Fishing for Our Supper

Our week in Sri Lanka was incredibly relaxing and stress-free (after we got there).  Having done five family beach vacations, I've refined over the years what we need to have the best possible (i.e. least stressful) vacation, and this year I was able to get the mix of housing, food, and location just right.  Thankfully everyone loves swimming, so we were happy to spend the entire week doing the same thing every day.  

We would wake up, have a breakfast of massive amounts of fruit, pancakes, eggs, and bacon.  Then we would put on sunscreen, walk through the coconut grove beyond the pool, and onto the beach where we would swim.  Halfway through the morning, we'd reapply sunscreen, go back to swimming, and eventually end the morning in the pool.  Lunch was more fruit and toast.  After some quiet time to avoid the intense sun, we'd swim again in the late afternoon before having a delicious dinner of Sri Lankan curry.  

One morning Joseph and Eleanor had gotten their sunscreen on first and didn't want to wait for us, so they headed out to the beach.  A few minutes later we went out the gate to find Joseph and Eleanor hauling on a rope that was coming out of the surf.  A local Sri Lankan waved us over and told us to help pull the rope, so we all found our places and started hauling.  

After a few minutes, we realized that we were helping the local fishermen to pull in their catch for the day.  They would start out the morning by paddling their boat out past the surf line and laying a long net that could stretch as long as a kilometer.  Then they start pulling it in by hand.  

We were drafted at the beginning of their pulling and didn't realize exactly what we had signed up for.  It turns out that pulling a rope is a lot of hard work, and it's a lot of long hard work when you're pulling a rope that is attached to a kilometer-long fishing net.

At first I thought that we'd were just pulling the rope until the first buoy made it to the shore which is still a long time to pull a rope in the hot sun and increasingly hot sand.  But as we made it to the first buoy and started pulling in fishing net, I looked out to sea and realized how far out the buoys stretched.  

After awhile, it turned into a rhythm.  Walk the net until you reached the coil at the end, then go back to the surf, get a new spot, and walk it up to the pile again.  After 10-15 minutes, walk down the beach to a new spot and resume pulling.  

As I looked down the beach, I noticed another team of net pullers who also were hauling in their fish for the day.  But as we kept pulling and walking the rope down the beach, I realized that we were all pulling in the same net - they were just on the other end.  

Both teams continued to pull, and after almost an hour and half we met and began to haul the net with the fish out.  After all that pulling, we were excited to see what got hauled out of the sea.  When the net finally emerged, it was filled with about a thousand pounds of flopping, squirming fish.  The fishermen opened the bag up, pulled out a couple of live fish, and handed them to us as thanks for our help.

We walked back to the house with aching hands, burnt and abraded feet from the rough hot, sand, and a newfound appreciation for the hard work that the fishermen undertook every day.  We handed the (now dead) fish over to the cook for our dinner that night.  When we ate them deliciously seasoned and grilled, I can definitely say that I have never appreciated fish like we did that night.  

A Pivot in Travel Plans (or Lengths I Will Go for Mangoes)

I love tropical places.  They speak to my soul in a way that no place else does.  Whenever I go to them, I feel like I've found the place that I was meant to be.  They are always warm, they are always green, they have beaches that you can always swim in, and - most importantly - they have mangoes.  

This spring break is Sophia's last one with the family, so we decided to use one of our R&R tickets from the embassy to go on a tropical vacation together.  We'd really enjoyed our last two vacations in Thailand, so when I started my research last fall (I also really enjoy planning vacations), I started looking for places to stay in Thailand.  

However, when I started looking at the travel time to places that looked nice to stay, it started to get complicated.  Dushanbe does not have regular flights to anywhere, and when I started looking at days that we could get out of Dushanbe plus getting flights within Thailand (staying anywhere that had direct flights from Kazakhstan would be too crowded and too expensive), it was starting to look too complicated for a week-long vacation.  There would be ferries and overnight stays and three legs, and none of that looked relaxing at all.  Sure, we can take 24 hours to travel to the US each summer, but I had no desire to do that for a week-long vacation.  Pass.

Then I had the idea to look at flights to Sri Lanka.  We had gone with friends to Sri Lanka in 2022, and all the kids enjoyed it.  I had looked at going back while we were in Kazakhstan, but ran into complicated travel time issues and so we went to Thailand instead.  

