Silk Road dreams and nightmares

First of all, my apologies for the huge gap in blogging. Internet access in Central Asia is pretty dismal, and in China the government blocks all websites with the word ‘blog’ in the title. (No, really.) Thus it has been impossible to update the blog without simply rushing it, which I didn’t want to do. The news you’ve missed is that I couldn’t go to Iran as the visa transfer was taking too long. I had naively assumed that sending a fax from the embassy in London to Istanbul would be pretty straight-forward – in fact it took them a month. By this stage I was forced to leave Turkey, or else the rest of my trip would have required a costly and stressful change of plan. I’m very sad to have skipped Iran, as it’s the one country that stood out above the rest when I was dreaming up my grand tour. It is somewhere I definitely want to visit before I die.

The next leg of the trip, then, was Uzbekistan. I took a flight from Istanbul to Tashkent, via Riga – for some reason this was cheaper than going direct. I had received dire warnings about Central Asian airlines, and their dangerous habit of chartering old Soviet bangers without the requisite safety record to land in the EU. Fortunately, though, this was a Boeing, and a tedious five-hour cruise ensued. For my meal I was offered a choice between something in Russian and another thing in Russian, and chose the latter, which turned out to be a pie. Most of the Uzbeks on board seemed to have visited Europe for an extended shopping spree, returning with enormous designer bags stuffed with clothes, jewellery, toys, electronics, or anything else considered shiny and Western.

My passport was checked and stamped by an official in his early twenties who looked as if he’d have no qualms about deporting me for simply smiling at him. Before I got into a taxi, though, I had to extend my visa by one week, in order to give me enough time to see the country properly. I had unwisely applied for my Uzbek visa without going through a government-approved tour company, and thus had been awarded a desultory 11 days in which to visit, with fixed entry and exit dates. The man responsible for visa extensions was not best pleased at being dragged half way across the airport to acquiesce with someone as insignificant as I, and demanded (via. a translator) a “reason” for my request. My answer – that I needed more time to see precisely the ancient wonders advertised on tourist displays at the airport – seemed to rile him further. Eventually he became so fed up at my lack of Russian that he gave me the extension, if only to get rid of me.

Taxi drivers in Tashkent effectively have the airport on lockdown. The money exchange booth is frequently empty, so you have to find a cabbie who will change your dollars on the black market. Their rate is significantly better than the official one: 2000 Uzbek Som to the dollar vs. 1700. But the exchange rate is far from the only perplexing thing about the Som. The highest denomination note is 1000, equivalent to about 25p. Consequently everyone walks around with enormous wedges of cash, much of it worth sod all. One man at Bukhara train station looked like he’d just returned from selling five kilos of heroin, yet the bundles of notes he was stuffing carelessly into a plastic bag couldn’t have amounted to more than £200. This was the first phase of my induction into the school of Uzbek inefficiency, which, over the course of two weeks, would teach a masterclass in how not to run a country.

Small change

There are no youth hostels in Uzbekistan, only guesthouses and hotels. Tashkent offers very few of the former, so I asked the taxi driver to take me to a cheap hotel. For 20 minutes he drove one-handed through a chaotic traffic jam, all the time on the phone to his cousin. I had attempted to fasten my seatbelt, which he refused to allow – apparently this is considered an insult to his driving abilities. After much swerving and honking, he found me a hotel, although from the outside it could have been anything. The place was equipped with a front door, a desk, and a flight of stairs. There were five people working at reception, all of them hunched over piles of ‘registration slips,’ which all foreigners must keep in their passports wherever they travel. This is absolutely essential to avoid police hassle in Uzbekistan, as officers are all too happy to issue a "fine" for any gaps in your collection. The government also like to know where you've been, and when.

I handed over my passport to one of the receptionists, who filled out a series of forms which, from what I could tell, were simply different methods of recording exactly the same information. Two of these forms were the famous registration slips – one for me, one for the hotel. (It is no overestimation to say that a good 50% of staff time at this hotel was spent processing these slips. It is a laughable waste of resources, but they have to do it, or else they get in big trouble. Exhausted, I meticulously counted out 54 of my 1,000 Som notes, and handed them over. I was then led to my room, which you can view in all its luxuriant splendour below. I still had absolutely no idea where I was, or even what the hotel was called. The staff were too busy buried under a Caspian Sea-sized haul of paperwork to give me a second of their time, so I headed out for a walk. After an hour of traipsing down cavernous boulevards and grotty alleyways, all I had found were a handful of mini-marts and silent government buildings. I bought a bag-full of mobile phone-shaped biscuits and wandered back through the dark to the hotel. Is this why I went travelling, I thought: to eat biscuits for tea and watch lice scuttle across my room?

