Baggage wars

“It’s faster than the Yak-40.” A fellow passenger at Bishkek’s Manas Airport pointed out of the departure lounge window towards the Kyrgyzstan Airlines aircraft on the tarmac, the first flight of the day to Osh.  It was a Tupolev TU-134, which since the mid-1960s had been the standard short haul jet airliner in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe.  It looked a little worn around the wingtips and tail, but I assumed it had been seeing its mechanic for regular check-ups.  I hadn’t yet flown in the smaller Yak-40, the other plane on the main domestic route in Kyrgyzstan, but we passed a couple as we walked across the tarmac. The Yaks, with a light coat of snow on the wings and icicles hanging from the wheel housings, looked as if they would be happier sitting in a nice warm hangar than flying anywhere.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

I don’t know where the airport baggage handlers were on that cold December morning, but the passengers had to carry their luggage to the plane, where one of the ground crew hoisted bags into the hold.  There was a lot of jostling for position. Several passengers had been on shopping trips to Moscow, Delhi and Bangkok to restock inventory for their shops or bazaar stalls, packing it in sheets or blankets secured by rope, or in cheap, plastic zipper bags that looked as if they would burst open at any moment.  Nothing was weighed.  Several passengers (myself included) were not aggressive enough and were left standing on the tarmac holding our bags. The crew member closed the hold, looked towards us, shrugged and shook his head, lit up a cigarette and sauntered back towards the terminal.

We walked up the steps to the aircraft carrying our bags.  All the overhead compartments were full.  My bag was small enough to fit in a bin behind the cockpit, but larger bags were stowed in the aisle. We took off 30 minutes late, and were soon over the snow-capped mountains of the Kyrgyz Ala Too.  We crossed two more high ranges before descending into Osh and the Fergana Valley an hour later.  I had not followed what appeared to be the brief safety announcement in Russian, so I rifled through the seat pocket, eventually finding an English-language booklet.  It did not reassure me. “To escape through emergency hatch. Pull handle. Open hatch cover. Throw out rope free end into hatch.” I had no idea where the hatch was, and even if I did I didn’t think I could clamber over the mountain of luggage to reach it.  And then I would have to find the “rope free end.”

The “foreigner’s price” for a one-way flight from Bishkek to Osh was about $80.  Locals paid about $25. In theory, the “foreigner’s price” included perks. You got to wait in a separate terminal with an overpriced souvenir shop, and were escorted to the plane by an official.  It was a legacy of Soviet times, when all foreigners were kept under surveillance and shepherded around in groups by Intourist, the official government travel agency.  Somehow, Intourist survived the fall of the Soviet Union, and was still inconveniencing travelers in Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s. On the return trip to Bishkek three weeks later, the staff at Osh airport solemnly weighed my bags, charged me $14 for overweight, and told me that I could collect them from Intourist in Bishkek.  “That means you’ll get them an hour later than everyone else,” a passenger told me. At Manas Airport, I lingered by the conveyor where other passengers were picking up their bags.  Several of the rubber flaps that divided baggage claim from the loading area were missing. I peered through and saw my bags about to be loaded onto a hand cart to be consigned to the Intourist bureaucracy. “Moy bagaj,” I shouted, and held out a five-dollar bill. A hand came through the flaps and took the bill. The conveyor belt re-started and my bags came through.

Slow bus to Almaty airport

At the Hotel Dostuk in Bishkek, I paid the $60 foreigner’s price for a ticket on the 10:00 p.m. bus to Almaty airport, 150 miles across the border in Kazakhstan. I didn’t realize I was also a travel pioneer—this was the inaugural run for the airport service.  The bus was brand new, and the driver was still apparently learning the controls because we spent several minutes parked outside the hotel while he tested the lights. The company evidently needed help in the marketing department, because I was the only passenger on a 48-seat bus.  In addition to the driver, there was a hostess who served champagne and soft drinks from a cooler.  We set off into the night, the driver trying to protect his vehicle by dodging the potholes and driving slowly over the speed bumps.

I knew we were in trouble when, on the outskirts of Almaty, the bus circled a roundabout twice before the driver tentatively selected an exit. We drove for another 45 minutes through darkened streets.  At intersections, the driver slowed down and had hushed conversations with the hostess.  Soon, the conversations became more animated.  It was clear we were lost.  There weren’t many people on the streets at 2:00 a.m. but eventually the driver found someone who gave him directions. When we reached the airport, more than an hour late, the driver was uncertain about maneuvering into a parking space.  The hostess and I got out to watch the sides of the bus, shouting instructions.  “Chu chu na lieva [a little to the left].  "Dostatochno [enough]!”

Wrestlemania on horseback

What do you get when you put together two teams of Kyrgyz cowboys, a 250-pound headless calf, and a wildly cheering crowd?  It’s the traditional horseback game of Ulak Tartyshy, popular throughout Central Asia.  I’ll describe it as a cross between rugby and a no-holes-barred polo game, although I’m sure this description does not do it justice. 

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What do you get when you put together two teams of Kyrgyz cowboys, a 250-pound headless calf, and a wildly cheering crowd?  It’s the traditional horseback game of Ulak Tartyshy, popular throughout Central Asia.  I’ll describe it as a cross between rugby and a no-holes-barred polo game, although I’m sure this description does not do it justice. 

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on

Team lining up for Ulak Tartyshy

          In October 1996, Stephanie and I were in the crowd for what I guess was the Fergana Valley regional championships. Ulak Tartyshy was one of the highlights of the two-day Osh Harvest Festival, held at the hippodrome outside Kyrgyzstan’s second city.  Like other harvest festivals, it marked the end of the season when herding families packed up their yurts and came down from the summer pastures in the mountains to their villages for the winter. The passing of the season was celebrated with traditional sports—wrestling, falconry, horse races, and horseback games. Even though Soviet bureaucrats preferred structured, mainstream sports in showpiece public arenas, they allowed the traditional games to go on, perhaps reckoning that they were a safer outlet for cultural expression than Islam. The herders dutifully claimed to be competing for the honor of their collective farm, but everyone knew that it was all about individual strength and horsemanship.

            In a game called Oodarysh, wrestlers on horseback tried to throw the opponent from his horse; there was a referee, who periodically separated human and horseflesh for infractions, but the rules were never entirely clear. In Kyz Kuumai, male and female riders chase each other around the track; if the man catches the woman, she has to kiss him; if the woman catches the man, she horse-whips him. There was no scoreboard but, as far as we could tell, there was more horse-whipping than kissing going on.

            In Ulak Tartyshy, two teams struggle for possession of an animal carcass, try to pick it up, and race with it toward the opposition’s line for a touchdown. In the minor-league version, a headless, legless sheep or goat is the ball, but this was the big league, so they used a 250-pound calf. Picking up 250 pounds is tough at the best of times, but when you’re on horseback with other riders jostling, punching, and whipping you, it’s a real challenge.

Possession on the 10-yard line, but still no touchdown

            For most of the game, all we could see was a tight knot of riders; they would reach down to try to pick up the calf and get pushed or kicked out of the way. One team, sporting what looked like Soviet World War II aviator headgear, clearly had the edge (with the help of some sideline coaching), and made two touchdowns. This dangerous game was played with true passion, with the crowd cheering each block, tackle, and fumble. The Kyrgyz are justly famous for their horsemanship, and we were happy we had made the long trip from Bishkek to see the traditional games.

