Man Joy Sex Oil is featured on the bottom left.
We had two nights in a hotel in Kashgar, in the west of China. The Blue Sky Seafood Grand Hotel is a three-star place located at the west end of main street. We all were delighted to have hot showers for the first time in ages (nine days for me) and a chance to do laundry in the bathroom sink. Poor John is quite adept at stringing a clothesline around a hotel room or campground, so our two nights were made more interesting by the maze of wet clothes we navigated through to get to the beds.
Not that we really wanted to find the beds. The mattresses were quite thick, but they rapped when you hit them with your knuckles and they were harder that the terrazzo floor we slept on in the port at Turkmenbashi. Seriously, you can’t imagine how solid they were. WE contemplated getting our roll mats out of the truck and sleeping on them on the floor. Instead I folded my fluffy doona (coverlet) in half and slept on it. The vast majority of us were unhappy about the hard beds, but two people said they had a really good sleep.
Mosquitoes were the other challenge. I thought mozzies couldn’t fly as high as fourth or fifth floor, but Chinese mozzies must be much more athletic. In the very early morning, I awoke scratching so slathered on some bug repellent. That night I applied repellent BEFORE I went to bed and Poor John shut the windows, but the mozzies were either already trapped inside or were able to squeeze through the many cracks. I was covered in bites in the morning. At ;east this wasn’t malaria country.
The most entertaining aspect of the hotel rooms was the display rack of non-gratis items available in the bathroom. They were the kind of products that make you realise that the Blue Sky Seafood Grand Hotel really does rent rooms by the hour—it’s called the o’clock rate. Among other things, there were perfumes, sprays, creams, panties, stockings, condoms and, my personal favourite, Man Joy Sex Oil. I’m such a meanie, I didn’t let Poor John buy any.
As I write this, we are on our fourth night of bush camping and last night I had the best sleep I’ve had since we camped in the driveway at Bishkek.
NOTE: If you have access to Facebook, please feel free to share this post with others. I can’t get on Facebook in China, so it’s impossible for me to let people know I am adding to the blog now. Thanks.
Poor John enjoying the hardships of tent life in Kazakhstan.
Poor John and I have spent the last 16 nights in our tent.
We were supposed to have a few nights of hotel/hostel accommodation in both Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Bishkek, Kyrgrzstan, but the driver deemed the options available in these cities to be too expensive, so camping was the answer.
We stayed two nights on the outskirts of Almaty, in the Ile-Alatau National Park. It wasn’t too bad, except that there was quite a bit of litter around, it poured with rain and the cows tramped through in the morning. But we were able to take a rickety old bus into Almaty and see a city that the guide books claim is reminiscent of many large European cities. I don’t think so. It is certainly a leafy place with plenty of European shops (I was even able to buy a replacement electric toothbrush), but it definitely has a Central Asian feel to it.
Bishkek’s accommodation was more of a homestay. Ten people had bunks in a dorm room, and the rest stayed in tents. There were quite a few other campers, too, so garden was filled to overflowing.
Poor John and I opted to put our tent up in the driveway, and crossed our fingers that the car wouldn’t have to go out for the two nights we were there—it didn’t. We actually made the best choice. It rained while we were in Bishkek and the driveway, unlike the garden, was covered. The only disadvantage was the fact that even with sleep mats, concrete is a pretty damn hard surface to sleep on. But our hostess had heaps of thick coverlets, so I borrowed one to put in the base of the tent. I had two of the best sleeps ever there.
NOTE: If you have access to Facebook, please feel free to share this post with others. I can’t get on Facebook in China, so it’s impossible for me to let people know I am adding to the blog now. Thanks.
Plov and salad from a little cafe -- about $3 a plate.
Ever since we hit Turkmenistan, the most common food available in restaurants has been plov, a combo of rice, grated carrots, finely chopped meat, some sort of fat (probably ghee or mutton fat) and sometimes various embellishments. It’s related to pilaf, pilau and the world’s many similar rice/meat dishes.
We’ve had countless versions of plov in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and now Kyrgyzstan. Some have been simple, some elaborate. Added ingredients have been grated turnip, raisins, sultanas, diced apricots, chickpeas and lentils. They’ve all been delicious.
The most deluxe plov and, by far, the most expensive, was served at a homestay in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Everyone was supposed to stay in a hotel/hostel in town, but the place the guide arranged had only 11 beds, so six of us were carted out—almost into the countryside—to the B&B owned by the fellow who runs the agency.
