Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25062
stops near a pi we are ere. ing to e top dirt pile reveals that we are surrounded by more dirt with holes in it. ur guides explains that we are in the center of a great city. To be ccurate we are in the center of a lot of dirt. During lunch I learn to enjoy the professional bus ten,on"" of having fun no matter where you are and instantly creating a nomadic tribal bond to help the weak overcome the rigors of life on the road. They can effectively insulate themselves from any foreign culture by discussing life in Seattle, people they know and past bus tours. The flash their gold teeth and smile. They are happy that there are too many questions because they probably would have to make up answers anyway. When it is time to go the whole tour is surprised to find that I have taken a one way trip and that I am on my way over the mountai d down into the badlands of Dushanbe. A couple of graying nadians from Alberta wish they could come with me but they paid too mn much for the tour. We say goodbye and my little bubble and band of babbling urists is gone. E BUBBLE HAS BURST: ENTERING TAJIKISTAN Leaving a bus tour requires a certain amount of decompression. Now I must think. Where will I sleep? How will I communicate? Where will I keep my stuff safe? What will I eat? Where can I change money? Where am I? How do I get to where I am going? The usual drill is made even more important by the fact that I need to stay low so the police don't find me. I am hoping that when the bus heads back they will hit the border late enough in the day for the cheap vodka to kick in and for the guard to get his tour-guide commission hopefully overlooking that there is one less passport in the pile. I find a small teahouse and soon find myself surrounded by four very drunk school teachers. I feel like a space alien trying to look nonchalant. The gravity of the fact that I am in Tajikistan without a word of Russian, with no map, no guidebook and no permission takes hold. I can't even order a coffee as my drunken friends start to press glasses of vodka on me. And the last thing my pompadoured friend said as he escorted the bus back to Samarkand was, "I'll be back to make sure we register you with the police." Thanks but no thanks. I decide to trust my new friend Hamrakul, the tour guide. When he comes back from taking the tourists back into Uzbekistan I tell him what I am up to. The fact that I am gambling on this one tiny road taking me all the way to Dushanbe through the back door and without incident will now be put to the test. It seems that Hamrakul is a part-time mountain guide, part-time Engl ish teacher, former prison guard in a Siberian gu/ag (prison camp) and all around mellow fellow. Naturally there are not many tourists here and there is even less call for English teaching in this Tajik/Russian town. Hamrakul has learned English from reading books and then looking up the words he didn't know in a dictionary. His pronunciation is flawless but there are massive gaps in his vocabulary. I discover why. He likes pulp crime novels. He has also read Moby Dick eight times. He likes to read but there are no books for sale in this town. He sits with me in the cafe and apologizes for his drunken friends. As we chat I learn that I am in the home of backgammon, an 5th century Sogdian game. Here it is called nard. I also learn that the national game of Taj ikistan is shahmot, or chess. Shahmot means blocked king. Taj ikistan is also the birthplace of wheat and the pea. I just learned more in five minutes about Tajikistan than in the last two months of preparation. THE PRICE OF TOURISM That night we share dinner at Hamrakul's sim ple apartment. The pompadoured guide who I now call Elvis returns from escorting the bus to the border and cracks open a bottle of local wine. Well, they call it wine but it is actually a passable sherry they pour into their own bottles directly from the factory up the road. In any Russian or former Russian country you don't sip, you slam booze. So conversations are punctuated with toasts to your health, your host and, later on in the evening, to more vague concepts like life and friendship. Then finally it's just drinking. Hamrakul was born in the mountains and has been guiding people since he was young. People used to come in the summer: Japanese, French and Americans. I ask him what it's like to work in a gulag. He just says he went into the army and was a prison guard in a Siberian gulag. That's it. All he wants to say about that phase in his life is that the prisoners ate and lived in better conditions than he did. He shows me his Russian passport, which, by law, must have a new photograph every 15 years. He was a dapper, handsome man in his youth, a much heavier, happier man in his later youth, and now a hard sad man in his fifties. He quietly tells me that times have been tough. He looks at my passport. He says "Time has been kinder to you."