Almaty, Kazakhstan
I head back to Almaty, which by now seems like my Central Asian home. This will be my third arrival in the city, in order to relax, then fly out to Nepal. Central Asia has been full of picturesque people and places, anecdotes, emotions, cultural memories, lessons learned, and, of course, meat. If the meat section in the bazaars does not immediately overcome by their stench, then spending months in these places will certainly take that impact on the tongue. Here are old men in fur hats and wrinkly faces, ladies in colorful headresses and velvet coats, horsemen and goats, Soviet apartment blocks, haggling fruit sellers, ancient city blocks and ruins, tales of Alexander the Great, endless tea, hospitality, liars, cheats, yurts, boundless steppe land, mountains, valleys, arranged marriages, laughter, tears, and adventures.
Hitchhiking to Charinskiy Canyon
Charinskiy Canyon lies 200 km outside of Almaty. There are of course day tours that go there, but what's the fun in that? A German compadre and I decided to hitchhike there. The people here don't completely understand the concept of hitchhiking. Here, every car can be a taxi. Just wave one down, and if they are going the same way, for a fee they will take you there too. Thus, people don't understand why you would expect to go for free, especially a seemingly rich westerner. We did have decent success explaining about hitchhiking though, especially since we there thumbing a ride, instead of the usual taxi hail. A nice young businessman took us to the edge of town, and an airport security guard going home took us to the next village. From there we got more annoyed tsks when we explained we were hitchhiking and wanted to go for free, but eventually we did find a ride for maybe the next three villages. There, rush hour hit. People were standing on the roadside everywhere hailing cars as taxis, and if we told drivers we were traveling for free, we were outcompeted in every way. It was impossible to go for free at this point, so we decided to haggle for a ride, and did end up going halfway to the canyon for a decent price.
It was now dinner time. Muriel and I walked into a dark, wooden village roadside cafe and asked what was on the menu. Nothing without meat of course, which was bad for her since she is vegetarian. So we decided to reach the next village to see what was up. We were picked up by a young man, Irjok, withing a matter of minutes. He was a merchant-businessman, and driving to the Chinese border to sell and buy some children's toys. He also hadn't slept in two days, which was comforting especially given how fast he was driving. We stopped at a roadside cafe cluster with him, and ate. He was bewildered that Muriel didn't eat meat. "Ask her", he said to me, "why doesn't she eat meat? If something doesn't have meant in it, we wouldn't think it would be worth eating". He also tried to pay for us, but I wouldn't have it.
Irjok asked me, "If there were a war between the US and China, who would you support?" I hesitated for a moment, told him that I didn't like wars, then struggled to explain in Russian that I am American now, that I has mostly grown up in America, and I don't have too many connections to China. He replied that he repects me, but that he doesn't like America, mostly because of all the wars America fights overseas. On the other hand, he has a favorable opinion of China, which is common in this region. He dropped us off at the canyon, worrying about our sanity for wanting to camp, and telling us the wolves would come eat us.
