Joshua Kucera

 

From April to October, 2007, Josh traveled throughout the former Soviet states of the Caucasus and Central Asia, producing a serial travelogue for EurasiaNet.org, as well as a blog, Istanbul-Beijing.

 

So Long, Farewell...

I've realized that for most of the remaining ten days of this trip I'll either be on a bus, a train or in nature -- in any case, away from the Internet. So I've decided to formally bring the blog to a close, even though I won't actually reach the titular end of the trip for another week or so.

This site will still exist in the form it did before the trip started, as a sort of online portfolio. I have a lot of material still to be published from this trip, and I'll post links to those stories when they appear. When I get home I'll put up all my photos on flickr or a similar site, and I'll likewise post links to that here, as well.

And, as I mentioned before, I'm already trying to put together a Part II of this trip next year and if that happens I may blog it again.

If you still want to keep up with the sporadic entries I'll be posting, I recommend you sign up for the FeedBlitz emails (there's a box where you can enter your email address on the right-hand column, toward the top of the page). That way you'll get a message every time I post something, without having to check the site several times a day like I know you'll want to.

So, thanks to everyone for reading all these months. This started out as a travel blog without a real name that only a few friends and family members read, and has grown into ... well, a blog that still has no name and has a handful of readers besides my friends and family. But it's been a lot of fun, and has allowed me to meet a lot of excellent people along the way. So, hopefully that will continue: If you're ever in DC, drop me a line and we'll get a beer. Until then, happy trails... Josh

Beef Steak and Bosom, Tiredly

So, I know that funny English is totally the low-hanging fruit of travel observations in China, but I've already mentioned how I have almost no idea what's going on, right? (Another example: I went to the convenience store next to my hotel and asked, in English, for "water." The guy behind the counter picked up a cardboard box off the shelf, opened it up and handed me a pair of socks. Apparently the word in Chinese for "socks" sounds like "water.") So, it's things like these that help me get around:

I like that this magazine title gets straight to the point:

And my favorite so far. The English is perfect, but ... huh?

Protective Welding Mask, Uyghur Style: Khotan

Seen at the Khotan Sunday Market:

That's So Jane's

When I used to work at Jane's, the military equipment magazine, people regularly confused it with Jane, the women's magazine. Now someone, bizarrely enough, has riffed on that confusion. Jezebel, part of the Gawker/Wonkette/Deadspin network, has a new feature called "That's So Jane's". (Notice I'm using the British punctuation there, in honour of my days writing about armour programmes.) Their explanation:

Back by popular demand, it's "That's so Jane's," where we apply the snarky Valley Girl charm of our beloved dead magazine 'Jane' to questions pondered by the types of people who read 'Jane's', the "defence" publication that basically to the military industrial complex what WWD is to the celebrity sartorial complex.

(They say it's "back by popular demand," but I can't find any previous episodes.) Anyway, that's an ambitious goal they've set for themselves, and I don't know that they entirely succeeded, but there are funny moments. Their first episode is actually about Central Asia, which is how I happened upon it. They interviewed Joshua Foust, one of the guys from Registan, one of the big Central Asia blogs. My favorite bit is this:

Anonymous Lobbyist: Ok, anyway, do you ever get jokes about being part of the Military Industrial Complex, you know, because of your name?
Foust: You mean the Goethe play?
Anonymous Lobbyist: No I mean the "bargain" thing.
Foust: Um.

UPDATE: I found out that there was a previous episode to this series, and it was in fact a guy who has the same job I used to have at Jane's! How close I was...

Non-Traditional Medicine: Kashgar and Khotan

Walking through the Sunday Market in Khotan, China, I came across this crowd of curious onlookers. What were they looking at?

Why, it’s some streetside dentistry!

What better place to get some dental work done than a filthy alley in a bazaar, while a dozen curious men look on?

Dentistry is a big thing in Xinjiang, and in all of China, as far as I know. Except for vendors of tourist crap, dentists’ offices were by far the most common business in Kashgar’s old city.

Also at the Khotan bazaar, this guy was selling some stuff that I think could literally be snake oil.

