surkhandarya

For me, one part of Uzbekistan’s appeal is this: it’s undeniably, and inescapably, a land of weirdness. Stuff happens here that genuinely surprises you, and people regularly say or do things that catch you off-guard. And since I'm a firm believer in the idea that life should include regular moments of "Huh?" if you're doing it right, I find this quality irresistible.

A few random examples: first, Uzbekistan is the only place I’ve been where you quietly tell hotel staff that their 'traditional' tea room is heavily infested with flying ants, and they respond proudly, as if you've just discovered one of the hotel's selling points. “Oh yes", they reply. "Some of our guests eat those. They say they’re very good for health.”

That's what I've started to think of as the 'Uzbek Response' – shorthand for "the last thing you expected to hear". 

Uzbekistan is also the only country I've visited where you walk into a restaurant to find a huge, almost empty floor space with only a few tables clustered around the walls, and as you stroll around wondering where the patrons are supposed to sit, you narrowly avoid being knocked to the ground by the very thing you need: i.e., by a huge wooden table. As your brain recovers from the shock of so much oncoming furniture, you realise that two staff have members actually been chasing you with the damn table ... and, in their enthusiasm to serve, have almost caused you an injury that no-one will believe when you try to explain it.

Another simple way of bringing out the weirdness here is to complain about your seat on an overnight train. This, we've recently discovered, can lead to bitter competition between conductors, as each attempts to find you a better place for a better price – to the point where one offers you his own compartment, and you sleep in the conductors’ quarters while he stays awake all night. (Of course this is all done for an 'unofficial fee' ... which kind of adds to the fun.) And if you're looking for the next extreme sport to take the world by storm, Uzbekistan has your answer. So far at least, it's the only place I've been where cows are put out to pasture in a field also used for football practice, leading to the inception of an entirely new, fast-paced and ferociously competitive team sport: “cowball”.

But if you come here partly in the spirit of Louis Theroux (i.e. in search of the bizarre), my foremost piece of advice to you would probably be this: try to spend some time down in the country's far south, heading away from the Silk Road cities and into the relative unknown. Life down there is … well, quite a bit different to what you and I would call ‘normal’.

Our own mini-adventure in the Uzbek Deep South began late one overcast morning, when we arrived at a shiny new railway station with a platform not long enough to accommodate our train. The station was about 40 minutes out of Boysun, a town that nestles up against the Tajik and Afghan borders.

The journey to these parts had been rather picturesque. Boarding the train in Samarkand at 2am, we’d slept until about seven and then spent most of the next three hours staring out the window at mist-shrouded hills covered in mossy grass. Said hills occasionally grew in stature to become mountains, including the dramatic, almost vertical granite cliffs of the Hissar range, which form one of Uzbekistan's natural borders. (The cliffs were completely blanketed by thick fog when we passed them, so none of the photos turned out.)

Strewn all over this wild terrain were shards of shale-like rock, sometimes assembled into winding, rustic-looking fences (one of which you can see in the pic). Streams wound their way down the gentle slopes, flowing through shallow rocky clefts. Farmhouses frequently sprang up, as did the occasional village, and the damp soil ranged in colour from deep red to rich greys and military greens. (Don’t know if you’ve ever seen green soil, but I can tell you that it's rather odd-looking.)

Much of the territory we saw through our window is off-limits to travellers because of border issues, so we were getting privileged glimpses of areas that remain almost completely unexplored by foreigners. Which, as you can imagine, was pretty cool.

We’d chosen Surkhandarya for its scenery – and, I suspect, because the name sounded a bit wistfully exotic – so thus far all seemed to be going according to plan. Cue the weirdness …

As we stepped off the train we felt a damp chill, resulting from the thick mist which hung everywhere. And then ... mud. LOTS of mud. It immediately started caking around our shoes and splashing across the legs of our trousers – and this clearly brought it considerable satisfaction, because it continued doing the caking-and-splashing thing for the whole day.

Striding through the happily-coagulating brown goo came a tall, slim, elderly man wearing a skull cap and something like a velvet bathrobe. He sauntered over to us and offered a lift into town for $2. He then threw our suitcases into the boot of his beaten-up old Lada, but as they were too big for the available space, he left the boot open.

