The drive to Bukhara was uneventful, except for the regular police checkpoints. We found a bed and breakfast, again in a traditional Uzbek home. The emirs of Bukhara were a nasty bunch, running a huge slave trade and beheading foreigners, including the unfortunate British officers Connolly and Stoddart. We visited the Ark, the emir’s fortress, and other scenes of dastardly deeds. Although the madrassas and mosques of Bukhara are not as visually dramatic as those of Samarkand, there are many more of them. The artisans’ covered markets have been restored, but much of the old city with its dirt streets remained pretty much as it used to be. We had more of a sense of being in an ancient city than in Samarkand, where the Registan is bordered by wide, wooded boulevards.
It was a long day’s drive back to Osh, with the usual hassles from police and border guards. In Tajikistan, one guard asked me to swap a $100 bill, which he claimed had been burned by a cigarette, for a new one; surely, I could exchange it at a bank in the United States. I wasn’t buying, and we gave up a can of car shampoo to cross. In midafternoon, a cop pulled us over and began examining our passports. He said he was learning English, and started reciting the names of the US states printed on the visa pages. I went along with this performance for about twenty minutes, good-naturedly correcting his pronunciation. “No, not Ar-kansas, it’s Ar-kan-saw, and please don’t ask me why.” I gave up when he could not wrap his tongue around Mississippi, and said we had to move on. The Uzbeks were searching cars (for drugs, they said) and asked us to pull out all of our bags. We were worried they would confiscate our purchases, so we all got out and started scattering dirty clothes and toilet articles all over the road. This was too much for them on a hot afternoon, so they waved us through. We got back to Osh late in the evening, slightly amazed that a mixture of charm, bluff, deceit, and the occasionally choreographed show of indignation had got us all the way through Uzbekistan and northern Tajikistan, and back again.
The Rapids of the Chuy
Stephanie, Richard, and I made one more trip that summer—whitewater rafting in the gorge of the Chuy River, east of Bishkek. In September, the water level was fairly low, and the trip was deemed easy-to-moderate. I’d heard that phrase before (in reference to our trek in the Tian Shan), so I wasn’t sure what to expect. For those of us rafting for the first time, it was wild enough. There were seventeen in the party (mostly expats living in Bishkek) on three rafts, ably handled by what we were told was Kyrgyzstan’s international kayak team. They kitted us out in what looked like Soviet World War II aviator gear. Some of us tried to paddle, although it probably didn’t help much because we didn’t know what we were doing and the directions—except for the occasional “rock ’n’ roll”—were shouted out in coarse Russian. We were on the river about four hours, including brief stops. It was all great fun, and everyone got happily soaked.
In later years, when Richard and I went on rafting trips on the New and Gauley rivers in West Virginia, we would pretend to compare the rapids with those of the Chuy. Someone else in the raft would invariably say, “The Chew-ee? Never heard of that one. Is it in Georgia?” “No, Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia,” we replied casually, gaining instant river cred.
Customer Disservice
When the Soviet Union broke up, its national airline Aeroflot suffered the same fate. From Baku to Bishkek, the governments of cash-strapped new republics seized the aircraft sitting on the tarmac, repainted them in the new national colors, and hoped they could round up enough spare parts to keep them flying. National airlines have since modernized their fleets, adding Boeings and Airbuses for long-haul flights, but Soviet-era planes are still the standard on most domestic and regional flights, and travelers still struggle with bureaucracy at ticket offices and airports.
In the early years after independence, foreigners had to pay the “foreigner’s price” for tickets. It was usually at least 50 percent higher than the regular fare and often had to be paid in Western hard currency. The only advantage, as far as I could tell, was that you entered the terminal through a separate “foreigners’ entrance,” waited (usually alone) in an area with an overpriced souvenir shop, had your passport inspected multiple times, and then were escorted to the plane by a uniformed official. Special treatment had nothing to do with being nice to foreigners. It was a holdover from Soviet times, when foreigners were segregated for undisclosed security reasons.
