In the last couple of years Uzbekistan tourist visas have become quite a bit easier. Starting from July 2018 travelers from 51 countries are able to get an evisa to the country, which vastly simplifies the and speeds up the visa process for Uzbekistan.

Here is the website to get an evisa for Uzbekistan.

Supposedly, it's also possible to arrange for a visa upon arrival in Tashkent Airport if you have an authorized LOI stating that you will pick up the visa there. We have not tried this ourselves, but know a few people who have done this. Read more on this possibility.

We used Stantours for our LOIs to Uzbekistan. No tour booking was needed and we received the scanned letter by email within a couple of weeks. It was worth the extra money to speed up the process and try to avoid any problems.

Visas to other countries in Central Asia

If you're traveling through the region and need to sort visas for other countries in Central Asia, skip ahead:

• Tajikistan Visas and GBAO Permits (needed for the Pamir Highway and Mountains)
• Kazakhstan Visas
• Uzbekistan Visas and Letters of Invitation (LOI)
• Turkmenistan Visas and Letters of Invitation (LOI)

Our Experience Getting an Uzbekistan Tourist Visa in Azerbaijan

We expected this visa application process to be hell, but we surprisingly received the visa the same day we applied in Baku, Azerbaijan. The friendly, English-speaking Uzbek Consul there acted as if he hadn’t seen a tourist in ages and seemed to be happy to have something to do. Without the LOI, the process would have taken us 3-5 business days and would likely have been peppered with perfunctory paranoia.

We heard horror stories from people who applied for visas to Uzbekistan from other countries. “That woman is evil!” is a direct quote from a tourist describing the woman at the Uzbek Embassy in Bishkek. Some people we know gave up and crossed Uzbekistan off their itinerary altogether in order to avoid another trip to the embassy there.

When in Uzbekistan, the game of collecting registration cards from hotels and guest houses begins. We were never asked by the police or border guards to see these chits, but it's better to err on the side of caution regarding bureaucratic issues in Uzbekistan.

The post Uzbekistan Visas and Letters of Invitation (LOI) appeared first on Uncornered Market.

Shaft us once, shame on you. Shaft us twice, shame on us. Try and shaft us repeatedly and charge our friends $1.00 for a few teaspoons of sugar, and we write a blog post about you. [Yes, one of our travel mates was repeatedly charged for sugar – and outrageous sums, no less.]

Apologies to all of our recently acquired Uzbek friends, but rip-offs in Uzbekistan – particularly along the touristy parts of the Silk Road – seem endemic.

I don’t know why my country, he likes to cheat everyone.

— Aziza, an Uzbek woman, rhetorically pondering why many of her Uzbek countrymen enjoy ripping off tourists so much.

Living in Pakistan with her husband, Aziza returns often to visit her family in Tashkent. As an experiment to see what foreigners are charged for services, she occasionally pretends to be an English-speaking tourist when she returns. After receiving a “foreigner price” of five to ten times the normal rate, she then berates the taxi driver (or other service provider) in fluent Uzbek. As if still questioning the perpetrators of all those attempted rip-offs, Aziza continued, “Why you make me a fool?”

In order to demonstrate, we offer a few representative anecdotes from our experiences, from banking to dining:

1) National Bank, Urgench

It probably goes without saying, but count your money. Always. And the more official the institution in Uzbekistan, the more suspicious you should be. We learned the hard way. Every money exchange transaction involved missing bills that had to be coaxed from the money-changer.

Our worst experience of all occurred at the hands of the National Bank of Uzbekistan branch at Urgench. After exhausting us and our two friends for 90 minutes in a simple U.S. dollars to Uzbek som transaction, the agents pretended to forget to give us our money. When they finally forked it over, we didn’t count it, somehow satisfied with the official looking paper bands wrapped around each stack of 50 bills. Only later did we discover that two of our officially-banded stacks were short a few bills. Although we only lost a few dollars in the transaction, the bank’s audacity was infuriating.

By the way, if anyone in Uzbekistan finds eight extra bills in their stacks of Uzbekistani som from the National Bank in Urgench, please drop us a line. Maybe it really was an honest mistake 😉

2) You’ll rarely find menus at restaurants

“Why?” we asked Aziza. “Oh, they have menus. They don't give you the menu because it's easier to cheat you that way.” Three examples (of many) come to mind:

a. Farrukh Restaurant, Khiva: Its comfy tables and brightly colored suzani (embroidered wall hangings) cater to a tourist crowd. Waitresses are polite and well-dressed. There’s even a slight air of formality. But no menus, strangely enough.

Our friends asked the price of the main dishes before ordering to ensure the place was still within everyone's budget. However, upon receiving our bill, we were all shocked by the amount which was a bottom line figure without any detail and several times higher than we had calculated.

