This story, if nothing else, will serve as a good lesson for those headed to the Pamirs, double check time zones.
We arrive in Murghab as the sun is going down. My driver asks what I will be doing the next day, to which I reply “Osh”. We have time to find tomorrow’s driver as the guesthouse dinner is generally an hour after sundown and the town, for once, looked big enough to have restaurants, if we were late. We pull into the container bazaar to find a driver. The shops housed in shipping containers all have their doors locked for the evening. Near the entrance, we greet a friendly looking man of about 45 sporting a traditional Kyrgyz hat, who gives me the traditional tourist greeting of quoting me double the price to Osh. With a smile, I reply “Fuck off, I’ll walk”. He laughs, then gives me a real price. We shake hands and asks where I am staying as he’ll pick me up. What a gentleman, but I am not sure yet, rumor has it, this town has wifi and I am not about to settle for a guesthouse with slow or “nyet” wifi. We agree that my driver, on his way out of town, will swing by and let him know where Im lodged for the evening.
My driver and I pull out of the container bazaar and he says he knows a place for me. I paid him a hefty price in Alichur to cut our mountain safari short and drive me to the next sizable town so I will not be shy if I find the first ten guesthouses to be undesirable, he’s indentured to me until the end. Though we were searching for Marco Polo sheep and Snow Leopards to start the day, the new hunt is connectivity to the outside world. Every person has a limit of how much time away from news, social media updates and dumb cat videos they can spend, I’ve hit mine. We pull into a guesthouse which does not look promising, I don’t know what it is about this country by the concept of marketing material or any sort of outside labeling of businesses being open and accepting of your hard earned western money has not yet caught on. We go inside and I inspect the premise. They give me the wifi password but my phone rests lifeless, no twitter notifications nor inbound text messages from my mother asking if I am alive. On to the next destination. We find a guesthouse that boasts “WIFI” from the front door, and they aren’t wrong. They have it and I decide this will be my residence for the evening.
Sitting in the living room of the rather large guesthouse I read some Trump news, Impeachment is on the table again…This should be riveting. A lady walks in the room and tells me she is in the area interviewing candidates for American universities. She was selected because she had worked for two years in Uzbekistan in the peace corps and that I would learn the local language faster by bartering with the taxi drivers. The conversation is one sided and I dont even really know how we got on the topic of bartering with taxi drivers. She leaves, I remove my hat, and I return to my phone. I look up to the sound of the front door opening, its my new Osh-bound driver. He looks me dead in the eyes and then keeps scanning the room in search of something, not a word is exchanged. He walks away and I see him conversing with the guesthouse owner in the front yard. He walks back, and again stares me in the eyes, squinting this time then a smile appears and says “My Friend!” I am in plain site, perhaps five feet from him. My mind is in a pretzel, is my new driver blind? Did I agree to get into a car for a twelve hour drive over a mountain pass in harrowing conditions on less than favorable infrastructure with a blind driver? Christ… He tells me he’ll pick me up at “Eight o’clock…the Kyrgyz eight, not the Tajik eight”. I laugh and say “Okay”, not only can he not see but he can’t understand I don’t get his racist jokes. Maybe he thinks the Tajik are lazy and when they say eight they mean eight thirty or maybe the Kyrgyz are always running late because they are held up at sheep traffic jams. I have no idea. Regardless I will be ready because the guesthouse breakfast is at seven and I am not one to sleep in.
I sit for another thirty minutes in silence periodically running through my head how he didn’t recognize me, and who is probably the more punctual tribe of Central Asia – Tajiks or Kyrgyz. My American-selection-committee friend is back. She walks in the room and sits down. She tells me she is tired from a day of interviewing students for American Universities and that she use to live in Uzbekistan. She recommends that I barter with taxi drivers to pick up the language. this is almost verbadum the same convseration we had thirty minutes prior. What the fuck is going on? Is this a dream? The strongest case of Deja Vu ever recorded? Am I a ghost? No because people see me, they just don’t recognize me. Maybe she suffers from short term memory loss and she does the same routine day in and day out like in fifty first days, waiting for her Tajik Adam Sandler. But what is wierder is the driver is in on this act too. How have two people not recognized me as the person they met earlier. The driver had to be told I was the person he had met earlier and this girl seems to not recognize me now, which I don’t know if I am more annoyed by that or the fact that she probably greets everyone with “Barter with Taxi drivers to learn the language”. I come back to dinner being served in two rooms, I elect for the room without the American-selection-committee. Diner is bland – potatoes and rice. Head to bed.
I wake up and pack my things. Leave the room and read a bit before breakfast. At seven, I see breakfast being brought up to the house by the guesthouse owner, and right as she gets to the front door, I see a Jeep pull up as well; its my ride to Osh. I grab a piece of bread and a hard boiled egg perplexed at the situation. My Driver says “Lets go” and I grab my stuff. I finally understand, we are in Tajikistan but headed for Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan is an hour ahead of Tajikistan despite Osh and Murghab being located on the same longitudinal. Thus my driver’s eight o’clock is the guesthouses seven. That solves one mystery, though I’m annoyed bit hungry still. In the car, my driver mentions that he did not recognize me without my bright blue hat on. Mystery two solved… Well at-least he isn’t actually blind, I feel safer. I am also comforted with the fact that the previously unbelievable cinematic trope of thwarting pursuers by donning a hat does suffice.
Culture Capital 