The lizards on his little tray of goodies were alive… for now.

This guy had told the doctor/huckster that he had some sort of pain around his jaw. So he got a little brushing of the snake oil. I couldn’t see exactly, but I think this cost two yuan (about 30 cents).

Ill Communication

So, China. Some readers have questioned China’s inclusion in this trip, believing it to be a different sort of beast from the rest of the countries I’ve visited. It is, of course, but it’s also not. I’m spending most of my time here in Xinjiang, in the far northwest of China, where about eight million people of the Uyghur ethnic group live. Uyghurs have a lot in common with the people in ex-Soviet Central Asia – they have a closely related language, a lot of shared history, are Muslims, and so on. They have the same food, the same hats. Even the super-distinctive Uzbek Atlas silk turns out to be Uyghur, as well:

Even so, it’s still very much China. Uyghurs eat their laghman with chopsticks, slurp their soup in the Chinese style and, I’ve been charmed to discover, spit as much as Chinese people.

What they don’t do is speak Russian or any other language with which I’m remotely familiar. And anyway, most of the people I deal with here are Chinese rather than Uyghur. I think it’s safe to say that this is the most challenging language environment I’ve ever traveled in. Very few people speak even a tiny amount of English, and of course the Chinese characters are pretty impenetrable for a newcomer. The Lonely Planet claims that signs in the Latin alphabet are “often used” in China, which at least here in Xinjiang is totally untrue.

Words that are common in other languages are completely different in Chinese: hotel, taxi and Internet are binguan, miandi and yintewang. I’m somewhat embarrassed to report that the only Chinese character I can identify at this point is the one for “Internet.”

Transactions that should be very simple become extremely time-consuming and confusing. Ordering food at a restaurant involves a lot of sign language, making animal noises (snorting like a pig means pork, mooing means beef) and usually, in the end, looking at what everyone else is eating and pointing at what looks the best. Fortunately the food has been great, and I have yet to get something bad even in this random fashion.

Ancient History: Bishkek

Before I get into China, there’s one more thing I wanted to write about from Bishkek: the history museum. I've written about how Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan have radically rewritten their history after gaining independence, and have a whole new set of museums to display that. Uzbekistan has done the same, though not to quite the same extent. All those countries (and Georgia and Armenia, too) have tried to remove pretty much every trace of what Soviet symbols were there, with some exceptions: native son Stalin lives on in Gori, Georgia, and this oddly undersized statue of Lenin remains in Ashgabat.

Kyrgyzstan is another story. Kochkor has kept these ornaments on their light posts:

And old government buildings in Bishkek still have the red stars or hammer and sickle insignia from the old days.

But the most surprising part, to me, was the museum. There were three floors. The first was small and had a variety of gifts from other states to Kyrgyzstan. These included both gifts from former Soviet republics to Kyrgyzstan; the anniversary of it becoming part of the Soviet Union seemed to be the most common occasion for gift-giving.

And, as if nothing had changed, these Soviet-era gifts segued into gifts to independent Kyrgyzstan, like a cheesy eagle statuette given by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, or an equally cheesy crystal chess set given by Vladimir Putin.

The second floor was devoted to Lenin and the October Revolution, in a fashion that showed no evidence of any change since 1991. There were all sorts of clippings from Pravda of important events in the revolution or Lenin’s life, rows of photos of Lenin’s comrades, and at least 20 of these massive bronze relief sculptures:

The third floor was mainly ethnographic things about Kyrgyz people. The highlights of this floor, however, were the murals on the ceiling. I spent a long time looking up at these, trying to figure out what on earth was going on. There were some celebrating Soviet soldiers liberating Nazi concentration camp victims…

…some post-WWII victory celebrations…

… some hippies…

… and some anti-US protests.

I also visited the museum celebrating the life of Mikhail Frunze, the Bishkek-born general who conquered Central Asia for the Soviets. His museum is still totally intact, too, except for a couple of photos of the Tulip Revolution, which was odd.

