30^th July, Oral – Tashkent

The journey to Oral was uneventful but a little bumpy. It could not have been too uncomfortable a ride as I got quite a way through my book. On reflection, a book I wish I had left at home or at least should not have taken to heart as I did. Murder in Samarkand, by former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, was certainly a compulsive read. It made me feel party to secret knowledge, to a better understanding of Uzbekistan in particular, although in hindsight I am certain this was unjustified. I should have guessed the book’s shortcomings at the time as it fell to pieces as I read it and it flavoured my experience with an unnecessary touch of paranoia.

However, Uzbekistan was yet to come and we still had much to see of Kazakhstan. In the far north west of the country near Oral, Kazakhstan is still comparatively European and indeed being west of the Ural River it is geographically in Europe. Here ethnic Russians make up the majority of the population. The first person we met was a German who was farming there with his Russian-Kazakh friend Alex. They were travelling together to Russia in Alex’s Toyota which was pitched forward at a ridiculous angle on account of non-authentic replacement parts.

Kazakhstan was a joy to discover and not a bit like its Hollywood representation. Although Oral was not a pretty town it had its charm. There were lots of communist built concrete blocks and some post-communist tin roofed arrangements. However, once you have spent a little time there you soon realise that it is anything but a depressing city. We quickly found a really tasty café where a friendly Kazakh advised us on our choice of borsch, a Russian meat soup, followed by a plate of potato topped with fried pork, carrot and herbs. The supermarkets were well stocked. Beautiful young people were walking around. Best of all, on the outskirts of town, people, young and old, were gathered together in the evening sun; bathing, drinking and making merry in the river.

This was Kazakhstan at its best, sunny, well watered and the people overwelmingly friendly. On the Aral road comforts were sparse. By night fall of Monday 30th we were back in the middle of nowhere. The road soon became too broken and uneven to attempt – even when it was not blocked by huge piles of earth. Instead, we were taking the dirt tracks which weaved in and out of each other and the telegraph poles that gave us our bearing. New tracks were made as the old became too rough, sometimes five abreast, it was always a lucky dip guessing which track to throw yourself down. Again we carried on driving until very late, zooming through a few homesteads whose welcome looked dubious. Dogs came running after us, untethered and angry. We found a place to stay, balanced between the securities and inhospitability of the homesteads and the mosquito infested lower lying sections.

The morning of August 1st, I awoke to hear Jonno talking to a pair of truckers who had stopped to check whether we were okay. Middle aged and conservative they looked a respectable pair. They wished us well and it was time for us to move on again. Before we knew it, it was as hot as hell, the morning mist long burnt off. We decided to pull in for lunch when we saw an anonymous roadside building, encouraged by two Kazakhs, dwarfed by their huge double articulated truck. They waved at us beckoning us down from the embankment on which the road ran. Very happy to see us, they invited us in for a drink. The smaller of the two, and owner of the more disgusting teeth, showed us to the hand wash and then lead us in. We walked passed a group of women, either huddled around the cooking fire or leaning against the wall outside. They did not return any smiles or curious looks, instead ignoring us or looking back frightened and angry.

Slouching uncouthly and baring his barrel-like chest, a huge mound of muscle and fat lay awaiting our entry. The second man was already spread out on a cheap carpet in a bare white room with a single tiny window for light. It was far from an opulent scene and devoid of decoration except for some posters from the Soviet healthy eating bureau – promoting the fruit and vegetables which were simply unavailable and I was so sorely missing. He was stoned and wanted to entertain us. Jonno seemed to have a greater ability to understand him. I talked to the slighter man with horrible teeth. After a cup or so of tea I felt a little peculiar but, still believing we were at the home of one of these men, we accepted the offer of lunch. Greasy, gristly meat was soon presented. I turned to the serving girl to thank her. She was unmistakably spooked and didn’t appear to relish our visit. Her behaviour could not have been mistaken for the humble or overly shy bearing of a traditional hostess the guidebook had promised.

The man with the horrible teeth gestured after her and continued to sign that he could get her and another girl to come in for us to have fun with. Still preserving the idea that this was a family home I was quite appalled. Having read horror stories that wives could be treated thus by their husbands and husbands’ brothers in neighbouring Uzbekistan it was, in my mind, a possibility. In hindsight, it seems clear it must have been a roadside brothel. Jonno was still quite unaware of any problems and was none too quick to work out that I was scared and wanted to leave immediately. Apparently he was discussing plans for us travelling to Tashkent together with the truck drivers. The little man had disappeared and I was concerned about our car, outside and unattended. The huge man insisted I came around the table to talk with him more closely. I was very reluctant and my unease must have been apparent. However, after I had knelt next to him and he had put a great paw around me and babbled nonsensically about the road, we were free to go.

Pleased to see the car untouched, we rummaged around for something to give in return for the food. Not wanting to hang around for the bill Jonno delivered a jar of Saf’s homemade blackcurrant jam to one of the women. Jonno was now alive to the apparent threat. We motored off after a final hug from the huge man. We sincerely hoped never to see them again.