In July 1998, I needed to fly from Osh to Bishkek. The Kyrgyzstan Airlines ticket office was inconveniently located in a suburb, a twenty-minute cab ride from downtown. The agent told me she could not sell me a ticket. “Only Gulmira is authorized to sell tickets to foreigners,” she announced, “and she is at the airport today. You will have to come back tomorrow.” I asked if I could buy a ticket at the airport. “That is impossible,” said the agent. “Tickets are only sold here.” I went to the airport anyway and found Gulmira, who sold me a ticket at the foreigner’s price with, um, a small commission. It was cheaper than another trip to the ticket office.
Foreigners’ prices have largely disappeared, but there’s still the foreign passports line at most airports. And sometimes the line can turn ugly.
Until the late 1990s, Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, was not on the business (and certainly not on the tourist) itinerary. A five-year civil war meant that the airport was periodically “closed for fighting” (about as routine in Tajikistan as “closed for construction” anywhere else). With the return of peace, if not prosperity, the airport is open, if not exactly ready, for business.
The arrivals hall, a ramshackle building separated by a few city blocks from the main airport terminal, has limited staff and a single baggage carousel. When three flights (including mine) arrived within a half-hour period, the fragile infrastructure was quickly overwhelmed. Only one passport booth for foreigners was open, and it took the officer at least five minutes to review and stamp each passport. And there were many foreigners—most of the passengers on my flight from Almaty were Kazakhstan citizens. Occasionally, a policeman climbed over the barrier, waded into the crowd and pushed some people around, but it seemed to make no difference. Apparently the only way to get ahead was to slip a few bills to a policeman who would go into the booth and have the officer process the passport (while the person at the booth waited).
The foreigners’ “line” became more unruly when a group of Tajiks, tired of waiting in their equally slow-moving nationals’ line, decided to join us (but at the front, not the back of the line). People clambered over barriers and passed papers back and forth. Meanwhile, baggage from all three flights was arriving on the single carousel. All bags had to pass through a scanner; however, it was not connected to a computer, so no one actually inspected what was inside. Two airport staff collected baggage tags, but did not match them to the bags you were carrying. The trip had taken four hours—a two-hour flight and a two-hour ordeal in the arrivals hall.
Preflight Shakedown
Customs and security officials at Central Asian airports have gained a reputation for trying to shake down weary travelers by inventing airport taxes, selling transit visas you don’t need, and charging for excess baggage both on departure and arrival. Some travelers have had luggage impounded for weeks by officials demanding thousands of dollars in import duties or fines. Other scams involve currency controls. Because of capital flight, Central Asian countries imposed strict limits on the export of currency. However, the official inquiry, “How much money are you carrying?” can be the prelude to a search and an on-the-spot and undocumented fine.
Fortunately, most attempted shakedowns are minor and often played like a game. Arriving at Almaty for a flight to Europe, I was stopped by two policemen who inspected my passport. One noticed that my OVIR registration stamp had expired two days earlier. “That’s a $100 fine,” he declared with triumph. I figured that fines in the Kazakhstan Civil Code were denominated in tenge, not dollars, so I asked him to show me the regulation. As he skimmed through papers, failing to find the one that described my offense,
I became impatient. “Even if you’re right, I don’t have $100,” I said, not entirely truthfully. The policemen looked crestfallen. “How much money do you have?” the other asked. “One thousand tenge [at that time, about $8],” I replied. “That will do,” the first policeman said. “Have a nice flight, and if anyone else in the airport asks, please don’t say this happened.” I handed over the money, shook hands, accepted a shot of vodka and went on my way. In a country where police do not earn a living wage and routinely stop drivers to extract small fines, it was an additional, and not unexpected, travel expense.
