by Jamie Maslin
In what seemed like double-quick time, the meal was over and Benoit was indicating it was time for him to go out—possibly to drop the truck off. I thanked the family and bade them goodbye. Before jumping back in the truck, Benoit led me to a water tap in the garden where he began washing his face. I followed suit, the super-cold water jolting me to full alertness. We said our goodbyes on the edge of town by the single-lane road I would need to reach the country’s capital, Bishkek. As this kind and hospitable man pulled off into the traffic, I raised a thumbs up sign to him in thanks. With a beaming smile Benoit returned the gesture in solidarity.
Looking rather unkempt and carrying a dirty great backpack, my presence here caused quite a stir. A woman drove past in a Lada and began gawking at me, diverting her attention from the road, causing her to crash into the car in front. The two got out and a heated verbal fight ensued that looked on the cusp of turning physical. I stood where I was and watched on, bemused. Although I’d managed to get a ride from the border yesterday, I wondered whether this had been due to the area’s remote location rather than my written note. I was on the edge of a city now, so this would be the first real test of Kyrgyzstan’s viability as a hitchhiking destination, and the success, or otherwise, of my Kyrgyz and Russian translations. After less than ten minutes an old-style Audi pulled up, whose driver, a rugged-looking guy, wagged his finger at me on approach. I didn’t know quite what he was getting at, but after passing one of my notes through the window, he gestured for me to get in. And that was that. Hitchhiking was most definitely doable in Kyrgyzstan.
To be fair, this was a lucky first attempt, as I discovered thirty or so miles down the road when dropped in the town of Uzgen. From here I received four refusals in a row from drivers who, on reading my note and discovering I had no intention of paying, promptly drove off again. Not that this was really a problem, as it was more than balanced out by the sheer volume of vehicles that pulled over. With this being so high, it still made hitchhiking easy, since about a third of drivers were still willing to give me a lift for free. And so it went all the way to Bishkek, which I arrived at by mid-morning of the following day, after making my way there through mountain scenery of such spectacle and size that it convinced me to take up mountaineering when I finally made it back to Europe.
I was dropped just outside Bishkek by an old truck driver called Abdul, whom I had pushed on with from late afternoon until 3 a.m., and spent the night with in his cab as accommodation—me in the two front seats, him in a bed behind. My final ride into the city came from, of all people, a taxi driver, albeit an off-duty one, who dropped me by Bishkek’s central square—a masterpiece of Soviet Brutalism, surrounded on all sides by communist era buildings, one of which, I learned later, was actually a massive façade, clad onto a former clothing factory to give it a grandiose appearance befitting the capital of a Soviet satellite state. Flanking the square’s eastern and western sides were buildings made up of arches, from which hung giant colorful banners depicting traditional Kyrgyz life: men on horseback or training falcons; women outside yurts, all set to a backdrop of green hills and snowy mountains. At the northern end of the square was a museum dedicated, in large part, to Lenin, outside which stood a huge statue of a winged woman grasping onto a tunduk, the round central roof section of a yurt. Known as the Kyrgyz Statue of Liberty, it is a controversial symbol for a country where it is considered bad luck for a woman to hold a tunduk, and where superstition pervades to the extent that politicians slaughter sheep inside parliament to ward away evil. (Soon after I left the country, the statue was torn down—a victim of a widespread belief that it was cursed, and somehow responsible for the two revolutions and ethnic violence that befell Kyrgyzstan since its erection in 2004, when it replaced a statue of Lenin.)
Fluttering nearby was a massive Kyrgyz flag, deep red in color with a golden tunduk in the middle, issuing forth a ring of forty flames, each symbolic of Kyrgyzstan’s different tribes. And at the square’s southern end, tucked into one of the corners, was a burnt-out four-storey police station—torched during the recent unrest. I took a discreet photo, then went looking for an internet café, finding one a few minutes down the road.