On the Osh bazaar

Soviet-era joke: A man walks into a shop and asks, “Don’t you have any fish?” The shop assistant replies, “You’ve got it wrong.  This is a butcher’s—we don’t have any meat. They don’t have any fish in the fish shop across the street!”

                In the Soviet era, all shops—from the Tsum central department store to the small corner store—were state-owned and operated and numbered, with fixed prices and limited selection. Shoppers complained of long lines and surly customer service.  In some areas, seasonal shortages of basic foodstuffs—bread, meat, dairy products, fruits and vegetables—were common. 

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               An underground retail sector existed alongside the state-run shops.  Prices were higher, but the quality was better and some items were simply not sold in state-run stores; for Levis or Marlboros, you needed to talk to the guy in the leather jacket who hung around behind the Palace of Culture.  In agricultural regions such as Kyrgyzstan’s Fergana Valley, some city dwellers had dachas where they grew apples, apricots, peaches and cherries, and raised vegetables; they canned for the winter months, and sold surplus to neighbors and friends.  The police periodically cracked down on the underground economy, especially when it involved large shipments of alcohol, cigarettes or consumer electronics.  But it was not worth the effort to stop a babushka selling tomatoes or strawberry jam to her neighbors in the apartment block, or even to stop the production and sale of moonshine called samogon (translated literally as “self-run”), the homemade distilled alcoholic concoction, usually made from sugar, beets, potatoes, bread or fruit. 

                In many ways, the state shops were a Potemkin Village—impressive facades, with empty shelves inside.  And so the Soviets quietly allowed business in the informal economy to keep running, especially on the bazaars.  In Osh, the massive Jayma bazaar which sprawls along the western bank of the Ak-Burra river, winding up dozens of side streets and alleys, had been one of the great markets on the Silk Road since medieval times.  Today, it is open seven days a week, and thronged on Friday and Sunday, the traditional market days.

Buyer beware. The consumer electronics aisle at the bazaar in Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan, summer 1996. You'd better read the labels carefully. It's not a Panasonic, it's a Panascanic. And there's no 30-day return on those Daewoo TVs.

It is still primarily an agricultural market, with slaughterhouses and warehouses.  One section is piled high with bales of hay; in another, live chickens are sold, in another, raw cotton and wool; nearby, blacksmiths forge horseshoes, nails, stovepipes, kazans and traditional Uzbek ornamental knives. In the summer, the market bulges with fresh produce--peaches, apricots, oranges, cherries, grapes, melons and vegetables. Even in winter, apples, pears, figs, pomegranates, potatoes, onions, and carrots are abundant, and dried apricots, raisins, pistachios, almonds and walnuts are sold year round. Uzgen rice—the main ingredient of the Uzbek national dish plov, a lamb pilaf with carrots, onions and hot peppers—is sold from open bags.  Lipioshski (flat bread) is baked in tandoori ovens. Butter comes by the slab, sugar in huge yellow crystalline lumps. Shashlyk (marinated mutton or beef kebabs, served with vinegary onions), laghman (a Uighur spicy noodle and vegetable soup), manti (dumplings stuffed with diced lamb and onion), and samsa (pastry filled with spicy meat or vegetables) are sold from stalls.

Getting around Osh

In the mid-1990s, it wasn’t easy communicating or getting around the city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan.  The telephone switching system was antiquated and overloaded. You could usually get a local call through on the second or third attempt, but to call another city meant dialing a complex series of digits; making an international call required a trip to the city telephone exchange where you waited in line to book the call. The major challenge was finding the number. People who needed to make calls on a regular basis kept numbers in well-worn pocket organizers.  Osh, the second largest city in the country, did not have a telephone directory.

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            There was also no city map--or at least no one I asked could remember ever having seen one.  Even if it had existed, it would have likely featured Soviet-era street names which were fast disappearing as the city authorities dug into history and changed them to the politically correct names of Kyrgyz leaders and literary figures.  Ulitsa Pionerskaya (Pioneers’ Street) was renamed for the painter Gapar Aytiev, Ulitsa 25 Oktyabrya (October 25th Street), marking the date of the Bolshevik Revolution, for the writer Kasym Bayalinov.  The main one-way south street, Ulitsa Lenina (Lenin Street) became Kurmanjan Dakta kuchasi, named for the “Queen of the South,” the tribal chief who ruled the region after her husband was murdered in a palace coup in Khokand in 1862. 

            Even for fervent Kyrgyz nationalists, the name changes were confusing, and many people continued to use the old Russian names long after they disappeared from the street signs.  Lenin was a particular source of confusion.  Even though he was usurped by the “Queen of the South” on the main one-way south street, he simply moved one block east to take over the main one-way north street, pushing aside his one-time Bolshevik comrade-in-arms Yakov Sverdlov as Ulitsa Sverdlova officially disappeared into street-sign history.

          The city buses and marshrutkas (private minibuses) plied both the old and new Lenin Streets but I did not know the city well enough to know where they would take me, so I took cabs for most trips.  In Central Asian cities, the taxi business is still the most visible part of the informal economy.  Although there are commercial taxi services, many drivers in private cars pick up passengers on the street.  There’s a brief negotiation over the fare, although experienced passengers know the going rate between most points.   

          Apart from the occasional Mercedes, Audi or BMW driven by a government official or crime boss, there were few vehicles in Osh in the mid-1990s that should have been on the road at all.  The problem wasn’t just the bare tires and noisy mufflers.  It was the streets, which had received little maintenance from a cash-strapped city government since independence.  Cold winters and sizzling hot summers had buckled the road surfaces and created huge potholes.  To avoid them, vehicles weaved and swerved, statistically increasing the chance of accidents.  The Soviet-era Moskvichs, Volgas and Ladas looked like casualties of a fender-bender war with dented doors and shattered windscreens, and a few were flamboyantly out of alignment.  There were few auto repair shops and parts were in short supply.  If you needed a radiator or distributor, you headed for the bazaar to scour the used parts laid out on tarpaulins and old blankets. A shortage of auto parts can spur innovation, and drivers routinely made repairs with scraps of metal and wire or a part salvaged from a different type of car.  Gasoline cost about the same as in the U.S. (making it expensive by local standards) but there was no quality control.  Because there were few gas stations, most drivers filled up at the roadside from roving tanker trucks called benavoz that sometimes dispensed a mechanically injurious blend of diesel and gasoline.

          On days when I had to visit several newspapers or TV stations, I hired a car and driver for about $30 a day. My regular driver Babur, a broad-shouldered, grinning Uzbek with a perfect set of gold teeth, fearlessly gunned his Volga through the rutted side streets, dodging pedestrians and farm animals, shouting (in English) "No problem!" It turned out that he was a police driver who took time off work because I paid more than the police did.  Whenever we got stuck behind other vehicles he put a flashing light on top of the car, and bellowed orders through a small speaker mounted on the hood.  The cars magically parted in front of us.

Kyrgyzstan's mountain barriers

From the so-called Pamir Knot in Tajikistan, the great mountain ranges of Asia extend in all directions—the Himalayas and the Karakoram to the southeast, the Hindu Kush to the southwest, the Kunlun to the east, and the Tian Shan to the northeast.  In Kyrgyzstan, the Central Tian Shan range forms a natural border with China’s Xinjiang Province, rising to Pik Pobedy (Victory), at 24,111 feet the second-highest point in the former Soviet Union. 

The Kyrgyz Ala Too range rises south of Bishkek

South of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz Ala Too range runs east-west to the deep mountain lake of Issyk-Kul; the Kungey Ala Too range north of the lake forms the border with Kazakhstan; the Fergana range straddles the middle of the country; the Pamir Alay range dominates the south. More than 90 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s land area—the size of Austria and Hungary combined, or the U.S. state of Montana—consists of mountains, with 40 per cent over 3,000 feet.     

