Happy trails

This blogging thing is a snap, especially when you don’t do it!

I returned from a trip to Tajikistan about 10 days ago. From the capital, Dushanbe, I flew north to the city of Khujand. From there, I drove for a full day to the city of Penjikent, tucked in the mountains of the west. Well, I didn’t drive, but the driver of the car did. When I first got into the car at the airport, I went to put my seatbelt on. As often happens, the driver reached out to stop me. “No, no, that’s not necessary.” Putting on a seatbelt is often somewhat offensive to drivers here, sort of like getting invited to a dinner party and showing up with your own stomach pump, you know, just in case.

So I spent the long drive to Penjikent shifting as the car rocked along ruts in the road. Part of the drive winds up through mountains, climbing, climbing, on dirt roads with patchy asphalt cut into the sides of steep hills. The drop offs are so steep that just looking out the window gave me a nauseous-vertigo soupy stomach. I held on tightly to the armrest, as I sometimes do on airplanes, in order to steer them to safety with the power of my brain.

At the top of the mountain pass on the second day’s journey it began to rain, mixing with the dirt road and gravel. I tried to tell myself how lucky I was to be there, in a real-life National Geographic episode. Lucky, lucky! But each time the driver passed on the right to squeeze through an impossibly narrow bit of road with who knows what on the other side, I stopped breathing and made a collect call to God.

The trip went well though. Dushanbe is an endlessly charming city, with lots of big trees, parks with small cafes, and these fantastic almost carnival-like light fixtures posted along the road sometimes shaped to look like large flowers, or bursting fireworks.

On the plane ride back home to Bishkek, I followed my usual protocol: sat next to a young woman (instead of a man), put in my blaze orange earplugs (sorry, what?) right after adjusting my seatbelt, and settled in. About half way through the two hour flight, as happens sometimes, the ceiling started to drip condensation on my seatmate. (Sort of like the plane is actually a sweaty beer plugging away through the sky.) I fished around in my purse and handed her a tissue so she could wipe herself and the ceiling. She thanked me and immediately started a conversation.

This is why I wear earplugs on almost any flight. I don’t like plane conversations, because they invariably turn into not just the normal supermarket line-length chat, but oh, say one or four hours of on-and-on. This lady looked ready to star in the telenovela of her own life: thick, rich black hair in large waves down to her shoulders, and the jazz-hands version of makeup: two-tone iridescent eyeshadow reaching up to the border of her eyebrows, Tammy Faye mascara so thick her eyelashes were like doll-house garden-rakes, a full frosty pink lipstick mouth rimmed in dark brown lipliner, and topped off with a makeup-sundae cherry – a fake beauty mark near her upper lip.

She started in at once. Where was I from? America. Oh, I want to immigrate to Canada. How can I do that? I’m sorry, I just don’t know, the irony being that I was born in North America and so have no idea how to immigrate. She told me how she was Afghan, although born and raised in Bishkek. She was 29 years old, and her husband had been murdered three years before, by jealous business rivals. Oh woah…. that is terrible. Yes, I know. And I have three children, and I want to move to Canada, or China. Or somewhere. I am a millionaire! A millionaire and I can’t find a place to go. And I have three houses, but it is not safe for me in Bishkek; so many of my husband’s rivals want to kill me. And for three years I wanted to kill the man I thought was responsible for my husband’s death: his business partner. I wanted his death, and he wanted my death. For three years. Until eventually we saw each other face to face, and realized: we were in love with each other.

And now they secretly love each other so desperately, but can’t be together, because he has a wife and a child, and she doesn’t want to offend Allah. And is anyone meeting me at the airport? INSERT HINDSIGHT IS 20/20 MOMENT: No, nobody’s meeting me. Oh! My brother is meeting me; we’ll just take you home too. No, no, totally not necessary! I’ll just get a taxi. A taxi where I can be alone and not talking any more to you, TMI lady!

But she seized one of my bags and wouldn’t let me take it until we were in separate passport control lines. Little gnats of worry were flying inside my brain: don’t take a ride from this lady who says people want to kill her, don’t let this lady know where you live, don’t get in her brother’s car, but the cardinal rule: don’t offend her! I cleared passport control first, and she called after me to just wait, she’d meet me at the front. I booked it to the door, with her steps behind me, her yelling for me to wait, me calling back, thanks so much! I really must be going though! Good luck! Whereupon she YELLS for her brother waiting at the exit to stop me and before any brother emerged from the crowd I basically threw myself on the first taxi driver to appear and then once in his car, looking over my shoulder, I literally slunk down in the back seat so nobody could see me until we’d cleared the airport.

Revised air travel protocol: always say that someone is meeting you at the airport. And never remove the earplugs.

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