After the I.D. restrictions in China, it was a delight to use a computer and the internet unobstructed. I pulled up couchsurfing.org and jotted down the telephone number of Charlie, the U.S. couchsurfer who’d offered me accommodation. With the phone booth in the internet café broken, and my cell phone long out of credit, I resorted to paying the guy who ran the place to borrow his.
“Hey, Jamie!” exclaimed an enthusiastic voice on the other end. “Where are you?”
Bishkek was a city of nearly a million people, so wherever Charlie was, it seemed unlikely that he was close, but to my delight he turned out to be no more than five minutes’ walk away.
I waited for him on a nearby street corner, hoping that I’d recognize him from his online profile picture. He spotted me and my cumbersome backpack first, evident when a guy in his twenties wearing a traditional Kyrgyz felt hat known as a Kalpak began waving in my direction.
“Welcome to Bishkek, Jamie!” he said with a wide smile and a firm handshake.
We walked to a gray, spirit-crushing Soviet-era apartment block, and climbed its dark and cold concrete stairwell to reach Charlie’s apartment above. Inside was a cozy homage to the 1970s, with Day-Glo orange tablecloths and bright-red flowery curtains making up some of the more tasteful décor. Taped onto many of the walls were handwritten notes. “Washing machine” “To Wash” “In the washing machine,” read one, next to the appropriate translations in Russian.
“Practising my language skills,” explained Charlie.
Walking through a thin hallway lined with dark wooden cabinets with sliding glass doors, we emerged in a sitting room where another couchsufer, Jason, a red-headed Brit in his thirties, sat writing up his diary notes. We all settled down for a chat.
Jason had been in Bishkek for the last few days and was heading to Kazakhstan next before flying on to India. He was in the early stages of a year long world tour and had been through some interesting places to get here, including the Kurdish section of northern Iraq, somewhere, apparently, much safer than the rest of the country. He had no shortage of funny tales from his journey so far, including an intriguing stay in Istanbul with a male couchsurfer who made him a novel pre-bedtime proposition: a massage to “help get to sleep.” Jason politely declined, and wondered to himself whether this was some Turkish tradition he was unaware of, until, that is, a week or so later, he met another couchsurfer in a different part of the country who, without prompting, recalled for him a similar offer he’d received from a couchsurfer in Istanbul—albeit with an additional twist.
“I had to share a single bed with this one guy, who offered me a massage and a blow job.”
“His name wasn’t Serdar, by any chance?” asked Jason.
“Yes, that’s him!” confirmed the unfortunate backpacker. “He told me, ‘I’m not gay, I’m getting married soon, I just want to know what it’s like to suck a dick. Go on, let me suck your dick. Please!’”
I laughed and then with mock sincerity turned to Charlie, “There’s not going to be any of that sort of thing going on here is there?”
He laughed and gave me a little wink.
It was great to have some fluent English speaking company for a change, whom I could not only converse with but banter. We all chatted for some time, talking of our travels and getting to know each other better. Jason, I now discovered, was a doctor of mathematics who had worked in the nuclear industry; Charlie, a former microbiologist, who now worked in microfinance.
“That’s a big career change,” observed Jason.
“Well, I kept the small bit,” responded Charlie with a laugh.
Jason had some work to do, so Charlie and I left him to it and went for a stroll. On the way, walking through streets made up of an increasing number of Caucasian Russian faces, I asked Charlie more about his travels.
I was particularly interested to hear about his time in Israel and the occupied West Bank—something that had culminated in him being beaten, bound, blindfolded, and thrown into an Israeli dungeon.
“I’m Jew-ish,” he told me, emphasising the last bit, which he accompanied with a twiddle of his downward facing palm, as if to say: a little. “I went there in 2009 as part of an organization called Birthright, which believes all Jews have a right to return to Israel.”