The ensuing ride was shared with a demure-looking Uzbek woman in the typically bright-coloured dress-and-headscarf ensemble, and with three other guys. As four of us squeezed into the narrow back seat, sitting almost on top of each other, I looked over and noticed that the woman was also clutching a leather handbag. Stamped onto one side of the bag was a bronze plaque, on which were written (in English) the words “World Peace”. The message seemed utterly strange and incongruous here, in the region through which most of Central Asia's Islamic extremists are funnelled southwards into the Afghan fray. I wondered if she even understood it.

A couple of minutes later we suddenly swerved right, left the highway and went completely off-road, descending one side of a rock-strewn valley towards a fast-flowing, muddy stream. Before I had time to spot a bridge or any other way across, the driver had steered us straight into the water.

Showing no hesitation whatsoever, he pointed the Lada directly at the deepest part of the stream, then turned right and actually drove upstream for about five mad seconds. Finally he pulled out onto the left bank, which was extremely steep and bumpy. The car lurched and bounced around in a violent act of protest, and Yuliya asked “Do we still have everything?” Our driver laughed gently, and jumped out to check that our suitcases weren’t currently tumbling downstream towards Afghanistan.

“Vsyo normal’no” (everything’s ok), he said as he climbed back into the car to resume the journey.

Once in the town, we left our luggage in the hotel (a word which I'm tempted to put inside rabbit ears here) and took in a bit of the townscape. In doing so, we accomplished the next task on our list: find a driver to take us to some local sights. In Surkhandarya this is ridiculously easy: you just walk along the main street looking foreign, and almost immediately someone will offer you their services. So it took us less than five minutes to find our ride, but before asking him to take us exploring, we needed to go back to the railway station, 'cause we’d decided to buy onward tickets. (The original plan was to stay overnight, but for complex reasons, that had changed.)

I know this all sounds fairly straightfoward – to the point where you might be thinking “Why all the unnecessary minute detail, Anthony?” – but in fact, when we arrived at the station all the ticket-selling guys were having lunch in the staff dining room … located, naturally, on a local farm almost a mile away.

When contacted by phone, one of the ticketing guys agreed to meet us outside the dining room, which looked like the abandoned safehouse of a rebel guerilla army, and was separated from the main road by a shepherds’ track. Our driver Abid steered us around the sheep, and Mr Tickets appeared in front of the house. He took our money, then told us that, since lunch was still in progress, he was unable to issue us with any tickets at the moment. We’d have to come back later to pick them up.

Without a guarantee, without a receipt, and without any other options, we just had to go away and hope that the guy was as good as his word. But the incredibly affable and helpful Abid* re-assured us: “Don’t worry”, he said. “Down here we like honest people. A man must be honest – if he isn’t, we punish him.”

I figured it'd be better not to visualise what this punishment might entail, so I did my best to just put the thought out of my head.

Abid’s car was yet another decrepit Lada with threadbare seats and a loudly complaining gear box, which occasionally needed some firm physical encouragement to keep it going. Needless to say, I pretty soon found myself in love with this machine, and envied its owner a little bit. But during the course of the day we would share the Lada with some odd characters … starting with a member of the Uzbek militsia.

The militsia man was standing alone on the roadside, more or less exactly in the middle of nowhere. Uzbek militsia used to have a dreadful reputation among tourists (though I personally haven't seen them do anything to justify this), so when our driver voluntarily pulled over, it crossed our minds that some kind of extortion may follow. But no … the guy got in, said Assalam-u-Alaykum ("May the blessings of Allah descend upon you") to everyone in the car, and chatted amiably about village affairs until we dropped him off 15 minutes later, a bit closer to the nowhere/somewhere border than where we’d found him.

Then we headed off on our main excursion for the day: a long drive along remote, high-altitude dirt roads to a place called Oman Hona, which is a mosque in a cave on a mountain – or at least, so we’d read.

The fact that we saw neither a mosque nor a cave at Oman Hona seemed to fit perfectly with the kind of day we'd been having up to that point. Instead, there was a kind of rock shelf overhanging a mineral stream, around which had been erected a few rather hideous buildings.

As so often seems to be the case, locals here believe that the water has special curative properties, useful for treating or preventing all kinds of ailments. So there were guys collecting it in huge 20-litre plastic bottles, for sale in Tashkent and elsewhere. Meanwhile, a solitary old woman sat on a randomly positioned plastic chair beneath the rock overhang, deep in thought and utterly inscrutable, not even glancing up as we passed. She was striking in that she was doing – and seemed as though she'd spent the whole day doing – absolutely nothing. And I mean nothing at all ... she wasn't reading, knitting, waiting for friend, waiting for a ride, clutching goods which planned to sell, or acting as a curator. She was just there, and that was all. 

