solo travel Archives - Page 27 of 30

Asia Uzbekistan

Playboy mansion, Uzbek style

Last night, after i posted to the blog, I went for a walk around the neighborhood. It would seem that things only get busier in the evening. All around Lyabi-Hauz people and families – almost exclusively locals – were walking and sitting, eating sunflower seeds and ice cream, having dinner, and kids were running around playing in unsupervised packs. It was a delightful scene and made me wish we had more squares for congregation in Vancouver. I had a cigar and people watched until bed time.

I must also mention that i had the best dinner last night – something other than the bread and cucumber/tomato salads i have been surviving on. I had this delicious salad of warm, crispy eggplant and tomatos followed by a rice, bean and vegetable dish. It seems that they don’t hate vegetarians here after all!

Today i awoke with nothing planned for the day. I had basically seen all sights on my list, so the day was a mystery. The mystery was solved as over breakfast i was chatting with another guest at the hotel: a man from Istanbul who had arranged for a driver and guide to take him to some of the sights outside of the city. He invited me to tag along, and i agreed.

We first visited the Bakhautdin Naqshband Mausoleum, one of Sufism’s more important shrines. It was beautiful and very peaceful, surrounded by roses and filled by visiting Uzbeks. I filled my water bottle from one of the legendary wells from which pilgrims believe springs water that brings good luck and well-being. (I must say, I was skeptical of the use of the water bottle I brought – one of these ones that has a filter built in, so you can fill it from anywhere – but it has proved to be a great asset. I can fill the bottle from any random hose or tap and drink without getting sick. Plus, I have now drank water from 3 holy springs, so I am pretty much blessed with good health and luck for the rest of the year.)

We then went to the Emir’s palace, where he and his family, slaves and harem (about 40 women at any given time) would spend their summers. As far as palaces go, it was modest in size, but its decoration was stunning: elaborate decoration and design often inlayed with mirrors for a sparkling effect. One room, all in white absolutely glittered. There was also a pool in the the back where the harem would frolic while the Emir sat in a shaded area atop a platform to watch. The Playboy mansion, Uzbek style.

We visited another site before returning to Bukhara where I and my Turkish friend went on the hunt for a new memory card for my camera (because you can’t have too many pictures of blue-tiled mosques). A bit of lunch and then I retired for a short nap, which turned into a four hour sleep.

Now it is 9:30, but the whole town again seems to be out, enjoying the perfect evening air. Not being at all tired now, I will do something before returning to the hotel.

Tomorrow morning I leave for my two day desert safari adventure. As I understand it, we will be driving for about 3 hours, stopping at some sights of interest along the way, then transferring to camel, and heading into the desert, where I will be camping out in a yurt, then doing it all in reverse the next day.

I am very excited for this experience. I don’t usually like camping, but this is a special experience and a yurt isn’t exactly a two-man tent from Canadian Tire.

If all goes according to plan, you should hear from me in about 48 hours. Thanks for following along with me.

Good night.

Asia Uzbekistan

Assalomu Alaykum from Bukhara

Here I am in Bukhara. I arrived yesterday afternoon after a pleasant train ride (first class really is the way to go on Uzbek trains). The AC was working, I had two seats to myself, we were only 1.5 hours behind schedule, and I spent the ride chatting with a British girl also traveling around Uzbekistan.

My hotel, the Komil Hotel, is perfect. It is in a 18th or 19th C home that is beautifully decorated and adorned with details carvings and design. The courtyard, breakfast room, and my own room are all like small, exotic palaces.

Bukhara is slightly more compact that Samarkand, and while Samarkand may have overall the more breath taking monuments, Bukhara is by far the lovelier city. Bukhara has not been restored and modernized the way much of Samarkand has. Its main streets are still an ancient feeling warren of dusty roads, sandy buildings and covered bazaars. At the centre of the town is Lyabi-Hauz, a plaza built around a pool, surrounded by giant mulberry trees and with stunning medrassas on either side – all dating back about 500 or 600 years. There is a pleasant poolside restaurant (where i ate last night and fed many hungry cats), and lots of inviting shops selling carpets and scarves and whatnot all around.

The monuments here are less tiled and colorful, and more the color of the desert, which means that wherever an azure dome appears it is astonishing. My favorite site so far though is the Kalon Minaret. It is 900 years old, about 50 meters tall and covered in rings of varying design. It is so enormous and so precise, that it is truly stunning. (Also, i like that at one point in history they used to put alleged criminals in sacks and thrown them from the top of the minaret to the ground in front of approving crowds. (This is why it is also known as the “Death Minaret”.)

