So, I did get a fever. My head got so hot that when I had a shower, it was dry within a few seconds of getting out. Cold water compress helped, but it seemed time to see a dr.<\/p>\n
Our fixer kindly arranged this and I went with him this morning to a clinic and was examined by a very nice woman with our fixer Bekzod in attendance to translate. The last time I felt this way was many years ago in Bhutan<\/a>, where I was diagnosed with Typhus Fever. Many of the same symptoms are present here in Uzbekistan for me, but the doctor felt it was primarily having drunk Tashkent tap water on my first day (WTF was I thinking?), going in and out of AC environments multiple times a day, and a throat infection that had travelled down to my lungs.<\/p>\n So I lay in the clinic on an IV drip with some concoction or two in the saline for 30min and then was given a script for some pills (antibiotics, anti-histamines, and one other one I forget now). I go back tomorrow morning for a second 30min session, and then we carry on back to Tashkent.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve spent the balance of the day in bed, reading Journey to Khiva<\/a>, by Philip Glazebrook, who passed through here in 1991. Wonderful writer. And was just stepping out for bite to eat with Harold when I could not find my wallet. Nowhere. I WhatsApp\u2019d Bekzod and thank goodness he found it in his car. It was a fraught lunch while I waited to hear back on that.<\/p>\n So, no photos today either, needless to say. Our drive back through the mountains tomorrow will be a nice re-visit. We kind of blew through them on the way here. I have picked up an excellent present for Owen, but have yet to locate the one thing I\u2019ve been thinking of for Finn. I hope to find what I\u2019m looking for back in Tashkent or in the small village we\u2019ll visit with Bekzod the day after tomorrow.<\/p>\n Some things to note about planning a visit to Uzbekistan:<\/p>\n 1)<\/span><\/strong> Under no circumstances should you rely on finding a bank machine that will allow withdrawals from your debit account. Even then, only two machines we found in TK (and there are hundreds of ATMs) will provide for a cash advance on your VISA\/Mastercard. And if you choose the latter, you start getting dinged for interest immediately. The trick is to cash advance on credit card, and then immediately do some online banking with your bank to pay the advance off right away. You\u2019ll still get dinged for interest, but then only for one day.<\/p>\n 2)<\/span><\/strong> We each brought USD$2000 cash, converting some to Uzbekistan SOM (the currency here) and that turned out to be the amount due from each of us for our fixer (to pay for train tickets, hotels, transfers, an airfare and his consultancy fee). Having the fixer book much of our itinerary was a very good idea.<\/strong> But we have necessarily had to make some cash advance withdrawals to cover off stuff not included in the itinerary. Harold has a Mastercard and was ablel to locate a single ATM with the \u2018Maestro<\/strong>\u2019 symbol on it, allowing him to make a debit withdrawal from one of his accounts. My Visa card is associated with the \u2018Plus<\/strong>\u2019 system and we could not find a \u2018Plus\u2019 ATM anywhere in Uz for love or money. So come prepared with lots of cash instead. I have<\/em> been able to use my Visa card to ad hoc pay for some things (extra hotel rooms for a couple of nights here and there, the odd purchased here or there). But I hate using credit. I had brought my USD$ cash in 20s, 10s and 5s, assuming they would be easier to deal with, locally. This was unnecessary. If we hadn\u2019t given our fixer all our US cash, we\u2019d just be converting chunks of it from time to time at banks anyway and they don\u2019t care about small bills. There is no Paypal or similar service in Uzbekistan. The only way we have to pay our fixer is USD or SOM advances from ATMs off of our credit cards.<\/p>\n 3)<\/span><\/strong> Very little to no English is spoken in Uzbekistan at all. Like, almost zero. The Uzbek language is king, but Russian is too. We are extraordinarily lucky in our fixer, whose English is very good indeed. I would be happy to pass on his credentials to anyone who is interested. I had supposed I\u2019d be able to rely on gesticulation and so on for communication, but this culture is unlike any I have encountered before and relying on this method of comms has not been overly fruitful.<\/p>\n 4)<\/span><\/strong> I am sad to relate that the food here is not that great. Primarily, it is quite bland, made up for with copious amounts of salt in everything. It is doubly ironic that the ancient crossroads of the Silk and Spice routes should not have any spices to their cuisine. Really weird. Their national dish, called Plov (and a kind of Central Asian take on \u2018pilaf\u2019 or \u2018pilau\u2019, is heavily-oiled rice with some way over-cooked veggies and a skewer of beef\/lamb. Not really a pot-boiler of a dish of distinction<\/em>.