When I looked at flights to Sri Lanka, it was a lot less complicated than Thailand.  Just fly to Dubai, have a 2 1/2 hour layover, and make it to Colombo by 4 in the afternoon.  That sounded a lot more like vacation to me.  Ten hours total travel time, including a layover, hardly even counts as traveling when you're traveling from Central Asia.

I was able to find a villa about an hour south of Colombo that had a pool, staff, and was beachfront at a beach with waves.  It turns out that the kids care very little for beautiful, crystal-clear water, white sands, or snorkeling.  They just want a beach where they can play in the waves for hours on end.  It looked great and was a good price, so I rented it.

Then the US started a war with Iran.  The Saturday before we were supposed to leave.  Usually world events don't affect my personal life that much (although there have been definite exceptions), but it really is obnoxious when they do.  And it's even more obnoxious when they get in between me and my long-awaited tropical vacation that is happening during mango season.  At a house that is non-refundable.  

My first thought was to try and move the vacation.  I looked at the rental schedule of the house and there was open time in mid-April, which would work.  We wouldn't lose money and we could still do the vacation.  And it would still be mango season.  However, the kids would have school (we had scheduled the house for the week when their online classes have spring break), and Brandon would have to get the time off.  Plus, we were all excited to go now, not in six weeks.

Then it occurred to me to see if we could get to Sri Lanka via another route.  The embassy had bought refundable tickets, and FlyDubai was already offering full refunds to anyone who wanted to cancel their tickets, so it would be possible to just get new tickets.  First I looked at going through Istanbul, as it would only be two (longer) legs, but all the flights from Dushanbe were already sold out.  Then I looked at going through Kazakstan, and it turned out that one of the twice-weekly flights from here to Almaty was on Thursday night and they had a flight going from Almaty to the Maldives on Friday morning. After that, getting to Colombo had several options.  To get back we could go through Bangkok to get back to Almaty and then return to Dushanbe.  It was longer, but we would still get to Sri Lanka and still have that amazing tropical location.  By Monday afternoon, the new tickets were bought.  They cost almost triple the cost of the original tickets, but we were still going to Sri Lanka.

At 6:15 on Thursday evening, our van picked us up and we began The Epic Trip to Sri Lanka.  It started when we took off from Dushanbe at 9 pm and landed in Almaty, Kazakhstan at 10:30 pm.  The last time we flew through Almaty, it was a complete disaster that involved spending a full day in a hotel room due to a missed flight and experiencing double midnight on February 29 (not a joke) in the airport in Astana instead of being on a flight to Bangkok.  We swore we'd never fly through that airport again, but life has a funny way to turning your words back on you.  

This time there was no double midnight, but we did get to spend six hours - from 10:30 PM until 4:30 AM - in the airport, which was a new experience for me.  Thankfully a new terminal had been built in the last two years and so instead of spending the night in the ninth circle of hell where there isn't even standing room, much less sitting or sleeping room, the kids each got a row of seats all to themselves to sleep on under the incessantly bright airport lights.  It was a whole new level of luxury.

Our next stop was Malé, the capital of the Maldives.  This layover was fifty percent longer, clocking in at nine and a half hours.  I knew that nobody wanted to spend that long in any airport, so I rented an apartment in the city where everyone could relax and get some sleep.  The airport in Malé is on a separate island from the capital city itself, but it is close so I figured it would be a pretty simple exercise to get ourselves there.  This is the part of me Brandon can't stand - the optimistic part that figures that everything should work out pretty easily just because I say so.

It all went well until we couldn't check our three fifty-pound suitcases back in.  We didn't have boarding passes for our final flight, as it was on Sri Lankan, and we weren't sure if our bags would make the connection.  So when we went through the baggage claim after passport control and saw our bags sitting by a sign that said "Colombo," we figured it would be safer to just re-check them ourselves.  But when we went to re-check them, we were told that actually, we weren't even supposed to have been allowed to leave the airport (I guess no day visitors allowed in the Maldives) and now we'd better just take the suitcases and come back later.

