Undersleeping in Uzbekistan

[kileskus]

Tashkent - Khiva - Samarkand - Bukhara (and some places in between)

"What ails you?" "Ah, my foot still throbs."
"Gout?" "The wound through which a bullet ran."
And at once the heart aches with longing
For the golden light of Turkestan.
- Nikolay Gumilyov, 'Turkestan Generals'. (Translation mine, meaning mostly preserved.)

Turkestan is an historic term used for a region in Asia inhabited by Turkic peoples that we now call Central Asia - the 5 Stans and Xinjiang. Gumilyov's lines were less about Turkestan itself so much as about the grit of Russian imperialist expansion contrasted against the frivolity of Moscow/Petersburg high society, but I find it evocative of the mystique of the region too.

This is my first major international trip in 18 months. In that time I've been dealing with personal and career setbacks; I moved to New Zealand for a 'fresh start' and learned that you can't run away from your problems if you are the problem.

So when I managed to get three weeks of leave, my first inclination was to use it for life admin. Do my taxes, add to the CV, read more Nietzsche. Travel was not on the list. Travel has, perhaps slanderously to admit on AFF, lost some of its shine for me.

Peer pressure made me book this trip: colleagues asking, "Where are you going for your leave?", to which "to the shops whenever the fridge is empty" would stick in my throat.

Part of me wanted to go back to Melbourne to drink with friends, get caught in a storm, and see if Town Hall station still smelled new. I hated Melbourne when I first went there for uni - the crowded streets, the PTV delays, the weather. But Melbourne has stubbornly become home to me; home is the place the you keep wanting to run away from, and then miss once you've left.

So this was how I decided to spend my leave: visit Uzbekistan, drop by Melbourne, and throughout this wrangle with the ATO, retool the CV, and read more Nietzsche. And hopefully re-ignite some passion for travel.

The final itinerary: WLG-AKL-JFK-LHR for 2-day stopover and then STN-SAW-OSS. Overland to Uzbekistan. 12 days there total, with many early morning starts. On the way back, TAS-CAN-MEL and then finally WLG. Essentially an eastward round-the-world trip, a bit of Phileas Fogging sans the hot air balloons.

I aim to do this report live, am posting this from my gate in WLG.

 

[RooFlyer]

Already my 'trip report of the month'

 

[Mtchrs]

I visited Uzbekistan in May this year so will be following.
Don’t miss the museum in Nukus, that was my highlight.

 

[kileskus]

WLG - AKL - JFK - LHR
JQ258, QF3, AA100 BA180

I booked this as a Classic award ticket for 64,000 QFF points in Y. There was availability to upgrade the QF3 sector to business but I'd burned most of my points on trans-Tasman J the past year thinking I wasn't going to fly internationally for a while. Ah the regrets.

Wellington is my nearest city with an international airport. It has the dubious distinction of being one of the windiest cities in the world, and these gusts congregate at the train station like children around an ice cream truck in a Perth summer. I've had patients who've fractured humeruses and femurs being blown over outside the railway terminus.

It was rainy and windy when I arrived, but the ground picked no fights with my bones. The plane to AKL was delayed due to bad weather in CHC. Check-in at AKL was then a bemusing process where the agent consulted a senior colleague for a long time and they both came back, asked if I had an ETA, and then started flipping through my passport pages looking for it.

As a plebeian QFF silver I had linked a lounge pass to be able to use the AKL business lounge, but given the flight delay and the check-in kerfuffle only had a few minutes so decided on a quick shower.



The suites are tastefully designed, but without an extractor fan it felt like a sauna by the end. They provide a stool too so I guess some people might sit down and use it as a steam room after. Boarding was called while I was in the shower, and then a dramatic last call while I was walking to the gate, 45 minutes before departure.

And then we sat... for 2 hours. Apparently 40 pax had had their incoming flight from MEL delayed so we waited for them, and then engineers came onboard as one of the toilets wasn't flushing. By the time we kicked off, missing my connection was a foregone conclusion.

