Update - More to Come!

Jessica and I left India happy that she had apparently been cured of a bad stomach bug by the hotel doctor, who also cares for the local king of Jaipur (who owns the hotel). We had a late-night/very early morning arrival into Uzbekistan, where we were surprised not to be searched in any way. Our pre-arranged ride did not show, so we accepted a ride from a friendly local, who then got us a special rate at a nice hotel, which we took full advantage of for the 8 hours we were there.

Tashkent was relatively uneventful. The most exciting thing for me was trying to get money to buy drinking water. After visiting two broken atm's, I found a friendly local who put me in a cab to the bank, where I experienced some good Soviet-style bureaucracy. It was over an hour by the time I got back to the hotel with some bottles of water.

After exploring Tashkent a bit on foot and on their cute trolley system, we boarded a train to Samarkand, famous city on the Silk Road. The incredibly uncomfortable seats were outweighed by the friendly locals who sat practically on my lap, one after another, trying to practice their meager English. One of them was going through the usual list of "what's your name? Where are you from? What do you do?" when we came to an interesting bit of information. I told him I was a lawyer. He nodded and then pointed to himself and made the international symbol for machine-gun with his hands, and making the rat-a-tat noise with his mouth, sprayed some pretend bullets around the train car. It was about this time that Jessica noticed the pistol tucked in his sock.

We also met a nice cardiologist on the train, and left our battered copy of The Economist with him to practice his English skills. He was one of the only Uzbeks we ran into who did not have a massive row of gold teeth--a grill, in the parlance of young people. All in all, the people were extremely nice and friendly, in stark contrast to the Uzbek regime currently in power, which boils ethnic minorities alive.

After a short car ride to the border, the adventure really began. We had no trouble with the Uzbek border on the way out, but as we walked across the no-man's land towards the Tajik border, we sensed something was amiss. The rifle-toting man at the gate started making signs with his hands for us to scram. We walked up to him nonetheless and tried to present our passports. I was hoping we could at least talk to a higher-up, when Jessica said "Wait--here comes someone!" I looked up to see a tall, scruffy man in a red hat and monochrome two-piece pajama-suit sauntering up to us. I looked back to the guard for a second, thinking that this guy didn't look very official, when I realized it was our friend Middy, who was greeting us at the border!

I had been expecting to see Middy, as promised, sitting under a tree in a pajama-suit with a good book and a melon (more on melons later). Seeing him walking around greasing the wheels within the Tajik border post was even better. However, even Middy, with his gift of gab and well-cultivated diplomatic skills, could not get us through the border that day, no matter how many games of backgammon he lost to the undercover KGB officers watching the border post.

Apparently, the President was in town for a local festival, so everything was shut down in the immediate vicinity. That meant that no one, especially a couple of shady-looking American tourists, was getting through this border post. In the end, we spent a night (about 22 hours total) sleeping in a field adjacent to the patch of asphalt separating Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. From the time we reached the border at noon until about 8 that evening, we were both pretty worried about being stuck out in the open with no sleeping gear and minimal food/water. We rationed carefully. We even scavenged some dried-out corn from the adjacent field and started munching on that. However, in the end, Middy took extremely good care of us, providing us with enough grapes and bread and water, and obtaining blankets and more food from the guards and other locals for us to spend the night relatively comfortably.

Tajikistan has the friendliest people I have ever encountered. A strong part of their culture is to be exceedingly welcome to "guests," which means giving ANY foreigner the royal treatment--the best food, the best rooms in a house, the best blankets to sleep under in a field in no-man's land, as the case may be. Needless to say, we were well taken care of, and actually too warm under all our blankets in the cool Tajik night. We eventually managed to walk right through the border post with negligible hassle the next morning.

We took a car to the local town of Penjikent and rested, and then headed into the mountains for a night at a beautiful alpine lake called Iskanderkul, a favorite getaway of Alexander the Great.