Having taken a college course on the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Charlie had gone with a view to furthering his knowledge of this, to investigate the situation on the ground for himself, and with an open mind, but soon found himself alone among the group in that regard. Appalled at some of their attitudes and bigotry, he stormed out of a group discussion and not long after decided to venture out of the comfort zone that is Israeli, and into the occupied West Bank, to see the world from the Palestinian side. Having spent, in Charlie’s words, his “entire life as an American Jew blindly supporting Israel,” he was unprepared and appalled by the extent of the Palestinian tragedy that unfolded before him: a land under occupation, fragmented by illegal Israeli “settlements” and choked with Israeli military checkpoints manned by overtly racist soldiers; a place where heavily armed hilltop “settlers” would torment Palestinian villagers in the valley below, throwing stones, shining bright lights down at night, setting fire to crops, and chopping down olive groves; a place where land owned for generations by the same Palestinian family could be confiscated and their home bulldozed, and where the Israeli Army would then bill the family for the cost of demolishing their home, and if the victims raised their voices in non-violent protest they were silenced with deadly force.
If the oppression of the Palestinians was a revelation, then so too was their attitude towards Charlie, something that, as an American and a Jew, he had been afraid of before entering the West Bank. He needn’t have worried. From the offset he was shown a humbling hospitality, where multiple Palestinian families routinely welcomed him into their homes and lives, to the extent that whenever he walked the young boys of one family to the shops, he would have to promise several other families that he would visit them later in the day to drink traditional Arabic coffee.
His incarceration came after a spree of arrests in one village that saw Israeli soldiers bursting into homes in the middle of the night and dragging from their beds any males between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, who were then taken to an unidentified prison and interrogated about their involvement in weekly protests against the so called “security fence”—in reality a grotesque apartheid wall that seals in the West Bank’s Palestinian population so their land and resources beyond can be stolen by Israel.
Charlie had joined a group of Palestinian, Israeli and international activists, patrolling the village streets at night, warning the population of approaching Israeli arrest squads and documenting any violence on video. One night at around 4 a.m. the alarm cry went out that Jeeps and soldiers had entered the village. Charlie found himself watching helplessly as a young man was dragged from his home and arrested. An Israeli solider violently struck Charlie in the chest with his rifle, while another began beating his Palestinian filmmaker friend nearby. As the fist and baton strikes rained in on the filmmaker, Charlie, acting on instinct, stepped in front of the Israeli soldier to try and prevent the attack, his hands held up to the sky in passive response. The next thing he knew, an arm had grabbed him around the neck and he was dragged onto the concrete floor where he was kicked. Suddenly, he was pulled up onto his feet again, but only so multiple soldiers could use him as a punching bag. They floored him once more, where he was zip-tied around his hands and feet, blindfolded, and had his pants torn off. Battered, bruised, and bloodied, Charlie was dragged by the soldiers to a nearby Jeep.
A six hour long interrogation followed, and he was given an ultimatum: sign a confession saying he attacked the soldiers and be deported immediately, or go to prison. He refused to sign and was sent to the horrendous Ramla Givon prison complex for fifteen grueling days—a break compared to what a Palestinian prisoner could expect, with Palestinians subject to arbitrary six month administrative detention, which can be renewed an indefinite number of times upon the order of a military judge. In court the judge asked him, “What would your mother think of you, a good Jewish boy, playing out there with those Palestinian monkeys?” Charlie’s mother and father later learned of his arrest on their wedding anniversary via a news story that included pictures of him being beaten.
By all accounts, Charlie had balls the size of grapefruits, and was a man of conscience and conviction. I couldn’t have asked for a more inspiring couchsurfing host to stay with.
“We can go for breakfast together in the morning, if you like,” said Jason on our arrival back at the apartment. “There’s a café nearby that’s run by the honorary British consulate; apparently he’s not very good at the job.”
“Running a consulate or frying sausages?”
“Oh no, his sausages are first rate.”
We spent the rest of the day hanging out, and when nighttime arrived it was with a sense of mild anticipation for the indulgent period of rest ahead. Having spent the previous night trying to sleep with an annoying gap around my mid section—from the space between the two front seats of Abdul’s truck—tonight’s arrangement was near luxury to me: a bed-roll on the floor, while Jason took the sofa.
