i'm in fergana now. i was out of touch for two days because i couldn't find an internet connection in qo'qon (kokand, the place i was this morning)
after samarkand, i was pretty much done with everywhere i intended to visit when i first planned this trip. i originally assumed that by the time i was done with samarkand, i would be out of time. but travel here is easy, at least compared to what i was used to in mali. so i left plenty of time for breakdowns, mishaps and disasters that never happened. i ended up in samarkand with about 5 days to spare, so i decided to go to the fergana valley
2 days ago, i woke up early and took a shared taxi to tashkent, then switched to another one to qo'qon. crossing into the valley was spectacular. the fergana valley is like a giant bowl, surrounded on all sides by various mountain ranges that are ultimately spurs of the himalayas. this is the breadbasket of uzbekistan. unlike the rest of the country, it does not have chronic water shortages. unfortunately because of soviet gerrymandering, the natural boundaries of the valley have been divided between kyrgystan, tajikistan and uzbekistan. because of the oddly shaped borders, the direct route from samarkand to qo'qon would have taken me through tajikistan, which i can't do legally. so instead i had to go north to tashkent, then turn south over the kamchik pass into the fergana valley. it took all day (to make it even more complicated. the most direct road between tashkent and samarkand goes through a bit of kazakhstan. so rather than take a 2 hour ride straight north, i had to take a 3 hour drive going north, then east, then north again)
anyway, the view as we crossed the kamchik pass was spectacular. the mountains surrounding the valley are snow-capped. i tried to take some photos from the car but the driver was a maniac and we were going really fast, especially just after the pass when we were speeding straight down the side of the mountain. the spedometer of the car topped out at 200 km/hr (120 mph), the needle was stuck all the way to the right the whole way down and the driver still had his foot on the accelerator.
in qo'qon, i stayed in a family's house. there were not really any hotels in the town other than two that my guidebook strongly advised i not stay in, so i went to the home of this guy who was mentioned in the book and he handed me off to this other family. they put me in one of the kid's rooms and i slept last night under the posters of some uzbek heart-throb.
no one in the house spoke english well, although two of the kids spoke a little. the house was behind a high white fence that looked exactly like everyone else's high fence and there was no number visible from the street. so after i dropped my things in their living room, i asked one of the kids how i could find the place if i went into town. he said "yes" and walked away.
i actually had a bunch of weird exchanges with that kid. before i went to bed, he appeared in my room (startling me) and said "outside dog." and then just stood there by the door looking at me. i didn't know what to say, so i just nodded and so he turned and walked out. he tended to appear, say random, semi-coherent things, and then leave.
this morning i wandered around qo'qon (the house i was staying at was about 3km from the center of town, it was a bit of a hike to get there). qo'qon is one of the newer silk road cities. it was a small village for much of the history of the road but then suddenly became the capital of a powerful khanate in the late 18th and early 19th century; a rival of the other khanates of khiva and bukhara. but it picked a bad time to get important, just as the russians were arriving. it held out longer than the other two, but was eventually defeated by the middle of the 19th century and turned into a russian provence. because it had such a brief period of glory, there wasn't that much to see other than the imposing and beautifully restored palace.
by noon i was done with qo'qon and so i got a ride to fergana. fergana is a russian planned city, designed to be the administrative capital of this region. i was originally going to go to margilan instead, a much more historic town, but i met a pair of travelers last night and they told me that there are not many places to stay in the town. fergana is only 20 km away from margilan, a taxi to margilan should cost less than $1 and has a lot more options, so i decided to go here.
i had heard good things about "olga's" a bed and breakfast with a woman who supposily speaks great english. i tried to call her from qo'qon but there was no answer. so i decided to just show up and see what happened. when i arrived, my driver dropped me at the cross streets where i heard olga's was. after he drove off, i realized that there was really nothing around me but nondescript buildings. i had the street address, but there were no numbers on the building.
one of the nearby buildings was an uzbekistan airways ticket office. i want to fly back to tashkent from here anyway and because they always have english speakers in their offices i decided to go in there. i walked in with my full pack on my back. first i bought my ticket to taskhent (it only costed $10 for a plane ticket!!!! unbelievable. the two car rides it took me to get from tashkent to fergana costed me $15), then asked to use their phone to call olga. a guy answered the phone who did not speak english. i tried to ask about a room but all he said was "olga tashkent" and hung up.
i wandered out of the ticket office. i was still determined to find olga's, even if she was in tashkent. the woman in the ticket office told me that the ticket office's address was number 20 al-fergani street. i was looking for number 11. i walked in the appropriate direction and went to the apartment building that was my best guess for number 11. there was no entrance in the front, so i walked into the back, where i found several different entrances. i was trying to guess which one would be the entrance to flat 10-11, when a woman yelled "hello!" from one of the balconies. i yelled up to her "do you speak english?" she said yes, and so i called her downstairs. she turned out to be a local english teacher and spent about an hour and a half both on the phone and wandering around trying to find olga for me. eventually, she arranged for olga's husband to pick me up. he does not speak english (and, i think is the one who hung up on me earlier) but took me back to his place anyway.
olga's place on the outside appears to be a drab soviet block apartment building. we rode up a decrepit elevator together. i thought: earlier in this trip, i have seen the ruins of the timurid and sogdian empires, this is the ruins of the soviet empire.
inside the apartment,however, it was really nice. he turned on the satellite tv and showed me how to get the b.b.c. he gave me a key to his place and showed me how to lock the door and then left me alone in his house, only 20 minutes after i first met him on the street.
that's pretty much where i am now.
