We stated at 5am, intending to avoid the worst of the desert heat on our journey to Bukhara. We decided to avoid the hotel's breakfast offerings (based on our gut feeling) and opted for a picnic of foods from the local bazaar.
The 'tarmac' road to Bukhara was appalling. It had endless potholes (more potholed surface area than flat tarmac) crators, giant nobbles like someone had laid the tarmac on with a spoon, deep ridges and relentless roadworks, despite this we were making reasonable progress.
So far we had managed to avoid/evade police attention... This was not to last.
Within 2 hours we were stopped 3 times. The first time we were pulled in and fined for breaking a mythical speed limit. The officers kindly showed us the photo to prove to us that they had seen us! In fairness we were doing around 60 mph (briefly at best) and they said that the motorway limit was 45 mph. There was clearly no avoiding the payment. It then transpired that the 'fine' was $150 and would have to go to the local town (in the wrong direction) or we could pay them $30 'cash in hand' and they would not make the official report! We chose the latter!
We then got stopped by the police at a checkpoint less than a mile later. This time they were only interested in our documents. They were obviously bored. I struggled not to laugh watching them try to read Andy's driving licence. They clearly had no idea what they were reading! They then proceed to give me a lecture about not having any children. They told us that we should have at least 4 by now! They let us go soon after I sweetened them up by giving them souvenir stickers of London, that I had brought with us to give to children during the trip.
Time was ticking along. It was getting really hot, we were getting weary in the heat. The last thing that we needed was to be stopped by the police again.
Surprise surprise the next lot of corrupted officers wanted yet more money from us!
They started with the whole document reading regime, then once they had established that we were English tourists proceeded to tell us that we had been speeding again and that we had to pay a ridiculous fine!!! In the first instance we both thought fair enough, but this time we knew that we had kept to the limit. They showed us the same photo again. We were well and truly stitched up. After 45 minutes of negotiations, we failed to make any head way, we had no choice but to pay again! The injustice of this made me very angry and I was able to express this by politely smiling and swearing a lot at them in a language that luckily they did not understand. Another $30 cash in their pockets and we were on our way again.
The frustrating thing is that everyone else seems to speed past much faster than us.
So our grand plan of an early start to avoid the midday heat totally failed.
The corrupt police situation does not bode well for the next 700 miles of Uzbekistan. :-(
No comments:
Post a Comment