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Central Asian Time
There's not much in Bishkek except for a huge bazaar on the edge of town housed in shipping containers, selling everything from electronics to the fur hats popular here. Turns out though, to get to anywhere else in Kyrgyzstan, I needed to negotiate private cars, since the bus company doesn't operate through the mountains. The vans sit near Osh Bazaar in Bishkek, with drivers yelling Osh! Osh! Jalal-abad! After haggling some, I sit into one of these vans. I had wanted to leave early to Jalal-abad, but that is always false hope. We are sitting until the van fills up with people, and that takes another two hours. By then, it's lunch time, so the driver and a lot of the passengers leisurely head to the cafe right by and chat over some coffee or tea. I have decided that people are so open and talkative in these places because it is so disorganized, so hard to find people or have them do things on time, that there is very often nothing better to do other than turning to the stranger next to you and talking to them. So it was thus in my van taxi. If anyone busts out food, they share it with the entire car as well, stranger or not. I was offered pomegranite and pieces of bread. Their culture is so that they probably feel bad if they are enjoying something their neighbor isn't.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homestays in Osh
There is a tourist agency in Kyrgyzstan called CBT, or community based tourism, and they are supposed to bring authentic experiences and fair prices. I decided to try one of their homestays with a family in Osh. Disappointly, the place was more like a private guesthouse than what I imagined to be a homestay. It was with a family that had a big house, and a seperate room for the guests. The house is arranged to surround a courtyard in the middle, customary design in this region; in the summer, eating is often done outside. The wife left me with some tea in the kitchen and went away. Later, I managed to talk to the husband for a bit, about his job as a police detective, and politics. I asked him what he thought of the Soviet Union, and he said it was great because you didn't need a visa to go to very many places. Then, he also said there was more ethnic unity. No one would point and say, you are Uzbek, or you are Kyrgyz, but everyone was more unified. He also thinks the current Kyrgyz government is great because it is democratic. But then I pointed out the Soviet government wasn't democratic, did he like that? He said a lot of things I didn't quite catch in Russian, but the gist of it definitely was: life before was great! Life now is great! Life is always great!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bro Talks
I sat around in Osh much longer than I had intended to, due to unforseen circumstances. So I watched people come and go in the hostel in cycles. Towards the end, a Swiss girl arrived. She had been invited by the keeper of a store nearby the hostel to go see the city with him, and invited me along to go. So I agreed, and we went to meet Akbar, a young man around 27ish. He drove us to the mountain around which Osh is built, called Sulaiman Too. There, we spent a few hours climbing around the mountain, chatting, and went to a cafe afterwards to eat. He was a funny guy, and invited us out to drink some vodka in the evening.
Deborah and I met him again in the evening, him carrying a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag. He told us, "my friend owns that cafe across the street. So we can get a private room, and sneak the bottle of vodka in to drink." So we did that, and of course he ordered a meat dish for the table. We told him that we had already eaten, but he insisted, because it is Kyrgyz tradition to always have meat on the table when guests are over. We also tried to make him give a long speech for toasting with every vodka shot, but I guess he was a little bit of a shy one for that. Of course he asked us about our merital status, and why we aren't married yet, especially Deborah because she's 26, and the Kyrgyz marry early. Merital status is quite the customary topic when conversing with the Kyrgyz. We turned the tables on him though, because he's not married either, and we demanded to know why. He told us a sad story about how a girl he had known for 10 years went and married a rich guy, and thus a bro talk began. I tried my best to console him using limited Russian, and told him that he'd find a good girl who didn't run away with rich guys. He said, "Insha' Allah, I will be married next year." He needs to be married, because according to Kyrgyz tradition, the youngest 'son takes care of the parents when they grow old. Thus, he said he needed a wife to do the cooking and cleaning for his parents as well, and have kids so they can take care of him when he is old.