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           The mountains are both a blessing and a curse.  Their natural beauty offers potential for tourism, but “Switzerland of Asia” campaigns have so far failed to contribute significantly to the economy, mainly because of the remoteness of the country and poor roads and tourist facilities.  It’s great trekking terrain, but the so-called resorts—most of them former summer camps for Soviet industrial workers—are short on both modern facilities and après-ski ambience. There are mineral deposits, many of them unexploited because of the cost and difficulty of mining in remote regions.  Hydro-electric plants have the potential provide all the country’s electricity supply, and some for export.  However, as the glaciers continue to recede, scientists worry about the sustainability of the country’s water resources.  For centuries, the mountains have provided summer pastures for herds of sheep, goats and horses, but most of the land cannot be cultivated. 

On the road from Bishkek to Osh

                Few roads cross the mountains, and they are often blocked by avalanches and mudslides; cash-strapped local authorities struggle to maintain or improve them.  Building new roads to improve commerce and boost the economy in rural areas means moving massive quantities of earth and rock and constructing bridges and tunnels—a major investment that usually requires help from foreign donors.  It is difficult and expensive to transport goods, deliver the mail, or provide medical services; in winter, a trip to the town market or the hospital may be impossible. At higher elevations, the first snows come in October; some settlements are cut off from November to May. 

                The mountains are as much a cultural and political as a physical barrier.  The major concentrations of population are in two large valleys—the Chuy in the north, with the capital Bishkek, and the Fergana in the south, with Osh and Djalalabad, the second and third largest cities.  About half the country’s population of 5.3 million live in the south.   The Ala-Too and Fergana ranges separate the valleys, splitting the country and its major urban centers into two distinct regions.  In Kyrgyz society, where identity and loyalty are still defined by family, clan, and village, the government in Bishkek can seem very distant.  The north is more industrialized and secular, oriented to Kyrgyzstan’s larger and more prosperous Central Asian neighbor, Kazakhstan, and to Russia and the West.  The south is more agricultural, conservative and Islamic, looking to Uzbekistan and further west to Iran. Some northerners fear separatism, Islamic fundamentalism and the influence of Uzbekistan in the south; some southerners believe the government in Bishkek exploits their region, while short-changing it on tax revenue and social services.  Polls show that most people in Kyrgyzstan consider the differences between the north and south to be the major challenge to national unity. 

Central Asia Frequent Flier

CUSTOMER DISSERVICE

    When the Soviet Union broke up, its national airline Aeroflot suffered the same fate.  From Baku to Bishkek, the governments of cash-strapped new republics seized the aircraft sitting on the tarmac, repainted them in the new national colors and hoped they could round up enough spare parts to keep them flying.  National airlines have since modernized their fleets, adding Boeings and Airbuses for long-haul flights, but Soviet-era planes are still the standard on most domestic and regional flights and travelers still struggle with bureaucracy at ticket offices and airports.  

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

    In the early years after independence, foreigners had to pay the “foreigner’s price” for tickets.  It was usually at least 50 per cent higher than the regular fare and often had to be paid in Western hard currency.  The only advantage, as far as I could tell, was that you entered the terminal through a separate “foreigners’ entrance,” waited (usually alone) in an area with an overpriced souvenir shop, had your passport inspected multiple times, and then were escorted to the plane by a uniformed official.  At least you could choose your seat and stow your hand luggage before the other passengers boarded.  Special treatment had nothing to do with being nice to foreigners.  It was a holdover from Soviet times, when foreigners were segregated for undisclosed security reasons.  

    In July 1998, I needed to fly from Osh to Bishkek.  The Kyrgyzstan Airlines ticket office was inconveniently located in a suburb, a 20-minute cab ride from downtown.  The agent told me she could not sell me a ticket.  “Only Gulmira is authorized to sell tickets to foreigners,” she announced, “and she is at the airport today.  You will have to come back tomorrow.”  I asked if I could buy a ticket at the airport.  “That is impossible,” said the agent.  “Tickets are only sold here.”  I went to the airport anyway and found Gulmira who sold me a ticket at the foreigner’s price with, um, a small commission.  It was cheaper than another trip to the ticket office.

    Foreigners’ prices and entrances have largely disappeared, but buying tickets can still be a travel adventure.  Although all international carriers and some national airlines offer online booking, most tickets are still bought from travel agents or airline offices.  In 2010, I needed a ticket from Astana to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.  The only direct flight was on “Air Company SCAT,” a Kazakhstan regional airline with a few international flights and a booking service to match its ill-chosen name.

    Although several travel agents displayed the SCAT sign in their windows, none could sell me a ticket.  It was unclear why: either SCAT did not issue electronic tickets or its computer system wasn’t working.  I ended up at the large central ticket agency on Prospekt Respublika to buy a paper ticket.  Several agents were serving customers and I joined the shortest line.  When my turn came, the agent said she could not help me.  “Only agents 1, 3 and 5 can sell SCAT tickets,” she informed me.  “But you’re number 5!” I protested.  “There’s a chair missing—I’m number 6,” she replied.  It was back to the line, until agent number 1 was available.  

PRE-FLIGHT SHAKEDOWN  

    Customs and security officials at Central Asian airports have gained a reputation for trying to shake down weary travelers by inventing airport taxes, selling transit visas you don't need, and charging for excess baggage both on departure and arrival. Some travelers have had luggage impounded for weeks by customs officials demanding thousands of dollars in import duties or fines.  Other scams involve currency controls.  Because of capital flight, Central Asian countries imposed strict limits on the export of currency.  However, the official inquiry “How much money are you carrying?” can be the prelude to a search and an on-the-spot and undocumented fine.  

    Fortunately, most attempted shakedowns are minor, and often played like a game.  Arriving at Almaty for a flight to Europe, I was stopped by two policemen who inspected my passport.  One noticed that my OVIR registration stamp had expired two days earlier.  “That’s a $100 fine,” he declared with triumph.  I figured that fines in the Kazakhstan Civil Code were denominated in tenge, not dollars, so I asked him to show me the regulation.  As he skimmed through papers, failing to find the one that described my offense, I became impatient.  “Even if you’re right, I don’t have $100,” I said, not entirely truthfully.  The policemen looked crestfallen.  “How much money do you have?” the other asked.  “One thousand tenge [at that time, about $8],” I replied.  “That will do,” the first policeman said.  “Have a nice flight, and if anyone else in the airport asks, please don’t say this happened.”  I handed over the money, shook hands, accepted a shot of vodka and went on my way.  In a country where police do not earn a living wage and routinely stop drivers to extract small fines, it was an additional, and not unexpected, travel expense.  

      The secret to shakedowns is to apply (or invent) obscure regulations.  On another departure from Almaty, customs officials emptied the contents of my two suitcases, pulling out the three large Soviet-era school maps I had bought at a bookstore in Bishkek. “It is forbidden to export rare cultural artifacts, including historical maps,” declared the customs official.  I pointed out that maps like this hung on the walls of schoolrooms all over the Soviet Union.  They were neither rare, nor valuable.  “Show me the regulation on historic maps” I insisted.  I unfolded the map pinpointing the sites of labor unrest in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century.  “What am I going to do with it?  Invade the United States?” I asked rhetorically. That seemed to settle the issue.

