Uzbekistan Unbound

Central Asia’s most populous country is ready to welcome the world.

- Ben Bland

As the plane landed at Tashkent airport after the six-hour flight from Seoul, I tried to rev up my travel-weary brain (I’d started the journey in Hong Kong) for the travails that lay ahead and shake off the food coma induced by Korean Air’s filling but stodgy economy class beef bibimbap.

I had been warned – and read, to my angst, in online forums – that going through the rigmarole of Uzbekistani customs and immigration would test even the most stoic of travellers: foreign currencies had to be declared to the last cent; voluminous arrival forms had to be completed in Uzbek or Russian, with no English translation available; and the queues could last several hours, even though the passenger flows at Islam Karimov International Airport are not exactly Heathrow-esque.

But, apparently, things have changed in the former Soviet country. The Cyrillic forms were nowhere to be seen, the line for passport control was mercifully short, and the immigration officer who stamped my passport was cheerily efficient. “Enjoy Uzbekistan,” he said as I began my first trip to Central Asia’s most populous nation – and, until recently, one of the world’s most authoritarian and repressive states.

Having worked as a foreign correspondent in Asia for a decade, I have grown tired of clichéd descriptions of emerging markets at a “turning point”, yet it is hard to talk about Uzbekistan today without using some similar form of words. Gulf links are growing too, with fly-dubai starting five-times weekly flights to Tashkent from March 11, which will rise to daily from May 31.

Two years after the death of long-ruling dictator Islam Karimov, this country of 32 million is going through the juddering first phases of the sort of reform and opening-up process that has transformed the economies and societies of countries like China and Vietnam.