“Can you explain to us how much everything cost?” we asked our waitress. She pulled away from the table and returned with something resembling an itemized bill. The food was still reasonably priced, but the beers were five times what we had paid in a similar restaurant just down the street. We questioned the price and our waitress offered matter-of-factly, “This is good price. The Intercontinental Hotel in Tashkent, twice as much.” Not only was the bill bad, but so was her attitude.

b. Market in Samarkand: We decided (as we often do) to grab a bite off-trail by ducking into an alley-side restaurant stall on the edge of Samarkand’s main food market. In the middle of our meal, a man sidled up to us and engaged us with some usual chit-chat in Russian. At the end of the meal, he tried to “help” us by inserting himself into the bill payment process. What he didn’t know was that we had already asked for the price of absolutely every last bit on our table, having previously learned our lesson. Not only were his prices incorrect, but his math was conveniently off in the northerly direction by 50-100%. We ignored him and amidst the lunchtime chaos, we found the woman who ran the place and paid her what we knew we owed.

c. Art Café Dervish, Tashkent: One evening in Tashkent, we decided to pop into Art Café Dervish, just down the street from the Hotel Orzu where we were staying. Dervish had a menu, thankfully. The prices were relatively high compared to other local joints, but there was no service charge indicated on the menu. (Uzbek service is by no means world class, but you’ll find service charges occasionally indicated in menus and often appearing on your bill, running upwards of 20 percent).

After finishing our meal and watching the British group at the next table suffer through a painfully slow and error-filled eating experience where most of their food never arrived and half the party left hungry and frustrated, our bill arrived with an unmarked 20% service charge tacked on. We engaged the waiter. In Russian, he indicated: “This is normal.” We said, “Not normal. Not on the menu,” and asked for the manager.

Someone posing as a manager appeared. “This is normal. Standard,” he said with a tone that implied “…you idiot.” When we continued to press him, he explained that the restaurant was using the “old menus with old prices.” Their new menus had the service charge marked, but the prices were higher. According to him, we were getting a discount and shouldn’t complain.

Follow that impenetrable logic? Neither did we. We calculated a 10% service charge (which was also excessive), paid our bill and walked out. Avoid this place. The food is mediocre, the service is horrible and dishonest, and the guy who posed as the manager is condescending. Not the right equation when you’re looking for a pleasant meal.

If money is precious and you don’t enjoy getting ripped off, be aware when you are following the tourist trail in Uzbekistan. An attitude prevails, and is even sometimes voiced, that says “Why are you here if you don’t have a lot of money?” It's not so much the amount of money that is at stake in these transactions, but the principle of it all.

If getting ripped off is no issue for you, let it ride. That said, diligently asking the price of everything in advance and maintaining a sense of humor will keep you sane and vendors honest. If you happen to be traveling for business, you likely won’t feel any of this. Nor will you care. You’ve got business to take care of and someone else is probably footing the bill.

A Bright Star

Not everyone is in the game, however. While in Bukhara, we met Star, a young 20-something Tajik-Uzbek woman with a sharp business sense and a remarkable ability to acquire languages.

Star spotted Audrey struggling to tie her Turkmen silk scarf under the beating August Uzbek sun and offered her a sure scarf-tying hand.

The next day, Audrey was scarf-less as we passed by Star's ceramics stand. Star noticed, and later that day she beckoned us over, presented Audrey with a new scarf and invited us to talk with her. We were apprehensive from our recent interactions with vendors where money seemed the sole objective. Star called us on our mistrust and joked that she wasn't going to try and sell us anything. We laughed through the awkward moment and sat with her for the next hour, watching her speak five different languages as she sold ceramic bowls and tea sets. In the down time, we talked about life in Bukhara and politics in Uzbekistan, and asked her what tourists are like from her perspective as a vendor.

We enjoyed one of our most enlightening discussions in Uzbekistan in the least likely of places – a ceramics stand in the most touristy area of Bukhara.

More photos from Uzbekistan

• Silk Road Cities in Uzbekistan
• Tashkent travel photos

The post Uzbekistan? Overchargistan! appeared first on Uncornered Market.

Have you ever watched the news and witnessed escaping refugees at a border crossing, crushed against iron bars like animals in a cage? You know the scene. Now superimpose two backpack-laden white faces onto that newsreel, throw in a few cries of “Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan” amongst the shrieks of old women and children being squashed in a sea of madness, and you would just begin to understand what we went through at the Uzbek-Kazakh border yesterday.

To our pleasant surprise, exiting Uzbekistan customs and passport control couldn’t have been easier. Then – our real test – the Kazakh side. The combined wisdom of Soviet and Asian queuing techniques conspired to produce large clouds of humanity everywhere, rendering it impossible to determine where things started and where they might end.

The Crowd Gets Anxious

We joined the queue at the rear of an anxious mob – some carrying shoulder bags, many lugging sagging Chinese sacks of vegetables and melons, and others laden with all of their worldly possessions. The gate in front of this herd of hundreds was locked. As people escaped and climbed back to the Uzbek side (for what we’re not certain), the remaining crowd swelled and swayed. Those around us hung onto our backpacks and tried to maneuver where they could, even though there was nowhere to go. In amazement, Audrey asked a Russian-Uzbek woman who seemed to look comfortable in this setting. “Is this normal? Is it like this every day?” The woman smiled, and nodded “Yes. Don’t worry, a few more pushes and we’ll make it to the front.”

