I made a taxi driver cry
Trip Start
Jun 18, 2007
1
97
150
Trip End
Ongoing
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Bukhara,
Uzbekistan
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Reading this blog makes this pretty obvious but the taxi mafia at the turkmen and uzbek boarder take the cake for $%&^& - insert any rude you wish
I was at the boarder 4 hours dealing with them - from being ripped out of my first taxi cause I wasn't paying the tourist rate, to not being allowed on the mini bus with locals to the next town it just keep on going as they keep on coming up to me saying $40 then $30 and then at the 3 hour mark it finally got down to $20 - ha ha. I was so certain i wasn't going to give in to this crap I was getting ready to camp - minus the tent and sleeping bag
Finally the original taxi driver said $10 and we off - 4 hours later
Well it was obviously to good to be true and guess what when i got dropped the fare magically changed to $15 after I told her to stick it and gave her the money she started screaming at me in broken English - my lady who i was staying with even came out and then they started talking after a while it dropped to $12. After again telling her to stick it she started crying!!!! Telling the other lady this was her first time as a taxer driver and she didn't know the correct fare - look how could I make this crap up :)
This was at 8.00pm after I had been traveling 10hrs to travel 400kms so i had it, throw the tenner at her and walked off. Case closed tourist one
tourist zero
The next day I finally got to explore Bukhara and got to see a very nice old city that had no tourists, indeed many of the tourist sites weren't even open so it was very quiet, which i guess is a good thing.
However it was quickly evident that the main touristy things were very similar to Iran that is, mosques, Islamic schools and minarets the most evident difference though was they all cost $2-$3 instead of 20cents. Nevertheless I still had a great time exploring the old town and people watching especially since it was very different socially than Iran. It was quickly obvious that i was in an ex-soviet state - the vodka certainly flowed easily and many toasts were had for world peace etc
