Dushanbe Day 1 - Walkabout

Arriving in Dushanbe at 11 am, after a somewhat stressful flight (the airborn leg was fine, despite the soviet-era plane. the pre-flight boarding, on the otherhand, was a nightmare in undisplayed info combined with very lax departure times), I decided to hike from the airport to my hotel. This is usually a very bad idea, but the Dushanbe airport is right in the middle of town. In fact, it's presently more like a glorified bus station with a particularly big parking lot. I haven't been anywhere truly remote, but as for international capitals go, this was the most pitiful airport I've ever seen. Except for it's customs house, it was about the size of the Hondo (TX) regional airfield.

The hike should have been about 4 km, the only nervous part being that only the last 2 km of the journey was on the map I had. Never hike off-map: it's one of those golden rules. Long story short(er), I did make it to the hotel, but was a good bit sweatier than was perhaps necessary. It's 90+ by noon, and just barely over 100 as the afternoon wears on in Dushanbe's early July.

For the rest of the day, I just wanted to get my bearings. From reading ahead, I knew Dushanbe had several respectable museums, a few bazaars, and several other public buildings/parks worth checking out. It also has a wealth of international food choices - from the expected Tajik & Russian, to the more "exotic" Lebanese, Italian, French, and even Ecuadorian fare. In other words, Dushanbe had more to "offer" in a tourism sense than Bishkek. That, I would say, was my first surprise.

With a population of 600,000 and not a lot of tall buildings, you can surmise that Dushanbe isn't a huge place, but it does spread out. Having said that, everything I wanted to see is located along the main drag, a very long bit of a landscaped park/avenue called Rudaki (after a famous

Persian poet, claimed as a "proto-Tajik").

A lot of the public space is used to promote Tajik nationalism, which interestingly has very little (or even nothing) to do with the modern Tajik state. Instead, it's almost entirely focused on the past - even the imagined past. Sogdians, Samanids, and Sassanid empires join Alexander the Great as the forefathers of modern Tajikistan, even though in each the current Tajik territory was a tiny, and frankly very insignificant, chunk. Tajiks lay cultural claim the major metropolises of Samarkand and Bukhara - both now in Uzbekistan, and since these were the capitals of major empires - so they reason - those empires were actually Tajik, not Persian/Sogdian/Hellenistic, etc.

It's a bit of a leap, but they pull it off with gusto (and repetition doesn't hurt).

The most prominent statue in Dushanbe is of Ismoili Samani (at top), the founder of the Samanid empire, and nearby is the Central Park with a great statue of the persian/"Tajik" poet Rudaki framed by a frescoed arch. Between the two is a map of the once-great Samanid empire, stretching from southern russia to the persian gulf, from India to the Caspian.

Another item of interest I noticed in my wandering is the rare, but repeating, motif of randomly-frescoed buildings. This would be common on government buildings, but I've seen some beautiful, colorful, usually "inspiring" works on the sides of apartment buildings, grocery stores, etc. It's a great way to spruce up the neighborhood (and much richer than the usual white-framed pastel gov buildings), but I cannot find a reason to the rhyme.

Toward evening, I started looking for the Bactria Center. According to my Lonely Planet Central Asia book, this was somekind of "center" in which various NGOs sold handmade goods from the countryside to directly benefit Tajik families. And at 6 pm on Tues/Thursday nights, they did free movie screenings. And it's Thursday!!!

I was looking for a large structure, even a mall-like entity (movies... multiple stores...). The area in question was less precise than my map suggested, so I was forced to use the loop-and-look approach. After a few hours, and a stop off at the main bazaar to buy a much-needed hat, I finally located a large house with a red roof and a small plaque that said "Bactria center" just in time for the movie - sort of. According to the sign on the door, not only did Bactria Center close at 4 pm that day, it was taking a "season break" and would be closed from July 10 - August 10. Wah wah.

Only a little disheartened, I closed out the evening with dinner at a Lebanese/Syrian restaurant called al-Shams. It was quite tasty. The chicken I ate contained no bones or ligaments, and the tabbouleh was pure vegetal growth. A welcome respite.

Weber (on the lamb)