So today i wandered, visiting the usual sights (mosques, medrassas, bazaars, and a fortress). I has some wonderful tea and a strange stroll through a very ghetto Uzbek “carnival”. It basically consisted of four rickety soviet-era rides, an ice cream stand and the world’s most depressing zoo. The zoo was a collection of trailers painted with pictures of men shooting animals, depicted with bloody bullet holes. In side, there were a few fowl and about 4 or 5 canine looking creatures miserably chained to posts or in cages. I didn’t go in.

I like it here. It is very relaxing and pleasant. Tomorrow i will hang out (I actually saw most of the sights I wanted to see today). The day after tomorrow i set out in to the desert for my camel adventure.

Asia Uzbekistan

Da Svidanya, Samarkand

Today is my last full day in Samarkand. I have already seen the sights I wanted to see, so i am taking it a bit easy today. I walked for miles to find this lone internet cafe and I might head out of town to see this one rather ancient mausoleum, but other than that, I think I’ll just lay around.
I did not sleep at all last night, as i was quite ill. I am feeling better today, just weak. All I have been able to eat is tea and melons.

So, tomorrow, Friday, i catch the 12:00 noon train for Bukhara, which is supposed to be about a 3 hour journey.

I will check in when i can, internet access permitting.

Asia Uzbekistan

The Old Town

One thing that is odd about Samarkand is that because of their vast tourism, apparently, they have really cleaned up the areas around the Registan. It doesn’t feel western, but it definitely feel new and tidy and organized. But I had heard that there was an old town worth exploring…if you can find it. What the city officials have done is built walls around the old parts of the city where the people actually live, so that tourists can be spared seeing the poverty.

I walked up and down this one street for quite a while, watching. I finally saw kids with modified prams stacked high with non (bread) coming out of a door in the wall. I stepped through and it was a different world.

Unpaved, uneven streets tangled together and lined with broken and haphazard dwellings. Kids walking around with non on their heads or carrying buckets of water. Corner stores guarded by odd looking chickens, broken windows, watermelon rinds and once beautiful mosques that have fallen into disrepair.

It is really wonderful. All of the kids were very friendly and wanted me to take their picture. As i was walking past one house, i was beckoned inside to watch how they make the round, golden non by sticking it to the ceiling of a wood burning oven.

It all felt quite authentic and was preferable to the more sanitized Samarkand that the city has put on display.

A note about the bread. I had last said that I didn’t care for it, but I must issue a retraction. There are various versions and, while i didn’t like the first one i tried, i have found another which is magnificent. It has the consistency of dinner rolls fresh from the oven, but with a slightly chewier texture. It’s very good indeed.

And they must bake thousands of them everyday. All day long, kids are schlepping the bread from the old town to the market, by pram, wheel barrow, and bicycle. The entire old city smells of baking bread.

I don’t how they can possibly consume them all (although this may help to explain the hearty girth of most of the women here).

Asia Uzbekistan

Registan

Samarkand is amazing. It is a bit like Luxor, in the sense that it is just bursting with impossibly large, old and jaw droppingly beautiful monuments and mausoleums.
Obviously, the first place I had to go was the Registan. This is really the whole reason i am here, to see this collection of mosques and medrassas. It did not disappoint.

It is really hot here. It feels much hotter than Tashkent. The landscape is very deserty. On the train ride here, I watched as the land went from green and fertile to dusty and brown, with the odd, irrigated plot of land growing corn or green…something. It is definitely much more rural out here. People riding donkeys and tending to flocks of goats.

On my first evening here, I spent it handing out with Furkat at the hotel. We drank tea and ate bread and tomatos and cucumbers. I smoked a cigar. He told me does not smoke or drink, but then, minutes later he offered me cognac from a black bottle with cyrillic writing. “It is from Moldova,” he told me with what seemed like pride. We each had a glass of the vile liquor and i went to bed.

I have only met a couple of other travelers here. I met a couple from Colorado who have been on the road for one year. Staying at my hotel are two Japanese girls, each traveling solo, with whom I shared breakfast and as many stories as were possible given their limited English and my non-existent Japanese. It is nice to see other, solo female travelers.

It is so hot here that during the late afternoon, i retire to my room to enjoy the AC and have a nap, leaving me free for night time wanderings.

