The past month I've traveled over 11.000km trough eastern Europe and Central Asia in buses, taxis, trains & airplanes to get to my current location of Almaty, Kazakhstan.
After the Caucasus & Kiev the idea was to head west to the city of Lviv. After buying the train ticket in the afternoon for a departure that same evening I headed back to my hostel to eat and pack my bag. In the evening I took the metro to the train station, the connection between 2 metro stations I made earlier that day wasn't a problem then, however the pedestrian tunnel linking the two stations was closed for the evening, after getting out the metro and finally getting on the next metro and making it to the train station it looked like the train had already left, one of the few punctual things in Ukraine it seems...
Bought a new ticket for the next evening and trooped back to the hostel. The next day hanging around in the hostel I bumped in to Josh...again... after hanging out in Georgia for a couple of times he also traveled to Ukraine, we were thus obliged to celebrate our reunion that evening, which nearly made me miss my train again. After a mad dash across the station I boarded the train which left within in the minute. I'd prefer to call it excellent timing on my side....
After a few days in Lviv I crossed Poland for Lithuania in +/- 28hr (Mini bus > Train > Hostel > Train > Sleeper bus) to arrive in Vilnius in the early morning. After a few good days in the hostel (ran by a Canadian/Dutch guy, finally able to practice my Dutch again..) I made it for Latvia to spend a few days there and catch my flight to Uzbekistan, thus completing the 2.000km trip trough eastern Europe in the 2 weeks time-frame.
Finally having arrived in Tashkent.Though eastern Europe was fun for 2 weeks, it is hardly a challenge or 'adventures' to travel. Every major city has 20 hostels packed with folks coming there for a few days for a party. In Uzbekistan the true traveling could begin again, ordering food with a lot of pointing and sighs and in the end getting something completely different, buying train tickets in the midst of a jostling crowd in front of a small counter and fighting the people skipping lines and skipping a bit here and there yourself (which, if I may say so, am getting quite good at) the trick is to nearly hug the person in front of you and just zig-zag trough the line to the front. Then catching the attention of the sales attendant(woman, >40, bright eye shadow in green/blue/yellow or something in between).
Tashkent is a nice place to start for central Asia, not to big/small and enough to do and see to keep you occupied for a few days and get used to everything. The B&B I was staying at was close to the Chorsu bazaar, the place in town to buy fruit/vegetables/spices & to change your hard currency cash to Uzbek monopoly money.
At any official exchange office a US Dollar will already get you a whopping 1700 Uzbek SOM. At the 'black market' it will get you 2400SOM, a 40% difference. Not one soul in Uzbekistan changes his money at the official rate if he gets his hands on any hard currency.
The only problem with all the money is that the Uzbek National Bank never made any bigger note than the 1000SOM note (0,42$) thus you are carrying around huge stacks of SOM all the time, being worth nothing. Once the dear man in front of me at the train station had to pay 1,9 million SOM for a few train tickets, they happily spend a quarter of an hour counting the money electronically.
National hero is without a doubt Timur / Tamerlane(1336-1405). Thanks to his emprire building, Uzbekistan in packed with interesting mosques, medrassas and sorts. In his own museum in Tashkent all the amazing buildings he and his family constructed over time are happily mentioned. The fact that his wars killed about a million people is also happily overlooked.
From Tashkent to Samarkand I took the fast 'express' train which is supposed to do the trip in 3 hours, in the end it, always, takes 5 hours it seems.
Once in Samarkand I spend a few days sightseeing all the places around with as a highlight the 'Registan' a complex of 3 medrassas around a central square.
From Samarkand it was another 5 hours by train, however this one goes in the middle of the day, when it is about 40 degrees celcius / 100 Fahrenheit. Turning the wagon in to some sort of rolling sauna, but just without the pleasant sauna mood...
After Samarkand & Khiva it was time to get out of Uzbekistan and head for Kazakhstan, I took the sleeper train(22hr) back to Tashkent to head north to Kazakhstan the next day. The border crossing was something we were afraid off before we got there, we had heard a lot of horror stories about the exit out of Uzbekistan and into Kazakhstan. Once I got there it was one of the smoothest crossings so far, the exit out of Uzbekistan was without any problems, they did not even want to see any of my collected registration slips from all the cities I had been.
Due to my set visa dates I would only have 11 days to visit Kazakhstan, which is enough to see all cities worth seeing but it gets a bit more problematic considering the huge distances. The same day I entered Kazakhstan I made it to Turkestan, the day after I spend another 11 hours in the train towards Aralsk in the middle of nowhere. The town itself is as exciting as any town in the middle of nowhere can be, nothing to do or see.
However the town is as close to get to the Aral sea as possible. It used to have a port ON the Aral sea but due to evaporation the Aral sea is now 60km from the town. The former sea was most certainly interesting to visit(by trusty Russian Lada 4x4 jeep) with a dried up sea bed, rusty ships in the middle of nowhere and wandering camels all around the place.
After playing around in the sand for a day it was time again to move on to the next city, the problem being that I wanted to get to Astana and Aralsk being not directly connected I had to made a detour through Aktobe (500km, 11 hr train), which actually is quite a nice city with a nice (modern) Church and Mosque. Booked a flight to Astana(1000km) the day after.
Astana the new capital of Kazakhstan is packed with new futuristic business and grandiose government buildings. However for those not interested in architecture or central Asian prestige projects/cities, there is none but absolutely no reason to go there. The other 1% and me will have a fun day... :)
The artificial center of town is the 2km long ''boulevard'' (a long wide deserted paved street) packed on both sides with important buildings for business and governmental purpose.
Yesterday I took the sleeper train from Astana to Almaty (1100km, 22 hr) and tomorrow I will run for the hills, in Kyrgyzstan.
The route so far, clickable & zoomable;
More foto's;
