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

Some of you may remember a previous post about the corporate lawyer we met in Cuzco, choking down pizza with one hand in one of the best restaurants in town while frantically blackberrying his holiday away trying to keep tabs on a live transaction. It made us both desperately sad, and rather glad – sad that we had ruined so many of our own holidays doing exactly that, and glad that we didn’t have to let deals interrupt our dinners, at least not on this trip.

Or so we thought. We are in Tashkent, and we have run out of money. Not truly run out of money, mind. We still have a little stashed away in our home bank accounts, and we had recently tracked down a bizarrely incongruous branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland which had given us a small but crisp stack of US dollars. Our money belts were happily replete: those US dollars; some Renmimbi for when we reach the ATM-free far west of China in 10 days’ time; some leftover Hong Kong dollars for our return there in October; and some randoms – a few Euro, some leftover Aussie dollars, a taxi fare’s worth of Japanese Yen and a few Solomons and Bolivianos we had been unable to exchange back when we left those countries. And of course we also carry emergency travelers cheques just in case. But we didn’t have enough Uzbek Som, and this was a problem.

The Uzbek Som is a funny beast: the official exchange rate stands at about 2,000 to the dollar but black market rates are much higher, no doubt because of the rampant inflation in the country that rapidly depletes the savings of any Uzbek patriotic enough to keep their nest egg in local currency. As a result of this gap, almost nobody takes credit cards and there are virtually no foreigner-friendly ATMs – nobody would use them, as they would be pinned to the unattractive official exchange rate. As a result, travel cash in Uzbekistan is still done the way it was when I travelled in India in 1994 – queue up once a week to withdraw dollars from a bank teller and exchange them either at the bank or through some dodgy chap in sunglasses on a street corner. Oh, and add to this the fact that the largest denomination is the 1,000 Som note (worth about 40 cents) making $100 in Som literally about an inch thick (and by “literally” I mean “literally”).

So cut back to dinner – I had reached into my painfully bulging trouser pocket (no, not like that) and counted out my stack of Som (there is a special rapid counting technique, and now I have practiced it I could pass for a used car salesman in the UK). We had enough for a vegetarian dinner or wine, but not both, and we had had a really bad day. We were on the point of rediscovering the excellence of Georgian red wine (hi Dato!) and, faced with the choice of soda water or no dinner, I asked the waitress if they accepted dollars. The answer was unfortunately no (it is, after all, illegal) but they knew a man who could…

So this was the business deal that interrupted our dinner. After a couple of quiet conversations with the doorman, he arranged for a taxi driver friend of his to come, pick up an unmarked $50 note, drive away again, change the cash and come back. Interestingly, if unsurprisingly, the nighttime black market rate is a little worse than the daytime black market rate, but $50 is still enough for a good bottle of dry Georgian red wine.

And it led to yet another great life experience – you are sitting at dinner drinking wine with your lovely fiancée when a man enters, scans the restaurant, makes eye contact and walks over. He stops by your table, subtly slips you a half-inch thick slab of bank notes, bows slightly (with his hand on his heart, in the central Asian fashion) and walks away. Tonight, I am the Godfather.

The Godfather pays for dinner – about $80 for two, with wine

We are sitting in our guesthouse in Bukhara after a beautiful day. We have been wandering through mosques and medrassas and up and down minarets with our mouths open, gaping at the ancient architecture, the extraordinary stone and tilework and picturing the history, fair and foul, that has passed through this silk road town. All of the usual suspects were here – Marco Polo, Genghis Khan etc. – as well as the famous Stoddart & Conolly, two English army officers whose handlebar mustaches and Victorian stiff upper lips didn’t prevent them from being inventively and lengthily tortured then straightforwardly killed for breaches of local etiquette. It’s pretty stirring stuff.

Our guesthouse – an atmospheric old Emir’s palace, with heavy wood-beamed rooms surrounding a shady central courtyard and a jewel-like breakfast room complete with carved plasterwork, lavishly painted ceilings and tiny plates of brightly coloured jams – is unfortunately full of retired French and German tour groups. So far so standard: many of the people we meet on the road are retirees, Lufthansa has good connections to this part of the world from Eastern Bloc days, and Central Asia seems to have a special allure to those who did their original travel dreaming back when the Iron Curtain prevented them from imagining they would ever actually get here. That said, the tour groups don’t bother us much, until…

My spoken French is pretty rusty at the best of times, but this IS the best of times – for some random reason many of the guest house owners and taxi drivers in Uzbekistan speak French not English. Given that French is also the lingua franca (ha ha) of half of Vanuatu, I have been speaking more French recently than I have in years. As such, I understood the elderly French lady perfectly as she walked past, and even picked up on the heavy note of disdain.

“Poor thing. He’s having to sew up his shoes!”

That’s right lady. I’m sewing up my shoes. Running repairs are a necessity on the road when you have a limited set of clothes – so far I have handily put a stitch or two in one jumper, one wooly hat with a llama on it, one set of thermals, two t-shirts and one busted rucksack flap. In a moment of train-journey-inspired boredom I even darned one solitary sock. I have also had an Oswald Boateng shirt rehemmed by a little old lady in Port Vila with an even older Singer sewing machine.

I imagine in retired-French-lady-land one would simply buy another pair of shoes. And in my-partners-and-I-sold-an-investment-bank-last-year-land I normally would too. But these are New Balance barefoot running shoes. Not at all expensive, but very, very carefully chosen, and perfect – they are extremely lightweight, offer surprisingly good support and (critically) pack down to the size of a flip flop. In New York I swapped out the laces for black replacements and delicately trimmed off all the lime green decals, so they can just as easily be used as coral reef shoes in the morning and get you past the doorman of a cocktail bar that night. They are dark red, and hence go with every outfit I currently possess. They are, as I said, perfect travel shoes.

But … replacements are not available within a thousand miles of Uzbekistan, and after four months of swimming, walking on coral reefs, hiking and dancing they have a hole in the canvas upper.

So yes, lady, I am sewing up my shoes, whether you think I look like a tramp or not. And a damn good job I am doing of it too.