So all three suitcases got to come with us on the ferry.  But first we had to find the ferry.  And get money for the ferry.  The money was found, and after several trips up and down the airport, the ferry was eventually found, and we made it to the apartment building that contained the apartment we had rented.  After several trips up the wrong elevator (turns out that elevators in the Maldives are not build to hold 8 people plus suitcases) and then back down and then up the right elevator (in three separate trips), we finally did find the apartment where naps were very happily taken, movies were watched, and teeth were brushed.  There's nothing like long travel times to make you truly appreciate the utter pleasure that is brushing your teeth.  Next time you travel for 24+ hours, you'll know exactly what I mean.  

Then it was back to the airport with everything in reverse.  Including a search for the ferry, which it turns out does not leave from the place it drops you off at.  Thankfully the captain spotted us hurrying along the quay and waited for the enormous family of silly Americans to get on the ferry.  Usually they leave every fifteen minutes, but it's Ramadan and it was near sunset and there was a 45-minute pause in ferry service so that everyone could break their fast.  

Our bags were very happily dropped off (after a 20-minute pause in check-in service because, Ramadan), and we had an uneventful flight to Colombo where we landed at 10:45 - a mere 25 hours after taking off from Dushanbe.  Then it was only a thirty-minute wait in line for passports, a short ATM visit, a stop by the cell service kiosk for a SIM card, finding the driver, waiting at the curb for half an hour for him to get the car and make it back through traffic to get us, and a hair-raising hour-long ride down the highway and small rural roads at 1 in the morning by a driver who wanted to get home as soon as physically possible.  We finally pulled up to the villa at 1:15 AM, 31 hours after we left our house in Dushanbe.  And that was just to get to Colombo.

After a completely fabulous week of swimming, eating tropical fruit, swimming, eating tropical fruit, swimming, riding an elephant, eating tropical fruit, swimming, and eating amazing Sri Lankan food every night for dinner, we had to go home.  

So on Friday night after our last delicious dinner of chicken curry, daal, eggplant, rice, parathas, and papadam, our car picked us up.  The return trip to Colombo was certainly much less hair-raising as there was a lot more traffic, and included a twenty-minute wait to get through a toll booth.  But we made it in plenty of time to sit around in the airport wishing we were asleep while waiting for a 1 AM flight to Bangkok.  We landed in Bangkok around 6:30 and had a lightning-fast layover of only three and a half hours.  It was so quick that nobody even got to take a nap or had time to get bored.  

The flight from Bangkok back to Almaty was 7 1/2 hours - which was, incidentally, the total flight time (not including layovers) of both flights if we had been able to go through Dubai.  It ended with Elizabeth vomiting all of her food up as the plane descended.  

The flight from Almaty to Dushanbe was the shortest one of the whole trip - only one hour - but there weren't any flights from Almaty to Dushanbe on Saturday.  The next one wasn't until Sunday morning.  Not wanting to spend another night (and afternoon and evening) in the Almaty airport, I rented a couple of apartments within walking distance of the airport.  I got to enjoy the functionality of Kazakhstan again when I ordered Papa John's and Krispy Kreme and had them delivered to the apartment.  I really do miss delivery.  

This morning, after getting twelve hours of sleep, we boarded our final flight and made it home to Dushanbe by 1:15 - forty-one hours after we left the villa in Sri Lanka on Friday night.  

I had to laugh when considering the travel times that were involved just to get to Sri Lanka for a weeklong vacation.  The entire point of going to Sri Lanka was that it was convenient and easy to get to.  If I had had a crystal ball - or perhaps just had an inside source in the military - and known what was going to happen the week before our trip, I would have just gone to Thailand.  It would have been easier, and we ended up going there anyway.  Instead we got to have a best-of tour of all the tropical places we've been to since we've started taking tropical vacations (with the exception of Dubai, ironically).  

But I won't complain too much as we still got to go and have an absolutely fabulous and incredibly relaxing week with the kids.  And in the scheme of difficult things that are happening in the world right now, spending ridiculous amounts of time traveling to go and spend a week at the beach doesn't even rate as 'hard.'  It's just silly.  

However, I do hope that next time we go to Sri Lanka (I'm already planning for the next one), we can just get there the shortest way. 

