When prepping for the trip as a whole, the inspiration had been Samarkand, but I found the reading I did about Kyrgyzstan to be the most exciting. The itinerary I put together is flexible, but a must-see is Khiva in Western Uzbekistan. So distant is this city, there's not enough time to see it and the wilds of Kyrgyzstan, and thus... I was limited to what I could reasonably do around Bishkek.
Delightfully, one of those things was a day trip to Burana Tower, the last remaining structure of a 9th century city. It also features a graveyard with "balbals," which are headstones shaped like people. I was very curious to see these thousand-year-old memorials.
There were many tours to Burana Tower, but I was determined to try public transportation. I don't think I'm exceptionally brave or exceptionally confident, so it wasn't an act of heroism or anything. I tried it because I was curious and felt I would see more and experience more doing it this way. It also wasn't very far away.
I also needed to figure out how I was going to get to Tashkent. I had another night in this apartment, but if there was an overnight bus or train to Uzbekistan, it was worth it to me to eat the night to make sure I arrived in Tashkent during the day. It would have been a serious hassle to have my room here expire and have to lug my bags around the city for six hours waiting for a bus. And then, what if I arrived at my destination at 4am? Lord Almaty!
So, the plan for the day was: Walk to the bus station and figure out how to get to Tashkent, see if I could catch a marshrutka to Burana Tower while I was there, get back and take one last sweep of the city. Solid! I packed my camera and that Zweig memoir. I figured if I kept reading it, it had to end sometime.
Nice, long walk in search of a breakfast between my starting point and the station. It was fairly early, but things were coming to life. I'm really taken by this comfortable, rough-around-the-edges, park-filled place. This was a direction I hadn't walked in yet, so there was the challenge to see thing and also not cripple myself on the Galloping Gertie sidewalk.
Pushed forward lazily, passing other early risers, until eventually making it to the bustling Osh Market. The city of Osh is far south of Bishkek and is supposed to have the best market in the region, and this place named after the place I wouldn't be able to get to was going to have to do.
Old bakers sat on overturned buckets and sold bread on tables made from cinderblocks and planks. Large, round loaves with intricate designs in the crust. Almost too pretty too eat, but folks were buying them two at a time and tearing off chunks. Little Hot Pocket-like treats called samsi (like sandwich!) were offered as well. I wanted one, but got seduced by a covered area selling coffee and omelets.
Every table had, like, infused vinegar on it along with the salt and pepper. It would be a little glass container with a slice of red pepper or.. something floating in it. I was charmed, so I sat. The meal was unexceptional, and an attempt to enliven it with a curlicue of ketchup made it even sadder somehow. I ate the while thing, though, sprinkled with vinegar.
The market was an astounding place. Lively and exciting with people bargaining for.. everything from apricots to iPhone covers. It was like the PG version of the markets I saw in Sicily. Those still stand out as a visceral horror, but this Osh Market felt like a community affair. This is the man who sells your father the meat we cook. This is the woman who makes the socks we wear. There was a general, thrilling sense that this was where you go to get what you need, and not a Target logo to be seen.
Men wore big, triangular felt hats unironically.
Fortified, I left it for the bus station. On the way, I passed a shawarma place who had taken the McDonalds M and inverted it to make a W for their sign. The W is pronounced "sh" in the Cyrillic alphabet, a sound I remember because the picture dictionary I learned from had meat grilling on the "skewers" of the W. So... Waypma was Shuh--oo--r-muh.
Anyway, I thought it was exceptionally clever to incorporate and subvert the golden arches that way. It's the kind of thing I look for and enjoy on these long walks. Eventually made my way to the "autobus voksal" and found the kassa counter.
The lady didn't speak English but was very patient with my mimicry and was careful to make sure I was getting exactly what I wanted. She would write down numbers (the universal language! Sort of!) and make sure I acknowledged the date as accurate, etc. With mostly pointing and eyebrows we were able to work out: Tashkent. Tonight. No tomorrow, tonight. Yes. This day. Bus tonight Tashkent.
I've had people close the window in my face or tell me to find a translator or just to take the next bus, so this was a welcome counter encounter. I touched my heart and took the ticket. There were still numbers all over it. Like, one meant my seat number (I think) and one meant the platform (probably) and one meant... something else. The 23:30 meant the departure time (for sure). But I had hours to figure the rest out.
