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This is a report of a solo-trip to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, undertaken during July/August 1994.

Turkmenistan

Pierre.Flener
2004-04-03 19:02:45

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Then I make friends with Murat, a Turkmen student from YIldIz Universitesi in istanbul. He also tries to help me, but in vain. However, in passing, he mentions that about thirty people left at 8am in the morning on a bus to Ashkhabad, for about the same fare as the flight! "Harika," I think, back to my old plan. When I move to the standby queue to retrieve my passport, I see an obviously upper-class woman enter the airport with her kids, stoop in front of the long standby queue, and then energetically walk towards some office. Minutes later, she emerges with a handwritten notice, elbows her way across the queue, shoves the notice to the ticket lady, and gets tickets. Cool, what she can do, I can do! Murat reads the Cyrillic sign for me and says it's the airport commander's office. OK, in I go and tell him that since I have to pay for eleven (or sixty-seven?) seats anyway, Turkmenistan Airlines had better treat me as a VIP passenger and get me on the next flight out. (I guess my ticket is "reverse-subsidized," by which I mean that I reimburse the Turkmen government for subsidizing tickets for Turkmens.) "Sure," he says very sympathetically, "come back half an hour before the next flight, and we'll swing that deal." Needless to say that he never shows up, leaving the second-in-command behind, who is a rude obnoxious jerk and doesn't honor his chief's promise.

I definitely switch back to my bus plan now, retrieve my passport from the queue at about 9pm (the last flight being gone, they are closing anyway, so the queue will start all over again tomorrow morning), and walk over to the motel in front of the airport. Judging from the old Russian receptionist's reaction, I must have been the first foreigner to check in there, especially that the price list is not two-tiered. She asks me whether I have local currency. "Da" (as I did some black market deals at the airport). I think this is going to be ...