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F E A T U R E S Bad Trips
Visit Friendly Uzbekistan!
Big Island Blacktop
D E P A R T M E N T S Romancing the Road
Passages:
Table Talk
Salon Taste
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E A R L I E R Tuesday April 22 A night from hell in Los Angeles
A full list of all Wanderlust articles |
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U Z B E K + L O W + T E C H - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - page 2 which leads to the Health Issue. I can sum up this section with a simple, truthful statement. My far and away Best Friend in Central Asia was a bottle of Cipro. For the non-serious traveler: Cipro, or ciprofloxacin hydrochloride, is an antibiotic so powerful in times of dysentery, high fever and other developing-world bugs, it kills nearly everything organic inside you, to the point that it
almost kills you.
Don't worry. It's not that you can't drink
the water or eat uncooked food in Central Asia. Just being there
makes you sick. The oxygen atoms apparently have bacteria in them.
And Peace Corps workers were quick to inform me that one bout with
microtoxins, unlike in some places, doesn't make you immune for the
rest of your trip.
During an ugly 48-hour period in Bukara, I
would have died (really, as in six feet under, "We are sorry to
inform you ...") had I not had my trusted friend Cipro. At one point
after a head-spinning, freezing shower had lowered my fever to what I estimate to be 105 degrees, I found myself lying on a futon in a lovely bed
and breakfast and talking out loud to my bottle.
"Cipro, buddy," I said, during my 15 minutes of gastrointestinal peace before
the next round of agony, "it's you and me against the world."
It's difficult to explain to any non-junkie how I felt when I
finished the prescription with the realization that I still had two
months to go in Central Asia. These were odds I didn't like.
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Even a healthy traveler still has to deal with the
corruption. I found official dishonesty in Central Asia to be of a
different flavor than say, East African corruption (very civilized),
or Southeast Asian corruption (relaxed -- what do they care? If you
don't pay, you don't go). This place is still influenced by the
cronyism of Soviet bureaucracy. It's all who you know. I wouldn't
have had to pay $40 to the customs thief upon departing Kazakhstan if
I had a contact -- preferably a relative -- within the organization.
The argument was that my visa -- for which I had paid $50 -- wasn't
good enough. I was supposed to have some mythical "stamp" on it as
well. New law.
The extent to which this is true was expressed
to me jokingly by a German businessman in Kyrgystan, one of a slew
of people trying to get rich quick in virgin capitalist markets. He
said, "When I came into the country they asked me my business, and I
said, 'Trading in young girls.' The immigration guy made a note and
said, 'Do you have a permit?'"
The corruption is so entrenched
that Uzbekistan now actually has three exchange rates. The official
rate of 37 cym per dollar (also known as the New Visitor or Sucker
rate), the businessman rate of 51 -- which they'll give you upon
request in hotels that cost $40 or more a night, and the black-market
rate of 65, which is the rate that Uzbeks trade at.
Choose
your currency carefully when preparing to travel to Central Asia.
Denizens are illogically picky about what kind of bills they will
accept. I had delightfully crisp twenties rejected and a
$100 bill that was crumpled in a sock accepted without comment on the scent by a hotel clerk in Tajikistan.
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The fascinating history of the region is such that now three or more governments are simultaneously trying to co-opt the same mythic
national heroes. You see everywhere the legacy of invasion and
retreat, invasion and retreat. That's all Central Asian history is
-- Chinese, Persians and Russians have ruled here. The people look
Turkish and Mongol, some kissed with blue eyes, care of Alexander the
Great genetic graffiti. I will never disparage the sociopolitical
relativity I learned in Central Asia. It really puts in perspective,
for example, a Bob Dole speech.
It struck me as ironic, though,
all this emphasis on tourism in a region that can't pay its workers.
Coal miners in Kazakhstan, for example, are routinely paid in bread
(when they're paid). This kind of thing can lead to, oh, I don't
know, underemployed guys reaching over bus seats and trying to steal
American journalists' mere 100 percent UV protection sunglasses.
Pensioners -- often educated old babushkas who lost a lifetime of
savings in post-Soviet currency conversions -- can be seen begging on
the street. And I don't think the cops get that big a salary either.
My driver and I in Samarkand -- a wonderful historical city full of
Mosques, madrases and minarets, which are actually Persian but you'd
better not say that in Uzbekistan -- arranged a system whereby I
would duck as he lowered the sun visor every time we passed a
checkpoint.
It mostly worked -- he only got shaken down for a
$20 "you're driving with a foreigner" fee once. I was too breathless
from dysentery to argue when he asked me to pay half.
The
meaning of all of this was hammered home for me during an interview
with a government official in Kazakhstan. I asked if, given the fact
that Chevron alone is investing $3 billion in his economy this year,
did he believe that once the country got some cash in its coffers it
might start to build a social infrastructure, followed by responsible
government? This deputy minister-level official didn't think long
before responding, "Well, by then there'll be a new generation of
civil servants who need a Mercedes and a tinted-window Jeep."
