Words by Alexei Obolensky | Photography by Julien ‘Perly’ Petry | Video by Sam Moody
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea,
White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lies a prophet who can understand
Why men were born: but surely we are brave,
Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.
James Elroy Flecker
Dear PARKER SZUMOWSKI, your flight TK0370 from Istanbul (IST) to Tashkent (TAS) on February 21 has been cancelled due to force majeure (adverse weather conditions) reasons.
Like the butterfly that flapped its wings, this text received in Tokyo set off a series of events that, even by our standards, consists of an extreme fuck around for the ages.
A 5-hour drive from Idaho to Salt Lake. A 5-hour flight to New York. Denied boarding at Newark because yours truly got the birth date wrong on his Uzbek visa. A 180 pivot from Turkish Airlines – we were allowed to board. A quick 10-hour hop to Istanbul, a missed connection. The next three flights are full. Then a 2-hour delay in Istanbul, with a slightly scary rerouting option via Moscow. Arrival in Tashkent. Bags lost. Two return trips to Tashkent airport on very shit roads to collect the two bags, a 5-hour return trip. Each time.
A note in my diary from the first day reads:
Uzbekistan. We’re out here. Our luggage is in Istanbul. Parker, we hope, is also in Istanbul, but our travel agent thinks he’s in Moscow. Arthur’s body clock is in Mt. Baker, and mine is in Tokyo. My car is in the short-term stay lot at Bordeaux Airport. Perly’s dad still drops him off at the airport at the age of 42. There’s a man wandering around our garden every morning saying, “Money, money, 150 dollars.” Oh, and nowhere takes credit card. We’re really fucking doing it this time.
But, why?
A bemused Uzbekistani woman with the most incredible grill of gold teeth asks us in the gondola. And why indeed. Well, as our dear friend and stills lensman Perly replies with a coy smile on his lips, “Why not?” Uzbekistan isn’t the first destination that comes to mind when planning a snowboard trip, but as ever with the spirit of adventure and a lust for the unknown, a passion for soviet architecture and a penchant for seeing our filmers in uncomfortable situations, Uzbekistan seemed like the perfect place.
I thought prior to this trip, perhaps, and certainly now naively, that with my Russian roots, and by English standards, oh so slightly Slavic looks, I’d fit right in. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Leaving Tashkent airport at 4 am, Central Asia is an assault on the senses. It’s very, very different. I, and our group, do certainly not fit in. It’s cold, it’s grey, and shouts of Taxi Taxi and slightly threatening men rank it probably up there with my top 3 cities of “most likely to get screwed by airport taxi,” up there with Dakar and Rabat.
We’re met with subpar snow conditions, apparently the worst in 10 years. Should of been here 2014 -2024: this trip’s headstone shall read. However, we couldn’t have lucked out harder with our choice of talent from the Sunbum monkey’s overlord stable of talent with Arthur Longo and Parker Szumowski (who’s riding in jeans and borrowed gear). We find Side Hits galore, some fun side country hits, and in the first days we build footage, acclimatise and find our rhythm as well as a passion for Uzbek and indeed Russian cuisine. For dark snow-ridden storm clouds are gathering over the steppes of Uzbekistan, and we are very much ready and waiting for it.
It is of note (actually not of note but of utmost significance) to highlight two things about Uzbekistan. One is the food, and the other is the people. And where these two collide is “plov”. On our second night, we are invited to eat plov. Our man Azamat has been toiling over an oil drum for four hours, frying lamb, spices, and eventually steaming rice in the same dish. The result is subliminal. But like many things in life, the key is the delivery. We share the Plov with Oleg Shelamonov, our guide, fixer and all-around Uzbek legend without whom we would be thoroughly screwed.
We’re joined by his friends and family, generations of Uzbeks, speaking in a mixture of Uzbek, English, Russian, and French, standing room only around the table, groaning under the weight of plov, the various plov-related accouterments, and Russian beers. Such genuine and heartfelt hospitality will stay with us for a long time. Oleg is the founder of ShiPOWnilk, the Uzbekistan Freeride Community, and our most welcoming host and guide, without whom we would have most likely floundered. We befriend a local Taxi driver, Jonny, who, over Telegram and Google Translate, forms a merry band alongside Cerik and Chingiz. These are our drivers and de facto fixers for our time in the mountains and all-around great lads.
“We’re having a moment right now,” Oleg explains to me. “We have a good government, things are opening up. Europeans can come with no visa. We are able to buy dollars, consumer goods – before, such things weren’t possible.” Indeed, in a mood of global not-so-good times geo-politically, the vibe in Uzbekistan seems positively upbeat. Refreshingly so. And merited.
Amirsoy was our base camp for the first week. The most modern resort in Central Asia, a natural stepping off point for our gang of vagabonds with the promise of a new Gondola to whip us up to the peaks and with surrounding villages giving a very ‘Borat’ vibe, we felt in the right place. After a healthy little 40cm dump, we spend more time in the first days riding the resort, finding our feet, surviving in our coal-powered Villa. Parker’s luggage arrives. Everything is in its right place. We survive off a diet of meat and only meat, shashlik to be exact. Plov as and when it’s available. We make inroads with the locals and have a merry band of drivers, coffee sellers, and shashlik swingers dancing with us to the beat of the Uzbek drum. Things are looking up. Uzbekistan has the friendliest people going, each more curious than the next as to why we are there. Each more eager than the next to practice their English, bemused that we don’t speak Russian.
