Tashkent is Uzbekistan capital. The objective of my visit and of many other travelers is its embassies. I’m here to get the Kyrgyz visa, the last country I’ll visit before arriving to china.

As there is no cheap place to sleep that I wanted to go to , I end up in a hotel paying 50 Dollars. Auch! Thats whats happens when you don’t do reservations.

After going four times to the Kyrgyz embassy by roads full of yellow leaves, I get my visa. I feel alleviated for not having to go to more embassies and to fill up more forms.

Ther are travellers that are telling me that the border with Kyrgyzstan is closed. In July there were fights in the streets in the Osh region (border with Uzbekistan) and seems the Uzbek side of the border is closed. I ask to the two main travel agencies in the country and they both say that they have had people crossing last week. Who do I follow?

I decide to wait a few days, in Uzbekistan I still have to visit Bukhara and Samarkand. The best is going to be checking the border status when I’m closer to the time to cross.

Legacy of the past. What is as soviet as a Lada? Well, yes, Boris Yeltsin, the red square, the tzars, the vodka, the transversal, a nuclear soviet submarine(of course, saying soviet in the name…it’s easy to find things), the perestroika, Kasparov and its chess…

If you fake Pringles, the first obvious thing you have to do is to make a tubular packaging. They are not bad, but I miss the artificial flavour of the originals.

I love Ladas, in fact I’m feeling to buy one, I feel atraction from it’s simple shapes and the non metal colors little a kids drawing style.

I’ve thought that a cool trip would be to fly to Vladivostok in the east of Russia, buying one and drive all the way back home. If I get to do it I’ll hang a sponge Bob in the mirror as in this one.

Soviet buildings. There are super wide streets with subterranean passes to cross them

This one is not a Lada, it’s not that cool.

The tram with the same colors as the buildings.

Tashkent is big enought to have an underground and it is very peculiar. I haven’t been in Moscow one that was supposed to be very monumental but seeing this one I get an idea. It’s full of lamps, marvel and mosaics.

The to best stops for me are Cosmonaut, with giant circular drawings of Russian astronauts and Khaid Alimjan(I think) with lamps looking like mussrums making it look like a fairy tale stop. Fairy tale metro stop.. Sounds weird.

The metro was designed as a nuclear shelter so it’s not allowed to take pictures. In each stop there are several policeman than don’t allow you to take pictures and that ask you the passport to see if you are illegal.

The second day I get the underground and I ask one of the policemen if I’m in the right side of the platform. Before answering me he says “Passaport”. I find it funny, the situation is so stupid! My logic must be different than his, but if I wouldn’t have the papers right I whouldn’t ask a policeman, moreover, I would not get into the metro with the plague of uniform man.

To make a test I give him a horrible photocopy of the passport and the visa, he tells me that all is fine and that I’m in the worng side of the platform. The man must be arround 50 and I would like to ask him in his all his working life he’s ever met a sungle foreigner in the underground which was “illegal”. I smile to him, not to be nice but beause I find funny imagining his face. I’ve been ask for the passport another two times today.

Every day I see weddings. Well in the Aral sea I saw non, but since I entered Turkmenistan I see at least one a day.

A pleasant park and some horrible drawings. Tashkent is full of parks and trees, nearly all the travellers I meet find the place tasteless and they don’t like it, but I’ve liked it.

Two Italians in a tandem (the one in the back part has eyes problems and is almost blind) that wanted to go to Pakistan and have had to cancel their trip as it’s impossible to get the visa here.

In the hostel I find a mixed crowd. Two French women around their 70s that are travelling Central Asia for a few weeks, one of them talks Esperanto. A british guy and a Canadian girl that met doing the pan-american route, he was on a  scooter and she in a bicycle, they got married and now they are travelling by bicycle arround the area with a four year old girl. The last one, Mike, a funny Canadian and who knows how long he’s been cycling, he crossed from Canada to Europe in a Polish cargo ship.

I see a huge poster about Jose Carreras (Spanish opera singer), this apart from being anecdotic makes me relize that nearly in every capital I’ve been I’ve seen some kind of poster or advertising about a concert or exhibition of a Spanish artist. Dalí, Picasso, Velazquez, flamenco dancing, bands, opera… our cultural legacy goes farther than what I thought.

My days waiting the visa has been full of walks over crunching leaves sesing armies of sweepers trying their best to collect them with sweep and their hands. They’d be stunned by the blowing machine used in Burgos.

After the Aral Sea post I told you that I´d put some happier pictures. Here you have some of Nukus market we came across trying to find the bus station.

“Can I take you a picture?” I love when they ask me for a picture. Why are the foreigners the ones that always have to ask for it? We are as exotic for them as they are for us. How nice she was!

Yellow carrots. They taste very similar to our orange ones, they are used for a stew with rice and mutton fat, it’s called Plov.

Green asian eyes. The mixture of faces is very surprising, from mongols to slavs or germans, mixed with the central asian tribes and the russians.

The dressing has nothing to do with religion, if every day I’d arrive home with farinha even in my belly botton, I’d wear the same way.

Butcher, next to it there were women selling smoked fish.

Pili getting an adress to send back a picture.

The best way to carry bread around.

Nukus is the center of the Karakapakstan region that menas “the land of black hat men”, what a good name. They have their own identity, good sense of humor, a language or own dialect and a bit of independent identity.

After seen my last sunset in Khiva, I get to the capital. I shared a taxi with a girl from Granada who lives in Paris. She was an expert in interantional relationships specialized in Africa so I was able to ask her tons of things and we compared the difference life between the poor countries in Africa an Asia.

The second part of the journey was a night bus in which I as able to sleep nine hours using my incredible capacity to sleep anywhere and also, thanks to the inventor of ear blockers!

Uzbek greetings.
Fernando