Turkmenistan: welcome to Hell

Why bother with historical sites, charming villages, scrumptious cuisine  and works of art to draw the tourists in when you can offer THE GATES OF HELL. Yes, Turkmenistan’s top tourist attraction is the Darvaza gas crater, a great firy pit, without the inconvenience of a volcano that has the tendency to erupt and kill lots of people once in a while, which has niggling side issue of putting off the average tourist. Mind you, given the visa regime the country…

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Conversation with a taxi driver

What follows is an approximation of an exchange I had with a taxi driver outside Tashkent airport in Uzbekistan after I had already said no to a dozen other taxi drivers, but these details are almost irrelevant as other travellers on a tight budget will be familiar with all the salient points regardless of the country. “Taxi”. “No thanks I am getting the bus”. “I give you good price”. “I am getting the bus”. “I know good guest house”. “I…

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The most important book in the world?

The title may make a grand claim, so I had best state my case clearly. Looking at the picture below you may have rightly assumed it to be a Quran, but I am not making a case for the Quran in itself, although a reasonable argument could be made. If we are just talking about books as defined by their title, the competition is probably down to a three-way race between the Quran, The Bible and the Torah. Judaism may…

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Town on the edge of nowhere

On a wall in the Savitsky Museum of Art in Nukus, NW Uzbekistan, hangs a modest landscape painting from 1976 depicting the Moynaq fish canning factory. The factory itself is a relatively unobtrusive part of the scene and probably served more as a means of keeping the authorities from shipping the artist off to the gulag for the crime of rejecting the absurd values of Soviet Realism, as had happened to others. Art could not function as a means of…

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Uzbekistan: what did you learn at school?

In the golden age of education, that some politicians would still like us to return to, we were told that Europeans, preferably British, discovered everywhere, Europeans invented just about anything of any use and made the important scientific breakthroughs. When the rest of the world was mentioned it was likely to be with reference to what a marvellous job we had done bringing our enlightened values to their barbarian darkness. Of course I am being a tad facetious but it’s…

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