Day 1 Tashkent

After a surprisingly pleasant flight from London to Moscow and then on to Tashkent with the Russian flagship airliner Aeroflot, we land in the Uzbek capital at 2.30am. On disembarking the plane we are faced with a sea of people all ‘queuing’ for (read swarming towards) the handful of immigration officers there to receive us. After about an hour of trying to navigate our way through the mass of people, we manage to make our way through, buy some SYM (local currency) and move on to our next test… taking a taxi to our hotel…

We have agreed to pay $5 for the ride, but our driver insists on wanting $10 and paying us 15,000 SYM back in return ($5 based on the official rate, $3 based on the black market rate as we were soon to learn…). He didn’t win, he just got the $5;-)

Arrived at the hotel, we drop into bed at 5am and wake up at 12pm. Transport is our first priority for the day. We make our way to a state travel agency and buy our return flight from Khiva/Urgench to Tashkent. Our plan is to travel westwards to the Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva to then spend a last day in Tashkent before returning to London. Tashkent is a very clean and organised city with Soviet style wide boulevards and monumental grey and white buildings. It reminded me a little of the government building area in Hanoi, Vietnam. 
At the train station we learn that we are too late to buy a ticket for the Afrosiab bullet train to Samarkand the day after. It will have to be a taxi ride. We have a pleasant late 4pm crepes and salad lunch at a French café, before heading for the Chorsu Bazaar and its money changers.

Whilst looking for the café we couldn’t but notice the number of Korean restaurants lining the streets. I was aware that during Stalin’s regime half a million Volga Germans he perceived as a threat were deported to Central Asia. I did not know that the same treatment had been reserved to half a million Koreans from areas along the border between Korea and USSR.  Whereas most of the Germans emigrated to Germany in the early 90s, the Koreans stayed, explaining why in a country such as Uzbekistan they today constitute 5% of the population. Interesting fact!

We reach Chorsu Bazaar at sunset and meander our way through the orderly fruit & veg and meat stands. Our guide book tells us that by this stage we should be surrounded by willing money changers… No sign of them! After searching in vain for some time we finally find what we are looking for at the entrance to the market. The official exchange rate is 1$ to 2,700 SYM, the black market rate about 5,000 SYM. Worth considering, right? The government security officials (the ‘men in green’) appear to close an eye on this activity, or even, at times, to be in on the deal, as we will see in Samarkand.

We change $100 and are handed 500,000 SYMs in 5 wads of 100 1,000 SYM notes… Happy counting… In Uzbekistan you get used to walking around with wads of money in your bag. Paying restaurant bills takes several minutes as you count your way through the notes…

We return to the hotel and have an aperitif at the bar, where we get our first lesson in Uzbek and Russian from the bartender, Ilya. He is a representative of the 5% of Russians that still live in Uzbekistan (and other Central Asian countries). The Soviet government took over from where the Tsarist government had left off, in encouraging ethnic Russians to move to Central Asia to ‘colonise’ and farm the land. Under the Soviets the USSR (thanks to Uzbekistan) became the second largest producer of cotton in the world. The consequence of this 'leap forward' in cotton production is the dramatic shrinkage of Lake Aral, whose waters were used to irrigate the cotton fields, and which today is a quarter of the size it used to be... 

We end our first day in Uzbekistan with a good meal of shish kebab and vegetable stew, washed down by a Nero d’ Avola from Sicily, and even manage  to hit the dance floor (amongst students half our age) at the hopping VM Club, the place to be seen at in Tashkent. There are very few Uzbeks around, the majority of the clientele is clearly Russian Uzbek.