When we wrote about our night out in Port Moresby we made one mistake: we hadn’t realized that there was an active Port Moresby internet community ready to leap to the defense of that fair city. Our ignorant misconceptions about the place were eloquently set right at flattering length in the comments by a nice-sounding guy called Brian. We were, however, taken completely aback that anyone other than our immediate families and friends was reading our blog. So with the knowledge that there is an infinitesimal chance that the world may be reading, I’m going to take a risk: I truly hope there isn’t an active and defensive Tashkent blogosphere. For Tashkent, the grand and storied capital of Uzbekistan, is an utter hole in the ground.

Our experience in Tashkent is almost completely our own fault, for we are looking for souvenirs on our way round the world. Not typically touristy “oh won’t it look lovely on the mantelpiece next to the Charles & Diana memorial crockery” type stuff, but a few nice pieces that we will keep forever. So far we have picked up a little jewelry for Lucy (including a pig tusk bracelet that marks her out as an Ambrym chieftain), an armful of amazing Sepik river carvings, some epic North Korean literature and some statues from Port Vila that we eventually shipped home in a 1.5 meter long box. And it is the shipping that gets you every time – the cost of shipping large items from strange parts of the world can be as much as (or more than) the cost of the items themselves. Walk into any sufficiently far-flung DHL office and there is a good chance that in the back room you will find a few large souvenirs that were simply dumped once the purchaser realized how much it would cost to ship them home (wily bargain hunters, far-flung DHL staff will typically give these to you for free if you can stump up the shipping charges – true story).

We had travelled through Uzbekistan being offered some truly lovely souvenirs: delicately painted ceramic serving bowls, large and ornate embroidered suzani and amazing brightly coloured woven silks by the bolt, all at knock down prices. We had spurned all offers to bargain, however, because there was no way to ship such large souvenirs home from the small towns we were in and they were too heavy for us to carry long distances with our rucksacks. Our strategy, cunningly worked out with a Londoner’s or New Yorker’s faith in capital cities, was to wait until Tashkent, where we could both purchase all of these things and ship them home. Although most canny travelers might stay in Tashkent say, one day, we planned three days in Tashkent to run our errands and move on.

Big mistake. FIVE days after we arrived in Tashkent we finally broke for the border. FIVE days in an expensive hotel complete with hot and cold running ultraviolent Russian movies during breakfast. FIVE days walking huge distances around town to avoid being ripped off by scabrous taxi drivers. FIVE days eating crappy, overpriced meat products and being food poisoned for our pains. FIVE days trying to track down any souvenirs anywhere near the quality we had seen just days before. After an earthquake-leveling in 1966, Tashkent was seemingly designed by a megalomaniac with a love of soul-crushing Soviet architecture and long distances. True, there is the famous metro system, but the knowledge that police are known to shake travelers down for bribes on the platforms really takes the edge off. There is also the famous opera and ballet, but it was closed.

We had set our heart on an embroidered suzani large enough to cover a double bed, with fine silk embroidery on a silk background. We had seen several in Samarkand, and were now facing shopkeepers swearing blind that such things did not, in fact, exist and that we should buy their inferior products instead. We now realized why so many of the carpet and embroidery workshops in the provinces have been set up by UNESCO – in the more progressive capital, people don’t seem to care about such musty old things – give them tight, fashionably weathered jeans and polyphonic cellphone ringtones any day. If any travelers are reading: buy the bloody stuff in the regions.

Anyway, we finally bludgeoned enough reasonably good quality silk road souvenirs out of the city. This rant is already running very long, so I won’t go into the full gory details of DHL Tashkent. Let’s just say that:

• Putting a notice on your front door indicating that you are out to lunch, and not coming back until … the next day;
• Making Lucy fill out a lengthy form in triplicate, only to transcribe the results into a computer at the same desk;
• Telling me that we couldn’t write “8 small ceramic dishes” on a form, because three of said small dishes were in fact small bowls;
• Sending us on a long taxi ride across town to obtain a document from the ministry of culture proving that our very obviously new purchases weren’t antiques; and
• Asking us to pay with a two inch thick pile of bank notes, or alternatively a credit card at a 30% higher price

…aren’t the best ways to make James and Lucy happy.

Beautiful Samarkand Suzani – that we didn’t buy