Driving hard to get away from the truckers, we developed quite a severe noise from the exhaust system. One of the pipes had sheared off at a joint which had previously been leaking. In addition to the noise and the smell in the cab, the engine backfired when idling. We also lost power and often had to bump start the car.

By the afternoon we had reached Aral. It had been several hours since our brothel encounter so we felt we could relax a bit, stock up on food and get the car fixed. People were surprised to see us and a little shy but very helpful. When we stalled at a petrol pump a group of amused men helped us bump start the car and pointed us in the direction of the central bazaar to get the exhaust repaired.

Rolling up at the dusty central square in our red and white convertible mushroom car that was roaring and backfiring, we quickly caused a stir. We pulled up to one of the old railway cars that lined the edge of the central square. Like several other carriages, it was raised up on blocks off the sand and housed the metal workers and people fixing tyres. There was a market or bazaar at the head of the square. It was communist built, surrounded by people selling fruit, clothes and hardware. The square was mainly deserted and dusty but by the time we had introduced ourselves to the mechanics a fair crowd of spectators had gathered.

The resident welder held sway over the proceedings. He was short, both in stature and temperament, but he was the only man with a welder so had good reason to feel important. He had a squashed up little face and a wild assortment of teeth that he seemed to swill around his mouth like chewing tobacco, ever in danger of being ejected in a stream of spittle. Despite the sun he wore a huge green woolly hat bunched up above his brow and ontop, the badge of his profession, a pair of blackout goggles. His assistant was much more pleasant in looks, meek and unassuming with a charming smile. This understanding middle-aged gent notably had no tools whatsoever and I wondered how he survived and still more how he managed to retain his distinctive composure.

We stripped the exhaust system down completely and Pij, the welder, took a broken piece of pipe to inspect. Where two separate pipes are clamped together, one fits inside the other, the female having an expanded end. In our case this expanded end had fractured off due to rust and stress. In most cases back home it would have meant a replacement part but the repair was no problem for Pij. He nimbly took a piece of rod and began flattening and curling it to the shape of the missing piece. He quickly cut and welded it into place and we had a pretty good fix up – we were ready to go on again.

Back in the driving seat and keen to get some miles covered, we sped off. Just before leaving town someone waved us back with a concerned look on his face. Thinking he wanted us to stay or just chat we carried on enjoying our renewed top speed. It would never have occurred to me but Jonno asserted I had just charged through a police check at 100km per hour, something that usually required a stop and our papers being shown. At Jonno’s insistence we turned around to face the music.

A grossly obese man, ensconced in the shaded high seat of his concrete guard box, shouted down at us. Although apparently furious, he stayed put and a younger officer came up laughing, telling his colleague to calm down. After he had driven the car around for a while he was happy. No need to see the papers even. But who should turn up, just as Jonno was pulling in to let the policeman out – there laughing hysterically, through his brown and broken teeth – but the man from the brothel and his fat accomplice. Jonno had noticed him too and was anxious to go as quickly as possible. Probably quite unfairly, we were further disturbed by how friendly the larger driver was with the policeman, I anxiously started the car and was just pulling off when the huge man started waving in my face and banging the window in. We were gone. Giving him a nervous wave and a polite smile, I span out of the station vowing not to stop driving until Tashkent. I believed, in hindsight quite unfairly, that they meant to rob us.

We were checking our mirrors frequently for the first hour or so, keen to get as great a lead on them as possible. I drove for as long as I could but it had already been an exhausting day. Jonno took over at midnight and amazingly managed to keep driving until around seven o’clock the next day. He was rewarded for his endurance with the sight of a beautiful dawn. Nothing but the steppe, grass blowing lazily, the orange glow from behind the horizon slowly getting brighter and a Kazakh dwarf riding a tiny donkey over a brow, silhouetted against the Martian sun rise.

Not ready for the drive when Jonno had had his fill, we rested in a carpark just close enough to Uzbekistan for a final push. We hoped to be in Tashkent and be relaxing by noon but due to a navigational error we ended up in Shimkent and only got back to the border at midday. It was unlike any border we had seen. The political frontier between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan bisects the suburbs of Tashkent, a huge city and capital of Uzbekistan. It is obvious that vast numbers of people and goods would be likely to move through such a border; to further complicate matters, there are considerable economic inequalities between the two states. We were queuing up among long lines of traffic and hundreds, maybe even thousands, more people were flocking around on foot with stacks of merchandise. It was getting hot and it looked as though we would not be moving for a while.

It took over an hour to pass into the Kazakh control area. We were then processed quickly to begin with but waited for hours to get through the gate into the Uzbek control area. Jonno was talking to some young lads who explained that when they left school they had begun operating at the border crossing. They stayed inside the border control area and ferried things between the two sides. The guards were kept happy with a regular supply of cold water and probably a cut. At either end a horde of people were fighting to get through. The crowd seemed to be composed mainly of fierce looking grandmas wearing the traditional patterned or floral dress, heaving great sacks of goods and attempting to scale or squeeze through the tall, spiked, metal fences. There were many hundreds of people all surging around and bearing the incredible heat. It was a humbling spectacle, perhaps an echo of similar scenes enacted hundreds of years earlier, around the city’s medieval walls.