<\/p>\n 5)<\/span><\/strong> I am celiac, so anything with wheat, barley and the like is a hard no-go for me. I had assumed that I would be able to find rice dishes with vegetables as an alternative. Not so. Rice is hard to come by outside of plov for some reason. I have defaulted to sampling the \u2018chicken salad\u2019 offering all across the places we have visited, supplemented by french fries of various qualities. As well, there are very few vegetarian options at all.<\/p>\n 6)<\/span><\/strong> This feels like a very safe society. while this is true of many islamic cultures, I have felt particularly safe here. Sometimes, when I have given too much money for something, the vendor has chuckled and picked out the excess and handed it back to me. You do need to bargain in markets, but that\u2019s kind a given. I have never felt anyone sizing me up, or following me or anything like that at all. People here are honest and curious about where I come from (routinely being mistaken for a Euro – one guide pegs Italy at 50% of her clientele), and are always surprised when we say Canada. When I \u2018lost\u2019 my wallet today, I was not really worried about it having been stolen or someone finding and keeping it. I somehow felt it would turn up. Uzbekistanis are a kind and thoughtful people.<\/p>\n 7)<\/span> <\/strong>If you locate restaurants outside of tourist areas, you can have a full meal with sparkling water or juice for under USD$5. No kidding. Hotels prices are similarly low when selected outside of tourist areas. We have averaged USD$65\/night for really quite nice places. Going to the doctor this morning cost me USD$8, which included the examination and resulting medications (incl the IV drip today and tomorrow). Once here, and with a little care, your money will go a long way. Khiva, far and away, was the most expensive place with costs doubled and trebled for everything. You may have read my disappointing post on Khiva at this point, so a single day there is more than enough to check it off your list.<\/p>\n 8)<\/span><\/strong> We arrived August 1st, marking the beginning of the downturn in temperatures across the region. However, that said, we still experienced temps of 45C on some days. I have written at length about how this affects you as a traveller earlier on this blog. Our guide that day out at the desert fortresses said she\u2019d brought some tourists there in early July and it had been 60C that day. Unbelievable. I can\u2019t understand how humans can function in that sort of heat. So, while the temps are much better in September and October, those are reportedly the high tourist months and you\u2019d have to contend with that. It is only 33C here today in Kokand, and was actually an amazing 21C when we stopped for a pop mid-transit in the mountains yesterday.<\/p>\n 9)<\/span><\/strong> I brought a small 13\u201d laptop along on this trip. It has been very useful. It\u2019s not my daily-driver, and I am backing up to a small external drive each day, so I wouldn\u2019t be too bummed it something happened to it. But it\u2019s been useful to looking at maps, booking hotel rooms and so on (not to mention blogging!). I brought a small gorillapod<\/a> tripod. I used it once because I thought I\u2019d better having brought it. But I really should have left it at home. I have only a single DSLR<\/a> and two<\/a> lenses<\/a>, and have used those a lot. I have a backup DSLR<\/a> at home, but it is of inferior quality and doesn\u2019t allow for full-frame lenses anyway. I bought the Apple \u2018International<\/a>\u2019 plug kit to charge the laptop and have used that everyday (well, just the one UZ style adapter). I have a Satechi<\/a> multiport adapter that I plug into the laptop and then I attach my watch charger and phone charger to it. I do have a standalone wall-plug adapter<\/a> that accommdates a variety of plug styles that I got at Best Buy before leaving Canada in a pre-departure frenzy, but I haven\u2019t really needed it.<\/p>\n 10)<\/span><\/strong> I\u2019m certain there is more to add here, but that\u2019s enough for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, I did get a fever. My head got so hot that when I had a shower, it was dry within a few seconds of getting out. Cold water compress helped, but it seemed time to see a dr. Our fixer kindly arranged this and I went with him this morning to a clinic and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,22,82],"tags":[94,80,78],"class_list":["post-5861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kokand","category-travel","category-uzbekistan","tag-kokand","tag-travel","tag-uzbekistan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5861"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5863,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5861\/revisions\/5863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellum.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}