The first of many registration slips

I had nothing better to do than go to sleep, and settled down into my rock-hard bed. Around midnight I was awoken by a knock on the door. It was one of the receptionists, the only one who could speak English. I was still in my underpants, but this didn’t stop her from strolling right into my room with a crafty smile. “You want massage?” she said. “I give very good massage.” I politely turned down the offer. “You want sex?” she said. I gave her a quick scan, and saw that her belly was hanging out from beneath her tight black top. Clearly this is what she thought I meant when I had asked for “help.” There’s a time and a place for sex with a stranger, but a dingy hotel on the rough side of Tashkent with a 45-year-old amateur masseuse isn’t one. I eventually got her to leave, knowing I had declined pretty much the only optional extra this hotel would be providing. I locked the door and hid under the covers, wishing I was anywhere else but Tashkent.

The next morning I woke up with bed bug bites all over my skin and a foul smell in my nostrils. It was next door’s toilet, which was overflowing. I gathered my stuff and headed downstairs with the intention of fleeing as quickly as possible. I breezed past the previous night’s interloper in reception, who had returned to the rather more mundane fold of her registration slips. In daylight, Tashkent revealed itself to be little more interesting than when smothered in darkness: a hulking nightmare of endless duel-carriageways and concrete megaliths, criss-crossed by a vast network of redundant canals and pedestrian barriers that prolonged even the shortest of walks by a good five minutes. Clumsy attempts to beautify the city have resulted in a bizarre landscape of dried-up fountains and fake lawns, serving only to accentuate the ugliness of their surroundings. One of the city’s grandest projects, the Dom Forum, looks as though it has been teleported from another dimension, where everything is enormous and made of plastic. Walking around its perimeter is rather like experiencing ancient Greece on acid. The parks offer an escape, although many are still blighted by Soviet "artwork," grey concrete sculptures that, if you approach them from the wrong angle, can take one of your eyes out.

Hotel Uzbekistan

Some of this ugliness can be attributed to the volatile tastes of Islam Karimov, President of Uzbekistan, who has run the country since independence from the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Needless to say, he’s had a few run-ins with Amnesty International, and even the BBC, whose website was blocked after running a report on child labour in Uzbek cotton fields. His preferred method of torture is apparently to boil prisoners alive, which rather puts Dick Cheney to shame. The worst stain on his presidency, though, was to order the massacre of peaceful protesters in Andijan in 2005, among them women and children. He is also a prolific author, and you can buy his books on Amazon for a reasonable cost, such as Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the 21st Century and Evernew Tashkent. (Has the Nobel committee ever awarded the Peace prize and the Literature prize to the same person?) Every day at 9am, the main road between the presidential palace and Government HQ is closed off and surrounded by armed police so that Karimov's convoy can cruise along in peace, headed for another day of self-canonisation in the annals of Uzbek history. Anyone foolish enough to wander past the police barrier is acquainted with a sniper's bullet.

Karimov's morning commute is typical of the ruling mentality in the country: the obsessive belief that someone, somewhere, with even the slightest hint of power or significance, gives a shit about Uzbekistan. In Tashkent, tourists are advised not to take photos of countless public buildings: the upper and lower houses of parliament, the Forum, the Palace, foreign embassies, government offices, police stations, hospitals, airports, train stations, metro stations etc. Consequently, you never quite feel safe photographing anything, even the shower in your hotel room. Train stations are downright sinister due to the extent of security - in Samarkand, you can't get within 100m of the main entrance without having to present your passport and onward ticket to a pair of armed guards at a checkpoint. Quite what they're so scared of I'm not sure, aside from the mortifying prospect of people moving around the country freely, outside of the Great Database. Can you tell the Soviets used to run the place?

Perhaps this insularity is partly due to its geography: Uzbekistan is one of only two double-landlocked countries, i.e. surrounded by countries that are themselves landlocked (the other is Liechtenstein.) For all its size, Central Asia remains the world's great forgotten backyard. In China, fellow travellers scratch their heads when I tell them I have come from Kyrgyzstan - a country which borders China. Few people can spell, or even name, the five ’Stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan.) No wonder Sacha Baron Cohen selected the first as a cultural platform for Borat: no one seems knows anything about the place, despite being the largest and wealthiest country in Central Asia. It is precisely this sense of mystery that attracted me to the region in the first place.