The secret to shakedowns is to apply (or invent) obscure regulations. On another departure from Almaty, customs officials emptied the contents of my two suitcases, pulling out the three large Soviet-era school maps I had bought at a bookstore in Bishkek. “It is forbidden to export rare cultural artifacts, including historical maps,” declared the customs official. I pointed out that maps like this hung on the walls of schoolrooms all over the Soviet Union. They were neither rare, nor valuable. “Show me the regulation on historic maps,” I insisted. I unfolded the map pinpointing the sites of labor unrest in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “So what am I going to do with it? Invade the United States?” I asked rhetorically. That settled the issue.
Camping Indoors, Soviet Style
I don’t deliberately stay in rundown Soviet-era hotels so I can write about them later. Sometimes, there’s just no alternative.
From the mid-1990s, my work in Central Asia has taken me to places where the accommodation choices are pretty limited. I usually try to rent an apartment, if only for a couple of days. But sometimes I have to take my chances at whatever establishment displays a gostinitsa (hotel) sign. The Hotel Intourist in Osh. The Hotel Karakol. And the Hotel Molmol in Djalalabad in southern Kyrgyzstan in July 1997.
The municipally owned hotel had probably been a decent enough place in Soviet times when party bosses came to town to roll out the latest five-year plan, cook up inflated statistics on the cotton harvest, relax in the hot springs at the local spa, and dine in the hotel ballroom. There also used to be tourists—factory workers and their families who came to the spa and walked in the walnut groves. But few officials (and fewer tourists) had been there for almost a decade, and the place was in sorry shape.
I paid the foreigner’s price of $10 for a “luxury room” that consisted of a dormitory-style bed, a chest with broken drawers, and a few cockroaches. There was no running water. The staff—cheekily described by Lonely Planet as “breathtakingly rude”—told me the electricity would go off at 10 p.m. By 8:30, I was sitting in the dark, feeling hungry. The hotel restaurant was closed—for renovations, so they said. At breakfast the next morning, Buffet No. 37—the sign was a throwback to communist times, when all eating establishments were state-owned and numbered—offered cold piroshki and tea.
Most Soviet-era hotels reflect the ostentatious public architecture of the Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev eras with colonnades and cavernous lobbies. The impressive facades often conceal dark and drab interiors with poor heating and ventilation, dangerous wiring, and leaky pipes. The Soviets built their hotels large, and even small cities boasted establishments with several hundred rooms. Of course, the number bore no relation to the expected number of guests. In an economy based on artificial production quotas, not on demand for products and services, there was no place for market research.
So there they stand today—large, and largely empty. Hotel occupancy rates may still be a state secret in some former Soviet republics, but my guess is that most government hotels in provincial centers don’t fill more than 20 percent of rooms most of the time. And without guests, they don’t have the money to modernize.
These hotels have one saving grace—the dezhurnayas, the floor ladies. The dezhurnaya sits at a table opposite the stairs or elevator and discreetly monitors the comings and goings of guests. You hand in your room key to the dezhurnaya, not at the front desk. Even in Soviet times, the dezhurnayas were not very busy, except when the hotel was full. Today, they while away the hours reading magazines and watching TV. But in hotels where room service is not an option, they keep things running, rustling up late-night cups of tea and retrieving linens, blankets, and toilet supplies from secret stashes.
On a later trip to Mongolia, I learned that conditions in former Soviet satellite states were similar. I asked a friend who had traveled to the provinces to rate the hotels. “Pretty grim,” she said. “Rather like camping indoors.”
I’ve learned three valuable lessons about camping indoors. If you’re six feet tall (as I am) or taller, sleep at an angle because the beds are short. Carry a few tools so you can fix the furniture and, if you’re handy, the plumbing, too. And tip the dezhurnaya on the first day of your stay.
A Seven-Star Hotel and a Seven-Dollar Breakfast
My traveling companion Sergey nudged me as the aircraft began its slow descent from the Pamir Mountains to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.4 “We’ll be staying at the only seven-star hotel in Central Asia,” he said, with almost a straight face.
