The 5000 Project

Alright, I’m eager to blog about Iran – so I’m going to summarize Uzbekistan, as it’s mainly an isolated desert wasteland, many long bus journeys and a lack of communication with locals.

Khiva:
Tashkent->Organch->Khiva: ~$16

An ancient town in a dry desert, maintained as a tourist attraction, hotels within the old towns. A room with two single beds cost $10, so $5 each – the cheapest accommodation we could get in all of uzbek. Most of the time there was no hot water and we experienced 1hr blackouts every 4 or so hours, it seems that most of uzbek has the same power issues except for the capital city, tashkent. Khiva was old and impressive, but it was a bit themeparky – no legitimate businesses resided inside the old walls other than souvenir shops and hotels, the museums were cheap and tacky with no useful information. We didn’t stay long.

Moynuk:
Organch->Nukus->Kungrad->Moynuk ~$4

A collection of very cheap local buses later, after standing for 5hrs or so cramped between some overly invasive uzbekistanians (one guy was drunk, kept touching me and my belongings, then bought my water for an inflated price and sculled the whole litre – I was worried that he was going to piss in the bus afterwards, thankfully he didn’t) we finally arrived in a ghosttown called moynuk. The only hotel in this tiny town had no power when we arrived at night, most of the town had no power; this blackout latest the entire night. In the morning we were told there is water available for the town for only one hr a day (7am-8am), and it was used only for washing dishes and clothes; too polluted for anything else. You may be wondering right now what brought us to this place, well, 30yrs ago the town of moynuk was a thriving fishing port, situated on the banks of the aral sea, what used to be the 4th largest inland sea in the world… however as of today there is about 2% of the sea remaining.

You may now be asking how the hell an entire sea can dry up, well the soviet union constructed dams and irrigation channels directing water that normally flows into the sea from the mountains in the north; and channeled the water instead to farmland in the uzbek fields, for the immense cotton production. The problem with this is that uzbekistan is a very dry country and cotton is a very thirsty crop, the farmland required more water to sustain the agriculture, which hastily caused an entire sea to dry up. Today there are frequent ‘salt storms’ the wind blows ice and salt throughout the region and the effects of the dried sea is creating another desert to link up with the north eastern uzbek desert.

To make matters worse, the soviets used powerful pesticides such as DDT which is still today causing issues with contaminated water supplies. To make matters even worse, the soviets decided to use an island in the sea for testing chemical and biological weapons, the testing wiped out much of the wildlife in the area. I think that central asia was used as a testing site for pretty much everything they could think to test, perhaps even with the people as guinea pigs?

We walked down to the banks of the sea to find ships stranded on the dry sea bed, the haunting sound of salted wind whispered to us as we observed the spooky relics of an eternally lost age of prosperity in Uzbekistan. Yup, it was a moment worthy of fancy poetics.

Nukus:
Moynuk->Nukus ~$4

Met some russians in a hotel ($8 for a dorm bed), drank a fair amount of vodka. Took a bus to Bukhura the next day.
Now, the bus ride was quite something, it was run by a couple of charismatic iranians; the bus was very close to being unusable, none of the seats were in-tact, there was a giant hose coming from the back of the bus down the isle then back under the bus at the front, I assumed it was some kind of patch repair job. The bus was also very fumey and freezing cold, it seemed like the two guys running it were cowboys, reminded me of firefly a bit. 3hrs into the journey and the bus broke down, it took another 3hrs for the repair work – I had a feeling that this probably happens during every trip. The what was meant to be 8hr trip ended up taking about 15hrs… just to get to the border of the province, we arrived at the border at 10pm and the bus parked at a rest stop, everyone got out to have some dinner; we were ready to hop back in when one of the guys on the bus let us know that we will be here until 6am! as in, sitting or sleeping on the restaurant chairs for the next 8hrs!. We inquired as to why this is happening, turns out that there is a 10pm curfew for buses (and possibly cars) rather inconvenient. All up, the trip took 23hrs, when it was meant to take 8.

Bukhura:
Nukus->Bukhura ~$10

Really impressive old town that is truely functional, ancient buildings and heaps of mosquey things, bukhura was the capital of the timur empire which reached as far as europe. Timur was a turkish-uzbek dude who did pretty much the same thing as Genghis khan, after the Genghis empire, except noone seems to remember him because he wasn’t the first guy to rape and slaughter asia and europe originating from central/northern asia. He converted to islam and calmed down a bit, hence the many mosques. We stayed in a room for $12 ($6 each).

Nurota:
Bukhura->Navoi->Nurota ~$4

A few more busses and one small mountain range, we arrived at a tiny town called Nurota, Alexander the great built a castle here and married an uzbek lady. We hiked up the very worn castle hill, there were no signs anywhere with information and nothing to point is in the right direction (although it was pretty easy to see from the town). There was, however, a giant mosque at the base of the hill with a holy spring that contained holy trout which should never be fished out, else face the wrath of Allah.  This kind of overshadows the true significance of the extremely old castle. On the way down we spotted a museum; I was eager to read all about alexander the great in this region, unfortunately the museum was full of islamic artifacts, there was not one piece of information about the castle. I found that in many places within central asia, the islamic history tended to take over all other history or culture. There were no hotels allowing foreigners in Nurota, so our plans to hike through the mountains fell through. We hitchhiked back to Navoi, then took a bus all the way to Samarkand.

Samarkand:
Navoi->Samarkand ~$2

We checked into a hostel after walking 1.5hrs from the bus station, the dorm had no heating and the temperature all through uzbekistan was getting mighty cold. On the second night it felt so cold that I piled blankets from all the spare beds in the dorm, on top of me. Upon waking, I put my boots on and I could hear cracking of ice, the sweat on the inner fur of the boots had frozen; later that day I found out that the temperature that night got as low as -15c!
Samarkand was fairly average, more impressive mosquey things some of which had large christmas trees infront of them (new years trees actually, during the stalin days all mosques and churches were destroyed, traditions renamed. Father christmas is known is ‘Father Frost’). On the third night we decided to get into the vodka with a couple of other backpackers, suddenly a pipe burst in the ceiling and water came flooding down, we played ‘Magic Fountain’ by Art Vs Science on the laptop and proceeded to dance around the table, before deciding to get bucket. Vodka seemed to be the only way to attempt to warm up.

Next was the return to tashkent, visa pickup was uneventful – I cooked dinner for my hosts on christmas night, for them it was just another ordinary day. We took a bus back to bukhura, spent one night there, then headed for the turkmenistan border. The crossing was uneventful, they didn’t check registration at all (which is a good thing, because I had nothing for the couchsurfing nights) and, as all central asian police and border control officers seem to do, they checked my Iran visa (which has a nice photo of me on the visa itself) instead of actually checking my main passport page – proof that they have no idea what they’re doing.

We were in Turkmenistan! rated 2nd last in the Journalists-Without-Borders ranking of the press freedom of countries, North Korea being the last. Although it wasn’t anything like North Korea…