Asia Uzbekistan

Samarkand Express

Forgive the absence, but internet is very difficult to find in Samarkand. I have been here 3 days so far and today was the first day I found an internet cafe – and it took me over an hour to get here. Anyway, on to updates.

I left Tashkent on the Sharq Express train which left early in the morning. I was running a bit late, so I decided to take a taxi to the train station. They have a really good system for taxis here; there are the proper, marked taxis that you can call or hail and will cost a small fortune (they wanted the equivalent of $5US to take me to the station). Then there are the regular guys in regular cars (almost always Ladas). You just stand on the side of the road and they stop and you offer them money to take you where you want to go. It’s actually very sensible and they took me to the train stn for about $1.

The train ride was supposed to take 3.5 hours, but due to work being done on the tracks, it took over 6hrs. I was in first class, which is very comfortable and had little tvs at every seat. Unfortunately the little tvs only played on type of movie: Gangster movies in russian where russians with cold blue eyes and black leather car coats shot each other with silenced pistols….Then again, maybe it was the news. A few guys had their tvs cranked way up. The ride would have been fine, except that the slow speed of the train meant that they didn’t have enough power to run the AC, so it was very very hot. Despite that, and the odd cockroach, I found the ride very relaxing.

I arrived at the train station in Samarkand and immediately I could tell that it would be very different from Tashkent. Gone were the women in western dress; here all the women are wearing long, patterned, shapeless dresses with headscarves. The men wore the traditional square beanie hats. (I don’t know what they are called.)

I hired a taxi and headed to my hotel/B&B. Just driving through the city and catching glimpses of the monuments I had traveled so far to see made me giddy with elation, until I finally blurted out, “This is so fucking cool!”

Hotel Furkat is in one of the Old Town enclaves and from the outside is nothing more than a door in a wall on a dusty, unpaved road. But behind the door there is a beautiful courtyard and an enormous tree around which the 3 story hotel wraps itself. The tree pokes its branches on to each of the balconies, making the whole thing feel like a tree house. When I arrived, I tried to explain that I had a reservation, but the owner, Furkat, said “tea first” and ushered me towards one of the delightful chaikhanas that line the perimeter of the courtyard.

After some tea and apricots, I checked in to my room, which is sort of a tacky collection of odd furniture, shiny wallpaper and jeweled curtains. I then went out to wander.
Impressions of Samarkand to follow.

Asia Uzbekistan

Tashkent: day 2

hello again.

After breakfast I went to the train station and bought my ticket to Samarkand for tomorrow morning. I took the metro (a few times today actually). The subways here are very similar to those in Moscow. They are quite elaborately decorated (not as much as the nicest of those in Moscow, but lovely nevertheless). I wanted to take photos, but it is forbidden, and there are police everywhere here. They haven’t given me any trouble but i have seen them stop random people and look in their bags.

I went to the Chorsu bazaar today. It is mostly food items: produce and bread, spices and nuts, eggs, meats, etc., but there are also stall selling woven items, pottery, musical instruments, at whatnot. The Uzbekistan bread is very sacred to them. They incorporate it into ceremonies and pictures of it seems to be on all of their tourist advertising. Basically, the bread is this round, flat but with high edges, golden brown bread with sesame seeds. Sometimes they have intricate designs on them. The thing is, as i discovered today, it isn’t that great. I mean, it would be great with some hummus or a hearty mutton stew, but on its own, it left much to be desired.

Also while walking around the market, I had fruit, pistachios, and various types of honey. I watched a goat (or sheep) get hacked apart with a small axe in the butcher’ section. I also help collect fluffy yellow chicks that escaped from a structurally challenged cardboard box and were running away. My good deed for the day.

After the market I walked around the old city, which is entirely unlike the more modern parts of the city. It is rather decrepit and tangled, but charming. I visited a few mosques and a medrassa, but basically I walked…all day.

It was about 37 degrees today. I don’t know if this is the heat I was warned about; the heat that was supposed to crush me and force me inside in the midday with it oppressive hotness. I don’t know, but I thought it was beautiful out today. Hot and sunny and dry. Perfect.

Late afternoon I stopped for a coffee, smoke, and ice cream at some cafe. I read the menu, perusing the assortment of tongue and organ meats, when I read the last page of the menu, it said: “Payment for dish brakes”. And below that was a list of breakable dishes and prices. Apparently, if I had broken a plate it would have cost $5, but if I break a table it would be $75. This raises the obvious question: does this mean that I am allowed to break the table as long as I pay for it? Or, more importantly, how often does this sort of behavior go on?

