1:00 PM
We drove about 30 km into Kyrgyzstan before the truck drivers wanted to stop for some food again. Enrique and I wanted this whole ordeal to be over as soon as possible, so we tried to persuade them not to stop and keep driving, with no success. They stopped at a small restaurant and we decided to wait in the car. We thought this would make them hurry up and eat faster, but they still take their time.
2:30 PM
In a winding mountain road we saw an overturned trailer by the side of the road. The trailer had stopped a couple of meters from the edge, after which there was a drop of a couple of hundred meters. It was an ominous sight; the driver was extremely lucky.
4:00 PM
The truck we’re in is a piece of crap, so for the fourth or fifth time they pull off to the side of the road and get under the hood of the. This becomes a routine; they have to stop every half an hour to change or clean the spark plugs and fix other problems with the engine in order for it to keep running. This stop we decide to switch seats since Enrique had been having all the fun up till then, and now it was my turn to sit with the shifter between my legs. He advised me to place my water bottle between my legs to act as a shield from Tajik Morgan Freeman’s rapid gear shifting. Wise words indeed.
5:30 PM
We stop yet again, this time next to a public faucet. Both truck drivers get out of the car and start splashing buckets of water on the old truck. A few minutes later, a jeep pulls over in front of our truck, and the German couple we had met on the Tajik-Kyrgyz border step out of the car. The German guy explains to us that before going into Osh, drivers have to clean their cars or else incur a “dirty car” fine. This gets us excited: we’re near Osh! Our excitement quickly dies down when we realize that we are still 90 km away; which means around 2-3 hours more of driving. We reluctantly get back into the truck. We had been driving for 8 hours.
7:45 PM
We finally see the first sign that we are entering Osh. Finally! We had agreed on a spot to meet Vogel inside the city, and we tried to communicate this to our drivers by showing them where we wanted to go in the little Osh map in our Central Asia Lonely Planet. They told us that they couldn’t go into the city in their truck, so we had to stop at a truck depot just on the outskirts. We texted Vogel to come meet us with the keys so we could get the car out of the truck, and he arrived a couple of minutes later. With help from some other truck drivers, we managed to get the Puntito out of the back of the truck. It had really taken a beating on the way and looked like crap overall.
It was almost dark. Enrique and I were exhausted; we had been driving for more than 11 hours in cramped, uncomfortable conditions and we just wanted to get our stuff from the car and get the hell out of there. At this point, Tajik Morgan Freeman approached me and signaled with his hand for me to pay him (in their mind we still owed them $100 dollars). His young minion was standing behind him, holding a tire iron in his hand.
Since we had paid a bribe at the Tajik border because of him, Enrique and I had decided that we wouldn’t pay him one cent more. We had already paid them $400 total (the lady who helped us at the Tajik border called them bastards when we told her how much they were charging us) and we refused to be charged a cent more. I told TMF that no, we wouldn’t pay him, that at the Tajik border I had had to pay for him because of the debt he had. He instantly got angry when he understood and motioned again for me to pay him, but I stayed firm and told him no. He started speaking louder and cursing in Tajik, and got right up in my face and raised his fist above his head. Now TMF is a short, old dude, but he looked pretty pissed off and I wasn’t expecting him to get that angry about our negotiations, so I was very surprised and taken aback by his reaction. I instantly grabbed his fist and started motioning for him to calm down. He backed down, and then tried to grab my bag and throw it back in the truck. I grabbed it and pulled it away from him, at which point he reached out and grabbed my neck. I swatted his arm away and managed to rest my bag away from him. He started walking back to the truck. We looked at each other and decided that this was not worth $100 dollars. TMF came back from the truck, holding something in his hand in front of him.
A knife.
He came at Enrique and started waving it in his face. Enrique didn’t see it at first, and so he kept shouting at him and not moving back. From my angle I saw it instantly, and started yelling for him to calm down, and Vogel had already pulled out a $100 dollar bill and was waving it around for them to take it. The young driver grabbed the bill and kept waving around the tire iron, shouting ‘OK!?, OK!?’. TMF finally backed down when he saw we had given them the money, but kept shouting at us and cursing. We made sure that we had gotten everything valuable out of the car, and went out to the street to get a taxi.
We managed to stop a taxi, got in, and got to the hotel 15 minutes later. Vogel had bought beers and they were ice cold when we got there. I cracked one open and took a long, hard sip. There was one private shower and one communal one; I played rock paper scissors with Enrique to determine who would get the private one. I won, and immediately walked into the bathroom.
It was the most glorious shower I’ve ever taken.
Glad you made it! There is a reason it is called “highway robbery.” You have… no choice!