Double Blog?? With photos: j2westcountry.tumblr/post/60979523790/saturday-7th-september-filling-in-the-gaps Saturday 7th September - Filling in the Gaps There hasn’t been a huge amount of activity on this blog over the last month or so, often due to lack of reliable internet, often due to lack of time, but also often due to lack of motivation. I’m sad to say that the last couple of months in Central Asia have sapped the life and enjoyment out of this trip. Constant bouts of bad luck with visas, bad timing, having to resort to hitching or taxis and shitty stomachs have made me quite apathetic. Thankfully, now though, I seem to have snapped out of it, due to the fact that my wheels are actually in motion and ground is being covered. The border crossing over from Turkmenistan to Iran, from Asia to the Middle East has given me a new lease of energy, as the parameters of Europe seem closer each day, the end finally looks as if it is in sight! So this will hopefully be a short and concise blog to fill you in on what I’ve been doing for the last month. After crossing the Fergana valley in Uzbekistan in one of the hottest weeks on record for the area (upwards of 40 degrees, sometimes hitting 50!) I entered Tajikistan and was happy to be moving into higher, cooler ground. After a couple of days however, I realised that if I wanted finish my Iranian and Turkmenistan visa application processes before my time on my Uzbek double entry visa, I needed to be applying the next day in Dushanbe. Confused? So was I, most of the time when it came to Central Asian visas, but in short, I had to take a shared taxi from Khujand to Dushanbe to try to start my Iranian visa application again. After Tajikistan my next big town was Bukhara in Uzbekistan. As I was taking a taxi South rather than West, I actually would be cycling a similar distance to get from Khujand to Bukhara as I would from Dushanbe to Bukhara. That’s how I justified it to myself anyway. I think if I described to you all of my visa troubles over my three weeks of waiting in Dushanbe, it would be more interesting watching oven cleaner clean an oven. As you may have seen from facebook updates, there were a lot of visits to embassies, lots of visa fees were paid and a lot of “come back tomorrow” was heard. Time waiting in Dushanbe was spent reading kindles, cooking pasta, watching Breaking Bad or Flight of the Conchords, drinking beer, writing rubbish, drinking vodka, fixing bike parts and attempting to surf the internet on insufferable connections. My money was (and still is) extremely low, so food and fun were rationed out in meagre portions. A few good times were had in the “Public Pub” (Dushanbe’s answer to an Irish pub) with other cyclists and travellers. The last few days were probably the most enjoyable, as I was able to find a host on Warm Showers. This is a website similar to Couch Surfing, but designed for cycle tourists. It’s a great website, because the hosts are all tour cyclists too, and have been in your shoes and on your pedals and know exactly what you need. So for the last few days I stayed with a wonderful French lady name Veronique and her 7 year old son Gabriel. Veronique has a lovely large house in the centre of Dushanbe, (a few doors down from the President’s house!) with a huge garden, where I was able to pitch my tent for a few nights. Her house had a hot shower, a huge kitchen and washing machine, all of which were 1000 times better than the horrible hostel amenities I had been paying $10 to camp outside for the previous two weeks. I was not the only guest though, as three other couples were there- two from Germany and one from Austria, and then we were joined by two more British lads at the end of the week. It was a great little cyclists’ community we had, and everyone would often help out with the cooking or the washing up. Veronique was so generous, offered such wonderful hospitality and wanted nothing in return, I only wished I had found her through Warm Showers before! The problems I had with visas and their timing are so confusing it’s almost Kafkaesque, but I’ll give it a go. Mistakes made by embassy staff meant that the next few weeks that I had hoped to do with Julian and Ellie, my round-the-world cyclist friends were all screwed up. They had applied for a Turkmen visa a few days before me, but because they applied with another cyclist friend of ours, Neil, who is cycling from New Zealand to the UK, they assumed they were all together and put his dates. Turkmen transit visas are notoriously short and difficult to obtain. They unfortunately got only a three day visa, a week before they expected to cross. So they then had 10 days to cycled 1000kms through to Bukhara then through Turkmenistan to Iran, and I was left still waiting in Dushanbe for a second Uzbek visa to be processed as my first one had expired. So it was lone cycling for me again. At this point I was really quite down on the idea of cycling alone, I really did want some company, but that’s just how it turned out. The next path through Uzbekistan started well, and I had some nice days cycling through savannah hills and towards open plain desert, camping in an orchard one night and a large typical Steppe hillside the next. It was my third day (on my second jaunt) in Uzbekistan that I realised that the passport control at the border I crossed from Tajikistan had stamped it incorrectly. He had stamped my old visa and not my new one. My old visa expired the next day. So it was back to visa panic mode, that old feeling of should I or shouldn’t I be rushing to an embassy/visa office/border to sort this