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Biking in Uzbekistan, Days 5-7

Posted by Jim St. George on May 6, 2023
Posted in: Asia, Uzbekistan. Leave a Comment

Mark on the very dry and dusty road to the Asmansay Yurt Camp

We started Day 5 of the bike trip with a tour of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Normally Mark and I would avoid an organized tour of a city at all costs but there was really no way to avoid this one; the group left the hotel in the morning, toured the city, and then headed west – still on the bus – the city of Jizzakh. Thus were we trapped.

In the scheme of things it wasn’t so bad and parts of it were even good. We saw some monuments, went to the big market in town, toured a beautiful mosque complex, and had a great lunch of local food. Given more time I’m sure I would have found parts of Tashkent to like but with a whirlwind tour like that you just get a little flavor. After that it was a long drive over pretty awful roads to Jizzakh.

Part of a complex of Islamic mosques, schools, and museums in Tashkent

From there it was another transfer – we neither biked into or out of Jizzakh, it was just a convenient stop – out to the start of the ride. By now we were some 150 miles southwest of Tashkent and the terrain was completely different. This was essentially dessert, just dry rolling hills, with the ride entirely on dirt lanes. I missed the beauty of the mountains but this area had it’s own charms. And while I prefer riding on paved roads I learned there are lots of people who prefer this sort of mountain biking. So everyone gets some of what they like on this tour.

Biking to the yurt camp

We ended the ride at a yurt camp – sorry, no pictures – a lodge with maybe a dozen traditional round “tents” with beds. It was extremely remote and I was pretty happy with that. At night, though, the wind came up pretty strong and was just lashing the canvas on the outside of the yurt making a noise that was almost impossible to sleep through. And then to add insult to injury when we got up in the morning they had lost electricity which meant not only no lights in the yurt for packing, but no running water, which was powered by pumps. Not a great morning.

Then it was a l-o-n-g bus ride to Zaamin National Park, where we were supposed to hike instead of bike. When I say long, well, it was supposed to be a three-hour transfer which, on those roads, would have been bad enough. In fact it took us nearly five hours to get to the park. And when we got there it had snowed recently and there was a light drizzle falling making any trails muddy and slippery.

Most of us made the hike anyway, though Mark wisely stayed back; he’d have hated the slippery downhills and his knee would have rebelled. For those who went … hmmm … it was a good hike. Too fogged in to have great views and too cold to really enjoy. But I love mountain air and I don’t get a lot of that in Manhattan so despite the cold and the wet and the mud it was OK.

Cold and wet with plenty of mud, but it was still a beautiful hike

Tomorrow we’re off to the ancient city of Samarkand but it’s not clear how much biking we’re going to get in. Right now it’s actually snowing here and none of us brought the clothes you would need to survive biking in that kind of weather. Fortunately we’re all being pretty flexible so I guess we’ll play it by ear.

One of the first stops on our tour of Tashkent was the local market. I had Mark & Rebecca pose just to show off how spacious and clean it was, in contrast to many other markets we’ve seen.

There are always scores of displays like this

And this

Islamic architecture in Tashkent

Mark in front of a mosque. Because we were wearing shorts we couldn’t go in – which wasn’t the worst tragedy we’ve experienced

At another mosque they provided robes so men with shorts could enter. I thought Mark could have passed for the Grim Reaper…

Our tour of Tashkent included a ride on the local subway. My experience is that the Soviets – who built this subway – always did a good job of designing the stations. This is a LOT nicer than anything we see in NYC!

Tony & Sharon posing in front of some of the art in another subway stop

Plov is the national dish of Uzbekistan, so before leaving Tashkent we had plov at the Central Asian Plov Center. There were probably eight or 10 big vats like this with guys – always guys – making their own variation of plov.

This is what I ended up with and I thought it was spectacular

Dinner in Jizzakh included these new friends of Mark

Our new friend Rachel on the road to the yurt camp

There was a lot of this on the route

Cute kids on the route! Our experience so far is that locals – adults and kids alike – are much more reticent than most places we have biked. Not these boys though – they were eager to interact, run along with our bikes, and have their picture taken.

We had a camp fire under a full moon at the yurt camp, serenaded by this local guitarist

Mark and some of our fellow riders

And finally, near the start of our hike in Zaamin National Park. And yes, that’s fresh snow even though it’s already May.

Bishkek

Posted by Jim St. George on May 1, 2023
Posted in: Asia, Kyrgyzstan. 3 comments

Mark hiking in the Tian Shen mountains near Bishkek

As unlikely as it seemed at the start I really liked Bishkek. There’s nothing particularly interesting or exotic about the city, but I just really settled in nicely.

First off a quick preview. This is the first stop on a four-week trip through Central Asia, arranged around a two-week bicycle trip in Uzbekistan, and including a three-day stop in Istanbul on the way home. We’d scheduled the bike trip a couple months into the COVID lockdown when cabin fever was running high. Grasshopper Adventures – with whom we’ve done three bike trips previously – advertised this trip for September 2020 and we thought “Oh, that looks like fun. Let’s sign up, since COVID will surely be over by the fall!”

Obviously that didn’t work out and we kept postponing and postponing it, but finally we’re off. The plan is to add three other ‘Stans to the trip: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. I had previously been to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, but these are all four new countries for Mark.

The city is full of long parks along boulevards and square parks behind museums and trees and trees and trees

Now, back to Bishkek, the capital and major city of Kyrgyzstan. Again, there’s nothing great about it but it’s a very comfortable city. Lots of great parks, millions of trees (literally), easy to walk around, and – while we were here at least – perfect weather. Sunny with highs in the high 60s and low 70s. We found some excellent Georgian food which always helps.

As far as adventures, there were three highlights. First up was a day-hike in the mountains. Bishkek sits just north of a section of the Tian Shen mountains, and in late April at least they’re still snow-capped and beautiful. So we hired a driver to take us maybe 45 minutes out of the city and did a two-hour hike up into the mountains. Mark and I are both having some knee problems (mine temporary, his less so), so we didn’t want to go too high or too deep into the mountains but it was a beautiful little trek.

I was up in the mountains too

The second great adventure was the big local market. We’ve been to a bunch of these markets over the years (I’d even been to this one when I was on a work trip in Bishkek in 2005) but not a lot in recent years so it was fun to poke around the colors and smells and sounds of the local market.

Mark and one of the many friendly Kyrgi vendors

And finally I spent a couple hours one morning in the National Fine Arts Museum which was surprisingly interesting. Now, I have no reason to believe there was any particularly important art here, but it was a fun way to see how the Kyrgis see themselves. Lots and lots of paintings of peasants up in the mountains doing peasant things. You know, cows and hay and sheep and all that stuff. And then add to that the kind of Superman-esque quality of Soviet art, especially from the 1950s and ’60s and it was just a good way to spend a couple of hours.

From 1958 and titled “Help to the Collective Farm,” I love just how happy these kids are going to work in the farm. As a kid I spent a lot of hours working in our vegetable garden and I don’t ever remember being that happy about it.

The real highlight of Bishkek, though, when the weather is perfect is just to wander in the parks, find an empty bench, and sit and read. A very pleasant way to start our trip through the ‘Stans. Next up, Uzbekistan and the two-week bike trip.

Up in the mountains

A very strange sign at the beginning of the trail up into the mountains. An ant crossing? Carrying … something?

Mark in the mountains

The two of us on the hike

Bishkek has seemingly thousand (though perhaps only hundreds) of statues of great heroes riding off to battle

This statue of Lenin was once in a more prominent place but some years ago was moved behind the National Museum. Still pretty much in the middle of the city though.

Goose-stepping military in the changing of the guard outside the National Museum

Colorful dried fruits and nuts in the market

And bread!

A gorgeous rug in the National Museum

Oak Park was my favorite place to sit and read. In addition to all the trees and greenery it had a big collection of sculptures. This guy with his horse was my favorite.

Another piece of Soviet propaganda art as this young Kyrgi girl marches confidently toward the future, school books in hand

We went to Meat Point a few times. It was strange – excellent steaks, massive portions, really inexpensive … and almost completely empty except for us.

