Where are Ron and Ellen?
Central Asia, 17 September - 18 November 2009
Ron and Ellen and Amir Timur (Tamerlane), Tashkent, Uzbekistan, September 2009
Ellen in Afton, Virginia, Ron in Kazakhstan, October 2009
Ellen comes home, Ron travels backwards
24 October 2009
Afton, Virginia, USADear Family and Friends,
After traveling 31.5 hours in elapsed time (from hotel departure in Almaty to walking in our door in Afton), crossing 10 time zones, and taking three plane flights, I arrived home on Wednesday evening 21 October. I've now unpacked my suitcase, done all the laundry, opened and sorted the huge box of mail (most of it junk, of course), but am still trying to orient myself to the local time zone. Amazingly, about a month after our usual last frost date, we still have not had frost, so, even though all the vegetables are finished, there are lots of flowers in our garden.
Although I have returned home, but Ron has back-tracked. He did not intend to do so! He left Almaty on Wednesday 21 October via mini-bus, intending to go back to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, and from there by one of two possible routes to Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The decision about routes would be based on which/whether mountain passes are closed for the winter because of snow. When he got to the Kazakhstan/Kyrgyzstan border, he discovered that the visa from Kyrgyzstan, which we had thought was a two-month double-entry visa, was indeed a double-entry visa, but was only for one month and had expired. So he took a mini-bus back to Almaty and from there back to Shymkent, where we had stayed for several days after crossing the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. He has spent the last several days in Shymkent, researching various routes from there to Tajikistan. Tomorrow he plans to leave Shymkent via mini-bus for the Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan border (starting from Shymkent one is not at the mercy of the taxi mafia!), and hopes to get all the way to Penjikent, on the Tajikistan side of the Uzbekistan-Tajikistan border, an hour southeast of Samarkand. Whether he can do that all in one day remains to be seen.
During our last couple of days in Almaty, we made a list of the things we kept thinking of that we had not included in any of our messages, so here it is, in no particular order.
Differences between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (all these, of course, are based on our subjective experience): In Tashkent (Uz) there are lots and lots of parks, but very few benches which would allow one to sit and enjoy them. In both Almaty and Shymkent (Kz) there are also lots of parks, but all the parks had lots of benches, so there are lots of people sitting in the parks as well as strolling through. In both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, there were amazingly beautiful rose bushes everywhere, in parks, in front of buildings, in courtyards. In both countries we saw bicycles, but very few motorcycles or motor scooters. In Almaty the women we saw were almost exclusively in western dress -- high style, very dressy, lots of skin-tight jeans, nearly everyone in high heels (including many knee-high boots); in Tashkent we saw a mix of western and more traditional dress (depending on where you were in the city), with the western dress perhaps being not quite so high fashion as in Almaty. In the other Uzbek towns (Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva) there were some women in western high fashion, but many more in more traditional dress, with or without head scarves. In Kazakhstan cars turning at an intersection stop for pedestrians in the crosswalks or for pedestrians in zebra crossings where there is no traffic light (it took us a while to really believe that the cars truly were going to stop for us!), but in Uzbekistan this was not true -- the biggest thing (i.e. the car) charged ahead regardless. The one shared taxi we took in Kazakhstan, from the Uzbek border to Shymkent, proceeded at what we thought a quite reasonable pace (about 100-110 km/60-65 mph) across the desert; it was in Uzbekistan where the taxis traveled at break-neck speed. We mentioned the big difference in the kinds of cars seen in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, but realized that we hadn't mentioned Toyotas (all models), which were the cars we saw the most; also lots of Mitsubishis.
In Almaty (but nowhere else) we saw a lot of a type of skateboard we've never seen before. It has two elongated paddle-shaped ends and an axle in the middle so the ends can tilt independently, and there is one wheel under each end that rotates like the front wheel on a grocery cart. We saw lots of kids with these, one foot on each end, propelled forward by a sort of rocking motion without the need to put a foot on the ground for pushing. [Note added later: For those who were intrigued by our description of the unusual skateboards, I provide the following two links, sent to me by a friend who reports that they are called caster boards, and are a hot item here in the US (although he says he himself has never seen one): Wikipedia article, vendor photo.]
To me, one of the most interesting differences had to do with print material in English. As some of you know, the first thing I do when planning a trip is figure out which books I am going to take with me and how many books, and my greatest fear is running out of reading material. I read the books, and then Ron reads them, and we give them away after we've both read them. For this trip I had ten books, and started on the last one (Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool, during the last days we were in Tashkent. Although it is 550 pages, I clearly needed another book to get me through the rest of the trip and the flight home. According to our guidebook, the Intercontinental Hotel (top of the line hotel) in Tashkent had a fairly well-stocked book shop, so we went there to find me a book. We couldn't find the bookshop, so asked the concierge, who said the only books were at the small shop in the lobby, and they were all guide books on Tashkent and Silk Road cities. We asked if there was a place in Tashkent to buy books in English, and he directed us to a bookshop in downtown Tashkent, in the same building (and possibly run by, but we weren't sure) a local publishing house. That did turn out to be a very large bookshop, but had no books in English. We asked there, and they sent us to TSum, the big department store a couple of blocks away, which had only a small selection of children's books (not in English). And when we asked there, they directed us back to the big bookshop we'd just come from. Our guidebook noted several book stores in Almaty, so our first task there was to find me a book. We had asked Bob before we left Tashkent if there was anything he wanted Ron to bring him from Kazakhstan, and he said, "Bring a western newspaper, just to prove they exist." I'd marked the location of the several book stores on our Almaty map, but we decided to go first to the Regency-Hyatt hotel, which we thought would be a likely place to get a newspaper for Bob. Then a big circular walk would take us past the several book stores and back to our hotel in a loop through a part of the city we hadn't walked. We got to the Regency-Hyatt, and not only did the shop there have multiple western newspapers, but it also had three revolving racks of paperback books in English. So, while there seems to be NO print material in English other than guidebooks available in Tashkent (and therefore presumably nowhere else in Uzbekistan), such material is easily available in Kazakhstan (or at least in Almaty). The printed word is dangerous thing in a heavily controlled society! I finished the Russo book in the Almaty airport while waiting for my plane, finished the book I bought in Almaty, Dan Brown's Angels and Demons (perfect airplane reading: thriller plot allowing one to ignore the poor writing style) during my flights and waiting time between Almaty and Charlotte NC, and had the pleasure of choosing another book in the surprisingly good book store in the Charlotte airport. Ron is taking to Bob an International Herald-Tribune as proof of its existence, as well as a booklet listing the many, many different foreign newspapers available in Almaty through a subscription service there.
We didn't say a lot about food in our messages, mainly because we think (other than the melons in Uzbekistan!) this is not a part of the world to which one would travel for the food. We did have some excellent soups and some good meals, notably the shish kebabs at the corner restaurant near Bob's house and the home-cooked meals (Bob's housekeeper and the family in Shymkent), but other than that, our best meals were pasta at Italian restaurants! Plus the fabulous local bread, which is available from vendors on just about every street corner.
The seasons changed during our trip. When we arrived the days were much warmer than we expected (~30C/86F) but by the time we got back to Tashkent and Almaty at the end of my time there the days had turned cooler (19-20C/66-72F), the nights were quite chilly, and the leaves were all changing color. It has already snowed in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Love to all,
Ellen
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Last updated: 30 October 2009