out. The next big town was over 100kms away. Uzbek officials are very strict about everything so I decided not to chance it and hopped on a truck. When I arrived, I asked around for an OVIR office (where I could hopefully re-stamp my visa). They said next town. So I cycled on, until I reached the next town. It was almost dark and a farmer offered me a place to stay, so I sat and drank vodka with him and ate Pilov, a delicious fried rice dish with raisins, peppers and beans with a couple of fried eggs on the top. As we shovelled down the rice using torn up bits of bread, and slammed back the medium sized glasses of vodka, we laughed for a bit but the language barrier proved too much for him and he turned on the TV so we could sit watching Russian pop videos. The next day I found the immigration office and it was closed. The people in the government office next to it suggested I go to Bukhara, the third largest city in Uzbekistan, and the last point I had to reach before heading to Turkmenistan. I got a bus as there was no way I could cycle the 150kms before 5pm. When I reached Bukhara I was told I should go to the international airport to check with immigration there. The vast empty airport had one chap working in the immigration hall. He looked at my passport, made a tiny squiggle on my visa and told me not to worry. It seems my visa paranoia was unjustified. I had five days to wait until my Turkmen visa would start, so I decided to get the 10 hour night train to Tashkent for the weekend, where I could meet Sujung. Always an amazing supporter of me on this trip, Sujung could see how depressed I was getting with my lack of movement and constant bad luck regarding visas, so she flew all the way from Seoul to Tashkent just to see me. We had a great weekend together and I saw her off to the airport on Sunday night before getting the night train back to Bukhara, for the long day of cycling that would follow. It cheered me up a lot to see her and I felt lucky to have such an amazing girlfriend! The next day I wanted to cross the border to Turkmenistan, but still had to cycle 100km to the border, and I had to do this before 4pm. I really needed a good night’s sleep, so I had bought what I thought was a 1st class ticket in the sleeper carriage, which I was told would have air conditioning. It wasn’t 1st class and it didn’t have air conditioning. I decided to find another carriage and the guard offered me my own room for US$20. As the ticket only cost US$20 in the first place, I decided to pay up for a good night’s sleep. Except it wasn’t a good night’s sleep upon the discovery that I had roommates in the form of cockroaches. Around six that I could see, meaning there must have been hundreds more in the carriage. I slept restlessly, worried I’d wake up with a nuclear repellent friend on my face. So the next day, which was meant to be the first day of my five days to make the 550km crossing of Turkmenistan was spent cycling in the baking desert heat feeling exhausted, dehydrated and then as the day went on an increased feeling of general sickness descending upon me. I thought this was just my body’s reaction to the lack of sleep and cycling through the intense heat, but found out the next day it was something very different. I didn’t make it to border before 4pm, so I camped 5 kms away amongst some sand dunes, eating noodles for dinner with a chopped up raw red pepper and carrot as a salad. I could barely keep my eyes open as I ate them. I woke up in the desert morning shivering under my sleeping bag. A familiarly rushed unzipping of doors in order to relieve the stabbing stomach pains was the morning’s protocol. I already felt awful in the knowledge that I now had only four days to cross the 550km desert, I didn’t need this. It was after I packed up and reached the border control around 9am that I realised that I was really not feeling myself, and that this was perhaps more than a regular case of diarrhoea. When I was shivering in the air conditioning on the Turkmen customs side, and almost passed out at the desk, I definitely realised I wasn’t feeling myself. As a horrible concoction of fatigue, fever, aching and dizziness ran through my body and head, I tried to make sense of the angry looking Turkmenistan guard shouting questions at me in Russian. They wanted to know what hotel I was staying in. “Palatka” I said, being one of the few words I knew in Russian, and gestured my hand signals to make a tent. He didn’t like that. After a bit of head shaking, large eyebrow-raising and phone calls, he agreed to allow me to have my tent accommodation, as I was on a bicycle, but as long as I stayed near cities. I was nodding but all I could think about was vomiting. I put my bags through an X-ray machine and a customs officers was asking me if I had something in my bag in Russian. He clasped his hands together with two figure pointing out like a kid and made the childish sounds of a gunshot. I said no, I didn’t have a gun. They watched me struggle to put my bags back on my bike and told me I could go. I ran to the nearest outdoor bathroom going from shivering cold air conditioning to sweaty hot desert air, where I emptied most of the liquid from my body in a matter of seconds. It was a horrendous way to be starting a 550km marathon in 3 and a half days. It was 25km to the nearest town and 50km to Turkmenabat, the nearest city with a hotel. It was 38 degrees outside, there was absolutely no shade from the desert sun, I had a fever, was dehydrated and only had a few litres of water of dubious quality from a stagnant looking well, that the