Car hustling on the Silk Road: a guide for the perplexed
There are times in life when a line comes to you — a quotation, a poem, a song lyric— from some dark recess of memory that perfectly sums things up. Sitting in a dusty car lot on the edge of a Central Asian city under the pounding early September sunshine, the lyrics to Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads seemed irrelevant, but very appropriate:
And you may find yourself
In another part of the world…
And you may find yourself
Behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?
The automobile in question was a 2010 dark silver Lada 2107 ‘Zhiguli’. My Zhiguli. And so when they ask me, sometime in the 2040s, on a reconstituted and mercifully Clarkson-free version of Top Gear, what my first car was and how I came to own it, this is the story I will tell them.
As a rough plan began to emerge during the Spring of 2017 to drive home from Central Asia, hours and days were spent fruitlessly skimming blogs and websites for information on purchasing a car in the region.
In the good (bad?) old days when regulation in Central Asia’s republics was Kafkaesque but up for negotiation, buying and selling cars all over the region was easy. Stories abound of Europeans ‘dumping’ cars in the region by knocking off the plates and handing the keys to whoever happened to be around in return for a pile of cash. Through the superlative website, blog and forum that is Caravanistan.com — an essential first stop for anyone researching a trip to Central Asia — I came into contact with 2 Americans and an Israeli who suggested that this seems no longer to be the case.
Alex Eaton, an American teaching at the QSI Almaty International School in Kazakhstan, informed me that the process for him to buy a Jeep was arduous, even with a work permit and permanent address in Kazakhstan. For a couple of drop-ins like ourselves — no contacts, no Russian, and no fixed abode — Kazakhstan seemed out of the question. A shame, given that Almaty is famous for hosting one of the largest second-hand car markets in Asia.
China is a non-starter for those without fluent Mandarin, good contacts, patience, and time. Geopolitics rules out Tajikistan for anyone wanting to visit Uzbekistan’s Silk Roads cities: to date the Uzbeks refuse entry to Tajik-plated vehicles due to intractable political and ethnic differences. And unless you fancy saddling up in an off-white Uzbek Chevrolet — a freak result of a joint venture with Chevy meaning that nearly all of the cars in the country are identical — the conclusion must be Kyrgyzstan.
Ryan — Nebraska-born but a longtime resident of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital — was frank in his advice via email. ‘You should have no problem buying a car in Bishkek, although the prices here are a little inflated compared with other countries in the region. That’s the pay-off for the lack of paperwork. However, at present there’s no cash in the market so you may have a difficult time reselling.’ Given that I’d decided to (try and) drive back to the UK, hopefully this wouldn’t be an issue.
Optimistic but still no closer to the truth, I dug up Yuval through the Caravanistan message boards, an adventurous Israeli struggling to flog his Lada Niva 4x4 in Bishkek at the end of a long summer trip around the region. At $2500 his car seemed suspiciously cheap. Nevertheless I tried to plough on with the deal, even setting up a wire transfer to an Israeli bank account.
The amusing conversation with the Ellis, compliance officer at CurrenciesDirect.com went something like this:
‘‘Hi there. I’d like to arrange the transfer of 2,500 dollars.
To which country?
Israel.
What is the nature of the transfer?
I’m buying a car
Where is the car based?
Er, Kyrgyzstan.
What is your relation to the seller?
None whatsoever.
Is the seller also the fund recipient?
No.
Why not?
He doesn’t have a bank account. It’s his mate’s account.
Please hold, sir…’’
Red Flags. Red Flags everywhere.
Eventually it transpired that Yuval had in fact failed to follow proper Kyrgyz legal protocol in buying and registering the car. He paid the ‘seller’ $2500 and drove off on Russian transit plates without any documentation of ownership. When the seller then disappeared, Yuval was left with a hot potato on his hands that couldn’t get rid of, including on me.
History does not relate how Yuval’s story ends, but safe to say I did not buy his very cheap Lada. The only sensible move was to head to Bishkek and work things out on the ground.
