Uzbekistan - Getting to Know You

In September I had a two week adventure to Uzbekistan with a friend, Jean-Claude (JC).  JC is travelling the Silk Road bit by bit and I was delighted to join him on this unusual trip.

Saturday 21 September 

I started my trip by pogging on salads at Heathrow!  Bring meat free and gluten sensitive, and now heading for a country where fresh salads/raw food/unpeeled fruit are to be avoided, I knew it was going to be hard to feed a Ruth.

It was an easy flight to Tashkent changing at Istanbul.  The only event being a man collapsing one hour into our flight from Istanbul to Tashkent.  He seemed to not be in dire need of medical attention so we didn’t deviate course but it was still a reminder that we are all fragile.

Sunday 22 September

We landed at 0645 local time: a delightful 0145 BST.   Passport control was easy despite the Turkish ground staff telling JC that a Luxembourg passport needed a visa for Uzbekistan (it doesn’t).  Then the long wait for luggage commenced with our bags popping out at 0800.

It’s a small airport.  They put all the immigration officers on duty when a plane arrives then stand them down until the next one comes.  Part of me thinks the officers are then detailed off to empty the plane of luggage as it took forever for our bags to come through.  Sort of shifting from one job to the next.

We’d heard that Uzbeks were a friendly bunch and our first encounter of this was when, as we were leaving the airport, the customs officer called over to us.  Ok we thought, time to show him our luggage, but, no, he simply wanted to ask us if everything was ok as we were last out of arrivals.  We haggled for taxi prices and dropped our bags at the hotel.

Today was the day we found out how to do things.  We learnt that there is one flat fare for the metro.  It’s 1400 SOM (approx 15p) which gives you a blue token and entry to the metro.  You could spend all day underground if you liked.   We popped out at Amir Temur station expecting to be in the bustle of the city centre.   Instead we found ourselves in a pretty deserted hotel zone.   My three hour sleep the night before was showing and we stopped in a cafe to plan our day.   It was terribly hot ~32 deg C, I was sleep deprived and I was hungry.  This didn’t match well with Tashkent cafes offering of pastries and breads.   After iced tea we pushed on and walked down to the main railway station.

The station is a beautiful, imposing building typical of Tashkent.  Soviet architecture echos throughout the city.  As does complexity with buying things.  We wanted to buy a train ticket for later on in the week as buying outside of the country quadruples the price.  At the security kiosk to enter the station we were informed we had to enter a separate building to buy tickets.  Once we’d found that we navigated the queuing system and ticket purchase although ended up with economy which wasn’t the plan.

We caught the metro up to Chorsu to explore the huge bazaar there. It is enormous and categorised into quadrants of vegetables, meat, bread, dried fruits and nuts etc.  We headed for the latter in a circular dome topped building - meat on the ground floor, dried fruit and nuts on the first floor viewing balcony.

I was getting beyond tired and whilst JC wandered around taking photos I hung over the rails watching the ground floor market happen until the sight and smells of the horse meat got to me.  We bought some overpriced dried apricots and nuts (overpriced because even I was too tired to haggle hard) and we sat in the small shade we could find and dined on water and our goodies.

We watched local men lunch on water melon and bread.  Each group sat on cardboard, or directly on the grass, and carved up the melon with long knives.  Instead of slicing the melon into crescents as we do, they halved the melon.  From this they speared chunks of melon and, once finished, the last man drank the juice out of the massive fruit bowl.

Another discovery today was that Tashkent, and therefore most likely Uzbekistan, does not sell Diet Coke.  In fact it doesn’t seem to sell any diet drinks.  For some reason, no doubt fuelled by sleep deprivation, that put me in a sour mood.

We headed north to find the Hazrati Imam, the religious centre of Tashkent.  It contains the Uthman Qur’an - thought to be the oldest extant Qur’an in the world.  We walked an extra km or two in the stifling heat due to the construction of a huge mosque just beside it.  Post-communism, Islam is increasing its presence in these ex USSR countries.

Next on the list was the television tower.  This involved another metro trip and JC had a list of some of the stations he wanted to photograph.  Until 2017 photography was banned on the metro.  The stations doubled up as emergency bunkers and for this reason, and obviously Soviet sensitivities, had been off limits for photographers.  But now one can not only take pictures but use a tripod (something banned on London’s underground). We stopped at a few stations and JC set up and took some great pictures.  The security guards all came to see what he was doing.  They were fascinated by the images he was capturing as, using a long 30 second exposure, the people evaporate giving a strange emptiness to a station that’s never vacant.

Tashkent TV tower is 375 m high, which seemed quite small after my visit to the CN tower last month. Having said that it’s the tallest structure in Central Asia so not to be sniffed at.


The observation deck is 97 m high so it’s not a vast view once up.  It certainly showed how flat and featureless Tashkent was.  The odd tower, block of flats or mosque, but nothing to over excite the eyes.  But still an awesome view!

We lingered over iced tea for sun downers then headed for supper.

Another learning point for the day: Ruth really is very hard to feed in Uzbekistan.  We stumbled thro
ugh a menu of pictures with a waiter who had some English ability, but I ended up with a salad (bad), a dish of uncooked cabbage (bad) and a beetroot dish (good).  After sending one of them back I got a dish of beans (good).  Note to self - find out a better way to communicate.