Travails

From: Dushanbe, Tajikistan

Back again. I arrived early this morning in Dushanbe, the peaceful and leafy capital of the Tajik Republic. Will write about the city later, but this post is about getting here - an interesting couple of days, to say the least.

Funny how things work out sometimes. Right after I uploaded my previous post (about my problems getting to the border), I had a major stroke of traveler's luck that took me all the way to Tajikistan. Two backpackers in my hostel -- Raduz and Violeta -- had somehow managed to find a car that agreed to take them west to the Tajik border crossing at Batkent. I bumped into them just as they were getting ready to leave, so I paid my share and jumped onboard.

The political landscape in southwest Kyrgyzstan makes travel to Batkent tricky. Armed conflicts in the past fifteen years have produced a number of isolated Uzbek and Tajik 'exclaves' within Kyrgyzstan. There are four Uzbek-controlled exclaves in the country (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Uzbekistan), all of them effectively off-limits to foreigners. One of them (Sokh), is unfortunately located on the major road that locals use from Osh to Batkent. We had to pay our driver to avoid drive around the Uzbek checkpoints (all of this costs extra, of course) and cut across some inhospitable, lunar-looking landscapes to the Tajik border.

The border crossing itself was completely uneventful, which in Central Asia is a good thing. Once across, we headed to Khojand, an ancient city in northern Tajikistan, and once the easternmost city in Alexander the Great's empire. It isn't exactly packed with Greek ruins, but it's a nice enough place for a couple of days.

My traveling companions had some friends in the city. One of them (a local guy, Furyk) took us out to the Karaikum Reservoir, a Soviet-scale artificial lake just outside the city. We spent the afternoon at a crumbling communist-era turbaza, or health resort:

The place was comically dilapidated, but with a little imagination, you could almost hear the voices of children on holiday from around the USSR, singing Soviet songs. It's still a fun place today: cold beers and hot shashlyk for lunch, followed by a swim in the warm water.

That night, we headed into town for some Russian cuisine. Alright, 'cuisine' might be a bit strong a word, but it was Russian food anyways. There were maybe ten customers in the place (ourselves included)... more than enough to justify a live music performance. There was a small stage with disco balls, fake palm trees and an electronic keyboard. The Tajik performer would put on a CD, play along to the music on the keyboard, and sing or lip-synch the song playing (mostly Persian pop, I think). Outstanding.

My second day in Khojand was a combination of the fun and the infuriating. We'd been lucky to meet Halim, a native of northern Tajikistan and an incredible host -- he invited the three of us to stay at his house while we were in the city. It was yet more of the intense, yet touching, form of hospitality in Central Asia. Halim had made homemade cherry juice earlier that week. Incredible stuff -- we drank almost all of it.

In the morning, Halim took us to "register" our visas at the regional government offices. The very concept of registering one's visa is absurd. The idea is that, even after having purchased a visa for Tajikistan and traveled to the country, the government needs to make sure they know where you are at all times. Enter OVIR, the inefficient and ridiculous government agency charged with doing just that.

To get registered, you need to fill out a bunch of forms, get copies of your passport, bring passport-sized photos, and (most difficult) find a local who is himself registered in the immediate district and therefore authorized to fill out the host information box on your registration form. None of the local hotels are able to do this, so I have no idea what tourists do if they don't have a Tajik friend. Even once you have the requisite forms completed, you have to run around to local banks and made overpriced, certified payments in both Tajik somoni and US dollars. Even with a native Farsi and Russian speaker, the process still took the better part of the day.

I'll write more on this later, but I find it astonishing that a country that claims to encourage tourism still uses unfriendly, Soviet-era processes like visas and registration. It's even worse if you don't register within 72 hours of entering the country: the police can easily extort money or you can be forced to pay a $100 fine when you exit.

Registration complete by late afternoon, we caught some of the city's better sights. These included a well-stocked museum covering the history of the region from Alexandrian times, a poorly-stocked museum with some broken shards of pottery, and the famous Syr-Darya river. We went swimming in the river with some local kids (mostly boys, I noticed). I usually try to avoid swimming in urban waterways, but it seemed clean enough. And I haven't developed any signs of infection (yet).

Halim, Raduz, Violeta and I at the (better) museum:

Swimming in the Syr-Darya:



Two days ago, I got in a taxi heading for Dushanbe. I knew the trip was going to be long (my guidebook billed it as a 12-hour trek), but I really had no idea what was in store.

The first leg of the drive itself is stunning, a slow, high-altitude journey along the M-34 as it weaves through the Zeravshan mountains. For most of the way, the road offers specatacular views of the mountains and the cream-colored Zeravshan river crashing through the rocks below. This picture half-captures the beauty:




In early afternoon, we came across a few roadblocks manned by Chinese construction crews. It was a little unclear what the roadblocks were for, but I guess they had to do with repairs to the M-34. The wait at each one was about half an hour, during which time all the Tajik taxi drivers (usually at least 10) would harass the poor Chinese guy working there. This usually involved a lot of waiting, and what my driver described as "talking Chinese" (the Tajiks speaking Russian with an insulting fake Chinese accent, the Chinese guy politely smiling and shaking his head).

Later on, we arrived at the tunnel through the Zeravshan mountains. The tunnel is the only way to Dushanbe, and it's here where the fun really began. A Chinese-Tajik worker crew was making major repairs to the tunnel and had stopped all traffic along the M-34 in both directions for almost 4 hours. The traffic was backed up on our end for more than 100 vehicles, including both freight and passenger cars.

At 8 pm, someone had the brilliant idea to open access on both ends of the tunnel. Eager to beat the traffic, all the drivers sped as fast as they could into the tunnel, driving in both the correct lane and the lane for oncoming traffic. When the cars from the our side got halfway through the tunnel (which is about 2 km long) they bumped into the traffic from the other end, which had also taken up both lanes. To make matters worse, the middle of the tunnel itself had been reduced to one lane because of the repair work. As the cars piled up in the middle of the tunnel, there was no way forward, and it was impossible to back up.

I've seen very few places that I would describe as "hell on earth," but being stuck in the tunnel was one of them. With cars packed into the unventilated tunnel, the exhaust from the cars built up steadily. Instead of switching off their engines to keep the fumes down, most of the drivers revved their engines out of anger and frustration. After half an hour, it started to become harder to breathe. To add to the fun, each 'side' of traffic would break into a round of honking every five or ten minutes, either out of anger, or else to convince the other side to back up. Hundreds of cars honking in a sealed tunnel isn't the most accoustically pleasant thing in the world. On top of that, the tunnel was flooded with oily water that was ankle-deep in most parts and knee-deep in others; I saw a couple of rats scuttling around on the dry patches. The water meant that we couldn't get out of our cars, which was probably a blessing in disguise, since the drivers on our side were screaming at the oncoming traffic and things could have gotten physical.

A snapshot of the tunnel, 2 hours in:

A view of the tunnel at the repair station:

After 3 hours in the tunnel, I was coughing a lot and starting to get a real headache. I decided to grab my bag and make a run for the end of the tunnel (flooding or no flooding) when the cars started to inch forward slowly. The engineers had finally found a way to direct the traffic so that one side could move at a time. Thirty minutes later, we left the tunnel, and I rolled my window down to a beautiful, starry sky and the freshest mountain air I've ever breathed. I was asleep within a few minutes.

I woke up the next morning in Varzob, a charming, hilly suburb of Dushanbe, at the house of a fellow passenger. We had a nice breakfast (although a little too early, at 6:30, for my taste) then headed to town.