We decide that Amirsoy is a little too European for our tastes. Despite the fun side country opportunities and Russian lunchtime cuisine we score in the early days, we decide we need something a little more rustic. It was here that we found Chingman. A former soviet ski resort with a dilapidated chairlift that is, in a word, terrifying. And one broken T bar. This was to be our zone for the following week. It’s impossible to describe the vibe at Chingman, but it is best summarised by “People doing everything, all of the time.” There are men on quad bikes doing donuts, men dressed in full camo on horses. Ski doos from the 60s that look positively homemade whizzing around the joint. We’re in heaven. We arrange a horse to tow us over the Lada. Bemused men in Russian camo astride horses look on, Russian cigarettes in mouths adding to the haze of the valley.
Cerik picks us up daily in his Lada. For those of you unfamiliar with such beasts, Ladas are very much the de facto whip of choice for Soviet Russia. Unapologetically simple and rugged, Cerik’s car has 700,000 km on the clock (if accurate) and is on sale for 900 USD. Ladas are everywhere. Lurking in alleyways. Sprayed with mud in car parks. Bottoming out on soviet suspension with entire families inside and goats on the roof. Bombing past us on blind corners. Tackling snowy and muddy off-road terrain in rear wheel drive that would have a modern 4 x 4 quaking in its boots. Every colour under the sun, but each with its own distinct rust patina. We become enamoured with them, especially how well they lend themselves to becoming a feature, with Parker and Arthur jumping over the top with a horse-assisted whip in. You saw it here first.
With the snow fading into the central Asian spring, and no flurries on the forecast for the remainder of our stay, content with the riding we’ve had already, we decide the snowboarding part of our trip is over. It’s time to delve into the cultural wonders of Uzbekistan.
“If you are going to go rogue, you might as well do it in Tashkent,”
Parker says to me, on the 17th floor of Hotel Uzbekistan. The city glitters below with a mischievous aire as we stand on the rooftop of this testament to often underappreciated soviet brutalist architecture. A 1970s block, 17 floors, 300ish rooms. Reviews read:
“Sockets not working, cracked bathroom tiles, toilet paper holder broken, curtains and bed-sheets torn, ancient air-conditioning units, exposed wires in some places, etc.”
Exactly our kind of joint, and a perfect launching point into a Friday night in Tashkent. We drink beers.
Afghan hash is smoked in the basement of restaurants with waiters who then forget our orders. Bizarre that. After a quite literally very hazy evening, including an “Arthur and I will need a big wake up” text received from Parker at 4.55am, 5 minutes before waking up for our 5.45am train, which in hindsight was a touch early. One very hungover high-speed train ride ensues, with a minor disagreement with the Train Guard – “Your friend is drunk, I am calling the police” and a few hours of soft diplomacy later, we arrived at our destination, Bukhara.
Bukhara is a veritable trip back in time. A living museum, where 1000-year-old buildings are the norm. People have inhabited the region around Bukhara for at least five millennia, and the city has existed for half that time. Located on the Silk Road, the city has long served as a centre of trade, scholarship, culture, and religion. It is Marrakech without the tourists, we’re informed we’re here out of season and the place is a ghost town which only adds to the intrigue and mystery of it which captivates us ever more as we walk the ancient cobbled streets and soak up the winter sun on marble squares overlooked by larger than life mosques and madrasas. The history of Bukhara is rich and storied and far too long to go into here; however, what I will say is that in 2025, Bukhara is very much the world capital of merch.
What kind of merch, you ask? All sorts. Clothes, carpets, soviet trinkets, maps, and namely hats. Our obsession with the Uzbek hat has reached a fury peak at this point, and the ever-confusing exchange rate (1 USD = 12923 Uzbek SOM) has our heads in a spin. Our get-ups are getting more flamboyant by the hour, with Soviet army hats, flowing robes, quills, knives, maps, and more constituting our shopping spree as we drift from street to street.
The next day, we rise and board the train to Samarkand – very much ground zero of the Silk Road. Oleg’s friend Alisher picks us up from the station, and we immediately embark on a whistle-stop tour of Samarkand’s world-famous monuments.
Snow falls softly over the Gur-e-Amir Mausoleum, as we stand in front of the 14th-century building. It’s impossible to become immune to Uzbekistani monuments. The heritage and scale of them are hard to comprehend, and inside, the attention to detail, with intricate tiling, and gold leaf Arabic script, leaves most European monuments to shame. And Samarkand is no different, despite being a large vibrant metropolis it is littered with monuments that are quite literally breathtaking. Of note: it is in Samarkand that we cross paths with our first western tourists, not bad going for 12 days.
We board our final train back to Tashkent and the inevitable flights home, and the most lively of all. With our hangovers from Tashkent finally receded (I’m never drinking again vibes), we were keen for a few celebratory beers en route. Uzbek trains are the pride of the nation, and honestly, the best trains I’ve taken. Bought from Renfe in Spain, the trains are punctual, modern, and fast, and the restaurant cars are quite frankly debaucherous. Cold beers on tap and ice-cold vodka are bought and poured by strangers and friends alike with increasing ferocity. We drink, we get drunk. Natural order is restored. We get in trouble with the train police for wearing their hats, the bar staff laugh at them for being uptight. We do it again. We ask them to hold their guns. We are smuggled on and off the train by guards to smoke cigarettes when the train stops. This is living.
We arrive in Tashkent, drunk, lines around the eyes, dressed in the weirdest clothes in all of Central Asia. Boards buckled, lips chapped but ready to do it all again at a moment’s notice. Uzbekistan has left quite the impression on us, and we would urge anyone to go. Over our dinner that night, plans are drawn up for a return trip on a bigger scale, with more stans and undoubtedly more shenanigans. More on this story as it develops…
Thanks to all at Sun Bum, and to our incredibly welcoming local crew of Cerik, Oleg, Azamat, Alisher, Johnny, Chingiz, and the many others we crossed paths with on the Silk Road, whose names we may have forgotten, but whose generosity will stay with us for a long time.