The UAZ Hunter Red Army jeep screeched to a halt outside our guesthouse in Bishkek, throwing dust high into the evening air. Ryan, Nebraskan car nut, longtime Bishkek resident, and sometime archaeologist, emerged. ‘I’ve just been down in the Toktogul valley looking for Scythian graves’, he declared, shaking the dust from his trousers and showing off an enviable farmer tan on his upper arms.
Ryan had arrived in the city some years ago as a volunteer English teacher with the Mercy Corps, before settling down to run a guesthouse, an outdoor gear store, and a car rental agency. My enquiries had brought me to the latter — Iron Horse Nomads.
His advice was to buy a Zhiguli — Lada’s iconic sedan — not a Niva 4x4 as I’d intended. ‘For your budget, you could get a really shitty, 20+ year old Niva. It’ll break down loads. Or you can get a relatively new Zhiguli, with low mileage, which’ll break down less. I’ve heard of people doing the Pamir Highway in Zhigulis, so you shouldn’t have too many problems… You’ll just have to go round stuff, not over it.’
And with that, in the care of Ryan’s fixer Azamat, it was off to market.
Out on the Western edge of the Bishkek’s dusty 19th century Tsarist grid, looking away towards the hulking enormity of the Ala-Too mountains, is an unassuming dustpan. Dotted with shipping containers and filled as far as the eye can see with vehicles in every conceivable state of disrepair, this is one of the largest car bazaars on the Silk Road.
And under the harsh Autumn sun of a bright Sunday morning, the dealers are doing brisk business, in what must be the most masculine environment I have ever step foot in. Bellies hang from half-pulled-up t-shirts. Camel Slims hang from every pair of lips. Russian 90s dance music blares from a jumble of speaker wiring in one of the NOTARIUS offices.
With Azamat as our guide, we duck past the section where youngsters pull doughnuts in aged Mercedes with pitch-black window tints, arriving in the relative calm of the Lada section. Each car has a sign in the window noting mileage, year and price — apparently non-negotiable.
Dark sunglasses on, I do my best to look both hard and knowledgeable at the same time, giving a Zhiguli’s tyres a judicious kick and looking over longingly to the Niva section of the market. True to Ryan’s claim, all those under $3000 look ready to fall apart, etched with rust like eczema. The Zhigulis — stylish sedan cars, still being made until 2012 to the same 80s design blueprint — are much more encouraging.
Eventually, we settle on a car we like the look of. 40,000km on the clock, built in 2010, in sleek dark silver with aftermarket homemade extras like a sound system and even central locking. Azamat pokes around in the bonnet approvingly, while the vendor Timur clucks about, blasting Russian rap through the subwoofer. A test-drive in flip flops with a nervous Timur proves inconsequential. Never has the ancient maxim caveat emptor rung truer: a knowledgeable eye is required to succeed here, as only with time will the car’s (many) quirks and flaws become clear.
Once the price has been agreed — $2600 including all registration fees — Azamat steers us into the registration office. The process of enacting the sale is straightforward in the extreme. We have the Russian transit plates made up into full Kyrgyz ones. In one of many unassuming tin huts dotted around the bazaar, emblazoned нотариус (notarius), the sale is notarized for the princely sum of ten of your earth pounds.
The transaction — cash dollars in one hand, car key in the other, no receipt — takes a matter of seconds. Documents-wise, we leave market with a small blue techpassport — the car’s passport, essentially — and the crucial doverennost. This document gives us legal power of attorney over the vehicle: we can sell it, scrap it, or burn it out, without the real owner’s permission. This is not quite the same as owning it, but is a workaround that the Kyrgyz have devised to sell cars to foreigners. What happens after the document expires is somewhat unclear. (In fact, later checking the date in Tbilisi, we realise that old papers have been used to print it, so it was to expire less than a year after the purchase date).
From there, its back to central Bishkek, at rush hour, in flip flops: a veritable baptism of fire for a driver more used to Brent Cross than Bishkek. We christen the car Azamat, which means ‘good job’ in Kyrgyz, is the most common male name in the country, as well as being both the name of the place we bought the car and our fixer, the linchpin of the whole transaction. A good omen?
Been living under a rock? Then you may have missed Part 1 of our video diary: Dreams of My Lada (YouTube).
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