At this point, he bestowed many compliments on Deborah, and perhaps half jokingly proposed that she marry him. I told him that Europeans expect the man to kneel when proposing such a thing, and so he got down on his knees and said a few things to Deborah. We were all laughing at this point, but who knows, he might have been half serious. Anyways, he told Deborah she had one year to think about his offer. I'm not sure that Deborah is exactly pleased at the prospects of having to do a lot of obligatory cooking and cleaning if she marries Akbar; the cultural obstacles are probably pretty insurmountable. Anyways, after Akbar attempted a dine and dash out of the cafe of his "friend," and got caught by the waiter in the process, we walked around with another bottle of vodka. So the rest of that night is not worth telling.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All about taxis
I have always hated taxis, and always will hate taxis. They are ridiculously expensive back at home, and attempt to scam and make it every bit as expensive here as well. They are the most sly scams in town and between towns, and everytime a taxi stops here I put my game face on and pretend as best as I can that I know what I am doing. In Russia and Mongolia, the people don't really try to rip you off, call it honest if you will. They stoically stare at you and tell you a reasonable price, take it or leave it. So I was unprepared for the South of Kazakhstan, the beginning of the bazaar culture. Taxis will usually attempt to charge 2-3 times, if not more, the local price for every ride. I've learned that it is generally more effective to bargain by turning their tricks on them - smiling and calling them friend, laughting with (or at) them, then threatening to walk on if they don't back off their exorbitant prices. You are not getting a good price by going through all this bargaining, you are merely getting the normal price. The taxi drivers will blatantly lie about how far away something is, and always attempt to tell you there are no buses going that way. My favorite is when one guy is ripping you off, and another "impartial" taxi driver comes up and says, normal, normal! If they are not doing that, they always give you the rundown of how the gas is so expensive, how the distance is so vast, etc. Good thing I'm half immune to these speeches because I can't understand half the things they say to me in Russian anyways. The old guys here are sly as well. If I ask them for directions, some of them tell me, well, I don't know where that street is, but look, there's my taxi driver friend over there! He can take you there. 100 som! Etc, etc. My favorite moments are when I arrive into a city while it is still light and the buses are still running. Then I can walk past the row of taxis, listen to their blatantly overpriced offers, and laugh and shoot down all of them because I don't need them! Or they say, "Where are you going?" And I say, "Istanbul! New York! Moskva!"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, I have been in the old Soviet Republics for over 3 months now. It is time to move onto Nepal!
You know you've been in the old soviet world for three months when:
1. Menus containing all Russian and no pictures become decipherable.
2. You get a little lost on the metro if there are no signs in Russian.
3. You are very surprised when the waiter speaks English to you.
4. You despair of communicating if the shop keeper doesn't speak Russian.
5. You are used to the Ukrainian government being called fascist.
6. You know the babushkas will help you find your way and send you off with a story.
7. You expect all hostels to have free tea.
8. Carrying 5 registration documents becomes normal.
9. You would rather eat the fruits and vegetables instead of the always nearby meaty dish.
10. Moscow begins to seem like the center of the world.
I head back to Almaty, which by now seems like my Central Asian home. This will be my third arrival in the city, in order to relax, then fly out to Nepal. Central Asia has been full of picturesque people and places, anecdotes, emotions, cultural memories, lessons learned, and, of course, meat. If the meat section in the bazaars does not immediately overcome by their stench, then spending months in these places will certainly take that impact on the tongue. Here are old men in fur hats and wrinkly faces, ladies in colorful headresses and velvet coats, horsemen and goats, Soviet apartment blocks, haggling fruit sellers, ancient city blocks and ruins, tales of Alexander the Great, endless tea, hospitality, liars, cheats, yurts, boundless steppe land, mountains, valleys, arranged marriages, laughter, tears, and adventures.
Hitchhiking to Charinskiy Canyon
Charinskiy Canyon lies 200 km outside of Almaty. There are of course day tours that go there, but what's the fun in that? A German compadre and I decided to hitchhike there. The people here don't completely understand the concept of hitchhiking. Here, every car can be a taxi. Just wave one down, and if they are going the same way, for a fee they will take you there too. Thus, people don't understand why you would expect to go for free, especially a seemingly rich westerner. We did have decent success explaining about hitchhiking though, especially since we there thumbing a ride, instead of the usual taxi hail. A nice young businessman took us to the edge of town, and an airport security guard going home took us to the next village. From there we got more annoyed tsks when we explained we were hitchhiking and wanted to go for free, but eventually we did find a ride for maybe the next three villages. There, rush hour hit. People were standing on the roadside everywhere hailing cars as taxis, and if we told drivers we were traveling for free, we were outcompeted in every way. It was impossible to go for free at this point, so we decided to haggle for a ride, and did end up going halfway to the canyon for a decent price.