Praying for Rain

Fall is usually a very rainy season in Tajikistan.  The first time we moved here, it felt like it rained all November non-stop.  We were in a temporary house for five weeks, and I remember being stuck inside with small children all day with nothing to do but just watch the rain fall.  I've come to enjoy the rainy falls after long, hot sunny summers.  It helps to usher in the quiet season where the days get shorter and the temperatures cools down to cozy levels.  The mountains start to turn green again after being brown all summer long, and the grass in town comes out of its summer dormant period and beings to grow again.  The air is washed clean from summer dust and we can enjoy the view of mountains again - mountains that become increasingly snow-covered as the rains continue.  

This fall, however, has been different.  The sun has continued to shine relentlessly every day, stubbornly refusing to hide behind clouds or rain or anything that would bring some water to the land.  When we arrived in September, that was normal.  As we headed into October, the rain-free weeks became a little distressing, but I didn't complain about the lovely seventy-degree days (detoxing from the winters of Astana will take some time).  But when November showed up and we had only had one good day of rain since we arrived, I started to get concerned.  

Now it's December, and there still hasn't been any rain.

I grew up on the East Coast where it rains on a regular basis, and 'droughts' look like grass that gets crispy around the edges and trees start to look a little sad.  When I moved to Utah, which is much more dependent on winter rain and snowfall, I started to pay attention to those things a lot more.  There were several very dry years that made the reservoirs drop alarmingly, and a lot of prayers were given asking for the rain to come.  We've lived in dry countries every since leaving Utah, and rain is something that I appreciate much more than I did in my youth.

All of Central Asia is dependent on seasonal rainfall.  No rain of significance falls during the summer, so all of the water for the region comes from snow that accumulates during the fall, winter, and spring rains.  All of the agriculture is watered from the rivers that flow from the mountains, winding their way across plains that grow food for the region.  If there is not enough snow to melt, there isn't enough water for the rivers, and there isn't enough water to irrigate crops.  It's a very important cycle to maintain.

Tajikistan has an even further reliance on water that goes beyond agriculture to power generation.  Over ninety percent of the country's power is dependent on hydroelectric power, which doesn't work when there isn't enough water.  So a dry year for Tajiks not only means less water next spring, but a very cold, dark winter.

It is not uncommon to have power cuts at the end of the winter as the reservoir gets low before the spring melt.  The villages are often limited to several hours of power per day, but Dushanbe usually has full power.  Friends who were here last year told of rolling blackouts in the city for several weeks at the end of last winter.

This year, however, the blackouts have started earlier.  We are very blessed to have a whole-house generator which automatically switches over when the city power goes out.  A few weeks ago, the generator started turning on for a few hours a day.  Then it was on from 8-5 every week day.  Next it started turning on for a few hours on the weekend.  Now it runs from 8-6 and from 10-4 every day.  

This means that in our neighborhood, which is a very rich neighborhood (remember, the presidents of Russia and Tajikistan had a meeting just one street over back in October), only has power 8 hours a day.  The remaining 16 are dark, cold, and without any water.  Brandon has heard from his staff that other parts of the city have power for 2 or 3 or 4 hours a day.  The villages are restricted to two hours a day - one in the morning and one in the evening.  They can't cook food, heat their houses, or have any electric appliances or running water.  So far, the weather hasn't been too cold, but it's not yet winter yet and will only get colder.

There isn't any rain in the forecast for the next ten days - just sun, sun, and more sun - so nobody knows when the rain will come and the power will return.  That's the funny thing about the weather - everyone has to live with it, but nobody can do a single thing to change it.  Instead we just have to wait and pray.  That's all anyone can do.  

Hopefully the rains will come, the reservoirs will fill, and the mountains will be thick with snow.  Hopefully the sun will hide for all of December and we will be ready to see it again in a month or so.  Hopefully everyone will get to enjoy warm, bright homes through the cold of January and February.  I certainly and praying for that.  But that's all I can do - hope and pray.  Nothing more.  The rest is up to God.  

Our First Hike

One of the really great things about Tajikistan is the hiking.  When we were here the first time, we did a lot of hiking.  I love being outside, and I love exploring, so hiking is the perfect excuse to be outside for extended periods of time while exploring new places.  There are endless hikes in Tajikistan - literally any creek or river has a path next to it - and the only limiting factor is how far you want to drive for a day hike.  