Very strange and amusing.

Anyway, I walked some more, went to some parks and Independence Square and then to dinner at a Russian restaurant, which was delicious.

I think that’s it for today. My train is early in the morning and I want to be well-rested for the first day of the focus of my trip: Samarkand.

I’m sure I have more anecdotes, but they escape me at the moment.

Later. d

Asia Uzbekistan

Hello, Tashkent!

Let me just being by apologizing for what are sure to be many typos (Cyrilic key board)

I arrived in Uzbekistan last night. The flight from Seoul was about 7 hrs and was uneventful. We arrived in Tashkent and began the immigration process. I was a bit apprehensive, since everything i had read said that it was a difficult process and could take 3 hours. On the contrary, it was far less of a hassle than entering Canada or the US; there was just a lot of paper work to fill out.

Outside the airport i was hit with a wave of summer evening heat and a mountain of taxi drivers all clamoring for my money. I lit a smoke and told them to wait until i was finished. They stood there staring at me. I told them to back off or they I wouldn’t be able to enjoy my cigarillo. They behaved. Then, in Russian, i managed to haggle the price of a taxi from $15 to $5 US. I know it shouldn’t cost more then $3, but i am ok with $5.

En route to my hotel, the cabbie asked me (in English now) if i wanted to change some money.
I should explain: Everything I had read told me that the best place to change money is with illegal, black market money changers. The banks will give you about $1700 Som for every US dollar and will charge hefty fees, but on the black market the rate is much better.
I agreed to the exchange and we made a detour to a poorly lit side street where we met a man in a waiting car. I gave them $100 US and got $210,000 Som, which was presented to me in four bricks of bills.

That done, i was driven to my hotel, the mighty Hotel Uzbekistan. Now, this hotel is a prime example of the hideousness of some mid-century Soviet architecture. It has no charm, but i picked it, because i am only here for 2 nights and it is in the best possible location. Also, it is a known hotel, and i knew i would have to give them my passport for a day to complete the mandatory Visa registration, so i thought it would be best to do that at a hotel with a good reputation. My room is unimpressive, but clean and has a great view. The hotel sits on the ring of Timur Square (which is really a circle) and is the centre of the city.

After getting settled, it was about 10pm and i decided to go for a walk and a cigar. The air was magnificent. It was beautifully warm and not at all humid and smelled of strange plants and spices. The moon was nearly full and small bats circled everywhere. Timur Square was beautifully lit and filled with people. Actually, there were people everywhere: families and couples and gaggles of teens walking around, sitting on benches, playing games and drinking tea. I even saw a few people on horseback. In another square people had gathered and there were merchants selling art and jewelry. It was such a beautiful night and the moon made all of the enormous soviet buildings look beautiful (even the ugly Hotel Uzbekistan). It was such a grand stroll. This is going to be an awesome trip.

I slept well and awoke to breakfast. This hotel doesn’t screw around with breakfast: fruits, vegetables, breads, oatmeal, eggs, meats, curried chickpeas, daal, rice, blintzes…I went back for thirds. Now, quite stuffed, I must figure out how to stash my mountains of Uzbek currency on my body and then head out for the day. I have some business to tend to (buying train tickets and whatnot) and then I will go for a walk.

My hotel has a computer room, so i will surely blog later today.

Asia South Korea

Sunday in Seoul

Hello! I have made it as far as South Korea. I left on Friday and flew to Los Angeles, where i had a tedious 3 hour layover (how can such an important city have such a crummy airport?). I then flew about 12 and a half hours to Seoul. It was a delightful flight, I barely slept, but it flew by. Arrived in Seoul at about 4:40 am.

I caught the first train into the city. It took just under an hour and takes one right from the airport to downtown Seoul. For some reason my transit card wouldn’t open up the turnstile gates at the other end, so I couldn’t get out. Some man suggested through the universal magic of charades that I jump the turnstile, which I did. I figure, if a local says I should do it, it must be ok, right? That is the first turnstile I ever jumped.

