The midnight bus to Tashkent was populated with elderly riders straight out of central casting. Crafty old babushkas with gold teeth and plastic bags full of salami, old drunks in tight hats, empty cigarette packets in their shirt pockets, worried-looking middle aged women with very young children.
A bunchy of shady-looking dudes were at the platform selling currency. The famous "black market" I'd read so much about. I chose not to do business with them, but I was certainly tempted. I just love seedy underbellies, don't you? Hucked my bag in the bus-guts and boarded. It was late, I was a little sweaty from the panicked race to make the bus, so I started to drift off right away.
But an old lady begged me with her eyebrows to please let her old friend have my seat. So I switched. As it turned out, I was now behind them, and they both reclined their seats as far as they could. Which, on this bus, was very far. I was completely trapped.
One of the drunks screwed himself in next to me, and thus crated I was taken on the road to Tashkent.
The route involved several border crossings. The roads and, perhaps, the mountains, obligate traffic leaving Bishkek to head north into Kazakhstan, west a while, then eventually south into Uzbekistan. I had thought I might sleep for eight hours, cross the border and wake up in Tashkent (it looked like a straight shot West to my naive Western eyes). But, we stopped every ninety minutes or so for one reason or another, sometimes needing to take all of our baggage out of the bus-belly while inspectors searched the seat cushions for poppy seeds. It was a serious business. Military rifles and truncheons. The hubcaps were removed and the wheelwells inspected.
Since we had to carry all of our possessions at every checkpoint, I became very familiar with the wheelchairs and bicycle wheels the other riders had to lug through every customs building. They used them to force their way forward. Everyone did this, used whatever they had to gain any temporary advantage in line. None of your quaint notions of "after you" or "ladies first," It was a free-for-all of elbows, handlebars, and salamis. I stayed out of it, which meant I was always last in line, which meant the bus always had to wait for me. Since my passport is "exotic," it took a little longer to process.
For some reason, the Kazakhs were exceptionally brusque with the old ladies, snapping in their faces, and slapping their passports against counters. It was strange and aggressive. What did grandma do to you, customs agent?
Usually there was a tragic toilet at the other end of these gauntlets, and the driver waited for everyone to debase themselves. I have a pretty bad gag reflex, and over the years it's gotten worse. I've gotten incredibly sensitive to bathroom smells, often close (it feels), to throwing up. This... is not the part of the world to have this problem. The toilets are just holes in the ground with boards nailed on either side to keep you from falling in. No dividers either, so you just squat and shit next to another shitting squatter. Hey, buddy.
I was frequently walking in on travelers mid-crap, men who looked like sections removed from a totem pole.
At one such stop, I shared my water bottle with one of the drunks and knew regret. He looked thirsty, and it felt like the right thing to do with and for a fellow traveler, but it absolutely ruined the water. It tasted and smelled like tobacco and Sterno afterward and may have made me sick. Lack of sleep and drunkard's saliva had me hallucinating in my seat. Strange visions and a sometime inability to know wake from sleep.
Well, darling, it was just too too hypnopompic.
I took a dream sip of water and imagined it had tiny plastic capsules of nicotine floating in it. They burst on my teeth. The front window of the bus was like an enormous movie screen and I believed it showed us plow through a family of cocker spaniels. They had been standing in the road. Much brain activity was spent trying to determine if this had actually happened. There had been no sound, the bus hadn't slowed. And yet, I began to tear up in my sleep thinking we had had no choice but to move forward. Why had they been in the road? Why that breed?
I do not now think this is real. I think it was sleep deprivation mixed with frequent actual images of animals in the road on previous drives. But, the tears were real. I danced with old friends at the front of the bus to Queen's "A Kind of Magic." This was absolutely a dream. And yet... I heard the music.
In this condition, I arrived in Uzbekistan.
There was the usual inside-out flea market rush for the customs counter. Heavy bed frames and duct-taped skis thrusting and pushing. I was by this time near the very back of the line. Though around eighty people were waiting, only two dudes were processing, and they were holding high carnival, cracking one another up laughing at people's pictures and possessions.
A sign on the wall read "We figt corruption," which misspelling aside, I assumed meant I wouldn't be asked to pay a bribe. I was asked, however, to wait. All jokes stopped when I produced my visa and it was found wanting. The company I'd bought it from had either processed it incorrectly or it was fraudulent.
I was in my customary place in the back of the line, so there was already the anxiety of the bus wanting to leave without me. This just ratcheted that up a notch. I kept waiting for the guy to shrug and stamp my passport anyway, but that shrug never came. Instead, a series of phone calls and procession of bosses, each with a larger pancake on his hat than the last.
An English Speaker was fetched. He was a young soldier, happy to have an excuse to practice his language skills. "You are problem," he said, "this visa is not systeming."
