For years, I have considered visiting the erstwhile
Soviet Stans of Central Asia. I have already travelled to the formerly Soviet
Baltics, South Caucasus and indeed Mother Russia, and Ukraine is also on my
list. In my original imagining, I’d visit all five Stans on the same trip:
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. I’d find
later that visiting the fifth in the list is prohibitively difficult, even for
people from the region.
(By the way, in case you didn’t know, “stan” simply means
“land of” or “place of” in Farsi.)
So, when Kasania expressed her desire to tour Uzbekistan
(after I returned from the USA in the summer of 2024), I jumped on the
opportunity. I am used to traveling alone and doing it without batting an
eyelid but including a friend would certainly be great, too. I got hold of a second
pal (Jerry) who had been living in Kyrgyzstan, to arrange meeting up with him
in Bishkek after Uzbekistan. I also looked at extending the tour into
Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, having decided to forgo Turkmenistan
altogether.
But then I made a snap (some might say, devil-may-care)
decision to fly to New York City for a weekend in February 2025 to see a unique
production of Romeo & Juliet.
This wanton expense forced me to abridge my Central Asian plans, and I held on
only to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The plan was again thwarted when Jerry
suddenly needed to depart Bishkek and head to the UK. Now I decided to make my
way instead to Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, located on (and constituting my
first visit to) the Caspian Sea. This would complete my collection of flags of
the South Caucasus (since there are only three countries in the region, and I’d
already visited Georgia and Armenia).
I travel on a South African passport and Kasania on a Taiwanese one, and neither of us was able to acquire an eVisa. Since there is no Uzbek embassy in Taiwan, we were forced to book a tour, whose operator would provide us with a letter of invitation. The shortest tour on offer that included an LOI lasted eight days. Neither she nor I would normally choose to do a tour, but our hands were tied; we booked and paid. Once that was all arranged, flights were needed. There was a direct flight from Seoul, South Korea to the capital of Uzbekistan, and so we headed to the East Asian peninsula first, deciding to spend a few days exploring. It was my first trip to Korea. As it turned out, there is an Uzbek embassy in this city; had we known, we might have avoided the tour altogether. Ah, well, hindsight!