It was now dinner time. Muriel and I walked into a dark, wooden village roadside cafe and asked what was on the menu. Nothing without meat of course, which was bad for her since she is vegetarian. So we decided to reach the next village to see what was up. We were picked up by a young man, Irjok, withing a matter of minutes. He was a merchant-businessman, and driving to the Chinese border to sell and buy some children's toys. He also hadn't slept in two days, which was comforting especially given how fast he was driving. We stopped at a roadside cafe cluster with him, and ate. He was bewildered that Muriel didn't eat meat. "Ask her", he said to me, "why doesn't she eat meat? If something doesn't have meant in it, we wouldn't think it would be worth eating". He also tried to pay for us, but I wouldn't have it.
Irjok asked me, "If there were a war between the US and China, who would you support?" I hesitated for a moment, told him that I didn't like wars, then struggled to explain in Russian that I am American now, that I has mostly grown up in America, and I don't have too many connections to China. He replied that he repects me, but that he doesn't like America, mostly because of all the wars America fights overseas. On the other hand, he has a favorable opinion of China, which is common in this region. He dropped us off at the canyon, worrying about our sanity for wanting to camp, and telling us the wolves would come eat us.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Central Asian Time
There's not much in Bishkek except for a huge bazaar on the edge of town housed in shipping containers, selling everything from electronics to the fur hats popular here. Turns out though, to get to anywhere else in Kyrgyzstan, I needed to negotiate private cars, since the bus company doesn't operate through the mountains. The vans sit near Osh Bazaar in Bishkek, with drivers yelling Osh! Osh! Jalal-abad! After haggling some, I sit into one of these vans. I had wanted to leave early to Jalal-abad, but that is always false hope. We are sitting until the van fills up with people, and that takes another two hours. By then, it's lunch time, so the driver and a lot of the passengers leisurely head to the cafe right by and chat over some coffee or tea. I have decided that people are so open and talkative in these places because it is so disorganized, so hard to find people or have them do things on time, that there is very often nothing better to do other than turning to the stranger next to you and talking to them. So it was thus in my van taxi. If anyone busts out food, they share it with the entire car as well, stranger or not. I was offered pomegranite and pieces of bread. Their culture is so that they probably feel bad if they are enjoying something their neighbor isn't.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homestays in Osh
There is a tourist agency in Kyrgyzstan called CBT, or community based tourism, and they are supposed to bring authentic experiences and fair prices. I decided to try one of their homestays with a family in Osh. Disappointly, the place was more like a private guesthouse than what I imagined to be a homestay. It was with a family that had a big house, and a seperate room for the guests. The house is arranged to surround a courtyard in the middle, customary design in this region; in the summer, eating is often done outside. The wife left me with some tea in the kitchen and went away. Later, I managed to talk to the husband for a bit, about his job as a police detective, and politics. I asked him what he thought of the Soviet Union, and he said it was great because you didn't need a visa to go to very many places. Then, he also said there was more ethnic unity. No one would point and say, you are Uzbek, or you are Kyrgyz, but everyone was more unified. He also thinks the current Kyrgyz government is great because it is democratic. But then I pointed out the Soviet government wasn't democratic, did he like that? He said a lot of things I didn't quite catch in Russian, but the gist of it definitely was: life before was great! Life now is great! Life is always great!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bro Talks
I sat around in Osh much longer than I had intended to, due to unforseen circumstances. So I watched people come and go in the hostel in cycles. Towards the end, a Swiss girl arrived. She had been invited by the keeper of a store nearby the hostel to go see the city with him, and invited me along to go. So I agreed, and we went to meet Akbar, a young man around 27ish. He drove us to the mountain around which Osh is built, called Sulaiman Too. There, we spent a few hours climbing around the mountain, chatting, and went to a cafe afterwards to eat. He was a funny guy, and invited us out to drink some vodka in the evening.