I took the "fast" train to Samarkand, perhaps the most iconic town on the Silk Road. Buying the ticket took a good ten minutes, as the ticket woman had to fill out about a dozen forms before reserving my seat. The Uzbek government has spent millions on a new fleet of high speed Spanish-made carriages, only to discover that the existing railway lines aren’t advanced enough to allow anywhere near the maximum speed. As the train pummelled through the countryside, I chatted to a young student living in Tashkent, who was returning home for the weekend. He told me that he was Tajik, but born in Samarkand. I asked him where in Tajikistan his family originated from, and he had to correct me - Tajik was his ethnicity, not his nationality. It turns out that most people in Samarkand are Tajik, stuck there ever since the national borders were drawn up by Stalin in the 1930s in a reckless attempt to snuff out any pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic (i.e. Pan-Central Asian) uprisings by splitting up the ethnic groups. Just to be sure, the Soviets murdered thousands of high-ranking figures from various communities, and orchestrated the forced migration of nomadic peoples into collective farming communes, resulting in the deaths of a million people in Kazakhstan alone. And to think the British pat ourselves on the back for putting up with wartime rationing.

Gur-e-Amir

After the history lesson, the Tajik told me how not to get ripped off in Uzbekistan. He couldn’t believe it when I told him I had changed my dollars at a rate of 2000 – locals will never accept below 2500. I then asked him to quote a fair price for my taxi ride from the station to the guest house. 1000 Som, he said, 2000 at a push. I kept this in mind as we arrived in Samarkand, where I was immediately accosted by a taxi driver outside the gates. How much into town? I asked. “10,000 Som,” he replied. I laughed at his opening offer, and followed the correct procedure for this kind of negotiation: I walked away in mock-disgust. He followed behind, shouting: “7000 Som… 6000!...” By this stage I had found the bus station, which concluded the affair.

On the bus into town, it struck me the respect that Uzbeks have for older people. Whenever a wispy-bearded old man clambered aboard, there began a competition to see who could surrender their seat first. Not that I had the opportunity to do so, as the marshrutkas are always so jam-packed that standing up is often inevitable. Indeed, it is possible to seriously injure yourself, such is the amount of time spent craning your neck to steal a glimpse out of the window. Looking at the wrinkled faces on board, I understood why opposition to the regime is so apathetic in many parts of society. Who was in charge before Karimov? The Soviets. Before that? The Russian empire. They've never had a taste of democratic government, and they may never will. And rocking the boat could land you in hot water - literally.

The Registan complex

Samarkand was the first proper Silk Road town on my trip. The Silk Road was essentially a giant trading route between China and the West, straddling cities, deserts, mountains, valleys, steppes, rivers, and whatever else happened to be in the way. On and off since 500 BC, there was no clearly defined road – traders would take whichever route offered more favourable conditions, depending on two factors: the seasons (different routes for summer and winter), and whether a route was blighted by war (which was most of the time). 

Samarkand, along with its nearby cousin Bukhara, flourished with the arrival of Islam from Persia in the 12^th Century. It was the rough half-way point between Constantinople and Xi’an, the two unofficial ends of the Silk Road, and has held the imagination of travellers ever since (that is, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook. Although it also paints Tashkent as some kind of groovy cosmopolitan culture-pot.) This fascination was most famously expressed through the Orientalist hokum of poets such as James E. Flecker, who wrote The Golden Journey to Samarkand:

We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand

It’s not quite Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, but it shares the same fantastical vision of the East: a strange and mystical land where only the brave or foolhardy dare to venture. Today, Samarkand is an ordinary Soviet-planned town, dotted with enormous Islamic monuments. My guesthouse was beside the majestic Gur-e-Amir, where the body of Timur, the first great ‘national hero’ of Uzbekistan and brutal commander of an Islamic empire that spread from Anatolia to India, is buried. In 1370 he made Samarkand its capital, and a vaguely imposing statue of the great man sits in the town centre.