I have been warning my family for months that the hiking was going to resume once we got to Dushanbe, and they have been dreading the resumption of them for months.  Until this past weekend, they've been able to avoid hiking as life has been busy with social activities, Brandon's work, settling in, and birthdays.  But this weekend was free, and when asked if the children would rather stay home on Saturday or go out (and hike), they all voted to go out (and hike).  So we went for a hike.

I had heard about an abandoned amethyst mine that wasn't too far outside the city, so we decided to go there for our first hike.  William has developed (inexplicably) a passion for amethysts, so he was very enthusiastic about the prospect of going to an amethyst mine where he could find his very own amethysts.  

A friend in the community had done the hike a few weeks earlier with his five year-old, so I figured that it wouldn't be a particularly difficult hike.  The hike was about 2 - 2/12 miles with 1500 feet gain in elevation.  Easy.  No problem.  We could theoretically have driven all of the way up to the mine, but the road reportedly got sketchy after a certain point, and part of the point was to hike, not just explore an abandoned mine.

The evening before our hike, a dust storm blew in, but we decided to head out anyway in the morning as we had plans and weren't going to let a little bit of dust stop us.  The temperature had dropped to the upper fifties, so Sophia decided that if we pretended that it was fog, it would make the whole day feel more like fall, which hasn't quite yet arrived in Dushanbe.

The drive to the hike was straightforward and easy - which was a good way to start out a hike, and not always the way that a lot of our hikes have started in the past.  We found the parking spot right before the road started developing serious potholes and ravines, parked the car (making sure to set the parking brake), and started walking.  Up.

After about twenty minutes of walking, Sophia turned to me and commented, "Somehow I managed to forget that hiking means taking a walk.  Up a hill.  I forgot about the up part." Elizabeth asked when it would all be over, and Brandon commented that his heel hurt from the three-mile run that he and Sophia had taken together the previous morning.  We had left Joseph home as he was sick with a cold, so there was one less person to complain, which was nice.

A good thing about this hike was that it was along a road, so there was lots of room to hike and it was clearly marked.  The unfortunate thing about this hike was that it was along a road, so it just kept going up, and up, and up with no break at all.  Usually hiking trails have some up, then maybe a little down, then some up, then some flat bits.  This was just up.  For two and a half miles.

Two and a half miles doesn't sound like a lot of distance, and usually it's not so bad on a flat road.  But hiking two and a half miles on an uneven gravel road that just keeps going up - for 1500 feet - is a much different prospect.  By the time we reached the mines, every single member of my family on that hike was very Not Happy with my decision to haul them out on a hike that Saturday morning.  Very. Not. Happy.

Thankfully the mine was at the top, and once the children started finding bits of amethyst scattered around the opening, all was forgotten and hopefully forgiven.  The mine was abandoned so theoretically we could have gone in and explored the passages (which friends have done), but we forgot our flashlights and Brandon wasn't very excited about the idea of exploring an abandoned mine.  Something about safety, I think.  

So instead we looked around both openings (there were two) and thought about how much rock had to be hauled out to make those long, dark passages leading deep into the mountain.  There definitely was no room for trucks, so most of the work was done by hand, and there was a lot of rock covering the hillsides around the mines.  

Sophia commented on how much more fun it is to go somewhere like an abandoned mine in Tajikistan, where it's literally just a hole in the side of the mountain where anyone who feels like it can go in.  There aren't any signs warning of the danger, no ropes keeping people out, and you can do anything you want because you're the one who will have to bear the consequences of any stupid decisions you make.  There are so many experiences that my children miss from not living in America, but sometimes I think that doing things like exploring abandoned mines make up for them a little bit.

By the time we started down, the children all had various rocks with bits of small purple amethyst embedded in them, treasures to be lovingly placed in their various hordes and carried around the world with them as a memory of that time we went to the amethyst mine.  Everyone was in a much better mood, which was helped by going down for two and a half miles instead of going up for two and a half miles.

While driving home in the car, everyone seemed to have forgotten their earlier trauma and were happy about the fun outing we went on.  Which makes me happy, because that means more hikes for me.