We woke up once again in Uzbekistan to a giant feast, laid out on the kitchen table for us by Shoney’s mom. Most of the dishes from yesterday were there, with the addition of a kind of buttery fried gluten, like caramelized roux, which was spread on bread or eaten straight.

Shoney’s sister Luiza came out to join us, and we all goofed around, drinking coffee and trying not to be outsmarted by the little firecracker.  She ate very little that girl, but could certainly throw back the Coca-Cola.

Our first mission for the day was to register. You see, dear reader, it is illegal to be in Uzbekistan for more than 72 hours without registering yourself with the government. So off to the registration and passport office we went, throwing our Speed TRs into a cab so as to be prepared to do a little wheeling later in the day.

When we got to the office, we locked our bikes outside and headed in. It was a two story, cheaply build Soviet structure, with sagging floors, now covered with flattened cardboard boxes, and peeling wallpaper. We began waiting in line, and scrutinizing the info-graphics on the wall explaining how one would be rewarded for turning in criminals.

Unfortunately, after waiting for quite some time in what turned out to be the wrong line, we were ushered to a new line and eventually into a room where a very grumpy woman looked positively crestfallen to see us.

“I am very sick today. I need a nap,” she exclaimed when we entered the room and indicated our intention to do the registration.

Shoney’s mother pressed on. “Fine then. I’ll need the full blueprints for your house detailing where they will be sleeping.” We of course did not have these. Shoney’s mother was not even sure she knew where to find them. So We walked out of the place empty handed. Fair enough.

We walked past the giant line of patiently waiting Uzbeks that had formed behind us, and past the gleaming black Mercedes 600 SEL, which was driven by the head of the office, and climbed back into a cab. We would need to think of a Plan B. One option would be to work with a hotel, who might register us for a cheap rate, given we wanted just the registration and that we weren’t staying with them. We talked about that for a while, but soon were distracted by the city of Tashkent flying by outside our window.

Our next stop was to meet up once again with Shoney’s grandfather, Nazarkulov.

We met him in the large central square where the government put most of its flashiest buildings and monuments. It’s place called Mustaqillik Maydoni, or Independence Square. We locked our bikes to a tree, where a nearby Somsa and drinks vendor had agreed to keep an eye on them.

Then we began strolling, and Nazarkulov began explaining to us the history of the square using this sign as a diagram. The square had first contained a statue of the Tsar. You see, Uzbekistan was first a colony of Imperial Russia. Then when the Soviets took control of the Russian empire it became a state of the CCCP, and the statue was replaced with one of Lenin. Then with the fall of the Soviets, the square was redone a few more times to bring it to its present state.

And what a state it was, with a giant monument showing the globe with Uzbekistan as the only country and a huge field planted with Siberian evergreen trees (each of which required it own shading device in order to keep it from withering in the Uzbek dry heat). We continued on into a nicely manicured and shady park, past old Soviet gardening trucks, to the Uzbek WWII memorial.

It was quite a memorial, and startlingly touching. The Soviets were very successful in the Second World War, but their methods for making war required some of the most reckless losses of human life ever recorded on our planet. In WWII 350,000 Uzbek Soviets died fighting against the Axis.

We wandered through the monument, where the names of each fallen Uzbek were carved onto great copper sheets, and collected like the pages of a book. Shoney and his grandfather struggled to locate the names of their own fallen relatives.

We moved from the monument out into the shadow of a giant pillared archway. On the top of the arch was a giant stork, the symbol, here too, of new birth.

We walked on past a giant fountain which had, in its hayday, blasted over a walkway, allowing visitors to walk through a tunnel of arcing water. It now sputtered weakly next to the walkway.

We sat down with Shoney and Nazarkulov in a special section of another nearby park to discuss Soviet times and this man Sharof Rashidov. Sharof Rashidov was an Uzbek leader during the Soviet times, made famous for his successful execution of an elaborate system of bribes and lies that convinced the Soviet government that Uzbekistan was producing more cotton and wheat than it actually was. This was of vital importance to the Uzbek people at the time, for they were not going to meet the quota that year, and would have suffered harsh consequences had they come up short.