After my act of delinquency, I then went to Namdaemun Market. I figured if I only had a few hours, that would be a god place to start. It is, except that at 7am on sunday morning, there isn’t a lot going on. Most of the stalls were closed and some were just setting up, hauling in carts of meat and produce, knock off handbags, and K-Pop souveniers. I did manage to find a charmingly decrepit restaurant and managed to say in Korean that I did not eat meat. They brought me kimchee and a steaming bowl of rice and odd spicy vegetables. I think it was a bibimbap, but I can’t be sure. It was really good.

After that I decided to walk to the Insadong neighborhood. It was a pleasant walk, but the city was pretty quiet. When I reached Insadong, everything was still closed. I am glad I will be back here in 2 weeks so I can actually visit some of these places when they are open.

On my initial glances, Seoul is not very attractive, but it is interesting. On the face of it, everything seems painfully western; I couldn’t turn a corner without seeing a collection of Burger King, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, TGI Fridays, Starbucks, Krispy Kreme… you get the idea. But from what I could tell, there are a lot of cool looking dirty alleys with interesting eateries and shops that are decidedly not American. I guess it would take more then 6 hours to figure it all out. I kept walking around in disbelief, thinking, “I can’t believe I’m in Seoul.” It just isn’t a place I ever thought I’d be.

Anyway, I enjoyed my walk; it took me back to the market, at which point it was much livelier. I wandered around taking pictures of large pig heads, sitting out in front of eateries. I imagined they were all Lord of the Flies theme restaurants.

I really wish I had bothered to learn a few phrases in Korean. Almost no one speaks English, and I feel like a jackass opening a conversation in English. I just figured that for the limited time I’d be here, it wouldn’t be worth it. But tonight I’ll be in Uzbekistan, and my Russian is passable (for a North American).

It is fairly warm, but really humid here. I am only 2 days into my trip and I already look like a dirty bohemian. Soon I will smell like one too.

One other random note: I stupidly checked my cigars, so while I was wandering around today I didn’t have any and couldn’t find a cigar store. I did however find cigarettes that are supposedly made with cigar tobacco. For a cigarette they aren’t bad, but they’re a poor replacement for a cigar. I had to have a smoke though (all the other kids were doing it) and now that I am at the airport I can take advantage of their plentiful and civilized smoking lounges.

I am back at the airport now, readying myself for the third and final leg of my journey: Seoul to Tashkent. (How cool does that sound?)

Asia South Korea Uzbekistan

Where Next?

It has been over a year since my last travel adventure, which was a trip to Ecuador in the spring of last year. I’ve been to Seattle and Colorado since then, but nowhere exciting. Then it happened, suddenly: that coming together of time and money that makes planning an exotic trip irresistible.

Initially, there was no question, i was going to Mali. It has been #1 on my travel list for a while. Unfortunately, the time i have at my disposal is in July and if there is one month not to visit Mali, it is July, when tropical-scale rains fall nonstop and turn the usually sandy landscape into a mud pit, which made my plans for camping in the desert an impossibility.

Next on the list: Syria. The thing is, things are a little too interesting in Syria right now.
India: Monsoon season.
Europe: I feel like going somewhere more exotic and less expensive.
South America: I can’t do two South America trips back to back, plus it’s winter in many parts of the continent.

Then it came to me: that mysterious part of the globe locked between the Middle East and Asia. The land of ‘stans – Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, etc. But what specifically caught my attention was Uzbekistan. Samarkand and Bukhara, jewels of the silk road, dating back to nearly 1000 years BCE, land of history, camels, and blue-tiled mosques.

The trip planning has begun and if all goes according to my brilliantly devised schedule, I will be leaving on 15 July. The only possible roadblock is my visa. Canadians need a visa to visit Uzbekistan. In order to apply for a visa we need a letter of invitation from a person or agency in Uzbekistan. Before we can get that letter our information, itinerary, etc must be approved by some government agency in Uzbekistan. Once getting the letter one can apply for the visa at nearest Uzbekistan embassy…which is in New York. So it’s an involved process. I think I have enough time to get my visa, but there is a chance that it will all fall apart at the last minute.

I have no plan B, so my next post will either be a bon voyage as I board a plane for Tashkent, or it will be a heartbreaking account of visa denial and crushed travel dreams.

Fingers crossed,
d

Wandering North

Tag: solo travel

Playboy mansion, Uzbek style

Assalomu Alaykum from Bukhara

Da Svidanya, Samarkand

The Old Town

Registan

Samarkand Express

Tashkent: day 2

Hello, Tashkent!

Sunday in Seoul

Where Next?