The Long Road Home

Well I’m in a cafe in city of Bishkek capital of Kyrgyzstan. I’m trying to get an Uzbek visa. No joy so far. The uzbek embassy is a dirty grey stucco mansion with the green flag drooping outside it. First day I went it was closed. Second day a group of people was standing outside the embassy. A guard came out at 10am with a small piece of paper with names on it in biro. He read the names and people said yes. Of course mine wasn’t on. A lady from the Kyrgyz Finance ministry trying to go to Tashkent for a training course told me you can’t just turn up, you had to phone after 12 noon to register, and then come back the next day. I already have a reference number having paid quite a lot of usd to a travel firm for an invitation. But I still had to phone etc. So I did, and then went back to the grey mansion this morning, the thrid day. My name was now on today’s scrap of paper - well, they aknowledged an English person of some name was on the list. We all waited on the pavement. People go in one by one, first into a kind of outdoor holding pen, then into an office. I chatted with a big Uighur from Urumqi who was doing some kind of textile trade. He was the first Uighur I met who complained that the Han get all the money and the jobs. He only really spoke Uighur, with rough chinese and apparently some basic russian, but he couldn’t read. He was absolutely delighted to find I’d been to his home town on my way.

After about 1.5 hours, I was called in. There’s a room like a doctor’s surgery waiting room and a lady in a booth. There are photos of people in a factory weaving cloth on white looms, cotton plants being harvested, some kind of industrial plant, of a person lying in a medical scanner, of rows of identical parked cars. Also fabulous monuments in Samarkand and Khiva. The lady looked at all my documents, then disappeared, then came back and returned my documents and said I should come back at 3pm.  I am, rather worryingly, the only person who got their passport back like this. Everyone else had come out having lodged their documents for pick up later.

Hmmm. Quite worried I won’t be accepted. Well let’s see.

Meanwhile I have been walking round Bishkek slowly, sneezing and blowing my nose, and I can’t hear properly because my ears have somehow blocked up. I caught a huge cold over the pass somehow.

Bishkek feels sleepy and shabby. There are lovely green shady avenues and sun and shadows on the pavements. But there are weeds in the concrete steps of the enormous main square. The concrete cinema had handpainted pictures of women and men’s face, and a dark policeman in a hat. The Palace of Sport looked nasty and there was an advert for muscle men show. The trams are tatty shaky tin things. The parks have dried up roses in big bare beds ad lamps with smashed glass.

Only 500m from the goverment building are quiet dusty residential streets where old men sit outside their garages with cardigans buttoned up despite the heat, and a few children go in circles on bikes with no brakes in the evening sun.

But there are nice tree-shaded avenues with wooden park benches an peopel sitting.

Lots of songbirds and doves and pigeons.

Bishkek is brilliant for cafes. Outdoor cafes in parks, trendy cafes for smart ladies, Italian cafes for people working for NGOs, Turkish cafes, local cafes where you get pots of tea. There are all SORTS of people here. There are big old ladies with gold teeth wearing huge flowery dresses and socks and slippers. There are pale young couples with pale toddler children. There are Asiatic girls in flimsy slingbacks and slinky dresses. There are dark young men in flipflops and baggy sports shorts. There are rather hefty peroxide blondes in shades and miniskirts.  The police are wearing comically large hats. There are neat tired-looking grey men with document cases.

I had my hair cut in a salon with pink anaglypta walls, pink tipped brushes in a pink holder. The big women hairdressers had stiff brittle orange or straw coloured hair. The lady for some reason cut my hair extremely fast so the scissors were snagging and getting stuck. I just closed my eyes. Not much I can do. It cost 120 som or about 1.50 gbp.

I’m staying at a place where they run conferences. My room opens into the main conference room, rather oddly. There are Americns in shirtsleeves explaining how to search and arrest poeple etc to Kyrgyz customs officers sitting at little tables making notes.

I had a very nice dinner with an American woman working for an ngo funded by US congress and a Russian lady who explained how municipal asset managemmment works in kyrgyzstan (or doesn’t).

In an open air gallery in a park, I met a lovely man who showed me how to play a Kyrgyz chopochor (?) clay flute and a kind of metal kazoo. The gallery paintings were mainly very brightly coloured mountains and rivers and lakes, some horses.

In Osh I’d stayed in a tatty wooden guesthouse with shared bathroom smelling of hamsters. There was a hectic bazaar with piles of fruit and veg and hot samosas. I ate a lot of salads and blinchiki pancakes with sour cream in open air teahouses, and drank lots of black tea. I climbed Babur’s House, a rocky hill in the middle of the town and looked out where apparently Babur had looked in 1497 before going off to conquer everywhre down to India and rule the Moghul Dynasty.

I didn’t manage to ride here from Osh because feeble with this cold. (How do proper explorers do it? And people who travel cheap cheap and camp everywhere? I’m staying in nice places wherever I can, and I’m always getting knocked back with colds and food poisoning etc. Not sure how they do it)

After a few false starts cycling round outskirts of Osh (cottages with startling orange tiger lilies, pink and red cosmos, and big white and yellow dogdaisies - nice)  I found a minibus that was going to Bishkek and caught it. Disappointing but I had a lovely time in the minibus. It was overloaded. Lots of mothers breastfeeding large toddlers.  Young skinny driver and old grey haired co-driver called Hassan. We all ate dinner together at a teahouse where the women and children took off their shoes and sat on a carpeted dais with a low table. The rest including me sat at wood chairs at table with clean flowery plastic table cloth. There’s a wash stand at the door for washing your hands when you come in. We had pots of black turkish tea, fresh flat bread, tomato and cucmbers which someone had brought. Everyone shared everything. If you buy a bottle of orange juice then everyone will have some, and then give you hunks of bread in return. We had plates of stewed lamb. It was suggested that the skinny driver should marry me to sort out the problem that I’m not married. We talk by flickng through a russian english dictionary. They gave lots of crumpled money to police at checkpoints. As night came on, and we were in the mountains, they played Kyrgyz folk tales chanted over the tape player. Repeated phrases, mesmeric. A burly Kyrgyz dad quietly pointed out each landmark, the lake near Jalalbad, the Naryn river slow and blue in its canyon, hydroelectric dams, and finally the stunning pass out of the mountains in the pink dawn onto the plain where Bishkek lies.

Tomorrow, hopefully, and rather incongruously, I’m setting off for my cousin’s wedding this weekend. Will be rather weird suddenly to be in the Cotswolds. Really looking forward to see all my family. I’ve actually not seen anyone I know apart from Rick since April. Then I’m back to my bike in Bishkek next week, to continue - hopefully - from here through the rest of Central Asia to the Caspian Sea. Bit worried about the visa problem. Let’s see.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 11:52 am and is filed under Kyrgyzstan, On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.