I was doubtful. If there’s a seven-star hotel anywhere in the world, I was pretty sure it wasn’t in Tajikistan. In any case, our travel budget didn’t cover such extravagances. I forgot Sergey’s remark and returned to my struggle with Tajik Air in-flight catering. The tray contained an array of small and hard-to-open items including meat paste, a slice of brown bread, impregnably shrink-wrapped Russian cheese, a cookie, and at least six condiments.
If I’d known about the seven-dollar breakfast at the seven-star hotel, I’d have eaten it all.
The Poytaht (Tajik for capital) Hotel, a massive, concrete, Soviet-era extravagance in Dushanbe’s central square, does indeed have seven stars in the crown atop its roof. So do many other establishments in this pleasant city with tree-lined boulevards, parks, and public buildings painted in shades of pink and blue. In Tajik culture, seven is a magic number. According to legend, paradise consists of seven beautiful orchards separated by seven mountains, each with a bright star at its summit. Tajikistan adopted a new national flag in 1992, ditching the proletarian hammer and sickle for the more ethereal crown with seven stars. The country didn’t need a Western-style branding campaign to adopt the emblem. In short order, the seven stars popped up on public buildings, restaurants, stores, and karaoke bars. Dushanbe has no shortage of seven-star establishments.
The Poytaht once had star quality. In Communist times, party bigwigs from Moscow stayed there while they checked on the affairs of the Tajik SSR. They threw banquets in the ballroom and lavishly entertained local officials. The Poytaht has at least two hundred rooms (though no one seemed to know exactly how many), but we saw only a handful of other guests. The staff seemed to spend their time dozing in the dimly lit lobby or hanging out in the karaoke bar waiting for customers. For $50 a night, I got a suite, with a lock that had been jimmied a few times. No stars for the furnishings or plumbing, but enough room to easily sleep seven people, which is apparently what the locals do to stretch their budgets.
Sergey and I had turned down the Poytaht’s offer of full board with dinner, opting only for the rooms and a $7 breakfast. The only moving bodies in the breakfast room the first morning were a few hungry flies. Sergey woke up the waiter, who was fast asleep despite the pounding sound of Tajik techno-pop from the DVD player.
He came over to our table. Could he buy us SIM cards for our cell phones? The latest Harry Potter movie with Chinese subtitles? Cheap plane tickets to Novosibirsk?
“How about some food?” Sergey asked. He looked disappointed, but ambled off to the kitchen. After some shouting, he reappeared with cold, slightly stale lipioshki, green tea, jam, and four small slices of cheese.
Sergey complained and the waiter returned to the kitchen. After more shouting, he showed up with two omelets. “Bon appétit,” said Sergey. “Remember that if this was really a seven-star hotel, we’d be paying a lot more than seven do
llars for breakfast.” I was already nostalgic for Tajik Air in-flight catering.
six
To Be a Kazakh Is to Be “Brave and Free”
It’s a Really Big Country
On October 14, 2013, Alex Trebek, host of the long-running TV quiz show Jeopardy, announced the category for Final Jeopardy: Big Countries. The clue: “Outside of Russia, it’s the largest country in the former Soviet Union, and the largest country not bordered by oceans.”
One contestant responded, “What is Ukraine?” Another wrote, “What is Kazakhstan?” adding $4,701 to her total. The reigning champion, Greg Buzzard, asked, “What is “Kazakhistan?” That extra syllable cost him dearly. “We don’t normally penalize misspelling,” said Trebek, but in this case it changed the pronunciation of the country’s name. It cost Greg his $6,600 bet, and he landed in second place.
The decision ignited a minor controversy on Jeopardy fan sites, with viewers citing precedents for rulings on misspelling issues. “I am going to stop watching Jeopardy,” wrote one. “This Kazakhistan should have been acceptable. This was a rip-off.” A European viewer lamented American ignorance of “anything foreign: geography, history, language.”
Postcards from Stanland Page 16