Get your Afrosiyob Tickets Now!

If you expect to be traveling between Samarkand and Tashkent, buy your Afrosyab high-speed train now! Against all common sense, despite having multiple trains per day, these sell out weeks in advance (probably months in peak season). Otherwise you will end up on the older Sharq (Nasaf) train that takes four hours to cover the same distance instead of two. Now, four hours in itself is not a big deal, but… there’s a but.

First, these trains seem to only go early in the morning or late in the evening. Second, these are not new trains, shall we say. This means even if you book specific seats, you may end up in cramped quarters with who knows who and very little space for luggage. Spoiled by European long distance trains which (with one exception) had dedicated space for large suitcases, we were shocked to find no space for our 50lb blue beast. It ended up riding in the doorway of the cabin, shuttling between the cramped walkway and our leg space.

But we were very lucky in our cabin companions. We quickly broke the ice and before the first stop, we were living the classic Russian train scene: on to the shared table went the dried fruit, the nuts, flatbreads, vegetables, left-over shashlik (in a sign of the times no bottle of vodka appeared), and we all ate.

We talked of Uzbekistan, then and now, of Kazahstan, of the political climate now in Russia, of raising children and of traveling the world . Sergei (a retired army hospital commander) and Tatyana have children who live in France and Italy and, since retiring, they have traveled all over Europe and the old USSR. Like many in the US, they were deeply skeptical of the media, labeling it all propaganda, whether intentional or not. Sergei shared his favorite shashlik vendor — “you go to Dostlik station, then go about a hundred meters down the street, there’ll be a guy cooking on coals; go through the dark corridor, it’s in the courtyard; twenty years ago it was amazing…” Gulna was a psychiatrist from Almaaty. She praised the mountain peaks around the city and seconded Sergei’s distrust of the media. We stayed thus engrossed in the conversation for the entire four hours, and were kind of surprised when the train pulled into Tashkent. Wistfully, we said goodbyes.

So may be Sharq isn’t so bad after all.