Deborah and I met him again in the evening, him carrying a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag. He told us, "my friend owns that cafe across the street. So we can get a private room, and sneak the bottle of vodka in to drink." So we did that, and of course he ordered a meat dish for the table. We told him that we had already eaten, but he insisted, because it is Kyrgyz tradition to always have meat on the table when guests are over. We also tried to make him give a long speech for toasting with every vodka shot, but I guess he was a little bit of a shy one for that. Of course he asked us about our merital status, and why we aren't married yet, especially Deborah because she's 26, and the Kyrgyz marry early. Merital status is quite the customary topic when conversing with the Kyrgyz. We turned the tables on him though, because he's not married either, and we demanded to know why. He told us a sad story about how a girl he had known for 10 years went and married a rich guy, and thus a bro talk began. I tried my best to console him using limited Russian, and told him that he'd find a good girl who didn't run away with rich guys. He said, "Insha' Allah, I will be married next year." He needs to be married, because according to Kyrgyz tradition, the youngest 'son takes care of the parents when they grow old. Thus, he said he needed a wife to do the cooking and cleaning for his parents as well, and have kids so they can take care of him when he is old.
At this point, he bestowed many compliments on Deborah, and perhaps half jokingly proposed that she marry him. I told him that Europeans expect the man to kneel when proposing such a thing, and so he got down on his knees and said a few things to Deborah. We were all laughing at this point, but who knows, he might have been half serious. Anyways, he told Deborah she had one year to think about his offer. I'm not sure that Deborah is exactly pleased at the prospects of having to do a lot of obligatory cooking and cleaning if she marries Akbar; the cultural obstacles are probably pretty insurmountable. Anyways, after Akbar attempted a dine and dash out of the cafe of his "friend," and got caught by the waiter in the process, we walked around with another bottle of vodka. So the rest of that night is not worth telling.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All about taxis
I have always hated taxis, and always will hate taxis. They are ridiculously expensive back at home, and attempt to scam and make it every bit as expensive here as well. They are the most sly scams in town and between towns, and everytime a taxi stops here I put my game face on and pretend as best as I can that I know what I am doing. In Russia and Mongolia, the people don't really try to rip you off, call it honest if you will. They stoically stare at you and tell you a reasonable price, take it or leave it. So I was unprepared for the South of Kazakhstan, the beginning of the bazaar culture. Taxis will usually attempt to charge 2-3 times, if not more, the local price for every ride. I've learned that it is generally more effective to bargain by turning their tricks on them - smiling and calling them friend, laughting with (or at) them, then threatening to walk on if they don't back off their exorbitant prices. You are not getting a good price by going through all this bargaining, you are merely getting the normal price. The taxi drivers will blatantly lie about how far away something is, and always attempt to tell you there are no buses going that way. My favorite is when one guy is ripping you off, and another "impartial" taxi driver comes up and says, normal, normal! If they are not doing that, they always give you the rundown of how the gas is so expensive, how the distance is so vast, etc. Good thing I'm half immune to these speeches because I can't understand half the things they say to me in Russian anyways. The old guys here are sly as well. If I ask them for directions, some of them tell me, well, I don't know where that street is, but look, there's my taxi driver friend over there! He can take you there. 100 som! Etc, etc. My favorite moments are when I arrive into a city while it is still light and the buses are still running. Then I can walk past the row of taxis, listen to their blatantly overpriced offers, and laugh and shoot down all of them because I don't need them! Or they say, "Where are you going?" And I say, "Istanbul! New York! Moskva!"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, I have been in the old Soviet Republics for over 3 months now. It is time to move onto Nepal!
You know you've been in the old soviet world for three months when:
1. Menus containing all Russian and no pictures become decipherable.
2. You get a little lost on the metro if there are no signs in Russian.
3. You are very surprised when the waiter speaks English to you.
4. You despair of communicating if the shop keeper doesn't speak Russian.
5. You are used to the Ukrainian government being called fascist.
6. You know the babushkas will help you find your way and send you off with a story.
7. You expect all hostels to have free tea.
8. Carrying 5 registration documents becomes normal.
9. You would rather eat the fruits and vegetables instead of the always nearby meaty dish.
10. Moscow begins to seem like the center of the world.