After leaving Kyrgyzstan, our train spent the night working its way west along the Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan border. At 5:20 AM our German train master came over the intercom with a jolly "Good morning!" wake-up call. Two minutes later he came back on, apologizing profusely because although he had stressed to us to set our clocks back one hour because of a time zone change, he himself had neglected to do so. "Please, sleep another hour," he pleaded.
Yeah, right. We both had been awake prior to his too-early wake-up call. In fact, Bob was in the shower during that 5:20 announcement. Sleeping on a train is not easy.
Notes from my journal written that morning: The view out the window as the sun rises is of the endless steppe covered in short yellow grass and occasionally punctuated by cattle, a road, or a barely livable dwelling. Power lines run incongruously parallel to our track, and sometimes a dirt road comes up alongside or traverses the track. Every now and then we pass through a small town. The houses we see through our window have livestock in the yard. Sometimes there is a small mosque. Just now we passed a dainty white one with a deep blue onion dome and four minarets, one on each corner. Every now and then we see a small knot of men staring at the train, standing silently with their hands in their pockets. Last night there were women and children watching us pass by, the children exuberantly friendly, calling out and waving. It is as hard for me to comprehend their life as it is for them to comprehend mine.
We came to the border crossing where we would leave Kazakhstan at 8:00 AM. Again the agents clothed in military uniforms or camouflage boarded the train and took our passports. Again a German shepherd drug-sniffing dog came through. We were through in record time, just 30 minutes, but we had to wait another 45 minutes until we could pull out of the station. I guess everyone has to wait their turn, even the American tourists.
Crossing the Uzbekistan border was next, and it did not go as smoothly. In fact, we didn't get through until noon. The train master said the border officials claimed they didn't have enough staff to process us, but the young man who came through our car was busy practicing his English and chatted companionably rather than working to get us through quickly. He laughed at Bob's scrawling signature, so Bob showed him how to do it. He tried it out, then hinted that he would like to keep Bob's pen, which Bob gave to him with a smile.
By the time we finally arrived in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, it was time for lunch, but we were way behind (again), and so a decision was made by the tour company that we would skip the lunch that had been planned and get out on our first tour. We all had food in our cabins, so that wasn't a problem. Bob pulled out a package of horse meat he had purchased a few days before:
Unrefrigerated two-day-old horse meat? No thanks. I had better things to snack on:
Uzbekistan is one of two countries in the world that is landlocked AND surrounded by landlocked countries. (The other is Lichtenstein.) In addition to borders with the other four Stans we visited, it has an 81-mile border with Afghanistan on its southernmost tip:
Yeah, right. We both had been awake prior to his too-early wake-up call. In fact, Bob was in the shower during that 5:20 announcement. Sleeping on a train is not easy.
Notes from my journal written that morning: The view out the window as the sun rises is of the endless steppe covered in short yellow grass and occasionally punctuated by cattle, a road, or a barely livable dwelling. Power lines run incongruously parallel to our track, and sometimes a dirt road comes up alongside or traverses the track. Every now and then we pass through a small town. The houses we see through our window have livestock in the yard. Sometimes there is a small mosque. Just now we passed a dainty white one with a deep blue onion dome and four minarets, one on each corner. Every now and then we see a small knot of men staring at the train, standing silently with their hands in their pockets. Last night there were women and children watching us pass by, the children exuberantly friendly, calling out and waving. It is as hard for me to comprehend their life as it is for them to comprehend mine.
We came to the border crossing where we would leave Kazakhstan at 8:00 AM. Again the agents clothed in military uniforms or camouflage boarded the train and took our passports. Again a German shepherd drug-sniffing dog came through. We were through in record time, just 30 minutes, but we had to wait another 45 minutes until we could pull out of the station. I guess everyone has to wait their turn, even the American tourists.
Crossing the Uzbekistan border was next, and it did not go as smoothly. In fact, we didn't get through until noon. The train master said the border officials claimed they didn't have enough staff to process us, but the young man who came through our car was busy practicing his English and chatted companionably rather than working to get us through quickly. He laughed at Bob's scrawling signature, so Bob showed him how to do it. He tried it out, then hinted that he would like to keep Bob's pen, which Bob gave to him with a smile.
By the time we finally arrived in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, it was time for lunch, but we were way behind (again), and so a decision was made by the tour company that we would skip the lunch that had been planned and get out on our first tour. We all had food in our cabins, so that wasn't a problem. Bob pulled out a package of horse meat he had purchased a few days before:
Unrefrigerated two-day-old horse meat? No thanks. I had better things to snack on:
Uzbekistan is just slightly larger than California (173,351 square miles to 163,696 square miles) and has about a 20% smaller population (31.85 million to 39.25 million), which is surprising to me. It did not seem that densely populated.
We spent more time in Uzbekistan than in any other of the five Stans on this trip. It is a historically rich country that has the infrastructure for tourism. When people ask me my favorite parts of the trip, most of them were in Uzbekistan. You'll see why in the posts ahead.
Fun, I'd forgotten about the incident with the pen. Love your notes of the countryside as we traveled through.
ReplyDeleteI loved the countryside notes. More! More!
ReplyDelete