Oh, and Meat Point had nice shots of vodka at crazy low prices. This bull became a good friend of ours.

And finally, in the category of “You Think You’ve Seen Everything…” there was this note on the menu in a Georgian restaurant we quite liked: the price they would charge if you accidentally (or presumably even on purpose) broke a dish. We’ve been in a lot of restaurants in a lot of countries and never seen this one before!

Koh Samui Yet Again

Posted by Jim St. George on March 5, 2023
Posted in: Asia, Thailand. Leave a Comment

Breakfast at Vana Belle, where they offered us champagne to start the day. Occasionally we would accept.

We closed our three-week holiday on our favorite island in the Gulf of Thailand, Koh Samui. We’ve been here a number of times and always consider the beach absolutely one of the best in the world. And we loved it again this time, though it wasn’t quite perfect. The first day we were there the sea was so rough you couldn’t really go in safely. I tried and before I got more than a few feet out a big wave just knocked me on my butt. As I stumbled to get up another came and knocked me back down again. So I left and waited until things calmed down the next day.

Then a few days later a pretty big storm blew through one evening and the next two days there were red flags out along the beach: don’t go in at all. The sea was really rough and so that was the end of that.

Our view from lunch. Normally we’re eager to get away from a resort for lunch, but the food was so good and varied we ate every lunch here, then went out for dinner. And with a view like that, there’s not much not to like…

Again, lots of reading (I finished the full three-volume biography of Teddy Roosevelt!), lots of lounging, another great hotel gym to stay at least a little active in, and lots of good food. Some great beach time before the weather turned. But I learned two things over these three weeks.

Local fish and calamari, one of many low-key but great meals. You know you’re not home when you notice the ashtray in the picture!

The first is more cool than important. We flew in and out through Singapore, which is almost exactly half-way around the world from New York. So the day of a flight out of New York, for instance, Singapore Air looks at the weather conditions and decides whether to fly northeast across the North Atlantic and over Europe, or northwest over North America and down the east coast of Asia.

On our outbound they flew us the northeastern route over Europe but on the return weather conditions were such that we flew northeast out of Singapore, up over Alaska and down across North America. So in fact we went around the world on this trip. How cool is that?

Dinner our last night at The Boudoir, our favorite French restaurant in Samui. Right – who has a favorite French restaurant on an island in the Gulf of Thailand? Turns out we’ve been there each of our last few visits to the island and it’s this little sliver of France off on a remote road. Since we were last there, though, a younger French couple started running it and it’s maybe not just quite as great as it used to be. Still good though.

Here’s the other thing I learned: three weeks of lazing on a beach in luxury resorts is just too much. I never thought I’d say that but by the end I was just a little bored with it all. To be sure, that is not the worst problem a person has ever had. But we both had the sense that we don’t need to do that again.

The good news is that we’re already getting excited about doing a winter vacation next year in Vietnam that would include some resort beach time but also probably some trekking in Sapa in the north, cruising in Halong Bay, urban time in Hanoi, and so on.

Hard to imagine getting bored on a beach like this, but somehow I managed it

If you had suggested on the LONG flight home from Singapore to New York that I would even consider another east Asia trip so soon (oh, and to make everything even more miserable I was sick on the flight, presumably from something I ate the last day in Thailand) I’d have been clear that wasn’t going to happen. But here we are just a few days back in New York with a Lonely Planet book sketching out what you could do next winter with five weeks or so in Vietnam. I’m already getting excited!

Bamboo Bar was a fun, colorful place maybe five minutes from our hotel and a nice place to stop for a pre-dinner drink

Enjoying a calm day in the sea

These were our chairs, under great branches that provided shade all day long

Another view from lunch

What’s the problem with a little late-afternoon storm if you’re already wet?

Lunch

An elegant plate at The Boudoir

Finally, this is the wine list at The Boudoir. I saw that chalk board and had to pull up the blog Return to Koh Samui from a previous visit. Sure enough, if you click on that link to our 2015 visit – eight years ago! – there’s the same chalk board down at the bottom. Nice to know that some things don’t change.