Anyone with any ideas on why Kyrgyzstan would not bother to get rid of this stuff, let me know. Obviously money is a factor: Kyrgyzstan doesn’t have the oil-and-gas money that Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan do. People I asked about this said Kyrgyzstan hasn’t really figured out an identity for itself, and that’s why all this stuff remains. But again, that begs the question of why it doesn’t have an identity.

And one thing I noticed in Kyrgyzstan – no matter how terrible the museum, there are always other people visiting it. In Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan the governments have built these fancy new museums and during my visits to most of them I was the only visitor. Here, the museums are almost invariably Soviet leftovers and incredibly dull, but have a steady stream of Kyrgyz visitors. For me, a foreigner who’s never visited the former Soviet Union, they’re fascinating. But for a local? I can’t fathom what they’re thinking, what possesses them to go to these museums. Again, anyone with any ideas, chime in.

Back out of the USSR

Among the various things that the Chinese have given the world – paper, gunpowder, silk – I believe the sleeper bus deserves its proper place. The ride from Osh to Kashgar was 22 hours, and it was perfectly pleasant, thanks to the fact that the bus had not seats, but bunks:

You've probably heard the stories about how Ernest Hemingway and Donald Rumsfeld had standing desks so that they never sat down. One of the things you'll read about me when I'm famous is how I'm the opposite – I always work lying down. This, to me, is one of the great benefits of working from home – I park myself on the couch with the laptop, cell phone and whatever I need to work with, and am happy for hours. I think our lives in general would be much better spent reclined.

Anyway, I digress. The one unfortunate thing about these bus bunks is that they're at least six inches too short for me, and so I was never able to properly stretch out. But even with that, I slept reasonably well and spent the following day on the bus happily lying and reading or watching the scenery go by. Why do other countries not adopt these? I counted 36 bunks, which seems like about half of the number of seats on a similarly sized bus, so obviously you have to charge double to make a profit. But they would be perfect for Turkey, I think, where buses are cheap but rides are long and overnights common.

So, in our posh bunks, we set off at about 10 pm. The drivers spoke neither English nor Russian, so I couldn't figure out when we were going to cross the border. But it was only about 150 miles, so I thought we'd get there in the middle of the night. But I underestimated how bad the road was – it was dirt and gravel, with lots of ruts and bumps, and over some 11,000-foot passes. So dawn broke – on a landscape that was about as barren as I've ever seen – and we were not yet at the border.

When we did get to the border at about 7 am, the drivers took up a bribe collection. Each person had to pony up 500 som (about $13); I was exempted from this, as was the other tourist on board, Ilya, a Russian guy who was on his way to bike from Kashgar to Tibet. I dont know why they had to bribe the border guards, since as far as I could tell everyone was going to China to buy stuff to sell back home, so at this point they werent smuggling anything. But who knows. Anyway, this all took a long time.

Then when we actually got to the border, the Kyrgyz border guards gave everyone the opportunity to buy a declaration saying that the bearer didnt have AIDS. This was naturally done without the benefit of any sort of medical examination, and cost 100 som (about $2.50). Buying the form was voluntary, it was stressed, but they warned that the Chinese border guards might give us trouble if we didnt have it. This is what Ilya told me – they didnt offer one to me. He bought one because all the people ahead of him bought one, and they were veterans of the route.

On the bunks next to me were a father and son from Andijan, Uzbekistan, whose names I never got but whom Ill call Jackass Sr. (pictured above) and Jackass Jr. After we left the Kyrgyz border post they started on breakfast – some cucumbers and a meat-and-potato dish. They offered me some, and I declined. I know it was rude, but 1. I had brought a lot of food for myself, including plenty for breakfast and 2. the sheen of fat on their meat and potatoes was not all that appealing to me at 8 am. Ilya did have some, but then all he brought on board was a giant bag of grapes, so he was likely desperate. "See," said Jackass Sr., "we from the former Soviet Union always share everything." (I later discovered that during the night they had taken and drank the bottle of water I had brought with me.)

Jackass Jr. wore a leather fannypack – as well as an additional cell phone holster – and a jacket that appeared to be a Chinese ripoff of Members Only. He ate his cucumbers in two bites, and immediately after taking a bite would start on a long monologue. His favorite topic of conversation – nay, his only topic – was how much things cost and how much money people made in various parts of the world. "How much did you pay for that camera in America?" he asked me. I bought it in Turkmenistan, for about $300. "In Kashgar it costs $200." He said this pretty authoritatively, without looking at the camera at all.