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Incidentally, I didn't report the shooting incident to the
authorities in Ourgench, as the authorities WERE the incident.
Perhaps this anecdote will give sufficient explanation: When I tried
to check out of the Hotel Ourgench after what you can imagine was a
relatively REM-less night in a room whose toilet I couldn't use (for
hygiene reasons), the manager said he wasn't going to return my
passport unless I paid double the agreed upon and much-haggled fee
from the previous evening (the concept of the receipt not having
reached Ourgench). Upper-middle-class travelers may be thinking,
"Just refuse and call American Express to explain the problem." But
that would presume functional telephones. And there are no credit
cards or traveler's checks in Central Asia. Standing next to the
manager was a uniformed policeman/militia guy, armed with an AK-47.
He looked fatter than the Intoxicated Marksman of earlier in the
morning, but was no doubt from the same unit. I stood my ground,
implementing a textbook performance of Ignorancing, the
speak-English-so-rapidly-and-with- so-many-gestures-they-get-disgusted-and-give-up
method that had been demonstrated to me by a Red Cross worker upon my arrival in Central Asia.
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Back in Tashkent, I was
interrupted from making notes for this story when my table in a
crowded (and, it turns out, toxic) food court was joined
simultaneously by a young whore, her mother and, from the East, by
the assistant to the general director of the Uzbekistan News Agency.
The girl, engaged in an eternal struggle to pull her dress
down over her thighs, wasn't so much a harlot as a vehicle for the
mother to escape the poverty of independence. What I remember about
the press guy, whose name was Shuhrat Umirov, is that when I asked
him if he thought corruption was a problem in his country's law
enforcement, he said, "I wouldn't know about that. I'm just a
newsman." That pretty much ended my inquiry into the status of
free speech in Uzbekistan. I had been in the heart of the country
during the Russian run-off election, and had been puzzled by the
answers I was getting to what had seemed to me to be a perfectly
reasonable and risk-free question about preference for Russia's
president. No one was sure if it was party line to be pro- or
anti-Yeltsin, or to espouse the "Who cares? We're not run by Moscow
anymore" view.
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It's not like I'm an advocate of boring uniform tourism packages. I
hope Kyrgystan's incredible glacial peaks remain undeveloped, and I
was glad for the chance to stay with an Islamic fundamentalist former
member of the Belarussian Mafia in an Uzbek town called Kokant, a man
who offered me shelter but sequestered my wristwatch. But even
leaving Central Asia wasn't easy. An "open return ticket" on
Uzbekistan Airways to JFK sounds simple enough. UA is an airline, by
the way, which was deceptively great -- to the point of Duck as a
dinner entree -- in the other direction. As the only Central Asian
former Soviet Republic with regular service to the States, it's
evidently a matter of national pride to look good on international
routes. Well, now, of course, the woman at the airline ticket
window in Tashkent said there were no open seats until May 1997,
unless I wanted to pay $440 for a spot on "business class." Now, I
knew this to be untrue. There aren't enough Uzbeks who can afford the
New York flight in six months to fill one wide-body aircraft (the
flight on which I am now dictating is, of course, half empty).
But I had been here long enough by now to know how to deal with this.
I dropped to my knees (giving the bureaucrat what she wants: power
over anything -- nothing too trivial), wept actual tears, claimed my
mother was ill in a voice as serious as Al D'Amato on Judgment Day
and begged for release. The bleached blonde made a call and
sent me to another window (a mild version of a bureaucratic game
visitors call "human football"), where another bleached blonde "did
me a favor." She scribbled something unintelligible in Cyrillic on
my ticket. I thanked her sincerely, leaving the ticket office as
uplifted as if I had solved a puzzle at a high level of a video game.
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Journalists are often accused of being quick to point
out the problems and slow to offer suggestions for remedies. If I had
a minute to offer suggestions to Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, here's
what I'd say: "Izzy," I'd say (he likes to be called "Izzy," I
imagine), "first, dish out anti-bacterial soap to the pilov vendors
-- spare no expense on this one. It is your national dish, and a
filling meal with carrots, seasoned rice, lamb and raisins for 50
cents. However, it is fatal to 50 percent of tourists. This is
because of preparation hygiene. "Second, raise the window eight
inches at every ticket bureau and currency exchange booth. In Soviet
times, these were designed so that any person of average height has
to literally stoop in a submissive position, known among travelers as
'the crouch,' and look up imploringly at the unconcerned paper pusher
on the other side. This is a New World Order, Izzy.
"And third,
dispense Cipro in all hotels. Or better yet, eliminate a step --
mandate that a steady 100 milligrams be released with every liter of
tap water.
"If you take care of all of that, and perhaps do something
about the summer heat (which routinely approaches 120 degrees), I'll
come back. You have some amazing sites in your country. Even if
many of them rightfully belong to Tajikistan." Doug Fine reports from four continents, Alaska and cyberspace for a variety of media. Please don't ask him if he knows a good Cipro dealer -- your doctor or pharmacist is a better source. Visit a Web site of his work. Share your tales of miserable escapades abroad in Table Talk. |
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