Nazarkulov  was quite the fan of Soviet Uzbekistan, spoke perfect Russian, and spoke passionately about how life was better during Soviet times.

Having toured Independence Square now for some time, we were all ready to eat some more. And so Nazarkulov took us to an chicken restaurant, established during the Soviet times.  The chicken was incredible. It was served with a Bloody-Mary-esque sauce, which came in a little shot glass, and for a few cents more, your table could share a still-warm-from-the-oven loaf of Soviet style bread.

Not believing the reality of the pure volume of bills it took to operate in the Uze, we had attempted to pack our wallets with сум, figuring that we couldn’t spend it all in one day. Wrong we were, for just this cheap lunch took a huge chunk out of our pitiful wallet-sized wads.

Bellies full and wallets empty, we exited the restaurant and took a moment to take in the giant and mostly empty Hotel Uzbekistan, across the street, with its exquisitely filigreed front facade.

We then stuck out our arms, and the next car that passed stopped to pick us up. In case he did not agree to the price Shoney felt was fair, there would inevitably be another queued up behind him, ready to talk to us if we flagged the first one on. This cab system was amazing. We threw the cycles into the back of a black Chevy and headed off toward Shoney’s grandfather’s neighborhood, where a bike was waiting for Shoney.

The frame had been recently painted, and everything tightened up. It looked like a good ride, very 1983. And with some heartfelt thanks and goodbyes to Nazarkulov , we hit the road for a little inaugural Uzbek wheeling.

Traffic was light, and the roads were good, the main ones at least. Like everything else he applies himself to, Shoney wheeled hard and fast, heading on past giant Soviet apartment blocks and in toward the city center. Then, suddenly, Shoney’s tire popped, and the wheel ground to a halt.

We had a patch kit and pumps (in our seat posts), but what we needed was some water so we could see where the puncture was and patch it. The best water we could find was this river.

The river ran through a large Soviet sports club, where Shoney used to box. All the workers there were instantly skeptical of us, and just as instantly sympathetic when we explained the story of the flat. Some of the groundskeepers even offered us the use of one of their buckets.

But once we took the inner tube out, we found that no patch would solve this disaster, and thus no water was needed. The tube was an old cracked monster of a thing, and the flat had occurred because the valve nub itself had just torn free of the inner tube.

We would need a new inner tube, for sure. So we locked the bike inside the sports complex, grabbed the problem tire, and headed back to the streets where we caught a cab to the nearest bike shop. We ended up buying not only a new inner tube, but getting a package deal on a ridiculously cheap Russian-made tire as well. The man at the shop changed the tire and tube, and even pumped the thing up to show us all was legit.

Back in the park, we made short work of the repair, and headed back out to continue the wheel.

It was glorious to be wheeling again, sun bright, air fresh. Then a cop stopped us, and began to yell at Scott in Russian (of which he understood none) using very condescending language (Shoney later explained) and asking him what he thought he was doing. Turns out the cop had thought Scott was Russian and had some bones to pick with the Russkis. Shoney interjected in Uzbek, which surprised the cop a bit, explaining that we were American tourists and eventually he told us to wheel on, but reminded us that in Uzbekistan it was illegal to wheel more than one meter from the right side of the road, which if I am interpreting the law correctly, actually makes left turns illegal.

“They just want to have enough laws so that they can catch you breaking one of them at any time day or night,” Shoney explained. Fair enough.

We wheeled on toward the train station, stopping halfway through to grab some water from this M&Ms branded Produkti, which is the Russian answer to the convenience store.  Or maybe the convenience store is the western answer to the Produkti; speculation is invited in the comments.

We wheeled on past giant new housing developments and old crumbling Soviet structures. Though most of the signs were in Russian, one also saw plenty of Uzbek too, which is these days written in Roman characters and looks like this:

We paused outside a the train station to let one of the many street trams go by.

The city really had some impressive public transit, for the capital of a country with a GDP per capita of just under $4,000. Sporting two metro lines and eight tram lines, it was very impressive. Also, as Shoney explained, traffic was a new thing to the city as well, having only arrived in the past couple years. Traffic jams were still a rarity.

