Journey Around the 5 Stans: Crossing the Line

Ken Powell a seasoned globe-trotter and experienced photographer (powellphotography.ca), blogs (powellponderings.com) about his journey with Adventures Abroad’s 21 Day Five Stans Tour, which covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. His insights, images, and expertise offer a wonderful glimpse into this extraordinary tour. In this vignette, he recounts a border crossing episode.

We had borders of five Stans to navigate, and one of them twice. While they all had their idiosyncrasies, there was one that we knew would be a challenge – the Uzbekistan into Turkmenistan crossing.

When we reached the border, the ritual began and lasted for over four hours. First, we had to officially leave Uzbekistan, which we did. Then at the first Turkmenistan contact, we showed our (pre-organized) invitation letter to visit Turkmenistan. This we had arranged months ago. We walked through “no man’s land” dragging our bags and then took a one kilometre bus ride. Soldiers with all manner of guns watched us.

I had been warned that no photographs should be taken. This was a serious order.

Once we reached the Turkmenistan side of the border, we were then submitted to a COVID PCR test (and paid a crisp $30 US for it). Probes were inserted up our noses by “a doctor”. (He did have a white jacket on.) The results took about an hour to come back; no COVID was detected.

We were now in a line, but it wasn’t. We were a bunch of supplicants inching forward to the two customs officers. Elbowing and shouldering techniques were displayed. The visas were finally inspected and we then coughed up more crisp US dollars, 73 of them.

Bags were then scanned, and some were inspected. We all showed our passports at least six times in the crossing; each uniformed officer really did look at them or pretended to.

This all reminded me of the Woodie Guthrie song, the Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. Woody is in the draft centre being signed up for the US draft. I’ll let him talk now; he says: “Proceeded on down the hall gettin more injections, inspections, detections, neglections and all kinds of stuff that they was doin’ to meet the thing there, and I was there for two hours, three hours, four hours, I was there for a long time going through all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things and I was just having a tough time there, and they was inspecting, injecting every single part of me, and they was leaving no part untouched.”

Yup, it was sort of like that.