Home 2014 (Page 4)

Year: 2014

Kyrgyzstan: What! No dictatorship?

As a seasoned connoisseur of dictatorships, Kyrgyzstan was always going to be something of a disappointment in a region characterized by kleptocratic despots. Sure, they can rustle up some electoral irregularities and even some human rights abuses when pushed but gone is the all-pervasive security presence or the anticipation at customs posts of a potential, full cavity search. The eloquent, almost poetic “thwap” of stretched rubber glove against the wrist, as the officer gleefully prepares for the  intimate intrusion into…

Continue reading

Ashgabat: Turkmenistan’s city of dreams and nightmares

One day I saw a piece of rubbish in Ashgabat. I want you to ponder on the significance of that statement: in a whole day of walking around the central part of the city I saw a single, solitary piece of rubbish. Even the Swiss couldn’t manage that! You need the single-minded determination of a dictatorship to achieve this attention to detail. It is difficult to know where to start trying to explain such a city but certainly only a…

Continue reading

Turkmenistan: a tale of two presidents

What is it with Islam and dictatorships? I sometimes wonder if it’s some kind of test Allah has set for his followers to endure to prove that they are truly worthy of paradise. I don’t expect paradise for myself in this world but I can’t quite grasp why so many other lovely people would need to be subjected to a lifetime of tyranny to qualify for it in the next one. At this rate my odds for the next one…

Continue reading

Where’s the Islam Mr Karimov?

A typical lunchtime scene in Uzbekistan: a humble cafe, four men sit round a cheaply laminated table, in front of them a full bottle of vodka and some small, dainty, chipped bowls, commonly used for drinking tea. The first round is poured out and the earnest work of drinking begins. By the hour mark things descend into slumps, slurs, blurs and increasingly vague gesturing, the jolly affirmation of male bonding familiar to many of us from other cultures. But, this…

Continue reading

Turkmenistan: welcome to Hell

Why bother with historical sites, charming villages, scrumptious cuisine  and works of art to draw the tourists in when you can offer THE GATES OF HELL. Yes, Turkmenistan’s top tourist attraction is the Darvaza gas crater, a great firy pit, without the inconvenience of a volcano that has the tendency to erupt and kill lots of people once in a while, which has niggling side issue of putting off the average tourist. Mind you, given the visa regime the country…

Continue reading

Conversation with a taxi driver

What follows is an approximation of an exchange I had with a taxi driver outside Tashkent airport in Uzbekistan after I had already said no to a dozen other taxi drivers, but these details are almost irrelevant as other travellers on a tight budget will be familiar with all the salient points regardless of the country. “Taxi”. “No thanks I am getting the bus”. “I give you good price”. “I am getting the bus”. “I know good guest house”. “I…

Continue reading

The most important book in the world?

The title may make a grand claim, so I had best state my case clearly. Looking at the picture below you may have rightly assumed it to be a Quran, but I am not making a case for the Quran in itself, although a reasonable argument could be made. If we are just talking about books as defined by their title, the competition is probably down to a three-way race between the Quran, The Bible and the Torah. Judaism may…

Continue reading

Town on the edge of nowhere

On a wall in the Savitsky Museum of Art in Nukus, NW Uzbekistan, hangs a modest landscape painting from 1976 depicting the Moynaq fish canning factory. The factory itself is a relatively unobtrusive part of the scene and probably served more as a means of keeping the authorities from shipping the artist off to the gulag for the crime of rejecting the absurd values of Soviet Realism, as had happened to others. Art could not function as a means of…

Continue reading

Uzbekistan: what did you learn at school?

In the golden age of education, that some politicians would still like us to return to, we were told that Europeans, preferably British, discovered everywhere, Europeans invented just about anything of any use and made the important scientific breakthroughs. When the rest of the world was mentioned it was likely to be with reference to what a marvellous job we had done bringing our enlightened values to their barbarian darkness. Of course I am being a tad facetious but it’s…

Continue reading

Equestrian hardcore in Uzbekistan

If you thought that equestrian sports were for upper class twits and the nearest the working classes should get to them is putting a tenner on the 3 30 at Chepstow then you ought to get yourself to Central Asia. Here in Uzbekistan, kupkari, the local variant of the traditional, regional game more commonly known as Buzkashi, is a sport for real men, on the kind of tough horses, which, if in England, would probably call your horse a poof,…

Continue reading