… or blogging is dangerous for tourism in Uzbekistan.

Everyone, who is interested in Central Asia, knows that Samarkand and Bukhara are the most ancient and history-rich places in the region. And they dream about visiting these extremely beautiful places to trace the history of Central Asian nations themselves.

Today, Bukhara and Samarkard are one of the highly touristic cities in Central Asia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the tourism infrastructure has been developing in extremely rapid manner, as people realized that tourism brings lots of money into the country. However, there is much to be done.

A friend of mine sent me a link to the interesting post at a Silk-Polyester Blend blog, where the author writes about his experiences during his trip along the Silk Road. In the post, the author shows his admiration of sights in Bukhara.

There are a lot of fascinating sights in the city… The neatest sight in the city was the Ark, the former palace of the Emir of Bukhara. The citadel is large and served as the seat of the prince until the Soviets attacked and destroyed most of the building… Bukhara also has a some of stunning medressas and religious buildings, many of them spectacular at night…

However, the author also writes about his bad experience as a tourist in Bukhara.

Bukhara also had some less pleasant moments — specifically, an incident involving the CNG (Uzbek successor to the Soviet KGB). Everything is fine now, but it was a little worrisome for a bit. Here’s what happened: we had bumped into the owner of our hotel on the street, and decided to stay with her since the accomodation was cheap ($5 a night, yeah!) She had just opened her hotel and the official registration was going to be processed in a couple of days. Technically, the hotel wasn’t authorized to take guests for a couple of days, although we didn’t know this at the time.

A local thief and layabout called Memin, who also works as an informant for the CNG, noticed us talking to the hotel owner in the street. Then, from what the owner later told us, he followed us back to the hotel to confirm we were staying there. He tipped off another, more senior informant, who was watching by the hotel to check what we were up to. None of us noticed the guy at any point. The day after we arrived, we went to the bazaar with the owner and her husband to buy food for dinner. We hadn’t noticed, but the senior informant had been following us for about 40 minutes. When we stopped to grab a beer at the bar, he started interrogating the owners, asking them to open their bags and demanding if we were staying with them.

The owners told us to take a cab to a bathhouse in another part of the city and then tried to beat the informant back to the hotel, where they quickly packed up our bags, spirited them away to another hostel, and had someone prepare fake registrations to make it look like we were staying at the new place the whole time. The informant came by our first hotel shortly after to check for (and maybe take) our bags, but the owners beat him to the punch. A weird story, but it ended up ok in the end.

The reason that both Memin and the senior informant were after us is, of course, about the money. The fines, if they had caught us, would be $600 per person, plus fines for the owners, and the informants would have gotten a substantial cut of the $2,000 total. It was an annoying incident for us, but could have been much worse for the hotel owners. To me, it was frustrating to see hard-working, entreprising businesspeople are undermined by leaches and informants looking to make a quick buck. I guess you can’t expect much more from a post-Soviet police state.

Argh #$@&*^%, when our people will finally understand that this is not right?! They probably do not know that these poor tourists will go back to their countries and write posts in their blogs or internet forums about their bad experiences in Uzbekistan. And today, before going to exotic places like Bukhara and Samarkand, tourists try to look for the first-hand information in blogs and internet forums about the places and then make their decisions. So today, blogging maybe dangerous for tourism in Uzbekistan.