Getting to Osh

The Bishkek hit n' run went well. Got there at midday, left our stuff at the helpful CBT office and went to pick up the visa. Come back in 2 hours. No problem. Ate at the university Stolovaya ($1 for soup, salad, bread, potatoes, cabbage, drink) and went to buy more pirate MP3s. The cheerful Russian stall-keeper said that I made her day by coming and told me I should stay in Bishkek. Hmm...

Well, picked up the visa and went down to the Osh Bazaar to take a shared taxi to Osh. Couldn't find the taxi stand. A babushka working at the marshrutka parking found us one. The driver didn't seem like the taxi driver type, so we decided to go with him, but not before eating dinner with the babushka at a place with a bare lightbulb suspended from the ceiling and a box of chocolates tucked behind a wire sticking out of the wall. Highlight of the meal: babushka gets a plate with a bone on it, takes a lump of lard from her soup, dumps it on the plate, dumps the bone in the soup.

Sharing the taxi with us were Ulan, his 2 y.o. son (vomiting from the outset), and Batar - a businessman from Andijan, who could speak some English - e.g. when the Audi's door wouldn't open : "fucking German car, Hitler fucking fascist." Great road - deep narrow canyons, a climb up to a 3600m pass, all in moonlight. Midnight, a dinner stop. An old wooden house, a few rooms with wood-fire ovens. Dim lightbulbs. Awesome tea. 3 am. Kaim pulls over, and falls asleep, snoring... loudly. 5 am. Flat tyre. The road looks like this - 500m of nice even asphalt, followed by 30 metres of no road, and so on for the 700km to Osh. The spare tyre is damaged. Finally a dude on a soviet motorbike with a felt wool cap helps us. Breakfast at a place with a woodfired oven, the tyre is fixed. Midday. Flat tyre again. The road worsens - gravel and dust. Coming to the Fergana valley is like going to a different country - half the people are Uzbek - conservative Uzbek (we even see women with faces covered). There people walking on the roads with their livestock, Daewoo marshrutkas. In one word : chaos.

The trip takes 20 hours.

In Osh we find an apartment in a soviet apartment block that costs $4 per night. This city is awesome - an explosive ethnic mix, a lively bazaar to display it and a huge rocky hill in the middle of it all with an ancient mosque. A muddy river runs through the middle of the city - chayhanas wrap themselves around the banks, old dudes with long silver beards sit inside munching on Shashlyk and sipping tea. There are also 2 straight modern (read: soviet) tree-lined streets. One of them has an improptu barricade through it... a potent reminder of what happened here 2 months ago and what could happen again.