At the Uzbek train station, we entered a terrible do-loop of waiting forever in the wrong line, then switching to a new line, then having it be wrong too. Eventually, we found the right line, though, and bought  two tickets for the day after the next’s train to Samarqand.

On the way back to the house, we stopped by a certain hotel Shoney’s mother knew of, and bargained with them to register us. They were skeptical at first, but soon realized the opportunity to make some cash and agreed.

When we got back to the house, Shoney’s mother had made another giant meal for us, featuring a giant lamb and potato dish which, despite being extremely impressive, was presented to us with an apology!

The feasting showed no signs of stopping in Uzbekistan, for as soon as we had pried ourselves back out of the  comfortable beds that Shoney’s family had prepared for our arrival in the dead of the night before, we discovered a new feast had been laid out on the Yakubjanov’s kitchen table.

And so we did the only thing we could, which was dig in, begin drinking cups of coffee, and generally feast. There were fresh crispy chunks of Uzbek bread called Lepyoshka, fresh meat-filled pastries called Somsas, a dark sticky earthy Uzbek halva, fresh black grapes, peaches, cut turkey and ham for little breakfast sandwiches, and even hand rolled balls of hyper salty fermented milk called Kurut, which we would find were a Central Asian staple.

The fruit in this country! I was not prepared for how amazing Uzbek fruit would be. With each bite I was reminded of all the flavors that lesser fruits are trying to maximize. “And it’s all organic too,” Shoney assured us. “That’s just the way Uzbeks have been growing it for thousands of years.” I was already falling in love, as I popped another few grapes into my mouth and reached for another crust of bread to make a turkey sandwich with.

“We’ve got plans, guys,” Shoney explained. “My grandfather is excited to meet you and would like to show you around. Excellent, we thought. We were also introduced to Shoney’s sister, who turned out to be an impossibly thin but quite beautiful little girl, who spoke mostly Russian, and emanated a most piercing intelligence. There was a certain greatness about this little girl, something like one must have felt when speaking with Madam Curie or Barak Obama as a child. We were also introduced that morning to the house cat, a very popular fellow, given a traditional Uzbek name.

And then Shoney’s grandfather, Nazarkulov Yakubjan Palvanovich, arrived. He was a rail thin man, with fierce features and an even fiercer intellect. He spoke deliberately and intelligently, proving a veritable font of knowledge on all topics Uzbek.

We had brought out our giant stack of foreign currencies to illustrate as we explained the story of submitting our customs form, and Shoney’s grandfather was quick to add our first 500 Uzbek сум onto the top of the pile.

The сум is a gorgeous, if bizarre and hyper inflated, currency which he holds up now for us to photograph.

And with that, we headed out with Shoney’s grandfather. We piling into a cab and headed out into Tashkent. The traffic was most interesting and unique, being in large part comprised of old Soviet vehicles. Of those that were not old Soviet Ladas and Volgas, the vast majority were actually Chevrolet’s, a model called the Matiz, a Korean model, actually placed into the Uzbek market during a failed venture by Hundai, rekindled by Chevy.

Our first stop was the Abdulkasim Medressah. It is a complex attached to one of the nation’s most prominent Islamic Universities.

We wandered through the grounds, thoroughly enjoying the unique Uzbek architecture. Inside the Medressah, we had our first taste of Uzbek wood carving as well. The interior courtyard of the place was supported by giant wooden columns, all intricately carved.

Also, placed all around the grounds were constantly running drinking fountains for the people. Shoney claimed you could drink the tap water in Tashkent, though it might give you a little bit of stomach discomfort. We were not quite ready to try it, not having been reared on its essence, but we did find the ever running fountains an impressive choice. It was dry as a bone here, with the difference between the temperature in the shade and in the sun so drastic that you could see most of the people clustered in the shade of trees or overhangs avoiding the midday heat.

Perhaps it was the polarization, or the cooler feeling of the bright sun as seen through the optics of our Maui Jim’s, but for one reason or another, we were just eating up the sun that day. It poured over us, warm and comforting. We had no need to worry about stickiness, sweatiness, or general reeking. We could just move through this fascinating environment, taking in the many shades of blue and white tiles adorning the buildings, our sweat evaporating as soon as it was secreted, to the soft trickle of the public drinking fountains, and the lofty spire of the minaret, all from behind the comfort of our Dawn Patrols.