After a long day’s walking and picture-taking, I headed to the Blues Bar, which appeared to be one of the only decent drinkings spot in town. As luck would have it, the guy next to me at the bar spoke perfect English, and very soon my freeloading instincts took hold again. He was a tour guide called Anvar, and was happy to discuss my Uzbek itinerary. “What were you doing in Tashkent for four days?” he said. “I think you have made a big mistake.” He had a point, although in fairness I had been waiting on my Chinese visa. I asked what he was drinking – it was Cognac, made just round the corner at the Samarkand winery. He offered to take me to a wine tasting the next day. “But I will pay,” he added. Uzbek wine, as I was to discover, is usually very sweet, due the high amount of sugar in local grapes, although a few dry wines were included. After the wine came the Cognac, and, after that, the strongest of all: a mysterious dark mulled wine that smelled rather like Christmas pudding. Anvar recommended that I take a spoonful before bedtime to help my dicky tummy, and to avoid water at all costs. This was not what I wanted to hear, given that daytime temperatures were pushing 30°.

From what I could gather, there are two usable cash machines in Uzbekistan. Both are located in 5-star hotels in Tashkent; the rest are dotted around the city, but empty. In order to withdraw money, the only realistic option is to go to a Bank of Uzbekistan. (If you have a Visa card, like me, it’s the only place that will work.) Being a bank, it’s only open on weekdays, between 9am and 4pm. This means that no one in the entire country can take out any money between Friday and Monday. Occasionally the banks will open on a Saturday morning, if the caretaker hasn't overslept. It was on one of these mornings that I found myself waiting outside the branch in Samarkand (yes, the second largest city in the country has only one centrally located bank.) After half an hour's wait, it was clear that the bank wasn't going to open. Amid the sea of equally-forlorn Uzbek faces was an English couple, who had cycled all the way from London. They had been stuck in Iran for six weeks waiting on visas, and the husband's patience was slipping. “Why?” he shouted at the policeman, gesturing toward the sign outside which, although written in Cyrillic, clearly displayed an opening time of 9am to 11am. “It’s the NATIONAL BANK OF UZBEKISTAN!! Why?!” The policeman simply smiled and shrugged. I tried to communicate, and told him that I needed a visa withdrawal. “Visa?” he repeated, puffing out his cheeks, as if I had just requested an audience with the Pope. He walked away, as had all the other locals by this stage. I had to somehow survive the weekend on a paltry 30000 Som.

An ex-wolf

An ex-dog

I began to reflect that Uzbekistan was the first country I had visited where the highlight of the day was my shit coming out solid. My bowels spent most of the time flitting indecisively between constipation and diarrhoea, the culprit apparently pesticides in local fruit and veg. Uzbek cooking has a distinctive ‘homemade’ quality to it – the recipes are strong and simple, the flavours unsophisticated. The staple is Plov, which tastes a lot nicer than it sounds: meat and vegetables on a bed of rice, usually soggy in its own oil. Another is Laghman, a bowl of thick noodles with meat and vegetables. Not forgetting Shashlik, enormous kebabs with all the gubbins, as my Nan would say. Uzbek cuisine didn’t exactly take my taste buds to new and thrilling frontiers, but it was cheap and filling.

Laghman

The ideal country to get diarrhoea

On the train to Bukhara I was seated next to the only other white person on board, an Australian schoolteacher working in Tashkent. I asked her about Lonely Planet's claim that ex-pats “genuinely love” living there. “It’s okay,” she said, after a long pause. I told her about my bowel concerns, and she reassured me: “There’s always an adjustment period. But some people get it for the whole year.” I tried to avoid this thought by immersing myself in the on-board TV entertainment, a shoddily-produced Uzbek-language drama, the highlight of which was a father playing with his baby son’s penis, only for it to piss all over his face. I managed to discern a vague plot: a bride stands up her fiancé on their wedding day, leaving him to care for their baby boy alone. He wanders around towns and deserts in absurdly long montages, babe-in-arms, searching for answers on the whistling wind. Even without subtitles, the film was clearly extremely sympathetic to the male characters, who suffer valiantly in the face of female heartlessness. It slots nicely into the social tapestry of real-life provincial Uzbekistan, where nightclubs are populated exclusively by men who, when not detesting the company of women, are busy forcing them into arranged marriages. (Later, when watching The Mummy on local TV, the female characters were overdubbed by a man’s voice.)