THE FOREIGNERS’ LINE

      Soviet-era airports were not built to handle large numbers of arriving passengers, and certainly not passengers with passports.  There’s usually a long line at the one or two foreign citizens’ passport booths.  And the line can sometimes turn ugly.

     Until the late 1990s, Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, was not on the business (and certainly not the tourist) itinerary.  A five year-long civil war meant that the airport was periodically "closed for fighting" (about as routine in Tajikistan as "closed for construction" anywhere else.)  With the return of peace, if not prosperity, the airport is open, if not exactly ready, for business.

    The arrivals hall, a ramshackle building separated by a few city blocks from the main airport terminal, has limited staff and a single baggage carousel.  When three flights (including mine) arrived within a half-hour period, the fragile infrastructure was quickly overwhelmed.  Only one passport booth for foreigners was open, and it took the officer at least five minutes to review and stamp each passport.   And there were many foreigners—most of the passengers on my flight from Almaty were Kazakhstan citizens.  Occasionally, a policeman climbed over the barrier, waded into the crowd and pushed some people around but it seemed to make no difference.  Apparently the only way to get ahead was to slip a few bills to a policeman who would go into the booth and have the officer process the passport (while the person at the booth waited).  

    The foreigners’ “line” became more unruly when a group of Tajiks, tired of waiting in their equally slow-moving nationals’ line, decided to join us (but at the front, not the back of the line).  People clambered over barriers and passed papers back and forth.  Meanwhile, baggage from all three flights was arriving on the single carousel.  All bags had to pass through a scanner; however, it was not connected to a computer, so no one actually inspected what was inside.  Two airport staff collected baggage tags, but did not match them to the bags you were carrying.  The trip had taken four hours—a two-hour flight and a two-hour ordeal in the arrivals hall.

The best fast food in Central Asia

Shashlyk—the best fast food in Central Asia (as long as you’re not vegetarian).  Lumps of lamb or mutton on metal skewers or sharp sticks are marinated and barbecued on charcoal grills until they are crisp on the outside but still juicy inside. 

The secret to the flavor is the marinade--usually lemon juice, diced onions and garlic, cilantro, ground coriander and salt—and the lump of mutton fat on the skewer.  Shashlyk is served with raw onions, sprinkled with paprika or cayenne pepper.  This is not your fancy kabob (although it’s in the same culinary family) with slices of pepper, eggplant or tomato.  It’s just meat, meat and more meat, giving you the protein you need to round up the herd.  The best shashlyk I’ve eaten has been at roadside stands like this one in the Fergana Valley of southern Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.  In Kazakhstan, you can also find beef shashlyk, but the mutton is best.  

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

Camping indoors in Central Asia

I don't deliberately stay in rundown Soviet-era hotels so I can write about them later. Sometimes, there's just no alternative.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

                From the mid-1990s onward, my teaching, training and consulting work in Central Asia has taken me to places where the accommodation choices are, well, pretty limited.  If possible, I rent an apartment, if only for a couple of days.  But often, I have to take my chances at whatever establishment in town displays a gostinitsa (hotel) sign.  

                The municipally owned Hotel Molmol in Djalalabad in southern Kyrgyzstan had probably been a decent enough place in Soviet times, when party bosses came to town to roll out the latest five-year plan, cook up inflated statistics on the cotton harvest, relax in the hot springs at the local spa, and dine in the hotel ballroom. There also used to be tourists—factory workers and their families who came to the spa and walked in the walnut groves. But few officials (and probably no tourists) had been there for almost a decade, and the place was in sorry shape.

                In July 1997, I paid the foreigner's price of $10 for a "luxury room" that consisted of a dormitory-style bed, a chest with broken drawers, and a few cockroaches. There was no running water. The staff-- cheekily described by Lonely Planet as "breathtakingly rude"—told me the electricity would go off at 10:00 p.m. By 8:30, I was sitting in the dark, feeling hungry. The hotel restaurant was closed—for renovations, or so they said. At breakfast the next morning, Buffet No. 37—the sign was a throwback to communist times, when all eating establishments were state-owned and numbered—offered cold piroshki and tea. 

                Most Soviet-era hotels reflect the ostentatious public architecture of the Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras with their high-rise apartment blocks, massive squares, and government buildings with colonnades and cavernous lobbies. The impressive facades often conceal dark and drab interiors, with poor heating and ventilation, dangerous wiring, and leaky pipes.

                The Soviets built their hotels large, and even small cities boasted establishments with several hundred rooms. Of course, the number of rooms bore no relation to the expected number of guests. In an economy based on artificial production quotas, not on demand for products and services, there was no place for market research.

                So there they stand today—large, and largely empty. Hotel occupancy rates may still be a state secret in some former Soviet republics, but my guess is that most government hotels in provincial centers don't fill more than 20 percent of rooms most of the time. And without guests, they don't have the money to modernize.

Hotel Almaty, slightly refurbished since my first stay in 1995

In capital cities, Western-style hotels (with Western prices to match) have been built for business travelers and tourists. But in the provinces, the only hotel is usually the old government one.  This gives them a monopoly on accommodation, and the chance to charge exorbitant prices to desperate travelers. On a trip in 1999, I checked into the Hotel Ordabasy in Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan. There were two room rates--$25 and $100. What's the difference, I asked? Is the $100 room larger and more comfortable? No, said the clerk. The $100 rooms have hot water, at least in the evenings. I went for the budget option. Seventy-five dollars seemed just too much to pay for a shower.  My interpreter and I were the only customers for breakfast in the 200-seater restaurant, with its dark velvet drapes and chandeliers. All that was on offer was cold grichka (buckwheat). I found myself feeling almost nostalgic for Buffet No. 37.

                These hotels have one saving grace—the dezhurnayas, the floor ladies.  The dezhurnaya sits at a table opposite the stairs or elevator (if it’s working) and discreetly monitors the comings and goings of guests.  You hand in your room key to the dezhurnaya, not at the front desk.  Even in Soviet times, the dezhurnayas were not very busy, except when the hotel was full.  Today, they while away the hours reading magazines and watching TV.  But in hotels where room service is not an option, they keep things running, rustling up late-night cups of tea and retrieving linens, blankets and toilet supplies from secret stashes.  

                 On a later trip to Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia, I learned that conditions in other former Soviet satellite states were similar. I asked my friend Susan Roe who had traveled to the provinces to rate the hotels. "Pretty grim," she said. "Rather like camping indoors."

                I've learned three valuable lessons about camping indoors. If you're six feet (as I am) or taller, sleep at an angle because the beds are short. (They must all have been manufactured at the same Soviet factory from standard lengths.) Carry a few tools so you can fix the furniture and, if you're handy, the plumbing, too. And tip the dezhurnaya on the first day of your stay.

BED AND BREAKFAST IN OSH

                My favorite place to stay in Central Asia did not have a gostinitsa sign outside.  It was a house in Osh owned by a Russian couple, Yuri and Nina.  In the Soviet era, Yuri had worked as an engineer.  When independence came—and with it unemployment—the couple saw a business opportunity.  Foreign consultants were frequently coming to Osh for anything from a few days to a few weeks and no one wanted to stay at the gloomy Hotel Intourist.  Why not open a bed-and-breakfast?

                The house was in a mostly Uzbek neighborhood about a 10-minute marshrutka ride from the center.  The street was the usual mix of single-story homes and small shops, with babushkas selling fruit from blankets on the sidewalk; a few hundred yards away was a small bazaar where used auto parts were sold.   Sheep and goats grazed on patches of grass, and chickens ran in and out of the back yards.  People sat out on the street in the evening, and children played.  It was a long way from the grim formality of the Hotel Intourist.

