The Tajik/Kyrgyz Homestay

Since I just have a couple minutes, I thought I would write about what was like staying in homestays in Tajikistan. Many of the places I went, especially in the Wakhan have nothing approaching a hotel, so staying in people's houses is the only option.

In the Wakhan, things typically went like this:
- arrive round 5pm, tired and dusty. Unexpected arrival promptly throws house into chaos. Various members dispatched to buy extra food for dinner, make tea, tidy room etc.
- invited to sit for tea, usually outside on a tapchan which is a large flat platform covered in flat cushions. Green tea is served, inevitably accompanied by bread, biscuits, and suspicious-looking boiled sweets that look about ten years old. If we are lucky, then it also comes with fresh apricots from the garden.
- make awkward conversation with the patriarch of the house for three hours using limited combined english-russion vocabulary.
- dinner comes around 8pm, ususally potatoes with onions but also pasta one night (great excitement).
- immediately after dinner is time for bed (around 9pm). This invovles the ladies in the house dismantaling the giant pile of bedding which can be used to sleep a seemingly unlimited number of guests at short notice. The blankets and mattresses in the pile appear to be interchangeable, resulting in either very thin mattresses or very thick blankets, depending on your point of view.
- brushing teeth a problem due to lack of running water and sinks, resulting in need to spit surreptitiously into vegetable garden.
- breakfast around 8am is usually, perhaps surprisingly, rice pudding.

In the yurstays in the Pamirs, things went pretty much the same way, except that tea came with yak dairy products instead of mini-sweets and was served inside the yurt on account of it being dusty and windy and cold outside. Total cost for dinner, bed, and breakfast around $10-12.