The plov was delicious, but he charged $10 a head for the dinner. The most we had ever paid for plov was about $3, so we agreed he figured we were ‘rich’ foreigners. Judging from his B&B house (also used as his summer home away from the city), he’s way richer than any of us.
Anyway, back to the plov. I finally bought a local cookbook in Kyrgyzstan—all the English-language cookbooks sold in the other Stans were just too touristy—which has a recipe for plov, along with ones for lagman and beshbarmak (both made of meat and noodles, with the latter being Kyrgyzstan’s national dish).
The same author has put out a second Kyrgyzstan cookbook, but I think she has stretched the recipes a bit far. I almost bought it for shock value, but the ingredients were just too daunting. I can’t imagine seeking out or cooking with sheep lung, cow udder, 500 grams of blood or any of the other ‘out-there’ items. That said, we’ve probably eaten some of these unmentionables. Poor John and I always go for the local dishes.
NOTE: If you have access to Facebook, please feel free to share this post with others. I can’t get on Facebook in China, so it’s impossible for me to let people know I am adding to the blog now. Thanks.
Poor John and I are in a village in the south of Kyrgyzstan — our last stop in any type of community before heading to China. We’re told that Facebook is blocked in China, and WordPress may be too. I’ll post again as soon as I can. Thanks for your patience.
Not a knife, but the end of a very impressive 20-inch skewer that Poor John’s lunch was cooked on yesterday.
Poor John takes after his father—extremely partial to knives. He always travels with a Leatherman and/or a Swiss Army knife. And he regularly loses one of them. In Africa, he lost his Swiss Army card. That’s a flat number that’s about the size of a credit card. He managed to replace it in Nigeria, when we were camping behind the Sheraton Hotel in Abuja.
On this trip, he has lost his Swiss Army knife. He hoped it had been bundled up in the tent (that happened to my glasses once in Africa), but it wasn’t. He put his back-up Swiss Army card in a safe place so he’d know where it was if he ever needed it. But his hiding place is too good, and he can’t find it. So I’ve loaned him my Swiss Army knife. He’s complaining about it because he thinks its too bulky, but at least he’s got a knife of some type.
Speaking of knives, I caused a bit of a stir before the African trip in 2009. We had a Facebook page where the driver posted trip information and where we could ask questions. In a private message, I asked if the cooking knives would be decent and sharp. He answered publicly, saying yes. I heard later that most everyone on the trip thought I was a bit weird asking about knives.
News flash: I wrote the above item about two weeks ago and we’ve had a rush of success in the last few days. Two days ago, we got our money wallet out of the truck safe and Poor John found his Swiss Army card in there, tucked behind a bundle of US dollars. Oh joy. Then this morning, he found his Swiss Army knife in the toe of his sleeping bag. He is a very happy camper now, and I have my knife back.
No wonder it was hard to find a hardware store. Not the typical grand entrance that we're used to seeing
The next three tips hit me like a thunderbolt. How could I not have mentioned them before?
1) Don’t wear white—unless it’s a napkin given to you by a waiter or a hospital gown you are forced to wear because of some ailment. I learned the hazards of travelling in white at least 25 years ago when I made the mistake of wearing a black top and white slacks on a train trip with two kids in Burma. Four or five hours later, when we arrived at our destination, my slacks were blacker than my top and both my kids, who had been crawling on the carriage floor for most of the journey. Heck for good measure, Petra, who was two-something at the time, grossed everyone out by eating a June bug/Christmas beetle. So leave the whites at home, or be prepared to look like a complete slob from Day 1.
2) Bring at least one padlock. This is great advice that I totally forgot to follow this time. I always used to take padlocks—attached to my bag. But in these days of uber-security, when inspectors cut locks off on a whim, I no longer even bother to secure my suitcase. Of course, the first night we stayed in a hostel, I realised that a padlock would be a handy way to safely store our belongings in the cupboard in our room. Poor John and I have been searching for a lock since then. Finally, we found a hole-in-the-wall hardware store in Tbilisi and they sold Poor John a sturdy abloy padlock for less than $2.
3) Buy toiletry bottles from a camping or hardware store. I needed two small plastic bottles for shampoo and body wash. The ‘thieves’ in the hair care shops wanted $10 for three tiny bottles. I got tougher, larger-necked and slightly bigger bottles at a camping store for $1.80 each. And when I ran out of body wash the other day, I topped up from the pump soap dispenser in a hotel shower stall. I never bother taking the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner—just too much fiddly stuff to carry.
Also don’t forget to pick a number before 29 February 2012.
Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, was a favourite stop for virtually everyone on the truck. It’s clean, cosmopolitan, friendly, upbeat and picturesque. We ended up there purely by chance. The roads across Turkey had been much better than expected and we had a few spare days in the schedule.
Will, our driver, checked the various options and decided that Armenia, which issued cheap visas at the border, was the go. So we could go from Georgia to Armenia and then back to Georgia for the price of a single $30 visa.
What a great choice. We spent several days in Yerevan, enjoying the delicious food and many sights—especially the dancing fountains in Republic Square.
The show—orchestrated to toe-tapping music and special lighting—starts every night after dark and goes for a couple of hours. When we arrived, the fountains were dancing to the tunes of Flight of the Bumblebee, Trumpet Voluntary, Rhapsody in Blue, the 1812 Overture, the William Tell Overture and two more tunes I swore I wouldn’t forget, but have.
If you have the chance, check YouTube.com for video footage of the fountains. I could’t decide which link to post. So just enter ‘dancing fountains Yerevan’ in the search field and plenty of choices will come up. I know I’ll do that when I get home—just to relive the memory. As an aside, the pictures I’ve posted were taken when Flight of the Bumblebee was playing.
I saw a jogger the other morning—he ran past our campground and up a mountain in the Ile Alatau National Park on the outskirts of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest and most cosmopolitan city.
Australia is overrun with joggers, but until today I hadn’t seen any on this trip except for a few in Germany and Belgium.
I noticed two joggers during our travels in Africa in 2009. We passed one going uphill in Cameroon. He looked as if he was in training for a much longer run. Soon we stopped to take touristic photos—at the Tropic of Capricorn, I think—and he overtook us. And not much later we passed him again and we all waved encouragement.
The other one was in the public gardens in Luanda, the capital of Angola. I should be permanently scarred by that encounter, but I’m not. The night before, we tried to camp at the local Yacht Club—the normal stop for overlanders—but that option was no longer available, and we were redirected to the gardens. From the moment we entered, it was obvious that this once lovely place had become the local rubbish dump. Litter was everywhere and the grounds were certainly not being cared for. We pitched our tents and made do. There were no public toilets so everyone grabbed their shovels and trowels and retreated to bushes and trees.
The next morning—extremely early on purpose—I found a nice grove of overhanging trees and squatted to do my business. Imagine my surprise to get a hearty morning greeting from a passing jogger. I waved meekly—it might even have been a royal wave—and wished the earth would swallow me. But the fellow ran on and suddenly it no longer mattered that I had been caught, literally, with my pants down. He was a stranger. There’s virtually no chance we’ll ever meet again, and it gave him something to talk about at the office.
I wish more of the women on this trip could throw their modesty out the window. Makes life so much easier. Everyday, we are confronted with all sorts of unpleasant toilets. Banks of toilet stalls with no doors, toilets with doors that don’t shut, crap holes in the floor covered by a couple of planks, flies in their thousands swirling around your bum, smells that curl your hair, tall grass and thorns. Sometimes some of my companions find they just CAN’T go.
We’re two months into this trip and I wonder if the ‘queasy’ ones will mellow. About three months into the African trip, I remember asking a fellow traveller how the toilet was. ‘Not too bad’, she replied. After I went for a pee, I asked her how she would have described it three months earlier. She blanched and admitted that she wouldn’t have even gone in.
I bring this up tonight because there are about 35 of us camping at a homestay place in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. There’s one toilet and one shower. They’ve remain surprisingly clean and there have been no overflows. I think we’ll all look back and say the accommodation and facilities were cramped but just fine.
P.S. Lin should get the All-Time Heroic and Bravery Award for Nerves of Steel in the Face of Adversity. She was in a public toilet in Turkmenistan. There were eight or 10 stalls, all with no doors. As she squatted to do her bit, a towering and stern Turkmen woman strode along in front of all the cubicles. She stopped dead in front of Lin, folded her arms and watched the proceedings. Lin stared her down in return.
Ashgabat—all white and light at night.
We rolled into Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, quite late at night and what an entrance the city gives you. It’s all white and light. We all were gobsmacked by the sheer magnitude and magnificence—streets lined with acres of tall buildings, a mammoth mosque, countless fountains and surprisingly little sign of life.
The whole place was rebuilt after the original city vanished, almost without trace, in an earthquake in 1948. But that rebuild has been ‘overwritten’ in a huge way. Turkmenistan has a lot of oil and gas money and HAD a megalomaniac for a president, Saparmurat Niyazov, from independence until he died of a massive heart attack in 2006.