As Jason settled in for the night, I turned off the light, throwing the room into darkness.
“Jason,” I said in hushed tones as if about to venture a delicate question.
“Yeah.”
“Would you like me to give you a massage to help you get to sleep?
“Fuck off!” he said with a laugh.
* * *
I received word that my old German buddy, Danilo, had made it to Bishkek and just booked into a hotel nearby. By now Jason had departed for Kazakhstan, Charlie had headed south on work, and two new couchsurfers had arrived, Caroline and Joris from Belgium, who were being hosted by Charlie’s roommate Marcin, a strapping politics and security student from Poland with an easy smile and cheerful persona, who was studying at a local university.
Danilo and I met up at the main square in the evening, then jumped on a local bus with Marcin, Caroline, and Joris, to what Marcin described as “The Underground Bar,” an interesting sounding establishment that was apparently hidden away behind metal bars in the basement of a dingy old building, located out the back of a parking lot. Here we planned to meet up with some of Marcin’s other friends, two of whom I had met the night before: Alice, a Londoner working in Kyrgyzstan for UNICEF, and Laurence, a Swiss girl volunteering with the UN Development Program. On the bus ride there, Caroline suffered the misfortune and indignity of getting pick-pocketed, losing nearly one hundred and twenty Euros.
“Nearly everybody gets robbed on these buses once,” confided Marcin to me later.
As we strolled into the car-lot, it looked a most unlikely place for a bar, with no apparent sign of its existence. All that was visible was a locked, barred door, where some unlit concrete steps led down below. The actual name of the place was “Eepjora” or “Bear’s Nest,”—a Russian play on words that suggests a bear’s nest with a beer—but to others it was simply “The Underground Bar” or “Anton’s Place;” Anton being the owner, bartender, waiter, and bouncer, whose only staff member was his mother. He’d take the orders and pour the beers, she’d do the washing up and cook greasy food.
Marcin rang the door bell and moments later an orange light came on below, revealing an odd cage-like structure flanking the steps where a man appeared. He made his way up, giving us a suspicious “once-over” from behind the security gate, but then, on spotting Marcin, opened up. This, it seemed, was Anton.
Jason had mentioned to me trying to get in by himself a few nights earlier. He had rung the bell, and when Anton appeared asked to be admitted, only to be told he couldn’t come in, and, what’s more, there
was no bar here anyway—despite piano playing and merriment emanating from its depths. Anton, it seemed was rather selective on who got access; and he had good reason. During the revolution, a group of ski masked soldiers had apparently raided the place, sticking AK-47s into people’s faces, demanding to know why they were here drinking during the nighttime curfew—as good a motivation as any to install metal bars at the top of the steps.
Pushing through a rusting metal door, we entered into a wonderful little subterranean world, thick with the aroma and smoke of tobacco. A dilapidated basement had been transformed into an ultra-atmospheric little bar. It was more shabby than chic, but I loved the place. A roof clad in undulating white wooden beams hung low over a floor made up of bare concrete, the occasional section covered in loose off-cuts of carpet or lino. Dusty piping and random wires stuck out from multiple walls, and an exposed brick column—artificially created from what looked like the partial sledge-hammering of a non-supporting wall—stood in the main bar area, covered from waist height up in a thick coil of blue rope to protect customers from its jagged protruding bricks. Space inside was limited, but crammed in among the tables and chairs was an old piano, on top of which sat a trumpet, a bunch of aged plastic flowers and a framed photo of Anton with some unknown Kyrgyz celebrity. Hanging from the tiny bar were dried fish, and on the walls, ice axes, mounted antlers, and other curiosities.
We sat at an empty table just in time for a giant rat with a thick pink tail to scurry past on top of a dusty pipe sticking out from a nearby wall. It was enormous, the largest I’d ever seen and, if rumors were to be believed, was responsible for despatching one of Anton’s cats.