Tashkent

As a strictly ‘hand luggage only’ traveller, I find myself floating through foreign markets with an apathetic nonchalance. When engaged, I politely raise my hand and smile, as if to say “there’s no room for an ornate bowl in my 32l rucksack, madame”. Our trip to Uzbekistan would see us travel from Tashkent, all the way up to Nukus, on the edges of the now barren Aral Sea. Sometimes we would travel by train, sometimes by car, but always in discomfort.

Tashkent’s metro deserves its plaudits. Each station offers something a little different. As any metro user will attest, however, a metro is only as good as the buses that connect you above ground. But buses are not on trend in Tashkent. The market has become completely dominated by Chinese EVs in a way that would make EU Commissioners tremble in their cheap leather shoes. I am personally very centrist dad about the people who don’t pay to use the underground in London, Paris and New York. Violence is the only language those people understand and on this I am in complete alignment with the heavy security presence in each Uzbek metro station. There is nothing like an unexpected frisk to remind you that we all have a duty to pay our way.

There wasn’t really that much to do. And when you’re in a capital city and that’s the case, you walk. And we did. We walked for many miles. At one point we saw a Madrasa that was fully rebuilt in 2019, which was a shame. Along the way I bought a t-shirt that read “I’m a plover”, a witty play on words acknowledging the national dish of ‘plov’. Little did I know just how popular it would make me, on a future birding holiday.

Fermented dairy products haunted me for my entire time in Central Asia. Each innocent looking glass of milk risked a lifetime of gut bacteria remodelling. I felt in no uncertain terms that a glass of Kumis, a fermented horse milk, would be the death of me. Every time we stopped for lunch, I would look around and see grown men with a limp white milk moustache, enduring beyond their sip and into the next bite of plov. How can anyone be expected to prosper in circumstances like these?

I’ve never known Museums to have so many rules. No photos, no sleeping and no laughing at the portraits of Uzbekistan’s ancient leaders even if the biography of their life reads: ‘He’s good natured, sincere, brave and educated person. Unexpectedly he died falling into abyss from his pigeonry”. Forced out by the increasingly stern glances of the museum attendants, we headed straight for KFC. My time as a plover was over.

Sadly the Russian Grippe we’d contracted in Kyrgyzstan followed us to Uzbekistan and forced us into Tashkent’s medical system. I had little patience for mandatory blood work and so headed to the Hotel Uzbekistan for medicinal alcohol. As I nursed a vodka in the shabby hotel bar, a former Finance Minister explained his soft affection for the ruble and surface-to-air missiles. Over dinner, I was encouraged to drink 4 ‘Barbie Girls’. They hadn’t heard of Neck Oil. I suspect the luminescent pink liquor would have lit up my stomach if it weren’t for the many layers keeping my shivering body in one piece. In the background, the Russian national karate team were warming up in a car park. I’m not sure what they were warming up for, but I was determined not to find out. As the night drew to a close, and the godfather of Uzbekistan’s only female British businesswoman had stumbled off into a taxi, a young American diplomat attempted to convince me that coal really was the future. I sipped an old fashioned and nodded in silence, wondering if it was the KFC or despair that I could feel, deep within.