Sleep on flights to me either comes early or never comes. This time it was the latter. I watched In the Grey, with the usual Guy Ritchie snappy montages and non-diegetic audiotrack, good action at the end but is slow to get going. I read a bit of Thus Spake Zarathustra next, and then an article entitled 'Devonian standard boundaries within the shelf belt of the Siberian Old Continent and in the South Tien Shan', as research for one of the places I'll be visiting if the plans of mice and men do not go awry.

At JFK the Qantas app showed I'd been rebooked for a later BA flight. Qantas ground staff gave me an express connection pass and as I am HLO it was 55 mins from disembarking to arriving at the gate, comfortable but not comfortable enough to check out the Centurion lounge for a drink that I badly needed by then.

The BA safety video is a riot. The dinner service was definitely up there as one of the better economy meals I've had, with a flavourful chicken and mash and some American comforts: a suspicious looking orange cheddar that actually tasted like real cheese, and a fluffy key lime pudding.




I found this notice on the back of the suspicious orange cheese amusing.

Am in central London now. 36 hours without sleep isn't the longest I've gone (thanks, night shifts) but definitely not rediscovering the joys of travel yet.

 

[kileskus]

London

I had made the n00b mistake of not realising that I arrived at JFK the same day I left AKL; I have therefore unintentionally allocated two days instead of one to my London stopover.

I last passed through in 2022 and, being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the city and not being culinarily adventurous to begin with, I remember retreating into the Tim Horton's-style comfort of Prêt-à-manger and dinner was packaged scotch eggs from M&S. This time, I planned to find out about this vaunted cuisine that my English colleagues grumble about missing.

Thus, yesterday morning the first order of business was procuring an English breakfast:

And I don't wish to do that again. Too many carbs, too much grease for the morning.

After that it was a morning constitutional in Kensington Gardens. I started reading Victorian novels when I was 8, which I had the technical reading skill for but none of the maturity. For some reason I thought the morning constitutional referred to keeping the bowels moving, and that the English back in the day were very regular and quite unashamed to talk about it. In the next few years I would stop believing that sticking out your tongue at your friends will disfigure your face, that spinach makes you strong, and in God. But it wasn't until my late teens that I suddenly had the revelation that these top-hatted cane-wielding gentlemen were talking about walking in Hyde Park.



The fog cleared up fairly quickly.

Overheard conversation between the French couple behind me:
"C'est bouddhiste ?"
"C'est Albert, là," the woman replied, with some exasperation. (The Albert memorial.)

A wander through Queen Victoria's erstwhile prison of Kensington Palace followed, and then a two-hour meandering walk from Hyde Park, through Soho and Westminster allowed me to check off several big ticket items from the London list (or at least their exteriors) to end up at the Royal Festival Hall for the Bruckner 4 performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra.

While called Bruckner 4, the first piece of the performance is actually Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 3 and that was for me the highlight. I've haven't seen a piano concerto before and it's a very different experience to chambre orchestral or symphonic concerts; there's so much more to look at, and the conversation between the piano and the orchestra is not just in the music but also a silent conversation in the way the musicians glance at each other, or prepare their instruments.

Leif Ove Andsnes treated us to an encore after his virtuosic performance in the concerto, a piece I didn't recognise but was rolling and contemplative in a way the concert mostly was not. Then he exited, and the piano was taken away during the intermission, and I am ashamed to say, I fell asleep halfway through the Bruckner.



The applause woke me and I dragged myself the 45 mins to my hotel, the Ibis Styles in Ealing. It's a serviceable budget hotel that helped me add two nights to my push for ALL platinum.


Today I took the high-speed Southeastern train from St Pancras over to Folkestone in Kent to do some fossil hunting. When I was an intern on the surgical service, there was an English inpatient we'd just diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer (low survival rate). He hadn't heard of the pancreas before, and said it sounded like "the train station in London". Unfortunately the pancreas is what I think about now when I see the name St Pancras.

Spoiler: Fossil ramblings

Folkestone has Gault clay formations which contain abundant Lower Cretaceous marine fossils, dating from around 100 mya, especially at a place called Folkestone Warren. I'm not sure why it's called a warren because there are no rabbit holes and it's a beach.


The warren from afar

The clay is found in the cliffs and along the foreshore. The cliffs are protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest so I went to the foreshore. Low tide was around 1.40 p.m.

