navigate:
Sunday 2004-06-20 - Tashkent, Uzbekistan
My name is Johan
Our driver, Vladimir, has gone to the office to pick up our plane tickets. When they arrive at seven this morning, just before we are to leave for the Tashkent airport, we find all our names have changed! Instead of a group of 9 women and 3 men, our tickets claim we’re all men now and though most (not all) have kept their last names, all of us have new first names… My name is Johan Katsma now. Our guess is someone, somewhere, seems to have mixed up two spreadsheets in their computer, and ordered the tickets in the wrong names (some other group must have tickets in the wrong name, too!). Will we be able to fly?
After a phone call to the local agent, they promise a representative will be waiting for us at the airport to sort things out. Someone is there, indeed, but we don’t get new tickets (they can’t print tickets at the airport); the situation is accepted though, and we’re entered in the computer — and the agent’s representative leaves again … too soon, since we still have to check in. Luckily, the airline official who’s to check us in has a sense of humor: for starters, our luggage is far too heavy for the small plane according to the rules but he accepts it because the plane isn’t fully booked. “Bring me a present next time,” he says, and proceeds to literally walk us through the rest of the check-in procedure, first keeping all tickets and boarding cards and taking care they are stamped, until we get onto the bus that takes us to the tiny Yak-4 plane.
It’s like a bus, with at most 40 seats, some of them at the back taken up by our luggage. On the 50-minute flight to Fergana we even get a drink but the seats have no head rests and no folding tables, so a meal is out of the question. We get beautiful views from the windows: plains, gradually changing into the mountainous area of the Fergana valley. Touching down at Fergana airport, we see scarecrows in the sparse grass along the landing strip, obviously meant to keep birds away but I doubt they’re very successful. A bus is waiting to take us via Andijan to the border crossing near Osh. Along the road friendly villages with light-blue washed walls and sidewalks and front gardens shaded with grape vines: I’d like to see more of this area some time!
We have an easy border crossing, and on the Kirghiz side our ‘team’ is waiting for us with the truck bus that will take us across yet another country.
Sunday 2004-06-20 - Osh, Kyrgyzstan
Getting used to camping
Osh, geographically still in the Fergana valley although thanks to Soviet administrators it’s part of Kyrgyzstan now, not Uzbekistan, is not far from the border. We go straight to our ‘hotel’ first: it’s what used to be a sanatorium in Soviet times but turned into tourist lodging - and very basic. There are simple rooms (though with decent beds), with shared bathrooms and washrooms for every couple of rooms. This serves as a good preparation for the next four nights when we’ll be camping in nature, without any facilities at all…
After we’ve checked in, the “truck bus” takes us back into town where we have some time to change money (there are a lot of money changers on the market — as expected at a typical border town) and then roam over the big market which covers a long stretch along the river, at some places on both sides. It’s a nice market, once of the largest in Central Asia in fact, and apart from a few things we buy for dinner (it’s too early for us to eat dinner now), I do a bit of other shopping as well. There’s even time to take some photographs although by six the market is beginning to close down.
Osh is not only a bustling border town but a smuggler’s center as well where a big part of the opium trade passes through. Looking around it’s not only obvious a lot of Uzbeks live here among the Kirghiz — there’s a lot of money around here as well although most people doing business on the market are clearly not part of that economy.