               Word soon got around the expat community and you had to book ahead to make sure you could get a room.  Word also spread about Nina’s skills in the kitchen.  Russian domashnaya kukhniya (home-cooking) at its very best—sumptuous pilomini, golopsi and borsch, pies and cakes, home-made jams and juices with fresh cherries picked from the tree in the yard and apricots and plums from the bazaar.  Yuri rigged up an emergency lighting system, powered by a car battery, so that when the power went out (as it did on several nights) we had light.  There were never more than three or four guests, and we often got together in the living room in the evening to talk and watch TV. Nina did everyone’s laundry.  Once she fixed the hem on my jacket (I didn't ask--she just grabbed it and started sewing.)  

UPSCALE BEEF LANGUAGE

                When Stephanie and I lived in Bishkek in 1996-97, most foreign visitors stayed at the Dostuk near Victory Square.  It was in a convenient central location, the phones and TVs worked (although the choice was limited to Kyrgyz and Russian-language stations and one Turkish satellite channel) and the two restaurants actually served what was on the menu.  The single elevator was standard Soviet issue—just large enough for two people and a couple of bags—but at least it worked.  I had little sympathy for visiting USAID contractors who complained about the short beds and the mutton stew served at breakfast.  This was luxury compared to most hotels in Central Asia.

                The Dostuk’s monopoly on foreign guests was soon challenged.  On the south side of the city on Prospekt Mira, Bishkek’s first international hotel was rising from the concrete rubble of the old city airport.  The 14-storey Ak-Keme Hotel, built by Turkish investors, soon eclipsed the Dostuk as the upscale option in town, offering conference facilities and, it was rumored, a French chef.

                Stephanie and I visited the hotel only once (for a fashion show) but I stayed there twice on later visits to Bishkek for conferences   By 2009, Bishkek also had a Hyatt downtown and an even more expensive boutique hotel, so the Ak-Keme had competition at the top end of the market.  It was comfortable, if not exactly well suited to business travelers.  All the flat surfaces in the room were about two feet from the floor, so there was nowhere to sit and work.  The business center charged $7 an hour for Internet service.   I could get a faster connection down the street at an Internet café for $1 an hour.  

                I’m not sure when the Turkish investors backed out, but the Ak-Keme was now officially a “Joint Kyrgyz-Malaysian Venture.” Because English is widely spoken in Malaysia, you’d expect the new foreign partner to have tidied up the English grammar and spelling on the room service menu.  The Ak-Keme’s varied from the mildly pretentious—“On green meadow” veal and “Romance” soup—to the simply careless—stewen rice and humburger.  And the laughable—domestics pie.  “Domestics” is a translation from the Russian domashniye which means home or home-made.  I guess the menu writer felt that taking the second meaning from the dictionary would be a classier option. Downstairs, the restaurant served “beef language” (in Russian, as in English, the word yazik, translated as “tongue,” can refer to either the body part or the language, but you need to think about what you’re describing).  Instructions for the hotel phone included a wordy, if mathematically precise, warning: “After telephone conversation it is necessary to press the button of interruption.  While the button of interruption is not pressed the telephone station doesn’t fix the end of the conversation.  After 53 seconds it will start to charge price.” 53 seconds.  The Soviets were always better at math than at English. 

                By 2009, Kyrgyzstan was at last seeing a steady stream of foreign tourists, and many stayed at the Ak Keme for a night on their way to and from the standard visit-Issyk Kul- mountain-lake-eat-in-a-traditional-Kyrgyz-yurt-see-traditional-dance-and-drink-kumys package tour.  I helped an Australian couple load their bags into the elevator—a hazardous task because the elevator doors stayed open for approximately 2.3 seconds before attempting to sever human limbs.  They had enjoyed the mountain scenery, but didn’t like the city.  “Bitofer rathole, mite,” said the man.  I told them I loved the city, despite the traffic and inconveniences. “It ain’t Sydney,” he replied, stating the obvious.  

Deconstructing Lenin

Statues of Lenin, while not yet on the endangered species list, are not as common in the former Soviet Union or Communist bloc as they once were. As the Soviet political and economic system fell apart, reformers made sure that its founder took a symbolic fall too.  In central squares from Tallinn to Tbilisi, crowds cheered as statues of Lenin were unceremoniously pulled down and bulldozed.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube           

However, Lenin still stands tall in what was once a distant outpost of the Soviet empire--the city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. In the broad, fertile Fergana Valley, between two great mountain ranges, the Fergana and the Pamir Alay, Lenin looks out on a sprawling, multi-ethnic city still struggling to adjust to the post-Soviet world.

Like Stalin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin was his nom de plume) remains a controversial historical figure.  Indeed, the presence or absence of a Lenin statue tells us something about how ready a country or people is to shake off cultural and ideological links to the Soviet era.  In Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the Caucasus, the break came quickly and decisively, and the Lenin statues fell almost as fast—in 1989 in Krakow, in 1990 in Bucharest, in 1991 in Tbilisi and Yerevan, and so on.  Yet in Russia, Belarus, eastern Ukraine and some Central Asian republics, Lenin statues still stand in many public squares and parks. 

            In 2012, Russian lawmakers proposed relocating Lenin monuments to museums or side streets, or selling them to collectors, ostensibly to reduce vandalism and maintenance costs.  But the debate in the parliament (Duma) revealed an ideological agenda.  One deputy claimed that the presence of Lenin statues in most Russian cities and towns meant the revolutionary leader still exercised a stranglehold on history, and that was unfair to other Russian historical figures. Didn’t Ivan the Terrible or Catherine the Great deserve equal historical billing?  Predictably, the Communist Party did not like the idea.  As one senior party member put it: “Lenin is the founding father of the Russian Federation. Same as George Washington in America.”   

                Kyrgyzstan, like other Central Asian republics, has a schizophrenic relationship with its Russian and Soviet past—a mix of resentment against military conquest and repression, political and economic control, and nostalgia for a time when everyone had housing, education, medical care and a job, even if pay was low, the lines at the shops were long, and there wasn’t much on the shelves once you got inside.  

                In 1984, to mark the 60th anniversary of the creation of the Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), a new Lenin Square was built in the capital, Bishkek, along the main east-west street, Leninsky Prospekt.  Its focal point, in front of the new historical museum, was a statue of Lenin in one of his more dramatic poses, his right arm raised in the direction of the Kyrgyz Ala Too mountains to the south. 

                At independence, Leninsky Prospekt became Chuy Prospekt and Lenin Square Ala Too Square, but Lenin remained, his arm outstretched.  Locals jested that he was trying to direct traffic or hail a taxi on one of the city’s busiest streets. In August 2003, the authorities moved the statue to a more discreet location—a park on the other side of the historical museum.  To mark what the government described, in something of a historical stretch, as “2,200 years of Kyrgyz statehood,” it was replaced by a statue of Erkindik (Liberty)—a winged female figure on top of a globe, holding a tunduk, the circular frame that forms the top of the traditional Kyrgyz nomadic dwelling, the yurt. As the Lenin statue was dismantled, protestors filed a lawsuit and marched with “Hands Off Lenin!” banners.  Communist party leader and parliamentary deputy Absamat Masaliev claimed officials wanted to convert a bomb shelter under the statue into an underground retail complex.  “Who gave the small nation of Kyrgyzstan its statehood?  Lenin!” said another opponent. 