Abid, meanwhile, was keen to have us know that people flock to this spot in summer to enjoy the pure spring water and the warm weather. We pulled our coats around us tighter, as the wind and the damp mist tried to creep beneath our various layers of clothing.

He then took us to the 'lookout' from where we could 'view' the Mosque, but ... well, if a Mosque could talk, this one would probably have begun by saying something like "I'm stuck behind so much damn fog here, it's like being stuffed inside a frikkin' pillow case! Can someone let me OUT, please?!?".) It was, in a word, invisible.

But despite all this, the journey to Oman Hona definitely didn't leave us feeling disappointed. The scenery rising around us was stark, mysterious and at times little foreboding, as well as being completely different to anything we'd seen elsewhere in this marvellous 'stan. On the way down, we noticed a distinct 'fogline' – an altitude above which nothing could be seen but fog – and this gave us the feeling of being completely cut off from the world in these high, almost-deserted valleys.

Odd though it may seem, the landscape vaguely brought to mind images I've seen of some out-of-the-way places in the British Isles. There was definitely a bit of Balkans thrown in there too, though, along with incongruous-looking white blossom trees and an atmosphere of intense poverty. The farmhouses were barely standing, the watchdogs were huge and fierce (one of them ran beside our car, barking at us in a white-fanged fury, until Abid beat it away by opening the driver’s door and swinging it forcefully at the dog’s head), and life in the mountains outside Boysun was clearly pretty tough.

I was stirred from these thoughts when Abid suddenly stopped our car, jumped out and started talking to a guy who was standing near a gate on the opposite side of the road. They evidently knew each other, and Abid’s friend was having some kind of problem. He pointed a few times at a goat that was on the far side of the gate, for reasons we didn't quite comprehend. The two of them then went through the gate, picked up the goat by its legs, brought it over to the car (which, remember, we’d hired for the day as our taxi) … and put it in the boot.

Abid’s friend jumped into the front passenger seat, and we headed down the mountain, the sound of the goat's bell periodically audible over the engine.

And so there we were: two travellers massively out-sized by our situation, one clutching a digital camera worth several times more than the car we were sitting in and frequently thrusting it out the window to take photos of intimidatingly huge rock formations, while a live goat aimed the occasional kick at the back of our seat, its owner tried to joke with us in regional Uzbek (or possibly Tajik – neither of us would've been able to tell the difference), and our driver ploughed recklessly over enormous road obstacles, any one of which could've spelled death for us if the car had struck it at the wrong angle and consequently left the road, ending up in the valley below. And of course, my brain went where it always does on these occasions ... which is to say that I was thinking "Yep, definitely adding this to my list of 'Central Asia Moments'."

So anyway, we made it back to town (obviously, given that you're reading this an' all), and Abid parked near a restaurant he’d selected for us. He then went off momentarily with his friend and the goat, returning a few minutes later. Shash’lik (BBQ’d meat on skewers), tea and vodka were being served in the restaurant, along with some tomatoes that looked as if they'd been accidentally machine-washed along with the owner's shirts and handkerchiefs. We ordered a skewer each, being very careful to specify that we wanted lamb, since the idea of eating the stately horned fellow we’d just shared a taxi with kinda repulsed us. Then I excused myself to go to the toilet, which was out the back of the restaurant.

A quick word about Uzbek toilets: in big city hotels many of them are the Western ‘sitting down’ kind, but elsewhere you’re in squat territory. I’m pretty much ok about squat toilets if they’re clean. In Boysun, I was not ok about them at all.

Regarding the specific toilet in question, let me just put a quick question to you: what’s the one thing you want to know more than anything else when you’re suspended over a giant pit of human waste? There are undoubtedly a wide range of possible valid answers to this question (which you're more than welcome to post here). My own answer, though, is simply this: you want to know that the structure supporting you is reliable.

In this particular case, the WC featured two wooden platforms, one original and one a later addition. The original had collapsed into … er, how can I put this politely? [prolonged pause] Nope, I can’t. It had collapsed into the shit.

