Uzbekistan Part 1

Crossing into Uzbekistan and arriving in Nukus

The border crossing had been a fairly painless affair as these things go, but the guard did question us about bringing Turkmen' Manat into the country. He then went on to offer to 'take it off of our hands', telling us that we can't spend it here. From that comment I remember thinking he wasn't too bright, but he was sure 'quick enough off the mark' to negotiate a poor exchange rate for our remaining Manat. I wasn't not too bothered myself, as a quick bit of mental arithmetic told me that it's just a load of zero's, and not really very much money if it was converted back into Sterling. But after the 'sting' Bjorn went back to the bike and got his lap-top out to check the last known exchanges. Finding he'd taken advantage of us dumb-tourists, Bjorn pulled him aside and gave him a hard-time, but of course it's way too late. Short-changed we left for the short ride towards our first town shown on the map ... Nukus.

Hotel Nukus is a dingy post-soviet style building, but it was the travel guide's recommendation from a short list of two. Their tariff seemed to us at the time to be charged at a rather high rate, though in fact turned out to be moderately priced in comparison to some others we stay in at a later date. Shortly after arrival and agreeing to stay for a one-nighter, Bjorn again gives 'em a hard-time about their poor US Dollar/Cym(Sum) exchange rates. It seemed that there was a significant disparity between what was quoted in dollars, and how much it'd cost us if we could have paid using the local currency. Blimey! Before today I'd never even heard of Cym before, let alone know what the exchanges were. It was another reminder to make sure we do some bloody research first, but it also stood as a testament for how little we (or, me at least) know about this region in The West.

As a legacy from the border post rip-off, what appeared to be a big 'wedge' of dosh in local currency and made my wallet bulge, didn't in reality go too far. The testament to this, was in finding it wouldn't cover the cost to pay upfront for our first night in the hotel. From that we're pretty much forced to pay in dollars, at the noticeably trimmed down exchange rate, which again dipped into my finite travel funds. To add insult to injury, we find out that we've got to pay another $5 for secure parking in a compound behind the hotel for our bikes, taking it to a grand total of $30. Now I can hear you say that 25 bucks isn't a huge amount to pay for a hotel room, and in part would agree, particularly with the current state of the U.S. dollar. But if you were to have seen the place, you'd understand our reluctance to pay that much. The room turns out to be tatty & poorly decorated with no air-conditioning. It was hot and stuffy, the windows jammed shut behind grimy curtains, hanging limply on something resembling a curtain pole. Opening the bathroom door revealed an antiquated shower head, with pipe-work that ran at unusually abstract angles. My best guess was that the chosen run of free-hand pipe-work, had been dictated by whichever fittings the plumber had in his bag at the time. Or maybe his philosophy was the same as dry-stone wall builders, who are taught never to put down any stone they've picked up, until they find a place for it to go. “Ah ... here's a 90 ° bend, and ooh, now I've got a 45 degree'r”. And to add, mark you ... none of that Namby Pamby feeble western copper rubbish. No, these were good solid 1 inch (or whatever the Soviet standard was) cast-iron screw-in fittings standing proudly out from the wall! The paint had long since gone from it's original white to a sort of yellowy cream, with dust encrusted cracks and corners. Reaching halfway up the walls, the white tile-work was seen to be unevenly interspaced with dirty brown grout, well past any kind of clean-up'able state, with spidery crack lines showing on every other tile. The whole effect made this 'wet-area' into something that was quite uninviting, except for perhaps for the absolute minimum necessary ablutions to keep the worst of the B.O. at bay. But we were all-in, and really didn't have the energy to go looking for anything better or cheaper. Hotel Nukus was our home for the night whether we liked it or not ...

In truth we get what we pay for in terms of western value. Be honest, what would you expect to get in the UK for 15 quid? You'd be struggling to find anything for at least double that price, I'd say. Though having said that, you'd usually get what I've now found to be the 'world' famous English Brekkie. Here we'd learned to expect a bit of dried bread, a slice or two of processed cheese and (thankfully) wafer-thin bit of sausage, most likely made from all the unsavoury bits of animal scraped from the abattoir floor. Sometime's the repaste would stretch to a little honey or jam, though the saving grace for me was always the tea. Light, refreshing and in some establishments, drink-as-much-as-you-like refills. Unfortunately the Hotel Nukus was on the low-end of things, and our breakfast was meagre, by even Central Asian standards.

Continuing with the whinging session ... Everything's run-down here, and in serious need of replacement/refurbishment/redecoration. But of course nobody notices, except us, and ... this isn't the West y'know! So, to lead onto another topic that's been bothering me ... if it's so poor here in Uzbekistan, I'm wondering why do so many people have mobile phones?

Something's gotta be way off-kilter. To my untutoured eye it's often hard to find the best shop in order to buy a decent loaf of bread, yet there are shiny modern adverts for 'Paynet' everywhere. The bill-boards for these mobile phone networks are to be seen sported outside all kinds of establishments, though this doesn't necessarily seem to give much of a clue as to what kind of shop it is. It might be a shop selling mobile phones, or accessories. It's just as likely be a sort of grocer's shop, vending highly sugared drinks in day-glo colours, which are responsible for making children leap about like lunatics, as well as creating healthy queues of people with unhealthy teeth, stood outside the local dentistry. It doesn't seem right to me, that I can see people wearing tatty plastic sandles who you might think can't afford anything better, yet are walking around with a nice shiny moby held to their ear. Those 'Paynet' signs also tell me that someone, somewhere's making a lot of money in this country.