of daughters and nieces (it seems that a lot of families in the towns send their children to relatives in the country for their summer holidays so a lot of the kids up here now actualy spend most of the year in Bishkek) milking the cows and horses and making cream and fetching water and cooking, while the sons and nephews herded the goats and the cattle and we rather got in the way, but everyone was very nice and fed us neverending quantities of tea and kumis anyway (ah, kumis. The one (monumental) downside to yurt living. Have I waxed lyrical on the subject of fermented mares' milk before? Oh, I have. If someone in a yurt offers you a large bowl of slightly suspect-smelling white liquid with... bits floating in it, proceed with caution (see post immediatley below this one). I don't want anyone to say they weren't warned).

One afternoon, our host invited the neighbours (i.e. everyone who had a yurt within two hours ride) over for the Kyrgyz equivalent of a kickabout, which of course meant an enthusiastic game of kok-boru, the Kyrgyz national game which can be described as polo with a higher body count and which is played with the carcass of a goat. Compared to the full village-on-village clash I watched earlier this year, this was a more modest though no less chaotic affair, with half-a-dozen guys on each team as opposed to two hundred but an equal reluctance to confine the action to the pre-agreed playing field and feeling that nothing has been achieved until someone has been carried off unconscious (he woke up again in time for dinner, so that was OK). In the evening we ate goat kebab and fresh bread and cream and wild cherry jam by the light of oil lanterns while the Anglo-Swedish contingent strove to find an acceptable excuse for refusing the fourth bowl of kumis ( a partial list of what hasn't worked so far: I'm sick, it's against my religion, I'm lactose intolerant, I'm pregnant) and convincing defense for the inexplicable fact that despite the fact all of us were unmarried, none of us were imminently planning to rectify the situation, and the mountains turned pink in the sunset. I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this.