His fixation on prices is a trait he clearly got from Jackass Sr., who was also a big talker and who ultimately forced me into a convoluted – and probably patronizing – lecture in pidgin Russian on how money doesn't buy happiness, how being with your family and in your homeland outweigh the money you can make in America and anyway, a lot of emigrants go to the US or Europe and then tell a bunch of BS stories to people back home about how great they're doing, they can't bear to admit that they're lonely and barely getting by and living a miserable life in a little apartment in the Bronx. He considered this heartfelt argument and responded: "My neighbor's son is an engineer and he got a job at a factory in Switzerland that paid $5,000 a month. And then he left that job and got another job that paid $10,000 a month..."

I had two apples along with me, and they were in a plastic bag hanging from the top of my bunk. "You know, you can't take any food into China – if the Chinese border guards see those they'll fine you 500 som for each apple," Jackass Sr. told me. So I offered him one, and he immediately took it. I ate the other.

When we got to the Chinese border station, there was a long backup. It turned out that a truck had overturned and blocked the road, which took several hours to clear up.

But getting out to investigate it allowed me to see this stream, which the truck drivers told me was the real border. So here it is, the border between the former USSR and China:

And again, having the bunk made waiting perfectly pleasant. I opened the window and breathed the fresh mountain air. And then in a couple minutes I closed the window, unable to tolerate the dust from the road and the truck exhaust. Still, I read and napped and the time went quickly.

When we finally got to the Chinese side everything went really smoothly, there was no mention of an AIDS test and no one cared about the remaining food I had with me.

When we got going again I passed the time talking to Paul, an Englishman who had joined us at the border. He was completely filthy, having just come from hitchhiking eight days across Tajikistan – dirt actually visibly came off his body as he moved, like Pigpen. I had actually heard stories about Paul from backpackers I'd met in Kyrgyzstan. He's a notorious drunkard who has been kicked out of hostels in Bishkek and Urumqi for loutish behavior including, in Urumqi, loudly proclaiming how much he hated Chinese people – in front of the hostel's Chinese staff. Pretty much every story he told involved the phrase "so at this point I was already pretty mental" and ended with him getting in a fight. He was a Cambridge graduate.

But it was a new country and amazing scenery and a mere six hours to Kashgar...

Some Photos from Osh's New Bus Station

So on Monday morning I flew back to Osh from Bishkek on a prop plane with some encouraging instructions written on the side: CHOP HERE WITH CRASH AXE. The flight was uneventful and no crash axe was needed. I then set about trying to find a bus to Kashgar.

There is a bus station in the center of town, so I tried that. It’s a pretty chaotic place, used more for marshrutkas than actual buses, and it took me a while to find a place that sold tickets. Not here, I was told, you have to go to the New Bus Station (Novi Avtovogzal). So I found it, on the outskirts of town, and never did any bus station less deserve the name New.

It looked abandoned. But at least there was this sign, which was encouraging:

And indeed, the station was functioning, if barely. There were two buses there, both Chinese. There was a security guard, posted in a tiny little shack with a bed in it, who pointed me toward the ticket office. It somewhat grandly had 12 ticket windows, and one – the very last one – actually had a woman in it selling tickets.

And luckily, there was a bus leaving that night. When I came back there were still only the two buses there.

There was also a public bathroom, and as readers have been clamoring for me to post more photos from bathrooms, I offer yet another:

This of course was a pay bathroom, and the woman who took the money for it also seemed to manage the little kiosk that sold drinks to the very few passengers waiting for the bus. Her husband seemed to have some vague role in operating the bus, as well. I had some time to kill so I wandered around the station. The family was apparently squatting on the second floor of the station. Apologies for the blurry photo, but this was taken through a pretty grimy window.

And there was a whole row of nonfunctioning carbonated water machines, which were quite picturesque. If anyone can translate the Chinese for me, I’d be very grateful: