HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Mar. 14, 2008 In late spring of 1998, I had been living in Beijing, China, about a year. I never did figure out how to renew my visa in Beijing, so every 6 months I would take the train to Hong Kong, to renew it there. Around June 1 then I trained to Hong Kong to get my third six-month visa. I was planning to visit Central Asia during the term of that visa. I had looked for travel books in Beijing, but Chinese travel books deal with China only. You won’t find any on Central Asia. However I was able to buy Lonely Planet’s Central Asia in an English-language bookstore in Hong Kong, when I was there for my visa. On the train back to Beijing, I read in the book that if you fly into Alma Ata (Almaty), Kazakhstan, you can buy a Kazakh visa for $100 right in the airport. I said, “Great! I can just go.” The flight all the way from Beijing to Alma Ata would have cost $450. but if I took the train to Ûrûmqi, Xinjiang, in western China, and flew the short distance from Urumqi to Alma Ata, it would cost only $275. So that’s what I did. As soon as I got to Beijing, I went to Beijing West Station and bought a ticket for Urumqi. Then I took the 66-hour train ride all the way across China. Alter a couple of days in Urumqi. I boarded a China Xinjiang airplane, which flew to Alma Ata in about two hours. As soon as I arrived in the airport in Alma Ata, I could see I had been deceived by Lonely Planet. There was no place to buy a visa. The airport officials, at first threatening to imprison me, finally just deported me, allowing me to fly back to Beijing at my own expense. This fiasco cost $750 in all. Once back in Beijing, I decided to make a second try for Central Asia by applying for visas in the usual way. Beijing is not like New York or Washington. You don’t just look up a consulate or embassy in the yellow pages and go out and hail a cab. It took me two days of detective work to locate the embassies of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in Beijing. The Kazakh embassy dealt with me in English, but in the Kyrgyz embassy, I had to speak Chinese. Uzbekistan, the main country of my planned visit, maintains no embassy in China. I planned to visit the Uzbek embassy in Kazakhstan, as soon as I got there. I had hoped also to visit Turkmenistan, but it never worked out. When I had the visas, I again bought a train ticket to Urumqi at Beijing West Station, but we never made it. The train broke down in Qingshui, a town in Gansu province in north central China. I was the only non-Chinese among 1600 passengers left stranded. A bus company sent several buses when they learned of the train failure. I boarded a lie-down bus that would bounce and rattle for 28 hours on dirt roads in the desert to get to Urumqi. Several times the bus left the road entirely, tearing through the weeds. On one occasion, we got stuck in mud, and everyone had to get out and push. Finally we made Urumqi. I visited the city for a couple of days. This time I would not have to fly to Alma Ata, so I went to the bus station on Heilongjiang Lu in Urumqi and bought a bus ticket for $45. This was a Kazakh bus company with Russian-speaking passengers. This was no problem. My Russian was at least as good as my Chinese. I had studied both languages for years. Twenty-four hours later, we made Alma Ata, where I had a great time for a couple of weeks. I got a room for $5 a day in the train station. There was a nice-looking Russian lady about 35 managing the rooms. Panfilov Park, in Alma Ata, has a Russian Orthodox cathedral, a merry-go-round, carriage rides and Russian music from loudspeakers. There were two museums, a zoo and a gallery in town. I went to the Uzbek embassy in Alma Ata, and was sent to a travel agency, which secured my Uzbek visa for $110. But first I had to go to Kyrgyzstan. So one morning I went to the bus station on Prospekt Tole Bi in Alma Ata to buy a bus ticket. However, a man in a compact car said he was taking passengers to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. So I got in. There was a Russian-speaking Kyrgyz couple in the car already, and away we went. Kyrgystan is one of the highest countries in the world, with peaks 15,000, 20,000 and up to 24,000 feet tall. This was terribly mountainous terrain. But whenever we got to a level stretch, the driver floored the gas pedal. We did about 100 miles an hour most of the way. He took the curves at 60 and 80. For breakfast, we stopped at a hamlet of yurts—Central Asian style wigwams made of felt. The nomads were barbecuing meat over an open fire. I stayed in Bishkek about a week. It was fairly uneventful, but I did meet some refugee children from Tajikistan, which had just had a civil war. I gave the poor waifs money every morning while I was in town. Finally, it was time to go to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan and the largest city in Central Asia, complete with a subway. As soon as I got to Tashkent, I was robbed by the police. About 4 AM, they haled me into the bus station at Sobir Rakhimov on a pretext, undressed me and spread out all my belongings and money. They took US$100. They were looking only for American money, and did not bother my other currencies or travelers’ checks. Despite that, I had a good time in Tashkent. At the opera house downtown, musicians play free classical and Central Asian music at midday, and all the people come out to the plaza to eat lunch and listen. There are also two beautiful museums, dedicated primarily to Prince Timur, the second greatest Asiatic conqueror of all time, and the national hero of Uzbekistan. I stayed in a hotel called Hotel Russia, managed by a charming Russian lady around 40. It was expensive for those parts, at $22 a night. Finally, I took a short bus ride to Samarkand. This is a city that dates back 2500 years, the oldest city in the former USSR. Samarkand was also Timur’s capital, and there he erected mosques, minarets, mausoleums and marketplaces all in blue majolica tile. Samarkand is really beautiful, but I had to hurry. So after a couple of days, I bused back to Tashkent. There’s a rule that you have 72 hours to pass through neighboring CIS countries, once you leave one of them, but I was afraid that, if I took the bus back through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the police would think that I had merely overstayed my original visa, and this would be a great opportunity for them to extort money from me. So though I was trying to be thrifty, I decided it was best to fly from Tashkent to Urumqi. It was actually two flights, with a twelve-hour layover in Alma Ata. After another short visit in Urumqi, I got on a train for Beijing, but I couldn’t get a berth. I sat in a non-reclining chair, something like a kitchen chair, for 66 hours. At night, like a Chinaman, I just threw my body on the heap of bodies on the floor. But I did get back, around the first of September. I would leave China in October. I have pictures of some Central Asian points of interest at my website. I also have pictures of Urumqi and other Chinese places. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