The call to prayer times prominently displayed on the wall inspired a moment of reflection on our concepts of time.

Soon, Nazarkulov’s bum hip began acting up, and we all noticed his limp increasing. And so it was that Shoney took bishop, so to say, and walked us back to the road.

He put out his hand, and the first passing car stopped, agreeing to take Nazarkulov back home for a dollar or so.

Our next goal was to change money. You see, dear reader, in Uzbekistan the currency has two exchange rates, the official one, and the black market one. The official one is about 1600 сум  to the dollar. The black market rate is much more like 2200 сум  to the greenback. So you see, dear reader, if you attempt to change money legitimately you are donating 37% of your money to the government.

Shoney took us to a market to find a black market money trader. Once in the market, it was not hard. Men with giant black trash bags full of money were wandering around calling out “dollars! dollars!” We stopped one, and Shoney began haggling an exchange rate for us in Uzbek. I could see a police officer in the distance, and attempted to subtly point him out to Shoney. “Oh, don’t worry, bro,” Shoney replied, “he’s in on it… probably gets 10 percent.”

Wild. We exchanged two one hundred dollar bills for a giant stack of сум .

We then understood why our dear Shakhrookh (Shoney is short for Shakhrookh) had always been wearing cargo shorts. We had thought it was just his Uzbek military punk style. But no, no; it’s for the сум .

The largest bill, dear reader, is when exchanged at the black market rate, worth just over 40 cents. This means that in order to pay for anything, one must use quite a few bills. This necessitates carrying around a serious bundle of cash, which instantly popularized the man purse, the fanny pack, and cargo shorts in Uzbekistan.  This monetary state of affairs has moved us to introduce the latest Tee-Shirt into the AsiaWheeling Trading post:  Business as Uzual.

Paying with the сум wad turned out to be one of our favorite parts of this country, injecting each transaction with new gravitas.

Wad in pocket, counted and recounted, we headed back further into the market. Our next goal was cell phones. We were back in the land of Beeline, AsiaWheeling’s preferred cell phone provider. However, it was explained to us upon entry to the shop that SIM cards were actually not legal to  issue to visiting foreigners. The man frowned and apologized, “There is nothing I can do.”

Of course, in reality, he just wanted us to pay him $4.00 instead of $2.00 for each card. And so we did. And christened with new beeline cards, we wandered back into the bright sun and the dry air, falling harder and harder for Tashkent.

We walked past vending machines selling unlabeled, hand-filled plastic drinks, to be poured and drunk from communal glasses and past stands selling ice cream in freshly made waffle cones. Everything was very cheap, and the locals seemed thrilled to have us around, looking up from their work with expressions between a welcoming smile and a shocked stare.

We continued on past a giant open concrete space that had in years past been packed with sellers, but had now,  for reasons that eluded even our dear Shoney, been fenced off and made illegal to enter. We continued up a long wide set of steps into the Chorsu Bazaar, where we continued our stroll, past people selling all kinds of foods: noodles, spices, flour, pickles, oil, olives.. you name it, dear reader.

People in the market were also quite curious about us, and we stopped from time to time to chat a bit, using Shoney as an interpreter. Shoney turned back to us for neither the first nor the last time and said “Uzbeks love foreigners, you know?”

The ceiling of this market was a fantastic golden dome, with a central skylight, which let in just enough light to easily inspect the products for sale, but not so much as to let it get hot inside. On the contrary it was actually quite cool, compared to the sunny street. We walked by ride merchants, and tea merchants, and interesting advertisements for American branded beers.

Then Shoney took us out to lunch in the ready-to-eat food section of the market.

We had a large plate of noodles with horse meat, some long skewers of very cheap and delicious Shashlik, served with vinegary onions, and a bottle of the delightful Russian soda bread known as Kvas.