The Aussie negotiated a taxi ride from the station, using her dubious Russian skills. “I think I agreed to something extortionate,” she said, as we rode the five miles into town. Indeed, we ended up paying $30. The driver told us this was a generous rate, as the cost of petrol had recently risen, or some other spiel. Fuming at yet another taxi rip-off, we were instantly confronted by a squadron of street orphans hawking various items of tat. One of them asked where we were from. “Brazil,” I said, to their amazement, and brushed past. My guesthouse was run by a wife-and-husband team, Medina & Ilyos, who had named the place after themselves. It was a small, neat affair with a spacious rooftop area to hang out and gaze over the dusty streets and houses. I was relieved to find some fellow travellers staying, among them an English couple from Derbyshire with a Land Rover. They had driven from Tajikistan on the Pamir Highway, one of the world's most spectacular roads, and were headed for Khiva the next day. I felt a touch of envy – having my own vehicle would have made navigating Central Asia a lot easier. A few days later, I was to discover that the only comfortable way of driving to Khiva would be in a tank.

Bukhara is immediately more attractive than Samarkand – unlike the latter, the old town remains largely intact, and contains almost all of the key sites. I walked for an hour through the narrow streets of the old Jewish quarter, most of which appears to have stood still in time. The surrounding monuments lack Samarkand’s wow factor, but exceed it in authenticity and beauty. Among the more intriguing sites is the old prison where, in 1838, an Englishman, Col. Stoddard, found himself after unsuccessfully persuading the Emir to side with the British Empire over the Russians. A year later he was joined by Capt. Connolly, who had been sent to secure the release of his colleague, only for the Emir to chuck him in jail as well. Incarcerated in ‘the Pit,’ living among a curated selection of rats and snakes, they were beheaded in front of the Ark in 1840. Nowadays, Englishmen are permitted to enter and leave at their own will, for a small fee.

The prison

The Ark

I walked to the northern section of the town to find the old city walls. The remains are impressive, albeit crumbling, and climbing on top of them was difficult. I was shown the way by a small boy, obviously a veteran of wall-climbing, and we played a bit of hide-and-seek around the ruined battlements. He was a good kid, so I took him to a nearby lake to rent a pedalo. As I handed over the 6000 Som, I realised that getting rid of him would be problematic. We paddled around in happy circles for twenty minutes, a mismatched couple amid an armada of teenage girls. By this point I was growing tired of his somewhat one-dimensional company, so I decided to head back to the guesthouse. I traipsed back through town, the boy at my heels, asking a series of increasingly annoying questions in Uzbek. My saviour arrived in the shape of a camel, tarted up in silk and bells outside the Ark, which the boy demanded a ride on. I simply waved goodbye and continued walking, leaving the boy to his new companion.

On my third morning at Medina & Ilyos, at about half six, I was woken up by the sound of an almighty row between the two hosts. Medina in particular was enraged. I tried to go back to sleep, until a deafening shriek rang out across the courtyard. By this point it was obvious what was happening: Ilyos had gone fist-happy on his wife. By the time I had flung some shorts on and ran outside, the pair were being separated by a young girl, either their daughter or niece. Ilyos skulked off, not to be seen again. Medina was inconsolable, wiping her tears away with a handkerchief. There was a bruise below her eye, and her hands had been cut. As I tried to console her, she revealed all: “Ilyos, he SMS prostitute!” she sobbed. “He is up all night!” This would explain why she had spent the previous day ranting down the phone at someone, who we had all assumed to be Ilyos. In truth they seemed an odd couple – he was much younger, and there was clearly an underlying mutual resentment to their relationship. Ilyos would join us for breakfast each morning, whilst Medina and the daughter/niece ate theirs out of sight in the kitchen. I had thought little of it before the fight, but now I saw clearly the real position of Uzbek women in domestic life.

Needless to say, the atmosphere at the guesthouse afterwards was rather unpleasant. All my new-found friends had moved on, either to Khiva or Samarkand, and I felt it was also time for me to leave. Before I could, though, I had to pay for the remainder of my stay. I had only dollars left, but Medina refused them on the basis that they were printed before 1996, which apparently makes them less valuable on the black market. I didn’t have the heart to argue with her, not least follow through with my plan to ask for a discount. After two hours chasing around various bazaars we found someone willing to change my dollars, and finally I could head for the long-distance bus station.