                The removal was supported by a coalition of NGOs.  “Lenin did not offer anything except violence and dictatorship,” its leader, Edil Baisalov, said.  He claimed that there were about 4,000 Lenin statues in towns and villages in Kyrgyzstan. “Isn’t that rather too many for a person who never even visited Kyrgyzstan, and didn’t say a word about our country anywhere in his works?  For Kyrgyzstan to still have so many monuments to Lenin is like Germany preserving statues of Hitler.  If we really want to build a democracy and a new civil society, we must tear such things down.” Other commentators were more cynical. “If the authorities don’t like Lenin any more, why don’t they just remove the statue’s head?” asked one parliamentary deputy. “That way, each new leader could simply screw a model of his head onto Lenin’s body. Just think of the money that could be saved.”  The government ended up spending more money.  In 2011, reportedly because some Kyrgyz believed that a woman holding a tunduk was a bad omen, Erkindik was supplanted by Manas, the national folk hero.

             Although some Kyrgyz nationalists in Osh would support the removal of the Lenin statue, the city has escaped a public spat on the issue, probably because it faces more pressing challenges—a stagnant economy, declining social services, a high crime rate, and periodic bloody conflicts between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, the most recent in 2010 when more than 470 people were killed and 2,800 properties damaged.  However, the statue’s reprieve does not denote nostalgia for Soviet rule; it's simply (and Lenin would understand this) a matter of economics. The city does not have the money to tear down or move the statue, let alone put up something more politically correct in its place. Today, it’s a local landmark, a place where visitors pose for snapshots, kids ride skateboards and lovers scrawl their names. If Lenin stays, it will be for that best capitalist reason—because he's good for business.

                Lenin statues come in many varieties.  There’s Lenin with his head raised, looking to the skies or stars, Lenin the action figure rallying the masses, Lenin deep in thought, Lenin looking resolute.  There’s even a Lenin looking rather uneasy outside a taco joint in Seattle.  Kyrgyzstan’s two most prominent Lenins do look different.  Bishkek Lenin, with his right arm outstretched towards the mountains, is the dynamic leader, pointing towards some mystic, communist, egalitarian future.  Osh Lenin holds out his arms as if to greet people.  He seems kinder, gentler, more human.  Considering Osh’s troubled history, maybe the Lenin statue is a symbol worth keeping. 

Soviet gerrymandering

When the Soviet cartographers sliced and diced Central Asia in the 1920s, someone must have said, “The Kyrgyz.  Aren’t they all nomads?  Let’s give them the mountains.”

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

             Before the Soviet era, there were no national borders between the peoples of the region, and identity was defined by religion, family, clan and place. The Soviets feared that such muddled loyalties could help Islamic, social or political movements gain popular support, as Pasha’s rebellion had shown.  Educated Central Asians and religious leaders still talked privately of a Greater Turkestan or a Central Asian caliphate.  The Soviets attempted to counter pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic tendencies by constructing nationalities, giving each a defined territory with national borders, along with a ready-made history, language, culture and ethnic profile.  Your loyalty was no longer to your tribe, village or faith, but to your nationality as a Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen or Uzbek and to its Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). 

                The Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs were created in 1924, the Tajik SSR in 1929.   It took the Russians longer to sort out the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz, who share similar physical features, traditions and language.  Indeed, in the 19th century, they were all referred to as Kyrgyz.  As ethnographic research began to reveal differences, the mountain tribes became known as Kara-Kyrgyz (black Kyrgyz) to distinguish them from the steppe-dwelling Kazakhs, who were called simply Kyrgyz because “Kazakh” sounded too much like the name of another group, the Cossacks.  Although the Russians seemed confused, the Kazakhs knew perfectly well who they were, and that they were not Kyrgyz.  They were members of a tribe that was part of either the Great, Middle or Little Horde, each of which had its own khan.  In 1926, most of present-day Kyrgyzstan became the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) and a full Kyrgyz SSR in 1936.  In the same year, the Kazakh SSR was formed.  And so, through the miracle of Soviet ethnic engineering, the Kara-Kyrgyz were no longer black but true Kyrgyz, while the people who had been called Kyrgyz for over a century turned out to be Kazakhs after all. 

                While promoting new national loyalties, the Soviets realized that too much nationalism could be dangerous.  In a parallel effort to solidify control, they shifted around ethnic groups to ensure that none was dominant in a specific area.  Thousands of Central Asians were moved to other parts of the Soviet Union.  Russian and Ukrainian farm and factory workers were settled in Central Asia, while Volga Germans, Chechens, Koreans and other ethnicities were deported to the region.   The policy of divide and rule, intended to suppress ethnic unrest and militant Islam, created artificial borders between ethically-mixed SSRs.  The medieval cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, historically major centers of Tajik culture and with large ethnic Tajik populations, ended up in the Uzbek SSR.  Osh was a classic case of ethnic gerrymandering.  As Central Asia scholar Madeleine Reeves points out, if the Soviets had drawn boundaries exclusively along national lines, the nomadic Kyrgyz would “end up with a Kyrgyz republic that had no cities of its own: a worrying prospect for a state preoccupied with thrusting ‘backward’ populations into Soviet modernity.”  Their solution was to make Osh, with its predominantly Uzbek population of traders and arable farmers, the republic’s southern city.

               Independence came suddenly to all Soviet republics. Unlike liberation struggles in Asia or Africa, there was no army emerging from the mountains or jungles to be cheered by flag-waving crowds, no government in exile, no heroes or martyrs to freedom.  Citizens of each SSR suddenly found themselves citizens of an independent country.

                Achieving independence is one thing; creating national identity is another.  At independence, ethnic Kazakhs were a minority (albeit the largest one) in Kazakhstan, making up about 41 per cent of the population.  At the same time, almost one quarter of Tajikistan’s population was ethnically Uzbek.  With the possible exception of Turkmenistan, all republics have a rich, but potentially volatile ethnic mix. The region, noted the New York Times, looked like "a medieval map" where power is defined by ethnicities and clans, not by borders. Former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously referred to Central Asia as “the Eurasian Balkans.”

From southern Kyrgyzstan to suburban Maryland

            On Christmas Eve 1995, my wife, Stephanie, picked me up at Washington’s Dulles airport. I had been traveling for almost two days and was exhausted.  After almost a month in Central Asia, I looked forward to returning to the United States. Instead I experienced, for the first time in my life, reverse culture shock.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

              We drove past brightly lit suburban malls, crowded with shoppers buying last-minute presents and stocking up on holiday food and alcohol. Billboards and neon signs were already advertising the post-holiday sales.

                One of the blessings—but also one of the curses—of international air travel is that in the space of a few hours (or, in my case, about forty hours) you are transported from one world to another. The place you leave and the place where you arrive differ not only in the predictable ways—the skin color and features of the people, the landscape, architecture, language, food, and money. More fundamentally, the everyday concerns of people are usually completely different.

                In the malls, people were making standard American consumer choices. “What should I buy for your mother? She’s so difficult!” “Which video game do the children want?” “How large a turkey? “Will anyone notice if we serve boxed Chardonnay?”

                It was a stark contrast to the world I had just left. In suburban Maryland, the shops were open, and open late. In Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan, where I’d spent most of the past month, almost all the shops were closed, and had been closed for several years; what was left of the retail economy had moved to the bazaar and street corners.

                In suburban Maryland, lights blazed from malls, streetlamps, and Christmas house and lawn displays. In Osh, the lights were off for at least several hours each day. No one was sure why there were power outages in a country with enough hydroelectric capacity to be a net exporter, but the usual culprits were named—corrupt government ministers, incompetent local officials, the mafia, the International Monetary Fund, or some cabal of all of the above.

