Uzbeki Sun 1

krolesh
Sep 2, 2024
5 min read

A Blistering Summer

Wow, it's a stinker out there

It's 6.42pm and it's still 37 smackeroos.

I'm so glad I've just sat down in a cool-ish café.

That's the thing about the summer here. The only real relief you get is very very late at night, or in the early hours of the morning. And while you get a sweaty breeze while you're riding, it's still hot, and, as the day wears on, the heat just gets more and more ferocious.

Today I arrived here in the town of Fergana at about 4pm, and I was totally frizzled. I'd ridden about 80 clicks in the heat, and, while the morning ride was ok, I really got cooked later in the day.

I don't know how many litres of fluids I drank, but it was a lot, helped by the kindest man, who pulled over next to me on the road in the late morning, motioned me to a drink place, and then bought me 2 x 1L bottles of cold drinks. What a guy! Just to be hospitable. After delivering the drinks to me, he said goodbye and rode off on his electric scooter.

Both bottles were from a traditional homemade drinks stall. The first was ayron, a fermented milk that basically tastes like a liquid version of the qurut fermented cheese that you get all over Central Asia. And the second was a type of kvas, which basically tastes like a thicker version of the Kyrgyz version of kvas that I've been drinking loads of, a fermented drink made from old bread and rye flour. It's super refreshing.

Uzbeki hospitality has already shown itself to be impeccable.

Ayron

Kvas

I've got a long way to go to get to my next major destination, the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, a city of 3 million.

I left Andijon on a very colourful (and very bumpy) paved cycle path.

While I was resting three women in separate donkey carts overtook me.

I wasn't having that, so I rode off and overtook them back, bloody upstarts. I did say salom on the way through though, and they all responded politely and smiled.

The bike track came to a sudden but ceremonious end

Great town names

Another car accident at a major intersection

It took me at least an hour to get out of the built up zone.

The Fergana Valley

The Fergana Valley, despite its arid clime, is one of the main food baskets of Central Asia, and straddles three countries, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Osh in Kyrgyzstan, where I spent some time recently, also sits within the valley.

The whole area is irrigated by waters from two major rivers, the Naryn and the Kara Darya, and has been settled for millenia. My namesake Alexander the Great founded an estate in the southwestern part of the valley, where they grew grains, vegetables and fruit, including grapes.

In fact, Alexander was originally known as Alexander the Grape (Grower), and over centuries his name became bastardised, as people drank more and more grape wine and thought he was so Great to grow all those raw materials for it.

These days the cotton and textile industries are also big here, as witnessed by cute tufts of raw cotton that occasionally fly off random trucks that are speeding down the main roads trying to kill me.

The valley is also famous for a guy called Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur, otherwise known as Babur, who is one of the most influential guys in world history that you've never heard of.

Mughal Conquests

Babur is the founder of the Mughal Empire, the empire that completely conquered most of the north of India in the early 1500s, and, at its peak in about 1720, grew to eventually control pretty much all of what is now known as India (except it's very southern tip), as well as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and northern Afghanistan.

The empire was huge, and was only eventually dissolved as a unified empire by the British, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

So Babur is revered all over the place, but most particularly in Uzbekistan, where he was born. He was actually born in Andijon, where I was last night, and spent a chunk of time in Osh as a teenager, before moving on to bigger and better things, like raping and pillaging.

They were smart buggers those Mughals, much smarter than the British. Once they'd conquered new lands they often just allowed the residents to continue their religious and cultural practices, but collected taxes, which they used to introduce civil works and administrative practices, and acquire more precious funds for their jewellery collections.

Organised infrastructure in turn generated more economic growth, which meant more taxes to collect, and therefore more jewels, bigger harems, more elaborate neverending banquets, and, of course, more magnificent palaces and mausoleums.

Just think the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Humayun's Tomb, Fatehpur Sikri, the Red Fort in Delhi, blah de blah.

In fact, it was only when one of the last Mughal rulers, Aurangzeb, started repressing Hindu religious practices that the chariot wheels really began to fall off, and there were major uprisings against them.

It was a super long super hot road today

Shady fruit stalls

Cold drinks were the order of the day, so I ordered them all day.

Eventually I made it here to the town of Fergana, which isn't as historic as some of the other great cities in Uzbekistan, but beautiful all the same. The Russians developed the area greatly in the 1900s, and made it all look nice.

Wide leafy boulevards. I wish I'd gone to the Ideal School before attending the Perfect University in Tashkent.

Whilst it's a bit confusing to start with, a non kebob is actually a kebab, rather than anything other than a kebab. It's served with non, which is bread. I saw a sign yesterday for a non shaslyk too, but it was also a real one.

The market here was a cracker. That's three out of three in Uzbekistan so far.

I would've loved to chat with this gentlewoman

More kartoschka somsa, I've been getting stuck into these.

Vegetarian borsch, which, despite the waiter's reassurances, was about as vegetarian as your Uzbeki grandmother's chunky horse soup.

It's happened three times this evening so far. Suddenly the lights go down, really loud music starts, and all the staff parade to a particular café table in the dark, sparklered birthday cake in tow. They pop some sort of firecracker thing, glittery paper flies everywhere, they all cheer, clap faster and faster, and then suddenly move away quickly, the music stops, the lights go back on, and it's as if nothing just happened.

I love it.