Finished with eating, we headed off to look for wireless Internet, which can only be found in a couple places in all the city. The fastest of them is a central mall called Kontinent. Unfortunately, even in Kontinent, the connection was so slow that working on anything other than e-mail was nearly impossible. We had barely loaded a page by the time our hour was up and we headed off to do some more feasting.

We headed back out to the street, got a cab, and it drove us across town to a restaurant where we were to meet one of Shoney’s old teachers, a man by the name of Brooksy.

Brooksy turned out to be a fascinating character, and we enjoyed learning more about his and Shoney’s life here in Uzbekistan, over more Shashlik and a bottle of добрыи вечер (good evening) vodka.

We paid for the meal with a giant pile of cash, and headed home.

We ate one last glorious breakfast, cooked by the expert hands of Ms Diane Heditsian and then packed up our dear Speed TRs, now newly adorned with brand spanking new Schwalbe Big Apples, a new Rido space age throwback saddle, and, in the case of Scott’s, new matching grips.

We planned to enter Uzbekistan positively blingin’.  Marco Marco appeared back to check the apartment out. He seemed unfazed that we had spent the previous night turning the living room into a bike turning and repair center, and even introduced us to a friend of his who gave us a ride to the airport.

Scott and I arrived quite early at the terminal as to accommodate Diane’s flight, which was a couple hours before ours. We wiled away most of our time at a café in the Istanbul airport, at which, if clandestine enough, one can access the Wifi for free. The name of the place is “greenspace.” And for all you AsiaWheeling readers out there, take note: the password to the network is “istanbul.”

Just as we were getting ready to leave our seats at the café, we were approached by a fellow with the most glorious mustache, bright white, flowing and gigantic, who was headed to Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan. When we asked him what he might be doing to there, he explained that he was a professional sheep counter, and that he was headed to Tajikistan to count sheep. More power to him, we thought, and with a few more compliments on his magnificent ‘stache, we headed off to find our gate.

And so, not knowing what to expect, we climbed onto Turkish Airways, and settled in for the three-hour flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. We had been in touch with our Uzbek Bureau Chief, Shoney, but had not actually heard back from him as to whether we could stay at his place. So we’d book a room at the Hotel Malika, which was one of the few hotels in Tashkent with a website, and were hoping that we might be able to land in Tashkent at 1:00 am and just figure things out. They would most likely speak at least a little Russian, we had been told, so I was trusting that my rusty Russian skills might get just us by.

We also were crossing our fingers that there would be an ATM at the airport. We had read that Uzbekistan had very few Automatic Teller Machines. But we hoped that in Tashkent, with its growing banking sector, we might just be able to find some.

We were headed into the unknown, once again, and as I struggled to fill out the Uzbek entrance card, I realized we were entering a totally new world of rules. For the first time, we were being asked to declare all our currency. In fact, online we had read horror stories about people not properly doing so and having any currency in excess of what they declared upon entry being confiscated upon exit.  Regardless, we had quite a bit of currency, 2-40 USD worth of currency from each of the countries we’d visited so far.  And I struggled, as we soared somewhere above Iran, to tally all the amounts that we had left over. In the end, there was way too much data to populate the few lines given to us on the entry card, so I put together a little hand written auxiliary table, that for lack of a better name, we might refer to as Table 1, which I hoped would pass snuff.

As I did my best to munch the medium tasty Turkish Airlines food, I thought about my time in Russia. I was headed back to that world now. It was a place of mad bureaucracy, of leather, zippers, and bribes, a lawless world where money is king, the police are your enemy, and the line between normal women and prostitutes blurs. That was Russia, of course, and this was Uzbekistan.

What would be different? What would be the same? Would we make it through with all our belongings? Our sanity? Our innocence? Would the streets be wheelable? The bright sun and smiling people of Indonesia seemed so far away… I was starving, but it was hard to eat, and even harder to finish the beer that I’d ordered with my meal.

And then we landed, and we stood to file off the plane. We followed the crowd down a set of stairs and across the tarmac, where there were three doors, one marked VIP, one marked CIP, and the other with a label long rusted and fallen. Being neither VIP nor CIP, we headed toward the rusting and unlabeled door, along with the rest of our flight. We followed the group through vaguely green, and moderately filthy dry-walled hallways, getting in line at passport control behind a large and rowdy Uzbek soccer team. We slowly filed along, as I gawked at the television ads for siding and energy efficient windows that were playing in Russian on a couple of greasy CRT monitors to entertain the people waiting to be admitted to Uzbekistan.

