The challenges of the blog

Not much wifi out here

I would love to be able to post every day or so, but I am once again remembering how hard it is to run a blog from Central Asia.

Last time we came this way, in 2011, we didn’t visit Iran, so it was a surprise last month to discover that the country blocks almost everything from the outside world. No blogs, no social media sites, no news sites, no newspapers (although I found a couple they still don’t know about), no PayPal, no social justice sites and on and on and on.

When I tried to access a no-go page, the computer would display a page of Persian explaining, I suppose, that they ‘were sorry but this page is unavailable’.

So while I could view this blog for almost three weeks, I could never log-in to update it. My cooking blog, on the other hand, has ‘wordpress’ in its url, so it was a complete no-go page. Apparently that pesky word ‘press’ is what makes a food-related blog so suspicious.

We hurried through Turkmenistan so quickly—thanks to new rules at the border—that I didn’t even have a chance to find out if internet was available there. Three years ago I found it on the top floor of a shopping mall in Ashgabat, where I could pay for the privilege of trying, but it never worked.

Uzbekistan was a welcome surprise this time. In 2011, almost everything was blocked there, but this time I could access every site I tried. The main problems were that wifi wasn’t widely available, connections were super slow, and the power went out regularly.

The wifi service at our small hotel in Samarkand hadn’t worked for some time. But it wasn’t working at the upmarket hotel down the road either.  After a couple of tries at the posh place, I convinced the waiter (I bought a beer to justify my attempt at wifi) to re-boot the router. When that didn’t work, I suggested they get someone in to fix it, but the waiter said the problem was outside not inside the hotel. Perhaps both hotels were affected by the same overall problem.

Driving beyond the world of wifi

We arrived in Kyrgyzstan last week and I’m still figuring out what is available and where. We’ve been in a couple of very small towns with no obvious internet, although some say they have it at home.

When we were last in Kyrgyzstan, nothing was blocked, but the only connection of any kind that we found was in an upmarket restaurant in Bishkek, the capital.

That restaurant has become a very expensive steakhouse with no wifi. But internet cafes are scattered around town, and our comfy hostel has reasonably decent wifi when I sit on the roof.

Starting tomorrow, we’ll be working our way around the country, camping most nights, and I probably won’t have a connection again for at least a week.

So in the meantime, thanks for following, for understanding the setbacks I face, and for coming back often to check. And apologies to those of you whose blogs I follow. Blogs are slow to load and often the ‘like’ and ‘comment’ buttons never load. Guess I’ll have a lot of catching up to do when I get home in August.