                In suburban Maryland, the restaurants were crowded; in Osh, the few restaurants that were still open had only the occasional customer and most of the items on the menu were not available.

                In suburban Maryland, people were spending their Christmas bonuses and maxing out their credit cards. In Osh, teachers, civil service workers, and others who had not been paid for months were wondering when (or if) they would ever get a paycheck again.

                In suburban Maryland, people were buying gifts for the holidays. In Osh, some people were selling all they had to buy food; in subzero temperatures, they squatted on the broken concrete sidewalks, their possessions—kitchen utensils, auto parts, school textbooks, old clothes, Soviet memorabilia—spread out on blankets. I don’t know who was buying because most passersby were just as poor as the sellers.

                In suburban Maryland and throughout the United States, people were looking forward to the new year with hope. In Osh and throughout Central Asia, people were simply hoping that 1996 would not be as bad as 1995.

                I had written e-mails about what I had seen to family and friends from Osh University on the only computer I found with a dial-up connection. Each took almost 30 minutes and a lot of electronic whirring to send. I described the city and the struggles its people faced, four years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

                After years of media coverage of famine and conflict, the problems of the developing world can seem relentlessly wearying. Poverty, suffering, and conflict are comfortably encapsulated in five-paragraph or ninety-second narrative chunks, with the requisite quotes or sound bites. You could not understand southern Kyrgyzstan in 1995 from the occasional media coverage or even from my photos and stories. You simply had to be there.

                I was there, and then I left. That was perhaps what disturbed me most. I had the freedom to travel, to move between the worlds of southern Kyrgyzstan and suburban Maryland. Most people in Central Asia were simply stuck, trying to survive. That Christmas Eve made me see my own world, career, and life in a new way.

                 My first experience working in a developing country made a deep impression.  Over the next 20 years, I returned frequently to Central Asia—to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan—for teaching and research.  As I traveled and met people, I knew that what I was seeing, and learning would change, so I kept a journal and sent more e-mail letters home.  There’s big picture stuff—about politics and media—but mostly I wrote about the everyday challenges of living, shopping, travel, working, and trying to keep warm, about speaking bad Russian or figuring out how to pay a utility bill.

              These experiences and my research on media, politics and society were the inspiration for Postcards from Stanland.  Over the next six months, I’ll be sending out weekly essays, some adapted from the book and some that did not make it into the book, on a wide range of topics. We’ll climb high into the Tian Shan Mountains, follow the Silk Road to ancient cities, and cross the vast steppe to the forests of Siberia, rust-belt industrial cities, the Polygon nuclear testing zone, and the oilfields of the Caspian Sea.  The region has a rich ethnic mix—descendants of the great Mongol clans, Russian farmers and factory workers, the victims of Stalin’s deportations.  We’ll meet teachers, students, politicians, entrepreneurs, philosophers, environmentalists, journalists, bloggers, cab-drivers, market sellers, hotel floor ladies, and others, to learn about their history, culture and struggles to survive in the post-Soviet era.  Thanks for joining me on the journey through Stanland.

Long-lost Postcards from Stanland jottings discovered

All right, all right. I’ll confess to taking literary license in that subject line (but I had fun doing so).  No, this “discovery” is not exactly in the same league as unearthing an ancient religious text or an unpublished Shakespeare sonnet.  And to say that the jottings were “lost” implies that I had been looking for them, which I hadn’t.  Perhaps “long-forgotten” would be more appropriate. Nevertheless, I felt a frisson of excitement when, on unloading the contents of a file drawer in my office (a chore I’ve successfully avoided for many years), I found a manila folder that had fallen under the stack. It was labelled “Kyrgyzstan 1995,” so it evidently had something to do with my first trip to Central Asia. I expected to find hotel receipts, or perhaps a copy of my project report. Instead, I found handwritten notes I’d taken during the adventure. 

Some of my impressions were familiar, and are recounted in my book, Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016).  If you haven’t read it, there’s still time to order from Amazon or another online bookseller before the holidays!  Great reading for those long winter nights.  Other notes recorded places and episodes I had forgotten, so I decided to write about them in a new two-part travelogue.

If you read Postcards from Stanland, you will know the December 1995 trip was the event that changed the way that I look at the world and my place in it.  I had been hired by the United States Information Service and UNESCO to establish a training and resource center for journalists in Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. It’s the second largest city in the country and was the scene of inter-ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks before independence in 1990.

When I arrived in Kyrgyzstan, almost exactly four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country was in deep trouble.  Factories and collective farms had closed, inflation was rampant, pensions were almost worthless, and many teachers, doctors and government workers had not been paid for months.  There were power cuts every day.  Most shops were closed, with all commerce moving to the bazaars.  Out on the sidewalks, people spread out household goods on blankets, selling what they could to buy food.  It made a deep impression on me, and over the next 20 years I returned to Central Asia frequently for teaching, training and research.  Here are a few scenes from that first trip.

Arriving in Almaty

In 1995, there were no direct flights from European airports to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, so I flew on Lufthansa from Frankfurt to Kazakhstan’s capital Almaty, 150 miles by road from Bishkek.  As we walked down the steps from the plane, another passenger surveyed the dimly-lit terminal building. “Just like Sofia,” he said. “All these Soviet-era airports were built the same.”  We tramped across the tarmac. Snow was in the air, and I was regretting having packed my wooly hat and gloves in my checked bag. At the entrance we passed a line of uniformed cops, their peaked caps seeming to sit unnaturally high on their heads.  They eyed us suspiciously without speaking. The interior décor of the terminal was, if anything, more depressing than the outside—hard, wooden benches and walls lined with faded plastic panels broken by occasional examples of Soviet realism, an oil painting or bas relief of heroic peasants or factory workers gazing towards some misty socialist nirvana, with a uniformed commissar looking on approvingly. My driver from the US embassy in Bishkek was waiting, holding a “Professor David” sign. His name was German (in Russian, some “h” sounds become a “g,” so we would translate his name as Herman). It was too late to make the drive to Bishkek that night.  We would stay overnight at the Hotel Almaty, at that time the only “business hotel” in the city where foreigners were allowed to stay.

The Hotel Almaty--a business hotel?

At 11:00 p.m., the lobby of the Hotel Almaty—a massive structure, with all the trappings of ostentatious Soviet public architecture—was deserted.  There was no one at the reception desk. German banged on the counter and shouted.  After a few minutes, a clerk dressed in his robe emerged from a back room, yawning. German helped me complete the registration form. In Soviet hotels, the reception desk does not hand out room keys.  These are the jealously-guarded property of the dezhurnaya, the “floor lady” who serves as the queen of her one-floor domain, handing out and receiving keys, fetching blankets and pillows and, if you’re lucky, rustling up tea.  Olga was snoring in front of her TV when German and I emerged from the tiny elevator on the 8th floor. I handed her the ticket from reception and she found the key in her desk drawer.  “It’s the only key,” she warned. “Don’t lock yourself out of the room.”