There's a stretch of beach that doesn't contain much clay, but once I passed that to the more visible, fresh clay at the water's edge I began to see ammonites sticking out of it:


I agitated it a bit too, which I think helped turn up the fossils but was also just fun to do. There are large clumps of drier clay as well along the foreshore which, if I'd had the time and a little pick, could've cracked open too.

The final haul was mostly incomplete pieces:


From 12 o'clock to 3 are the anahoplite ammonites, where the outer whorls cover the inner whorls so they usually look flat with one big outer layer. At 3 o'clock is an anahoplite that I've put onto its back to reveal its underside. The leaf-like ridges are called suture lines. The Jurassic and Cretaceous periods saw the zenith of ammonite evolution; they developed internal mineral partition walls that were arranged in complex folding patterns. These increased its structural strength and allowed for buoyancy regulation. The suture lines on fossils are where those walls joined the outer shell.

5 o'clock is a hamite ammonite, which were uncoiled and tubular.

6 o'clock is a bivalve of some sort. The lighting isn't the best but it has an iridescent mother-of-pearl outer layer to it, and then at the tip there's a separate ammonite as well. This is my favourite piece because of the shine and the co-existence of the two fossils. I haven't cleared away the clay between them for fear of damaging it.

The remaining three are euhoplite ammonites, where you can clearly see the inner whorls.

They're all quite fragile and some of them broke into smaller pieces in my hand, and flakes of mother-of-pearl have come off. I'm not sure if they'll make it back intact to New Zealand with me.

A street in Folkstone town


Martello tower near the warren. There were 74 Martello towers built from the Kent to Sussex coasts during the Napoleonic wars. This one had a nuclear bunker added next to it later.

I went to the Harbour Inn after the fossils for another foray into English cuisine. Call me a philistine but fish and chips just always tastes the same to me. The pub interior was pleasant though.


After that late lunch I rode the train a further 10 minutes down the line to Dover. I didn't do much, just wanted to look at the famed white cliffs, take in the Kent countryside of Moonraker and Goldfinger, and think about what it would've looked like during the evacuation of Dunkirk.


The castle on the left and a barely visible hint of the white cliffs on the right. This is taken from the pier, I thought I'd skip the trek to the cliffs themselves and try to catch a glimpse from the pier but there was a big ship right in the path of view.

The train back to London, which I hadn't pre-booked online as I wasn't sure what time I'd be heading back, was an uncomfortable 43 pounds compared to the 19 on the way there - try to book the day before if you go there.

I'm heading to McDonald's for dinner now, my culinary adventures here complete, and then to bed. Tomorrow is the flight to Osh.

 

[AuSammy]

Definitely along for the ride

 

[tgh]

A truly virtuosic introduction , looking forward to the main event...

 

[RooFlyer]

5 o'clock is a hamite ammonite, which were uncoiled and tubular.

Gotta love a straight cephalopod.

 

[Human]

Love the contrast between Beethoven, Bruckner, Andsnes ... and McDonalds for dinner!

 

[VPS]

Gotta love a straight cephalopod.

I was wondering when you'd comment.

They all look fantastic to me and I'm going to have to go fossil hunting next time I'm in the UK

 

[craven morehead]

Sounds interesting

 

[kileskus]

STN - SAW - OSS
PC1162, PC710

My options to get to Uzbekistan from London were with LOT to Tashkent with a 24-hr stopover in Warsaw, or Pegasus to Osh with a 2-hr layover in Istanbul and then cross by land to Tashkent. While Poland is on the bucket list and LOT sounds more appealing, I thought Osh would be a more fitting side destination. TK doesn't fly there, only PC.

The flight was at 1440 so in the morning I checked out and headed to the Gagosian Gallery on Grosvenor Hill (which is not a hill) to see their new exhibition 'This is still not a pipe', featuring works by Magritte and artists inspired by him.

The gallery looks like a garage from the outside, but inside the staff looked like they came out of a fashion magazine. I was wearing a brewery t-shirt and worn exercise shorts. Nevertheless, I was handed an exhibition catalogue after only the slightest pause (Chekhov: "Good breeding is shown, not by not upsetting the sauce, but by not noticing if someone else does").

