My Travel Adventures

On the second morning of my two-day layover in Uzbekistan, I rented a car and drove to the mountains. The process was easy: the rental company did not even want to see my international driver’s licence. They did, however, make sure to impress upon me the importance of a twice-stamped document that I was to show the police in case I was pulled over. It seems that stamped documents are an obsessive precaution in this country: when I checked out of my hotel early in the morning on the following day, I was handed another one to show at the airport in case anyone asked for it. No one ever did.

My plane landed in Tashkent at one o’clock in the morning, but fortunately I was not dazed enough to forget to exchange money. A few taxi drivers fought over me in the parking lot, but as a matter of principle I stuck with the first person I approached – the alternative had been a burly man who flung his arm around my shoulder in a manner that would have seemed friendly had it been easier to extricate myself from his embrace. He followed us to the car insisting to my driver that I was to go with him for a higher price, and exchanged some choice words with him – though thankfully no more than that – as I climbed inside.

I arrived in Azerbaijan on the evening of Nowruz. The timing was unintentional; in fact, had I realised my trip was to coincide with the weekend of the New Year, I probably would have arranged things a little differently. My original plan had been to fly to Islamabad via Sharjah on Sunday, but when Iran – in response to the recent US-Israeli offensive – began to launch strikes against its neighbours, my flight was cancelled. I scrambled at the last minute to figure out an alternative route, which eventually yielded the option of flying around the affected zones: From Baku to Tashkent and from Tashkent to Islamabad. Due to the timing of the flights, I ended up having one day to explore Baku and another two days in Tashkent.