Popped out to find a marshrutka to Tokmok, the closest town to the tower.
You're supposed to get to Tokmok, then bargain with a taxi to take you to the tower, get him to WAIT for you while you do the place, then get him to take you back. I figured I'd get to Tokmok and work it out from there. I typed "You take me Burana and back?" into my phone just in case. The station had a single bar of wifi.
Out to the massive parking lot where the vans lived!
It was simple enough to find the right one. You cock your head like a bird with a yellow ring around its eye and listen out for "Tokmok, Tokmok!" There were over a hundred vans, but I used my sonar to locate the right combination of sounds and my radar to locate a seat. It was much cheaper than I'd been led to believe, by the magnitude of several hundred soms, which relieved some of the pressure of bargaining with the taxi once I was there. I figured I was already ahead of the game, so...
Easy ride there, really only about an hour. The roads were better than the sidewalks. About halfway there, a giant gang of ladies in headscarves bum-rushed the van, so it was kind of a crush and I had to stop reading, but it was exciting to hear them laughing and talking about... their stuff.
Got out at what I hoped was Tokmok, and my hopes were fully realized by a weird old Soviet structure with the town name on it and an old hammer-and-sickle billboard with a golden laurel painting. I'm going to guess the people didn't care enough to tear it down or paste a cell phone advertisement over it.
Some cabs were hanging out at the drop off, likely waiting for folks Burana-bound folks like me. I had my translator ready, but instead of using it, I found myself blurting out "Burana?" to the first guy I saw. He balanced his palms like Libra scales and asked for about eight bucks. Probably a high price, but I was in a good mood, under budget, and felt like making his day. I agreed.
I hoped the Libra-scale hands meant "I will wait." I don't know why I thought this. I just wanted it to mean that.
Easy drive over a distance that would have been a too-long walk. Quiet little back roads under canopies of broad-leafed trees. Fields spread out behind them, all the way (it seemed) to the white-topped mountains. It was like a car commercial. It was like a credit card commercial. Sun filtered through the branches and made dappled patterns on the flanks of the cows who blocked the road.
The tower was in a national park, and it was a Sunday. I've lost all track of days. But it was open. And many locals were there enjoying the peace of the place. The taxi stopped, and here was the moment of truth. Would he wait? The key would be if he asked for money or not. I slowly reached for the door handle. He turned around and pointed to a shady area where a few other cars were parked. I took this to mean that's where he would wait (!!). I was acting on a lot of faith here.
And he hadn't gotten his money yet, so.. surely. I got out and walked toward the tower, the tip of which I could see rising in the distance.
An enormous family sat by the roadside on an enormous carpet. It was so beautiful to see the old women in their traditional clothing, intricate blouses and red headscarves. They sat together on the long carpet keeping the flies off of what looked like carrot and mayonnaise salads while the men barbecued a whole lamb a short distance away. It was picnic in the park, a regular Sunday outing.
I felt sentimental. And privileged to see it. I mean, it's the most normal thing in the world, but so different from the way I live my own life (so many people! outside! making their own food!) it brought up emotions that were difficult to classify.
The tower area was wide open, and a perfect breeze blew down from the hills. It was absolutely gorgeous. It felt like Iceland in a way or like I imagine those Northern Scottish islands must be like. A windswept plain with ancient stone markers. My heart was already swollen from seeing the happy family at their picnic, and my spirits rose further at the simple beauty of the experience. It just FELT good. I transcended my cares and my body and just experienced the pure air and the silence.
If one of those birds had shown up, I would have just lain there and let it make a nest in my freshly camouflaged beard.
The bulbuls (is that the plural?) were also beautiful, everything was to me in this place. Some of them looked a little like the Lewis chessmen. Helmets and mustaches. Weatherworn and enduring.
You can climb the tower, and I have climbed similar structures on similar trips, but one look at the stairs and I decided to leave it for younger, thinner people. No way I was going to cram my bulbul in that narrow space without crawling and sweating. And I was already full of love without needing to add a physical accomplishment on top of it.
The taximan was true. When I left, there he sat. I walked past the picnic and saw they had advanced to the meat course. It smelled like memory.
