A piece I wrote for a newsletter that is now defunct:

On the road to Bukhara…

The journey there

Dorothy and I got up at 8:00 am to go to Bukhara. Our original plan was to leave at seven, but neither of us was quite ready to face life when the alarm went off. I reset it to eight and the extra hour was enough to turn us into humans. We were out of the house by 8:45 and heading to the metro station. We got to Sobir Rahimov metro around 9:15 and commenced out search for transportation.

Since I used to live in Cairo, I faced the cab drivers. The Uzbeks had roughly a century of Russian domination to forget the skills of attack-commerce. Cairo cab drivers have several thousand years of uninterrupted experience in forcing people to choose their own particular form of transportation. So anyway, Dorothy hung back and I started negotiating for a ride to Bukhara. Eventually we settled on one driver who'd take us to Bukhara, and for 30,000 we'd get the whole back seat of the car. The driver's name was Sharzad.

Sharzad went off to find one last passenger, and Dorothy and I sat in the car and waited. In about ten minutes Sharzad came back with a guy who wanted to go to Samarkand, and we set off. It was 9:45. As we left the metro station parking lot, Sharzad would roll down his window and yell at other drivers, presumably people he knew, "I'm going to Bukhara!" Dorothy and I didn't understand and we didn't ask. We were almost out of the city when the passenger asked Sharzad to stop so he could buy something to drink. Dorothy and I refused his polite offer to grab something for us and our passenger came back about 5 minutes later with a bottle of warm beer. It was 10:00 am.

The day was still cool, and we had the windows cracked a little. Dorothy made conversation with the unnamed passenger and I drowsed a little. The temperature heated up as the sun rose higher; we opened the windows more. Dorothy ran out of small talk, and Sharzad turned the radio on. Our passenger laid his half-full bottle of beer carefully on the floor. I began to roast, unable to choose between noise and wind and baking sun. We stopped, briefly, at a roadside toilet you could smell ten feet away. The passenger paid the price for his beer consumption while Dorothy and I stood next to the car and stretched our legs. In a few minutes we were back on the road.

It got hotter in the car and we opened more windows and Sharzad played the Russian technopop louder, too loud to think or talk. We finally made it to Samarkand and disposed of our passenger, and when Sharzad asked if we could stop for lunch. Dorothy and I agreed.

We went to what can only be described as an Uzbek truck stop. It was full of men eating hearty Uzbek food delivered to the tables at high speed. There were two female police officers so Dorothy and I made a point of sitting near them. We made short work of our lunch (I had to order for Dorothy, who'd never had Uzbek food) and in 25 minutes we were making a stop at the bathroom on our way out. The bathroom, of course, was an outhouse with a hole in the floor and no running water. And no toilet paper. I dug through my purse for anything I could find - Dorothy got several receipts and I wound up wiping myself with a scrap of notebook paper.

Upon emerging from the restaurant, we discovered that the small child Sharzad had paid to wash the car was still washing the car. He'd finished the outside and was wiping down all the inner surfaces. Dorothy and I wandered off to buy ice cream and then stood around in the sun waiting for the poor kid to finish. We wanted to sit on the stoop by the car, but everyone knows that if women sit on the ground their ovaries will freeze. Rather than traumatize anyone by risking our fertility, we paced and waited.

We were about an hour out of Samarkand when the roadblocks started. In the four hours it took us to get to Bukhara we stopped at at least five police checkpoints. Several times we had to get out of the car and show our passports to various people. Sharzad paid out a small fortune in bribes. After stop number four or so, Dorothy actually asked Sharzad if he'd bought his driver's license, and was that the problem? Sharzad reassured us that he'd gotten his license driving Kamoz trucks in the army and we were just getting stopped for having Tashkent license plates so far south. By the time we got to Bukhara, about 6:00, we were slap-happy with driving and Sharzad knew every detail of our passport information.

Bukhara is a city you cannot describe without clichés and overheated language. It's beautiful. It's ancient. [To be continued…]

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USAID is one of many donors for the project I work for. The views expressed herein are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s employer or especially those of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. And I mean it. I probably give the US government heart attacks.