I would to take a shared taxi to Khiva via. Urgench, as all the buses coming from Tashkent would be full. I was also told by Medina that the road to Khiva was being rebuilt, and the drive would be prolonged by a few hours. This made it vital to secure the front passenger seat, both for my sanity and comfort. I was the first person to arrive for the next Urgench taxi, and it appeared that my plan of sitting up front would be vindicated. After twenty minutes another two men joined, one with a huge guitar case that wouldn't fit in the boot. As we waited for a final passenger, the driver told me how the front seat is usually reserved for a “Madame.” For another hour I sat and prayed desperately for the final passenger to be male. As this blog has hopefully demonstrated, I am all for the advancement of women’s causes, but not if they are to infringe on my birthright as an Englishman to claim the front seat of a shared taxi. Alas, a shrill female voice greeted the driver, and I realised the game was up. I (un)graciously surrendered my seat and jumped into the back, almost hitting my head on the guitar case, which was now wedged between the middle passenger’s legs.

A happy taxi

We made a lunge for the new road. Unsuccessfully

The journey to Urgench took 9 hours, 7 of which were spent listening to dismal Uzbek pop music at an ear-splitting volume. The road threatened to be drivable until we reached the desert, where it disintegrated into a pot-holed mess, made all the more agonising by the fact we were directly beside the newly-paved road for the entire journey, 99% finished, but still shut off by barriers. The monotonous desert scenery was the perfect accompaniment to the thumping soundtrack, with barely a dune or oasis in sight. We stopped for refreshment at a roadside café, my fellow passengers cheerily chomping on kebabs, not even fussed to swat away the flies which had found their way from the nearby squat toilets. (I say toilets – does a hole in the ground qualify?) The road continued to worsen, and by the time we pulled up in Urgench, utterly exhausted, it was well after dark. I managed to negotiate an onward journey to Khiva for 25000 Som, and arrived at my guesthouse a broken man. (In fairness, this journey pales in comparison to the return leg of a family trip to the Isle of Skye in 2009, which somehow took us 21 hours, including a puncture and a 25-mile traffic jam outside of Glasgow. Some Scots half-wit had scheduled a U2 concert at Hampden Park on the same night as a Celtic match.)

Khiva, as it turned out, was worth the slog. It's a gem of a town, mostly a restoration job, but nonetheless magnificent. Along with Bukhara, it was once home to one of the world's largest slave markets, but now the only living things tied up are goats. The old walls are still intact, enveloping the old town behind an imposing mud façade. By this stage I was growing a little tired of the same old madrasas and minarets, but the sight of locals still living and working inside the old walls was enchanting.

After two days in Khiva, my Uzbek visa was approaching its end. There was no way I was heading back to Bukhara and beyond on the road from hell, so I booked a domestic flight back to Tashkent. I showed up with a couple of hours to spare, only to be told that the airline had no record of my booking. To add insult to injury, my phone had somehow been stolen amid all the confusion. I ran outside and hopped into the nearest taxi I could find, and belted it to the nearest bank. Being a foreigner in evident distress, I was allowed to skip the queue and take out dollars almost immediately. We raced back, and I bought one of the last remaining seats, due to depart in 40 minutes. The small aircraft was a Soviet shitbox, but the flight was smoother than any I have taken. I waited at Tashkent airport for another flight, this time to Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan. I bumped into the visa official who had interrogated me on my first arrival, and, to my surprise, he shook my hand and smiled. Before boarding, I still had to fill out a form declaring all sorts of details, among them the exact amount of cash I had on me in all currencies. After submitting the form, I found a 2 Euro coin in my pocket. Wary of contradicting my statement, even by a tiny amount, I threw it in the bin.

For all its sporadic beauty, my Uzbekistan is dragged down by the vast, clunking bureaucracy that consumes everyone, and makes life needlessly difficult for solo travellers. Its primary purpose, apart from feeding the congenital paranoia of the state, is to keep people in a job. Why have just one person checking your train ticket when you could have three! The registration slips are a prime example: such an arcane and infuriating process, but at least it gives extra staff something to do. Uzbekistan is full of people who think they're doing actual jobs – jobs that in many other countries would be performed by a computer system. Uzbeks are required to play along from birth, so there is little choice but to adapt to these stale procedures and blindly persevere. I read in the Times of Central Asia that the government plans to create upwards of one million jobs in 2012. So that'll be more passport checks, more queues at ticket offices, and a lot more paperwork.

Khiva