The ride back went smoothly. The driver handed me a piece of notebook paper on which someone had written for him in English: "I will take you church 1000."
I thanked him with a hand on his shoulder, but I declined. He was pleasant about the declination and took me right back to the marshrutka station where he shouted excitedly: "Bishkek! Bishkek!"
I paid him and went where he had pointed. Sure enough, a van was leaving that very moment. I boarded and we were off. Just like that. Bye, Burana. Toodle-oo, Tokmok.
This marshrutka was all business, and the driver had an angry Russian woman counting the money and shaking her money fist at folks. She kept counting what she had and glaring at the riders with an expression like "Pot's light, motherfuckers. One of you soggy loaves didn't pay." It was true. Someone in the back passed up a crumpled 100-som bill. It went through everyone's hands. A 50-som bill, the change, came back the same way.
No stops, we were back in Bishkek in about 45 minutes. After all of that, it was still just early afternoon. I had intended to walk back through the market, but... the dropoff was a totally different bus station in a totally different part of town.
Shrugged and headed the way I thought Ala-Too Square must be.
It's a compact city with contained sprawl. Big enough to get lost in, once you get out of the center, but not so large you find yourself wandering long stretches with no people or structures. I have often found myself in similar circumstances kicking rocks near rock factories, but everything here has been visibly connected to everything else.
That said, I wasn't anywhere I'd been yet, so I just walked along the road and went the way the cars were going. I passed a closed shop with a stone bee in front of it. The bee was cartoonized and held a bucket. Did he represent industriousness or was he selling a bucket of his honey? A bee can mean so many things!
A large, curved monument tickled the horizon, so I made a cartoon, stone beeline for it. Turned out to be some sort of memorial war park with an eternal flame and a cool statue of two young men carrying artillery. I quite liked that one, because it seemed to represent the slog of war rather than just the glory. They weren't flinging their arms out to bust a cap in a Kraut, they were lugging a heavy piece of machinery to where it was needed. I liked it because it didn't seem like "recruiting."
Some Koreans were getting married under the arch structure. In the distance, a weird UFO-shaped building had letters that looked like they said "park" on it. Probably an old circus!
The streets have names here, but there aren't really street signs. You kind of have to luck out with an address number on a storefront. I saw something that looked like Chuy Ave, and that was the main drag in town, so I turned down it, and damned if it didn't lead to Ala-Too Square. Ala too easy. I'm going to make that joke forever.
Sunday afternoon, and the city was alive in a way I hadn't yet seen it. Food trucks and crowds. It struck me I had meant to contact my host about printing out my visa for Uzbekistan. Since I would be leaving a day early, I had less time to do that. I wondered if maybe... there would be a copy shop of some kind...open... maybe.
I walked among the locals as they enjoyed the sun and ate ice cream and lined up at the kebab houses. Plazas and shopping centers. Men selling lottery tickets. Women selling honey. In a little underground pedestrian mall, I found a kiosk with computers and printers. It was like I'd willed it into existence.
No English, but I pointed to my phone, pointed to a sign with an email address on it, pointed to a printer, and made a "zzt zzt" sound. It fucking worked. I felt like Marcel goddamn Marceau getting the Nobel Prize in the form of a cheesy-looking visa printed on glossy stock. I think this kiosk was for kids to print out their Instagram photos, and I was grateful for it. I don't usually need to have a physical visa, it's usually already in their system, or you can show the digital copy, but I was going to take a midnight bus, and if I was going to have to pass my docs to the front (as happens sometimes), I didn't want to hold everybody up.
Foreshadowing: This turned out to be a very good thing to have done.
I ate a gang of chicken samsi at a little place adjacent to the Square, coffeed up, tried to use up all my som, but there wasn't a water bottle big enough to spend it all on. Wrote, read, and at night I raced to the bus station. It took some doing, the cabs were all on a break or some shit, but I made it on time and bid a fulfilled farewell to Bishkek and, I suppose, Kyrgyzstan.
Fuck, I never bought a magnet.
Foreshadowing: i am also reading your facebook. this is great Simon! thank you.
ReplyDeletethis is Kent btw
DeleteThanks, mysterious... Kent! I appreciate that you're reading it.
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