Because it was the only “business hotel” in town, the Hotel Almaty could charge ridiculously high prices and get away with it—$90 a night for a small room with a hard bed, rickety furniture, noisy plumbing and AC outlets loosely attached to the wall by electrical tape.  (Over the next few years, more hotels opened in the city, and when I next stayed at the Hotel Almaty in 2001, I paid $40 for the same type of room).  I flicked through the 50-plus channels on the TV remote, but only two had signals.  The image and sound on the old Russian movie were breaking up, and the other channel offered color bars, so I gave up on TV watching.  A switch on the wall activated the wired radio system, which offered muzak versions of American country classics, including some Hank Williams favorites.  There were two phones. One was a rotary dial, presumably for local calls. The second, the white “international satellite line” came with a “buyer beware” warning on a card. “After the 35 seconds, irrespective of the fact that whether you have succeeded in getting through or not, the computer starts counting the elapsed time, which you will have to pay for. Which means that after the 35 seconds it will not matter whether you have talked to your opponent or not, you will have to pay as it for conversation.” You were instructed to pay in cash within one hour of the call. I didn’t relish the thought of rousing the clerk or dezhurnaya again that night, so resolved to call Stephanie in the morning.

I woke up early as the sun streamed through the windows.  I walked out onto the balcony and was rewarded with a panorama of the snow-covered Tien Shan Mountains, shimmering in the morning light. Not worth $90, but still a spectacular view.  I called Stephanie, paid at the front desk, and joined German for breakfast. Hank Williams was still on the radio.  Surreal.

The Soviet Union—another passing dynasty

The rickety furniture and electrical system in my room at the Hotel Dostuk in Bishkek was apparently inspired by the vision of the Almaty Hotel’s interior designer.  The bed was too short for my six-foot frame.  There was a closet, but no drawers for clothes.  The light switches hung from the walls at odd angles.  At least the TV worked.  It offered CNN International and BBC World Service, along with entertainment channels in Russian and Turkish, TNT, and MTV.  The Indian music video channel featured high-energy, choreographed Bollywood dance scenes, the men dressed in white suits and the women in brightly-colored attire sweeping their long dark locks in front of the camera.  At 9:00 p.m., Kyrgyz public television was offering what appeared to be a lecture on macro-economics, complete with equations and graphs for short-run marginal cost curves. Riveting television.

I spent Saturday at briefings at the United States Information Service. On Sunday, the day before I flew to Osh to begin my project, the embassy public affairs officer, Bruce McGowan, took me for a day out to the foothills of the Tien Shan to see some archeological sites, with Bakhit, a Kyrgyz historian, as our guide.  Soviet archaeologists began excavations in the 1930s, removing their prize discoveries to museums in Moscow and Leningrad; since independence, Kyrgyzstan has been trying to get its history back, with little success.  The archaeological digs have stopped because the government has no money for excavations or restoration, and most sites are unfenced, with sheep grazing on them.  The most-visited site, 50 miles from Bishkek, is the Burana Tower, the 11th century monument on the site of Balasagun, one of the capitals of the Turkic Qarakhanid dynasty that ruled a large region of Central Asia for almost 200 years from the early 10th century until they were overthrown by another Turkic dynasty, the Seljuks.  Archaeologists excavated the citadel of Balasagun and restored the Burana Tower in the 1970s.  At another site, sculpted stones mark the burial places of those who fought in the dynastic wars; by nomadic tradition, a warrior was buried with his horse.

We ended our trip with tea at the Issyk Ata (Warm Father) resort, where hot springs from the mountains are piped to baths. In the Soviet era, factory workers and their families came to these resorts, called sanatoria, for their annual break, to enjoy the clean air, walk the mountain trails, play sports, and relax their tired joints in the steam baths.  Since independence, the only tourists have been local. Many buildings have fallen into disrepair, with stucco peeling and sagging wooden porches.  The lobby of the main lodge features a brass replica of the Kremlin and a sign boasting that “The Collective of the Resort will struggle to uphold the highest quality standards.” It will be an uphill struggle without new investment and an improved economy. Apart from the staff and a few village boys who were sledding in the snow, we were the only people at Issyk Ata on a Sunday afternoon. Near the lodge, an image of Buddha etched on a large rock had been almost obscured by graffiti of the “Sasha loves Irina” variety.  In the driveway, a small statue of Lenin in one of his standard poses, his right arm outstretched, looked out over the resort, a scene of post-Soviet decay.  Like other dynasties that had ruled this region, the Soviets had come, and they had gone.  In the large scheme of historical time, they were really passing through.  The Qarakhanids ruled more than twice as long.

Mountain barriers

The Kyrgyz Ala Too range rises south of Bishkek

               From the so-called Pamir Knot in Tajikistan, the great mountain ranges of Asia extend in all directions—the Himalayas and the Karakoram to the southeast, the Hindu Kush to the southwest, the Kunlun to the east, and the Tian Shan to the northeast.  In Kyrgyzstan, the Central Tian Shan range forms a natural border with China’s Xinjiang Province, rising to Pik Pobedy (Victory), at 24,111 feet the second-highest point in the former Soviet Union.  South of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz Ala Too range runs east-west to the deep mountain lake of Issyk-Kul; the Kungey Ala Too range north of the lake forms the border with Kazakhhstan; the Fergana range straddles the middle of the country; the Pamir Alay range dominates the south. More than 90 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s land area—the size of Austria and Hungary combined, or the U.S. state of Montana—consists of mountains, with 40 per cent over 3,000 feet.        

                The mountains are both a blessing and a curse.  Their natural beauty offers potential for tourism, but “Switzerland of Asia” campaigns have so far failed to contribute significantly to the economy, mainly because of the remoteness of the country and poor roads and tourist facilities.  It’s great trekking terrain, but the so-called resorts—most of them former summer camps for Soviet industrial workers—are short on both modern facilities and après-ski ambience. There are mineral deposits, many of them unexploited because of the cost and difficulty of mining in remote regions.  Hydro-electric plants have the potential provide all the country’s electricity supply, and some for export.  However, as the glaciers continue to recede, scientists worry about the sustainability of the country’s water resources.  For centuries, the mountains have provided summer pastures for herds of sheep, goats and horses, but most of the land cannot be cultivated. 

On the road from Bishkek to Osh

                Few roads cross the mountains, and they are often blocked by avalanches and mudslides; cash-strapped local authorities struggle to maintain or improve them.  Building new roads to improve commerce and boost the economy in rural areas means moving massive quantities of earth and rock and constructing bridges and tunnels—a major investment that usually requires help from foreign donors.  It is difficult and expensive to transport goods, deliver the mail, or provide medical services; in winter, a trip to the town market or the hospital may be impossible. At higher elevations, the first snows come in October; some settlements are cut off from November to May. 

                The mountains are as much a cultural and political as a physical barrier.  The major concentrations of population are in two large valleys—the Chuy in the north, with the capital Bishkek, and the Fergana in the south, with Osh and Djalalabad, the second and third largest cities.  About half the country’s population of 5.3 million live in the south.   The Ala-Too and Fergana ranges separate the valleys, splitting the country and its major urban centers into two distinct regions.  In Kyrgyz society, where identity and loyalty are still defined by family, clan, and village, the government in Bishkek can seem very distant.  The north is more industrialized and secular, oriented to Kyrgyzstan’s larger and more prosperous Central Asian neighbor, Kazakhhstan, and to Russia and the West.  The south is more agricultural, conservative and Islamic, looking to Uzbekistan and further west to Iran. Some northerners fear separatism, Islamic fundamentalism and the influence of Uzbekistan in the south; some southerners believe the government in Bishkek exploits their region, while short-changing it on tax revenue and social services.  Polls show that most people in Kyrgyzstan consider the differences between the north and south to be the major challenge to national unity. 

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers, or from your local bookstore.  Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs and Articles) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube, http://bit.ly/davidhmould