Skål and Na zdorovye

It was early morning when we landed in Tashkent, and walking out of the airport doors it was immediately evident that we weren’t in Russia any more. On the other side of the forecourt road was a plaza filled with little food wagons and stalls, many seemingly equipped with a charcoal brazier cooking something delicious smelling. There were stacks of fruit, breads, lord knows what else. But no, you should already be full from your bread/egg/cucumber meal, so Larisa hustled us onto a bus and off to the Uzbekistan Hotel, another giant slab of a thing in the middle of the city.

Tashkent is in a very active earthquake zone, and the city had evidently been leveled a few years before. So the hotel was brand new (just opened a few months before we got there) and was a thing of much local pride. Fine, good on ya. We got checked in, managed a shower, then reported for an afternoon’s bus tour around the town.

To be honest, I don’t recall much about the next day and a half, possibly due to the influence of some very blonde SAS flight crew members who were laying over at the hotel. At the time, SAS had (exclusive?) rights to overfly the USSR between western Europe and Japan; all the other European carriers flew “polar” routes that involved tech stops in Anchorage. The price SAS paid was to make a tech stop at TAS, and the Hotel Uzbekistan is where their flight crews were domiciled between flights.

At the time there was a very nasty, overly sweet, but exceedingly cheap champagne knock-off made in Uzbekistan. That night we found ourselves in the company of a number of very attractive SAS FAs and stewards in the hotel bar (way prettier than any of us, so fuhgeddaboudit) who were self-medicating on this awful (but effective) booze. Thus my second day in Tashkent is a complete blank.

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In the shadow of the Pamirs.

We were forbidden to take pictures from any of the flights, which was a shame because the flight from Tashkent to Dushanbe entailed overflying some of the most incredible mountain scenery I’ve ever beheld. Like most of Tajikistan, Dushanbe sits at the foot of the Pamir mountains, extensions of the Hindu Kush, Karakorum and ultimately the rest of the Himalayas. You’re at 20,000 feet beginning your descent, and you’re looking UP at one mountain peak after another. Stunning.

Our time – just a day – in Dushanbe was the most “Soviet” of the whole trip. Only surface impressions, of course, but it was clear that the authorities didn’t feel that Dushanbe was ready for prime time. Our Intourist bus took us past some unmemorable buildings, a standard town square with a statue of Lenin in the middle, I think a war memorial (ubiquitous throughout the USSR although I have no idea how many, if any, Tajiks served in the Great Patriotic War.) The highlight/centerpiece of the day was a visit to a textile factory where numerous young women were all sewing furiously as they assembled “traditional” Tajik garments, sitting under red banners exhorting (in Russian, not Tajik) that they strive to increase production in time for the next CPSU Congress. As if they gave a…

And, as we kept observing throughout the trip, if you looked through the windows into the management offices, there was a blond (or blonde) head sitting in the big chair.






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