He wasn’t really loved, but now there are statues of him everywhere, mostly called for by him. Plus he ordered that much of the city be razed and rebuilt to feed his ‘cult’ status. His slogan was something along the lines of My, Country, My Nation and Me.
There are row upon row of empty and stark apartment and government buildings, tiled in brilliant white and dazzlingly lit to impress at night. It is awe-inspiring, but at the same time cold, sterile and remote. With few cars and people in sight, we found it hard to decide whether Ashgabat was a white version of the Emerald City, a spread out hospital or a movie set waiting for the actors to arrive. We were also pretty sure it would look rather tacky in the light of day, and we were right.
One of the many monuments to the megalomaniac of Turkmenistan.
Let me explain.
Thanks to our hold-up at the port, we were at least a day late arriving in Ashgabat so our hotel arrangements had to be revised. Our delightful and knowledgeable guide, Gözel, a retired university professor of English, arranged for us to stay in two hotels. It’s unbelievable, but no matter how large or grand a hotel looks in Ashgabat, it never has more than a handful of massive rooms or suites. Our hotel, with at least three buildings, seemed large enough to host a sizeable convention, but had only 10 rooms. The lobby was all marble and cushy furniture, but our room had a true seediness about it.
Some of its features—a mattress that was just a tiny bit softer than the terrazzo floor we had slept on the night before, an overhead bare bulb dangling from an electrical cord, a burnt-out but still functioning power point for the bar refrigerator, cracked and missing tiles in the bathroom, rising damp on two walls, a single doona (comforter) cover as a top sheet on a king-size bed (you can imagine the struggle Poor John and I had—he won), a mini throw for a bedspread, at least six storage units, bedside lamps with no lightbulbs, a torn window blind patched up with bandaids, a television that didn’t work, an air-conditioning unit permanently set on 16°C (61°F), room service plates (not ours) left on the ledge outside the room for the whole time we were there and a sign that warned ‘don’t drink from water valve’.
But the food and restaurant and, especially, the restaurant staff made up for everything.
Mohamed, our waiter, spoke some English and was a real charmer. He told us that his aunt got him the job there—I think she manages food service—and he seems to have become the hotel’s all-rounder. The night we arrived, we asked if the restaurant might be willing to serve us all even though we had not yet had a chance to change money. Yes, yes, he said. He was wearing nice slacks and a striped shirt. He wrote a bill for all of us and said ‘pay tomorrow’.
Yes, our fridge was plugged into that outlet.
He served us again at breakfast (this meal was included each day) and he was wearing the same clothes—turns out he sleeps at the hotel because it’s too far (10 kilometres) to go home each night. Next time we saw him, he was watering the lawn and wearing a t-shirt and rolled-up jeans. Later he was sweeping the grounds—wearing that t-shirt and those jeans. That night he took our dinner orders, still wearing the same get-up. His good humour was unfailing, even if his wardrobe never changed. We certainly couldn’t criticise because we regularly wear the same outfit up to four days in a row (once I did eight days).
Mohamed, on a t-shirt day, with Lin and Norm.
Every time we entered the restaurant, Mohamed would crank up the music for our benefit and we’d ask him to turn it down. He would, but would also point out the electronic board that showed us which tune was playing at the time. He was especially partial to Eminem and Lizginka. The latter is a Russian singer and I liked her too.
On our last morning, Mohamed was back in his smart slacks and striped shirt. He told me that he works seven days a week, but that he is allowed to leave early a few days a week so he can go home to visit his family.
Mohamed has the smarts and personality to do well, and Turkmenistan could benefit from having him in charge.
I can get to the blog in Kyrgyzstan — if only I could get to a WiFi internet connection. All my updates are on my computer, but it can’t be connected. Darn!
We’ll be roaming around this country for another eight days because our entry to China has been delayed until 6 September. I’ll post more news as soon as I can.
As an aside, we are camping at a homestay in Bishkek, the capital. Yesterday Poor John and I put our tent up in the covered driveway and — guess what — today it’s raining. We’re feeling pretty smug. We were also clever enough to borrow two blankets to put under our sleep mats, so the concrete isn’t too hard after all. Oh, and there is only one toilet and one shower for the 30-plus people at the homestay. There are signs to remind us not to put anything in the toilet and to conserve water. So far nothing has clogged and the water heater is doing an admirable job of keeping up. So everyone is doing their bit to cooperate.
Also, thanks everyone for comments and messages. Right now it’s a challenge to reply, so just accept my blanket thanks and best wishes.
Where to next? 