A fellow cut in front of me. And then another. And then an old woman. This was part of Russian culture that had stuck. I was remembering how fierce I had had to become about cutters in line. I was still too polite to make any fuss, Scott too, so we just waited. Finally we were getting close when the fellow in front of me handed his passport over to the officials who opened it to find a wad of US dollars inside. They held the US dollars out to him and said something sternly, waving them in his face. I am pretty sure the language they were using was Russian, but mine was too rusty to understand any of it. The man in front of me was then escorted by a couple of the many armed guards that stood around the cluster of passport control booths toward a dark hallway. I hoped he was not about to be tortured or beaten up. He looked like a nice guy, cutting aside.

Then it was my turn. I handed my moon passport over, and looked at the man behind what seemed to be slightly green tinted glass. His workspace was very well lit, and I looked up to see a ceiling positively lined with fluorescent tubes, and no less than three security cameras. I thought about the guy on the other end of those cameras and snapped my head back down when I heard the passport control officer say something to me. “Простите, что?” I asked him to repeat. He grumbled, and scrutinized my visa, and then my face, comparing it to the passport photo. Then he stamped the thing in the same way that one might spit out a very sour berry, and threw my документы back at me. I gave him a quick спасибо and headed off into the luggage area, where Scott soon joined me.

“Wild,” he said. And I agreed.

Soon the bikes appeared on the conveyor, looking only slightly worse for the wear and we lugged them over to wait in line at customs. When our turn came, we were informed by the guards that the line we had been waiting in was the line for “sportsmen” (meaning the soccer team). We pointed at the bikes indicating that we were sportsmen, and though it elicited a few chuckles from the staff, we were forced to head over to the end of another line.

We did, and eventually got through. My customs form with the attached compendium of currencies (see Table 1) was scrutinized, stamped, torn off, and handed back to me, and we were in.

On the other side of the gate, a chiseled character with a pencil thin line of beard, wearing a black Babson College tee-shirt called out to us “AsiaWheeling!” It was Shoney! Thank goodness. This airport was significantly rawer than we’d expected and certainly did not have an ATM. Luckily, it looked like we were sleeping at his house after all.

Triumphant arrival music of notes from a Rawap emanated from within our minds:

He introduced himself and we all shook hands. He spoke English with a Boston frat boy accent, and chatted on about life in the States as we headed over to the parking lot. Then began a furious process of bargaining, as we went from cab to cab. Shoney would explode in Uzbek, which sounds somewhat like Turkish, and with many a frown and head shake, move from cabby to cabby playing them off each other to start a bidding war and lower the price of the ride back to his family’s place.

Finally someone hit Shoney’s reserve and we all piled into a cab, which was, of course, as all cabs in the Russosphere, really just a private car. As the cabby dodged drunkards wandering the streets in a stupor, and whipped like a maniac around giant roundabouts, running red lights, all the time chain-smoking and trying to convince Shoney to go in with him to rip us off on the cab fair, I looked out the window. It looked not unlike Russia: blocky, concrete, plenty of statues and giant public fountains. Frankly it felt good. I was beginning to get a certain positive feeling about Uzbekistan.  We had no Uzbek sum (the local currency) yet, so Shoney was kind enough to pay for the ride, bless his heart.

When we arrived at his house, despite the fact that it was 3:00 am, his mother was awake and waiting for us, table set with a feast of fruit and breads. We stayed up for another couple hours, battling sleep, drinking cup after cup of tea (water was not an option) and doing our best to be cordial with Shoney’s family. They were overwhelmingly sweet and generous, and we felt completely undeserving of this sleepless hospitality.

When the sun finally started to peek over the horizon, we had enough of an excuse for us all to head off to bed, stomachs full of impossibly tasty Uzbek fruits and heads just spinning at the speed with which a page can turn here on AsiaWheeling.