There were one to two security guards in each room, with sharp black suits and even sharper French accents. The exhibition space itself features strong, bold lines the way Magritte used in his painting.



I'm familiar with a few of his pieces, but looking at an exhibition dedicated to him you get a sense for just how much he was able to make the impossible look realistic. And so many of his titles are ironic. I took pictures of the pieces that stood out to me but I think I'll paste cleaner ones from Google here:


The Traveller


The Delights of Landscape (les Charmes du paysage in the original. Paysage also means countryside, scenery etc. which is where the irony to me comes from)


Blow to the Heart


The Curse (this one made me laugh)

The rooms each had a large window that was covered by a blind in a lighter shade of the colour of the wall. One of the visitors actually asked the guard, "is that a painting or a window?"


With that taste of London high society, I headed over to Stansted airport. There's one Priority Pass lounge there, Essence by Escape Lounges, which services gates 1-19 and is not too far from the Emirates lounge. It's quite small and doesn't have its own bathroom. The tables work on a reservation system but the seats facing the glass wall with a view of the tarmac are free for drop-ins.

The lounge offers a selection of cold food, some sandwiches, salads, cold cuts and cheeses. There is a serviced bar with a decent selection of spirits. Despite the lack of glamour and high turnover I found the staff to be extremely friendly and attentive, offering to fill someone's plate for example, or proactively offering me bottled water after they saw me chugging mine down.



The non-reservation tables don't have charging ports though. I left early to go back to the main terminal and find an outlet, but it was packed and the scattered outlets that I could find were either being used or non-functional.

Obviously Pegasus doesn't supply charging ports. The flight was unpleasant in general. Boarding was chaotic - people sitting near the back decided to board from the front and vice versa so you'd get face-offs in the middle of the aisle. Kids ran up and down the aisle during the flight, one of them went around pinching passengers too which upset a few people. The person behind me kept kicking my seat and it would rattle loudly each time.

30 mins at the Plaza Premium Lounge in SAW (it was packed, some people had to stand and the wine glasses were all gone so I filled a beer tankard with rosé) and then I boarded the flight to OSS. There was a European family with six kids spread across three rows who I assume are moving to Osh based on the amount of luggage they were carrying. I was in the aisle seat next to two of their young girls. They spoke no English or Russian so I had to tighten their seatbelts for them and they put their excess carry-on at my feet. They kept offering me candy in German.

Essentially, the trip was an expected LCC experience, but somehow felt worse than Jetstar or Scoot. Next time, I'll take LOT and the 1-day stopover in Warsaw.

---

I was wondering when you'd comment.

They all look fantastic to me and I'm going to have to go fossil hunting next time I'm in the UK

So I had looked up a couple of fossil hunting places near London. I'll talk more about my attempt to visit a dinosaur fossil site in Uzbekistan when I get to that point of the trip, but basically I found out three weeks out that my application for a permit there was denied, hence the decision to find some fossils during my London stopover.

There's the Jurassic Coast down in Dorset including Lyme Regis where Mary Anning found her fossils. You can find ammonites there and go on guided fossil walks to see the dinosaur sites. It's doable as a day trip if you have a car.

At Compton Bay on the Isle of Wight you can even find dinosaur fossils yourself, though it takes 4 hours to get there including the ferry (probably a bit less if you drive to the port) and might be better as an overnight stay.

Then the Kent coast with the Gault formations, places like Folkestone, Herne Bay, and Isle of Sheppey. Folkestone was doable as a day trip without a car which is why I chose that. There are two places near each other, Folkestone Warren and Copt Point. The former is fairly accessible though there are a few rocks you have to clamber down to get to the foreshore so bring some sturdy shoes. I didn't go to Copt Point but have read that it's rockier there.

If you've done fossil hunting on beaches before you'll know what to do (I've been to Beaumaris in Melbourne), but if not be sure to check the tides and go an hour or two before low tide as it's receding. You'll also have to be willing to get on your hands and knees or do a lot of squatting - my thighs and knees were sore the next day. Bring tissues, airtight containers/bags, and stabilising adhesives if you can. I'm HLO so didn't bring any adhesives due to LAG restrictions.