September 4, 2008
Permanent Site Visit – Part 1: Getting to Talas
On Saturday, August 31, at 9am, I hopped into a taxi with a trainee I’ll call K, and our new
host fathers for what was to be a 4 ½ hour ride to Talas. It took us seven.
Here’s why. We hadn’t even left the city when we changed taxis. Let me preface
this account by saying our host fathers arranged the ride even though they had
never met before last Saturday. Oh, and neither of them speaks a word of
English. The reason for the switch, we learned, is that our first taxi was a
city taxi. We needed a long distance driver. Well, we did upgrade from a VW to
a Benz, so K and I weren’t complaining. (K is a female who is assigned to a
village about 40 minutes outside Talas and will be teaching English. She also
just finished at NYU so maybe that’s why the universe put our fathers
together.) Then K realized she was out of units and needed a SIM card for her
cell so she could text during the trip. We stopped. While there, my father
bought some bananas. He was scoring points in my book cuz they’re expensive
over here. Back in the taxi we drove for about 10 minutes when we realized the
fathers also wanted watermelon. We stopped. They didn’t see any they liked. We
drove a half mile. We stopped. They found a couple kinds of melons they liked
and loaded them into the trunk. Finally, we were sure the open road was ours
for the taking. And it was. For 15 minutes, when we pulled over to the side of
the road and waited. For what, K and I were clueless. After a few sentences
from my father, I knew we were waiting for someone. Finally a car pulled in
front of us and six people piled out. Relatives of K’s host father, on their
way to Talas for the Independence Day celebration on Sunday. We said hello,
they chatted a while and we all got back in the cars. K and I are finding this
rather amusing but figure we’re finally going to hit the road for good. Wrong.
A few miles up the road we pull over at a cafe and get out of the car again.
This time to eat. The other car had bread, cookies, a dessert, a box of juice
and a bottle of vodka. It’s a little after 10am. They toast me and K, I make a toast, then someone else
does. All these toasts have to be because the bottle must be finished. In Kyrgyzstan,
there’s no such thing as “let’s have a shot and save the rest for later.” Thank
goodness it was a small bottle. (I had none as I’m still sticking to my vow of
no alcohol for two years.) K and I realized we’d left the hotel about two hours
ago and we were barely out of Bishkek. Well, I can tell you we drove a few
hours without incident. Through the most beautiful mountain pass I’ve ever
seen, even better than I remember Colorado being. And the rain we drove through
on the way to the top of the pass was pellet sized hail when we got there. Not
sure how high we were, but we were up there. The snow-capped peaks were almost
eye level. Pretty amazing. Now it was time to make our way down the pass and
could envision being in Talas in a little more than an hour. Until we got the
flat tire. Yup. Open the trunk, take out the luggage and the melons (remember
them?). On the positive side, he had it in a beautiful setting. Tire changed,
back on the road. Everybody’s relaxing; I mention to K that through it all, our
driver was doing a pretty good job. That good job must have tired him out
because he fell asleep at the wheel. Literally. The sound of the gravel on the
shoulder roused him or we’re down in a ditch. I won’t exaggerate and say it was
a 5,000 foot drop, although I was tempted. K’s father took the wheel and drove
the rest of the way to his house. We were all invited in for some food, which
was a good thing because it gave our driver a chance to nap. We still had 30
minutes left to Talas. At 4pm we pulled in
front of my new home (well, it will be starting September 19).
Seven hours, but truly a Peace Corps experience.
Cool as my trip was, it doesn’t top the 10-hour ride of my friend C (scheduled drive time: 6 ½ hours). Among other unnamed things, her driver stopped at a mountain waterfall, stripped off his clothes and went swimming. All while his passengers waited in the car. This must have tired him out because a while down the road, he pulled over and slept for an hour. Jeez, I wish our guy would’ve thought of that.
Cool as my trip was, it doesn’t top the 10-hour ride of my friend C (scheduled drive time: 6 ½ hours). Among other unnamed things, her driver stopped at a mountain waterfall, stripped off his clothes and went swimming. All while his passengers waited in the car. This must have tired him out because a while down the road, he pulled over and slept for an hour. Jeez, I wish our guy would’ve thought of that.
Let’s talk taxis. The only time I felt afraid in
Kyrgyzstan involved transportation. The two main types of transport were
mini-buses (marshrutkas) and sedans, usually Mercedes, VW or Toyota. You could
take either for short trips across town or distant cities; most people used
marshrutkas from village to village, but not always.
Marshrutkas were (re)designed to hold about
fifteen people comfortably. As I recall, two seats on one side and one on the
other like a small commuter jet’s seating. Often they held more than twenty on
the village to village routes. And that didn’t include the bags the passengers
brought with them. We had to take them to our afternoon sessions as they
weren’t held in Kenesh. Some of these vehicles didn’t seem fit for the road.
Balding tires and enough klinks and klanks made one wonder when the engine
would drop to the road. One flat tire or broken axle meant serious injuries or
worse for all aboard.
The long distance taxis held different concerns,
but the one that scared me the most was being placed in a car with the steering
wheel on the right hand side. Nearly all of the cars in Kyrgyzstan came via
Russia, stolen I was told, and the price was cheap. Poor buyers aren’t picky
buyers. Anyway, since the roads were two-lane this meant that a driver who
wanted to pass had to put the passenger half of the car into the opposite lane
to get a view of oncoming traffic. Passengers would often be his eyes and
shout, “machina” which if I recall correctly, was the word for car. I never felt
more like a sitting duck in my life. The road from Talas to Bishkek is littered with memorials of fatal crashes.
I only took such a car once. After that, if one
was offered to me at the taxi station, I’d wait. This could make for a long day
because taxis needed four passengers before they would start out. If it was a
slow travel day, I could wait for over an hour for a car to fill up. If I
wanted to leave before the car was full, I’d have to pay for the empty seats. I
only did this once, from Almaty, Kazakhstan to Bishkek after my trip to Turkey.
Waiting for what could have been hours in a country I didn’t know didn’t suit
me, so I talked my travel partner into each of us buying two seats. It was
costly, but we made it back to Kyrgyzstan quicker and we had lots of room
during our trip. The driver had his money so he didn’t care.