Inspecting it more closely (as one does when entering a toilet which is the subject of some trepidation), I saw that the original platform was half-submerged in gooey excrement, the top half sticking up into the air at a ridiculous angle, like a cartoon picture of a sinking ocean liner. But the most disturbing thing I learned from my inspection of the two structures – on the left, the cartoon Titanic**, and on the right, the platform which suspended me above a septic bog deeper than a Japanese bathtub and about as wide as three average-sized household fridges lined up side-by-side – was that they were exactly the same. No design improvements whatsoever had been made after the first toilet had sunk into a lake of poo: no extra bolts, no supportive beams, no tweaking the set-up to forestall future mishaps. The management had simply put another, absolutely identical piece of wood next to the first one, inviting its clientele to take part in a bizarre scatological variation on Russian roulette every time they felt the need to reduce their green-tea-to-overall-bodyweight-ratio by making a brief visit to the Little Room out the back.

And so, thinks the Word Nerd, taking all of this in:
“Just how unlucky can I be today?”

Fortunately, not as unlucky as some vodka-addled customer probably will be in the near-ish future. I pity that diner ... though, in a way, I guess it serves them right for frequenting such a dreadful establishment.

Anyway, having escaped the restaurant toilet, I furiously washed my hands with antibacterial gel and finished my (pretty appalling) lunch. After a brief stop at the market and another to collect our luggage from the "hotel"***, we then exited Boysun by Lada, for the third and undoubtedly final time.

To our intense relief, the guy we'd met at the guerilla safehouse / railway station dining room did indeed have our tickets, and as we approached he waved them at us proudly. But we had about 45 minutes to wait for the train, so the driver decided – in one last gesture of Surkhandaryan weirdness – to try and get us a seat inside the brand new, incongruously shiny medical clinic which stood on one side of the station's main entrance hall.

Heading inside, we found ourselves in probably the cleanest, newest-looking medical centre I've encountered in my entire life, and almost certainly the best one in this or any neighbouring postcode. Exactly why they stuck it at the railway station (as opposed to, say, in the 35km-distant town centre, where 98% of the folks 'round here live) eludes me. But whatever the logic of this, it seemed the receptionist agreed to let us recline on her furniture because we were foreigners.

After a whole day of slurping around in the giant mud smoothie of Surkhandarya, it felt fantastic to sit on a soft, clean chair in a softly-coloured, clean surgery. Or at least it did until the farm boy with the broken leg came in. His parents laid him down on the sofa opposite ours, a protruding bone bulging grotesquely beneath his trouser leg, and his quiet, agonised sobbing took at least 75% of the fun out of my comfy chair. I suddenly felt kinda guilty for getting the red carpet treatment ... but not guilty enough to separate my ass from the leather-upholstery! Evil, spoiled Westerner ;-)

When the train came, we ran the length of about 15 carriages – once again off the end of the inadequate platform and into the mud – climbed the almost-vertical stairs, and waved goodbye to what is possibly the strangest, most alien part of this altogether odd country.

And that was our whirlwind visit to the Uzbek Deep South – one which part of me never wants to repeat, while another part secretly hopes I'll find myself back there again one day in the not-too-distant future. I'm developing a weird love/hate relationship with these backward, undeveloped corners of Central Asia where you can meet people at their rawest, weirdest and best, and see things which few Westerners ever lay eyes on. But while I relish that chance, I simultaneously struggle with a few things like hygeine issues. (Watching the market guy in Boysun pile honey into a jar for us by hand, licking his fingers as he went, made me want to throw up.) I'm sure this will continue to paly itself out over the months and years to come. And I'm equally sure you'll hear about it :-)

Until then ... take care!

Anthony.


* It seems against the law to be anything other than incredibly affable and helpful in Uzbekistan, unless you happen to a) live in Tashkent, b) work as a taxi driver near a major railway station or airport, or c) have a hand in running the country.

** I actually wanted to write RMS Lusitania rather than Titanic, but I figured that might be too obscure. Not sure ... is it?

*** There, I did it.

**** A "coupe" is a sleeping compartment with four bunks, so if you're travelling with one companion, you share the compartment with two strangers. It might sound icky, but it's generally a pretty stress-free arrangement ... plus, with Central Asian hospitality being what it is, it very often involves scoring some home-made food that your cabin-buddies insist on sharing with you. They even bring seasonings for you to sprinkle over your food – most commonly, salt packed inside a matchbox.