Greetings nomads! Last week, I traveled to Uzbekistan with a bus tour company called Asia Expeditions. For 5 days, we started in Bishkek and visited Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara. The tour was 19,000 coms ($380CAD) plus an additional $50 USD for an e-visa to Uzbekistan. I found out afterwards that the visa only cost $20 USD. But I was in a pinch with less than a week to go before the tour so I wanted to avoid any hassle. Canadians can travel to Kazakhstan visa free. Make sure your Visa into Kyrgyzstan allows multiple entries.
The tour guide spoke only Russian and didn’t understand ANY English. (She didn’t do much guiding anyways.) Luckily there were people on the bus who spoke English quite well who would translate certain important points for us like what time to meet back on the bus.
At each city, we had a local guide. Only Alishar from Tashkent spoke English. The other guides did not speak any English. However, I knew all of this going into the tour. I was happy just to see the sights and tag along.
Day Night 1 – Bishkek to Tashkent
At 9 pm, we met at (old) Dordoi Plaza and took a 10-12 hour bus ride from Bishkek, through Kazakhstan and into Uzbekistan. (I’m going to dedicate an entire future post on the land border crossings because they are complicated and was a complete learning experience for me.) I don’t think we made good time because we stopped every 3 hours for smoke and bathroom breaks. (I think I have to do a whole post on bathrooms as well.)
Once we arrived in Tashkent, the first stop was Hotel Uzbekistan. We exchanged our USDs into Uzbek Som (pronounced “soooooom”. It’s different than the Kyrgyz Com which is pronounced “som”). DO NOT take old US BILLS. They would not take any bills that had markings on them, that were torn (no matter how small), or old bills! Also, save the receipt because you will need it to exchange the Sums back into USDs. 100 Canadian dollars equals about 6,300 Uzbek Soms. The conversion and the zero’s were very confusing.
For lunch we had plov (or in Canada, "pilov"), which is a traditional Central Asian rice dish. The kinds of plov I've had so far are served with a boiled egg (both regular and quail), beef, chickpeas, raisins, pumpkins and carrots and you can get horse sausage on top but it's extra. I like to mix in the salad with the plov to cut the fatty richness. On this day, we went to The Plov Centre and had their Wedding Plov.
We stayed at a beautiful but older hotel called Hotel Honsaroy that was far from the city centre. The hotel bathroom provided two different sets of slippers (one for the shower presumably?), extra blankets and lots of outlets. It included a breakfast buffet that was upstairs in their indoor/outdoor terrace.
Yandex (Central Asian Uber) works in Tashkent so we were able to order a taxi to drive into the centre of the city for dinner. It took about 20 minutes.
I found Tashkent to be very modern. The streets are wide and well lit. The sidewalks are paved. There are a lot of Chevrolet cars because there’s a manufacturing plant in Uzbekistan. There are modern restaurants lining the streets and many of the buildings are night are lit by these LED-looking lights that line the windows or roof of buildings. For dinner, my friend and I went to an Irish pub then a restaurant called Steam. The waiters at Steam wear steampunk accessories. They had ribs, pulled pork, steak, burgers, fries etc. I had a steak salad that was really good and reminded me of something I would get from Milestones.