By this time our car had stopped starting, so we had to push it through a disinfectant moat to enter the Uzbek control area. After another hour we were through into Tashkent. Only a couple of minutes through the gates a man in a huge Mercedes pulled us over. It was a beautiful car, dangerously low with huge wheels that looked as though they barely cleared the arches. The driver was dressed in equally refined casual clothes and appeared to want to help. He rang a friend and passed his phone to Jonno. It was explained that we should follow ‘Bakhtiar’ to his carwash as it was illegal to have a dirty car in Tashkent.

What a start. What kind of a city was this? This was clearly an opportunity not to be missed but having driven most of the night Jonno just wanted to get a wash and a bed, a luxury he grumblingly waited considerably longer for. Tashkent is not an easy city to drive in and we had no maps so getting picked up as we did was a real bonus. We followed Bakhtiar to his carwash where he provided us with drinks and told his staff to clean up our car. A team of men armed with pressure washers laboured under a stand jetting down a carpet. A little presumptuously I drove our car straight up on top of the carpet. I was waved back and fortunately no offence was taken. While we tackled the inside, which was unspeakably full of fine, orange, Kazakh dust, a team began to wash our car. I gathered, in a pile, some food which we were unlikely to use and a dishevelled man came sheepishly over. After checking it was okay to do so, he began to sort through it, pulling out what he wanted for himself. He was very thin, probably homeless and perhaps an addict but had tucked his shirt into his jeans and swept his hair back as neatly as he could. It was his job to keep the garage clean and he seemed to be something of a pet. When he had taken what he wanted he quietly removed the rest.

This was one of the slightly odd things about Uzbekistan that we were to notice. Many of the people, particularly at the garage, were wonderfully helpful and friendly and wanted absolutely nothing for their help. When Bakhtiar’s friend, the translator, arrived he quite quickly began to ask about our religious views. He explained that he was a Muslim and that Islam made society healthy like a doctor dispensing pills to the sick. He was unconditionally kind and his views, although a little quickly disclosed, were harmless enough. Nevertheless I found something about him a little unsettling. He was very intelligent and his grasp of English impressive but these powers were clearly born of superhuman diligence.

He also shared the widely held belief that fanatical Muslims are a great problem in Uzbekistan. He elaborated that Jonno’s beard would be intolerable on a respectable Uzbek as it was the mark of a fanatic. A common belief, to some extent perpetuated by the government, it does seem to have grounding.

Almost everyone in Uzbekistan who had a car drove a Lada, the old Soviet state car. In defence of the Lada, they were spacious, hard wearing and comfortable on the more broken roads. The other common car, actually the only other generally available, appeared to be the Daewoo, manufactured in Uzbekistan in a government partnership. The cars are manufactured at a loss. In simple free market terms, which are very rarely enacted by any state, it would probably be cheaper and provide more choice if the Uzbeks were to import their cars. However, unlike Kazakhstan, which seems to mainly accumulate Germany’s unwanted Audis, Uzbekistan tightly restricts the importation of cars.

There were nonetheless a very limited number of imported cars in Tashkent. Bakhtiar, for example, drove a Mercedes imported from Kazakhstan. I also found it more than a coincidence that Bakhtiar came to own a carwash when it was illegal to have a dirty car in Tashkent. But from whatever level his privileges came you could hardly begrudge it, he was a natural prince. He showed nothing but incredible generosity to us and his staff and they visibly loved and respected him and were grateful for their jobs.

After several drinks Bakhtiar tried to set us up with an apartment but it was not available until the following night. He then drove us around town until well into the night, looking for a cheap hotel. This was impossible as cheap hotels would not take foreigners. We settled on a sixty dollar room. Nearly midnight, having not stopped in almost forty eight hours we ordered some food, had a delightful shower and crawled between crisp white sheets for the first time in what seemed like weeks.
The warm shower and fluffy towels were really extraordinary but the premier service was not so much better than the alternatives we had experienced. Despite having dreamt of a soft bed and a quiet room to comfort me in my weariness – when I got it, it was no great pleasure. Its most welcome effect was of reminding me of a comfortable life that still existed and would still exist when the Rally was over. I slept no better, too tired to drift off lazily. I had to patiently relive all of the sights, smells, noises, mistakes and embarrassments of the past fifty hours which streamed through my mind as disconnected images and broken conversations.

Rising/Falling – Always Hoping -can be bought online at Amazon.co.uk, - ordered by your local bookshop for just £8.74 (the price the team’s car was auctioned for at the end of the rally) Just note the ISBN:9780956196613 - or bought direct from the suppliers @ £10.99 (£8.74 plus £2.25 p&p) Address Cheques to Craig Chamberlain, Glovers Cottage, Lazonby, Penrith, CA10 1AJ