We thought we had seen had road the day before on the way to the crater. We had heard that the road going north to Uzbekistan wasn’t great either. Serious understatement. I don’t know that you could fully consider them roads considering there was more not pavement than pavement. Oddly enough you would hit these patches of road that were fine for about 10 seconds and then it would immediately go back to crap. Rough gravel, potholes, you name it. They are so bad that most of the time people drive on the dirt next to the road because it was smoother. Getting up to 20 mph was a real treat. I think it took something like 7 hours to go 120 miles or so.
Finally it was time for the dreaded Uzbekistan border. They are notorious for being very thorough with their inspections. They will ask you to pull out all of your medications and go through them one by one to make sure they aren’t on their list of banned drugs. They are known for looking through all the pictures on your phone or camera. They will also occasionally go through all of the pictures on your laptop or tablet looking for porn or anti-government material I guess. Also they hate drones. They are illegal for a dumb reason, and for the past 6 months that’s been a continual point of conversation between ralliers. How do you get through the border without it being confiscated.
We cleared Turkmenistan customs quickly and were scooted along to the other side. Between each border is a varying length of land known as “no man’s land” where you don’t want to be. If you’re stuck there that usually means you have a visa issue and can’t get across or you are stuck because the other border is closed for the day. Up until this point we’ve been lucky and every border we’ve crossed was open 24/7. This one closed at 6, and we were waiting outside the gate at about 5 or so. We’ve learned that border guards generally do whatever the fuck they want because it doesn’t matter to them how fast you get across, so there was concern that they just wouldn’t let us in and we’d have to wait until morning. After a consider amount of milling about they did let our 4 team convoy in. Whew!
There’s a maddening part of border crossings, and it’s that half the time they don’t tell you what to do at all. If you’re lucky you get a pointing in the general direction but most of them don’t speak English so you just have to guess. Dave and I were waiting for around 15 minutes before our convoy mate Alex approached a little office. Alex speaks a little Russian so he was able to get a little direction out of the guy. After that was the car search time. I wasn’t terribly excited about this because I do have a drone in my car. We have a ton of crap in and on top of our car and up until this point all of the border guards have had no desire to look through all that stuff. We were the only 3 cars there and I guess they were border so this wasn’t the case for us. They made me pull out every single bag in the car. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before but the borders will separate passengers from the car owner. They’ll make you open every single bag and dig through them for a minute. Sure enough every prescription got pulled out and I had to pantomime what they were for. A few minutes before they came over to the car I moved my my drone bag onto the roof rack and crossed my fingers. I think I got off a little lightly because while searching through the car they found a book about Central Asian history and the female guard was reading the same book in Russian. She started talking to me about all that which was a welcome distraction from the car search. I’ve also learned that if you’re super nice to the people usually they’ll shew you through. They eventually got bored with the mess they were sorting through and called it quits. Never looked at the roof. Sweet, drone safe! One of the guards found a bag of pistachios and just started munching on them while lazily looking through the car. Jerk.
At this point we were pretty sick of driving so decided to post up in a little town called Nukus not too far from the border. Hotels in this part of the world can be amazingly cheap and I think the place we picked was around $30 per room, with breakfast! Another huge plus is a hotel with a fridge downstairs that sells beer. After a long day on the road it’s nice to unwind with a cold beer.
Here’s an interesting thing about Uzbekistan. You can exchange currency with your hotel and at a bank like normal at the official exchange rate. Today the rate was 7000 of theirs for 1 USD. You trade in a 50 and get a comical amount of bills. The interesting thing I’m alluding to is that you can exchange money on the black market – which is illegal – for a better rate. Hendrick found a guy literally in the parking lot eating who offered to exchange USD for a rate of 7500:1. There were even rumors that you could get a rate of up to 8200:1 if you were in the right place. It literally makes no sense and we are still trying to figure out how this works. Of course we exchanged the money illegally, who can turn down more bang for the buck.
After everyone got cleaned up we all went out in search of dinner. We came across a restaurant that was closing but were willing to serve us food. Our waiter was a 12 year old who spoke no English, but really hustled around and got us hooked up. We enjoyed some tasty kebabs and a beer then decided to call it a night. We had a 600 km drive to Buhkara the next day.