"No to worry. I will not let your bus leave. We will hold it for you."
This was relieving, though I feared it would give time for the drunks to sober up and be angry. Every other passenger had passed through by now, and I was alone in the customs center. I pictured myself boarding in a few minutes and getting an ironic cheer.
But more than a few minutes passed. A dude just kept typing the visa number into a computer and scowling at it. "Did you get this on the internet?" asked Young English. "Yes," I said.
Since I am the age I am, I thought of the line from Return of the Jedi, "It was an older code sir, but it checks out."
But it wasn't checking out.
(I'm an alligator. I'm a mama papa coming for you)
I was eventually shown to a bench where I read the Zweig and tried to look harmless. I tried to keep a sort of sad-but-hopeful expression. I was as pitiful and harmless as a cocker spaniel on the highway. The energy in the room was low-key, and I wasn't afraid it would turn violent or I would be arrested or anything. I figured in the worst case I would be denied entry and have to spend the rest of the trip in Kyrgyzstan.
Which would have been fine.
My spirits were high. I just trusted it would work out. I wasn't sleepy, and I wasn't high on hobo spit any more. Just.. waiting. And... either I didn't show up on any Interpol lists, didn't look like I had poppy seeds in my wheelwell, or they stopped caring. There came the anticipated shrug, and the stamp machine went snicker-snack, and I was allowed through.
My bus was not there.
Barely Legal was like, "Your bus leave. But not worry. I will make another take you. They will do it."
And this happened. The next bus that came through, the driver was told to take this VIP to Tashkent for free with no questions asked. It was a nicer bus, and I had plenty of leg room. An hour later, we were there.
And then my troubles began.
For reasons unknown, the very large bus station in the very large city had no money-exchange and no internet. Taxi drivers were all over me, but even if I'd wanted to let them rob me, I had nothing to rob. I heard a guy yelling "Nyet! Nyet!" in an Australian accent, and that cracked me up all over the place. I had not heard that combination before. He was fighting off a taxi driver.
I gave him the Nod of Acknowledgement, and he was like, "Firstoim, inna 'kent?" The Kent! I said yes, He asked if I'd gotten money yet. I told him that he had precisely sensed my problem. "Shoulda got it when you boarded, mate. Only place to."
I assumed he meant the black market guys. He asked me if I needed any walking around change, and I told him I would be ok, I would find an exchange counter in or around the station. He winked and said, "You'd be the firs, mate." Then he left.
I was not the first. There was no place to get money. Some busted ATMs looked like homes for raccoons, and there was no exchange counter. None of the shady dudes either. I went ahead and used international roaming data to try and summon a cab, but the app failed.
So, I hauled my plastic nicotine capsules around the block for... a very long time. I thought a hotel might take my money, but they did not. Eventually I wandered into the Metro to see if maybe they had a machine that would let me use a credit card to buy a token.
I approached some Uzbek guards and explained my problem. They did not speak very much English and didn't seem to understand. But they were friendly. One of them asked me where I was from, and when I said California, he lit up. "California! California!" He looked at his buddy, and his buddy gave me a subway token. For free.
The absolute fortune of that. The absolute kindness. There were delays and hangups and hassles, and every time a local functionary helped me out in some overly kind way. I was overwhelmed with gratitude. Enhanced by the fact that the Tashkent Metro is the most beautiful in the world. Much has been written on this established fact. And there I was.. in it. And it was just as they said. More on this later.
My room was near Cosmonaut Station, so I figured out the map and got myself there. Met my host, dropped off my bags and crashed hard. Woke up before it got too dark to find a bank. When I did, I traded $40 for an enormous wad of bills. It was a cartoon. The current exchange rate is 9,400 som to the dollar, so I suddenly had four-hundred thousand bucks in small bills. They had to wrap them in a rubber band.
I got some tea for a dime and went back to bed.
The next day went by in a tired fog. I don't even really have a sense of the city other than the fact that the people, even the cops, were exceptionally kind. I photographed a memorial to the cosmonauts and felt pride in the accomplishments of our awful, awful species. We put a person in space. I'm a Cosmic Native, so I take that shit for granted most of the time, but these elegant bronzes made me feel the absolute wonder of it.
As well, I marveled at an enormous market. It was twice as large as the Osh Market, but three times as organized. I bought one of those giant bread circles and ate the whole thing. In a covered produce area, I paid a dollar for what felt like two gallons of pickles and cherry tomatoes. I had just wanted some walking-around pickles and asked for a dollar's worth. The ladle kept dipping in.
The economics of this place is very confusing to me. Everything is incredibly cheap. I thought with 400,000 bucks I'd be paying fifty grand for everything, but everything was thirty cents or less.
The whole second day here flew by in a confetti of thousand-dollar bills. Was I still on the bus? Was I still dreaming?
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