guards in no-man’s land offered me. I was feeling unnaturally tired, sweating profusely and felt stomach pains and trouble brewed every time I took a sip of water. There was no way I could cycle like this. There were no trucks moving through the border any time soon so I decided I had to give in and take an expensive taxi to Turkmenabat. Once I got there, I managed somehow in my dazed state to find a fairly cheap hotel room, with a bathroom and toilet adjoined to it, albeit a disgusting one. I spent the majority of the day going in and out of a deep sleep, running back and forth to the bathroom every time I tried to drink any liquid in this dark little room. At one point I was lying on my wooden-mattress bed on my back with an insanely strong headache, hallucinating, in this dank little chamber. It felt like a bad Trainspotting parody as the room walls breathed around me and the carpet in my peripheral vision seemed to grow further away. This wasn’t helped by the fact that there were loud bird noise coming from the bathroom, and small bits of dirty black wall plastering appeared to be dropping into the bathtub, every time I ran to squat over the dirty seat-less toilet. At 8pm I finally mustered up the energy to go out and find an internet café. They wouldn’t let me use it because, in my dazed state I had no idea where my passport was (I was relieved later to find that the hotel staff had taken it as a deposit), but thankfully I met a guy called Azat who had been living in the US for the last five years, who let me use his computer on his ID after he had finished. After about an hour of email sending, a miserable skype call to my parents and research into alternative methods of crossing Turkmenistan, I was just about to leave and Azat reappeared. He could clearly see what sort of unhealthy, confused and delinquent state I was in and said he couldn’t just leave me like that. He drove me to a restaurant and bought me some kebabs and traditional Turkmenistan dumplings, and amazingly it was the first food I was able to keep down all day. We also met a couple of his friends who offered to help me buy a train ticket the next day, as he had to work. Again, the kindness of Central Asian people came through at a time when I was most in need of it, the extent of which amazes me and I am truly grateful to them for their generosity and compassion to complete strangers. I woke up on day three of my five day transit visa with stomach pains still present, but my head was so much clearer after sleeping for what must have been a combined total of about 15 hours from the day before. My co-ordination was back to normal and I was not dropping things or tripping over anything whilst running to the bathroom as I had yesterday. I had lost two days, and was still not feeling 100% there, so I decided I would take a train or shared taxi to the next city of Mary, cutting out the most brutal 300kms or so of the desert, leaving me to do the final 175kms over the next three days. I was happy with this decision as there was no way I could push my body to the extent that the Turkmen desert would have demanded in such a short amount of time. About an hour before I checked out, I heard noises of bits of rubble dropping into the bathroom and poked my head around the door just in time to see the terrifying sight of the top corner of the room giving birth to a rabid looking bird. I slammed the door, in no state to deal with it… was I still hallucinating? Ever since I was a kid and a bird got into my sister’s room whilst I was staying in it I have been terrified of the idea of birds being indoors. I called the staff to come and have a look, and a big bolshie Russian lady came marched in and let out a bellowing laugh as she carried out a mangy looking baby pigeon from the bathtub. I can only be thankful that he didn’t make an appearance when I was sat on the toilet watching the walls slowly move the day before. I checked out of my luxury accommodation and met up with Azat’s friends who helped me find a shared taxi to Mary. The following days were fairly simply, just riding through the quiet rural desert roads, camping for two nights before crossing the border to Iran. There isn’t a huge amount to say about those days other than it was great to be back on the bike, the stars at night were unimaginably clear (I could see the Milky Way more vividly than I ever had in my life) and the weather was hot. I saw some camels. And the roads… the roads were so bad… so, so bad. Like a huge jigsaw puzzle with large 1-foot pieces missing everywhere, and pot holes as big as cars. I was so pleased to see the beautiful Iranian road conditions after crossing that border. And that pretty much brings you up to speed. That blog post got less and less concise and longer as it went on, but I felt I had to explain the episode I went through in my first days of Turkmenistan. The next blog is about my first few days in Iran, and I am enjoying it immensely so far. The last month or so in Central Asia and its bad luck has put me in some very low places. I have found it very hard to get motivated in terms of cycling, writing and generally finding the energy to complete this trip. But my arrival in Iran, in the Middle East has given me a new burst of excitement and energy again. I can now see the end is in sight, Autumn is descending over Europe and a life of normality that is equally missed and intimidating beckons from the distance in December. I should enjoy this whilst I can.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 00:45:21 +0000
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