As the full force of Uzbek-Kazakh rush hour hit, what little space existed disappeared and the real crush began. What air remained became almost too hot to breathe. We could feel our lungs taking on the pressure and slowly collapsing under the weight of bodies around us. In one of our most physically challenging travel moments yet, fainting was a distinct possibility. Injury was certain.

We were worried. The scene was something like a mosh pit, minus the order, joy and human decency. This was humanity and human misery at its worst: everyone tries to get in and ahead and no one realizes that the system crushes everyone under its own weight. This is the worst Russified post-Soviet Central Asian madness and behavior that we could imagine.

We looked around into the eyes of the herd and we could see normal people transformed into mutants consumed by anger, their faces twisting in smiles of fatigue. And there was no reason for this madness – no war, no shortages, no violence. What was going on here? Pretty simple: this is what happens when poor organization and perfect corruption conspire to bring human misery where it simply doesn’t belong. If this represents the combined wisdom of the Uzbek and Kazakh governments, life can only get worse before it gets better.

Getting Separated in the Crowd

In an effort to stay together, we locked arms. But the shifting human mass stripped us of our ability to move on our own and we eventually separated and drifted into the crowd. More people arriving from behind meant increased pressure, sandwiching the crowd more tightly forward towards the locked gate.

Dan struggled to move beyond an old man with an overflowing sack of watermelons and a group of Kazakh women built like linebackers. Women around us yelled, “Kazakhstan. It’s our Kazakhstan. I’m Kazakh, let me in. Kazakhstan is for us.” Angry Uzbek women replied that they were just as entitled to enter. Fortunately, no serious fights broke out, but everyone’s animal instincts were turned on full blast.

Audrey Makes It Through the Kazakh Border

After three hours in this angry steam bath of humanity, Audrey made it to the front gate and caught the eye of a Kazakh border guard. Just moments earlier, he had allowed a group of Kazakh citizens to pass due to their conveniently money-stuffed passports. Armed with her American passport and a look of helplessness, she implored him to let her through. As he opened the gate he smiled ironically, “Welcome to Kazakhstan.” The teeming masses tried to follow. The guard barked at them hinting that his gun was handy and tried to slam the gate. He perched himself against a metal fence and tried to close it against the weight of the mob with the force of his legs.

The Final Challenge: To Get Dan Out

The final challenge: to find and extract Dan. The guard was not up for this challenge. Dan was still several rows back in the angry crowd. Audrey tried with another guard, assuming the role of a distraught woman in search of her husband. Dan raised his hand to indicate where he was. The guard yelled and motioned to let him through. No one moved. Even if they could, would they? As a trickle escaped through the front gate, the crowd rocked back and forth in waves. Undeterred, the guard gave his best effort and reached in. In what little energy remained, Dan surged forward. His bags twisted in the crowd and he nearly went horizontal in an unintended crowd surf. He handed his passport to Audrey over the gate and reached to the outstretched hands of the guard, who helped to pull him – scratching and scraping just like the others – over and through the mob.

Final Step: The Passport Stamp

We were both covered in sweat, dehydrated and exhausted, but we still had one more hurdle to cross – getting our passports and immigration cards stamped by the Kazakh police. The corruption factory had apparently spawned another group of lowlife entrepreneurial women who collected money-loaded passports and handed them to the front of this queue, thereby expediting them to the colluding border guard at the window. Families huddled behind, unraveling wads of money (usually between $1-$3) to tuck into each passport. Having come this far without paying a bribe, we stuck to our principles and waited it out. When we arrived at the window, we were shown to a more civilized “foreigner’s line.”

Like all perfectly corrupt systems, there is an alternative to the experience above. Apparently, for around $8 (perhaps more for non-Kazakhs), middlemen touts have an arrangement with Kazakh border guards to allow people to enter through another gate, thereby fast-forwarding them to the front of the passport queue. We had considered this, but decided on principle not to contribute to the corruption; we subjected ourselves to the madness instead. By the time we’d figured this out, extracting ourselves was not an option anyhow. And in truth, we needed a really good story after enjoying so many uneventful days drinking lattes in Tashkent.

Reflections and Gratitude

Next time, would we pay to avoid the crowd? Having woken up with our share of cuts and bruises, it’s hard to say. For those of you who have ever paid a bribe (either directly or through a company that acts as a bribe-paying middleman or fixer), you are aware how systems that embrace endemic corruption have a way of wearing down your principles.

Cuts, bruises, and reflection aside, we were very fortunate to be carrying American passports.

Otherwise, we might still be at the border.

The post Battle at the Border appeared first on Uncornered Market.

Taking advantage of free wireless internet in Tashkent, we've decided to conclude our time here by uploading photos from Uzbekistan's Silk Road.

Tashkent has been the most connected city in Central Asia thus far. Rather ironic considering Uzbekistan's penchant for blocking internet sites and restricting printed material. Just one of the many contradictions here.

Uzbekistan Travel Photos

• Uzbekistan's Silk Road Stops – Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand
• Uzbek Food and Markets
• Mizdakhan: Necropolis Megalopolis
• Tashkent, Seen on the Street

The post Images from Uzbekistan appeared first on Uncornered Market.