En-route to Central Asia

Travel Dates 19th-20th September 2019.

Click on any picture to see a larger version. 

Day 1 of my trip to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. I have been fascinated by stories of the ancient Silk Road since I first read The Travels of Marco Polo many years ago. After visiting much of the rest of the world over the past couple of decades the time had come to visit Central Asia. I think part of the reason for deferring this trip in the past was concern about security. I realise now I was unfairly thinking the region had similar security problems to Iran and the Middle East. That was a mistake.

For family reasons I prefer not to be away from home for more than a month. After a lot of research I decided I could not visit all the ‘stans (Kygrhiz-, Kazakh-, Uzbeki-, Turkmeni-, Tajiki-,) in that period. I settled on Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan as representative of much of the old Silk Road. 

There are very few parts of the world with such a long history of settlement and invasion by a multitude of conquerors including Alexander, the Persians, the Mongols and many others ending with the Russian Tsars and finally the Soviets. 

The most tedious part of any of my trips is getting there and back. I accept that as the price I pay for living so far from most of the world. The day started well. My airport transport, A2B, arrived on time and delivered me efficiently to Gold Coast Airport. The AirAsiaX flight left on time and I had a reasonably comfortable trip in a Premier Flatbed, arriving at Kuala Lumpur 8 1/2 hours later at about 17:20 local time.

Then I had the misery of the immigration queue for nearly an hour. The KLIA2 immigration entry system is disgraceful. I have been through four times in the past four months, all equally poor. After the initial queue to get into one of two areas for foreign passports you have to choose one of half a dozen separate queues of 30-50 people. There is no system to send the first arrival to the next available officer. Instead, if one person in the queue has a problem the entire group in that queue has to wait regardless of how swiftly other queues may be moving. I have not passed through in less than 45 minutes and once took 90 minutes. I have no idea why the system at KLIA on the other side of the runway, where each separate queue is served by three or four officers, is not used at KLIA2.

By then it was 18:40. I had time for a pleasant dinner (soup, greens and chili chicken with rice for MYR 14.90, about AU$5.00) as my shuttle to the hotel was not due until 19:30. Well, that was when it was supposed to arrive. I waited until 19:50 after phoning at 19:35 to be sure he was coming. Eventually I took a cab to the Movenpick. My lack of happiness with the shuttle failure must have had some effect. I found the room was fabulous, probably the most spacious I will see on this trip. The bathroom is bigger than many rooms I have stayed in. 

I deliberately delayed going to bed until 10pm, midnight back home but still woke at 2:40 am local time. I tried to go back to sleep and was quite surprised to find I had when I woke at 6:30 local. 

Breakfast was an excellent buffet with eggs cooked to order and a wide choice of hot and cold dishes. My only minor criticism of the massive Movenpick complex is is the lack of alcoholic drinks; not really surprising as there is a large mosque in the grounds. Most of the residents at breakfast appeared to be part of a convention.

As I mentioned earlier long haul travel can be stressful but along the way over the years serendipity, fortunate accidents, have balanced out a lot of those hassles. My flight from Kuala Lumpur to Tashkent was mostly in daylight. Long before the flight I chose a window seat to see the view as we crossed India and the Himalayas. Note from the picture above we did not go over the Himalayas but we did pass over some other scary territory. As we passed over Afghanistan at least I saw some spectacular sunsets. And no missiles...

For reasons unknown Uzbek Airlines changed me to an aisle seat down the back and I was unable to modify that on their web-site. At check-in I managed to change it back to a different window seat up front. I tried to have a vacant seat beside me but the flight was full. By chance I was seated next to a young Uzbek man whose employment led to moving with his family to Australia for a couple of years while commuting regularly to Uzbekistan. Serendipity struck again. The long trip passed swiftly as we chatted about life in the two countries, travel, cultures, history and politics. I will not mention his name as I did not seek his permission. This total stranger invited me to join him for lunch the following day. I was a little nervous accepting the invitation from a person I had never met, but decided to risk it. More on that in the next post. 

On arrival immigration procedures were mercifully swift. I then used the strangest ATM I have ever encountered. Luckily a bystander who spoke English helped. I had to use my Mastercard to obtain US$, then feed those dollars back into the same machine to receive Uzbek soʻm. US$200.00 became US$203.00 with the ATM fee; that cost me AU$299.27. After feeding those US$ back to the machine I received a little over 1.9 million soʻm. I was an instant millionaire!