Travel day to Tashkent. Same Soviet train. Same route that starts in Bukhara, only we’re taking the second leg of it. Our hostel in Tashkent was lovely, perfect in every way. Except the internet didn’t work.

This has been a running theme in Uzbekistan. Not just a running theme, but a running theme that developed a progressively worsening limp. In Khiva, it was “just” slow. Everything connected to the hostel wifi, but we didn’t have enough speed to really do anything. In Bukhara, our phones connected to the hostel wifi, but our laptops would intermittently connect, forcing us to do pretty much everything on our phones. That does not include blogging.

In Samarkand, our phones still connected, but our laptops stopped connecting to the hostel wifi completely. With no other options, we tethered our phones to our laptops and were able to do a little bit of work that way. In Tashkent, nothing worked. Neither our phones nor our laptops would connect to the hostel wifi. Sensing a trend, I asked the hostel staff about it. To my amazement, they showed me their phones and they were online. OK, that’s not a good sign. I went to the common area and saw another guest with her laptop. I asked her if she was online. She said yes. OK, that’s a really bad sign.

Cindy and I pondered what was going on. Did we break something in all of our equipment? But it seems highly unlikely that we would damage two phones, two tables, and two laptops in the exact same way. And what was with the gradual deterioration or our connectivity? And why was it only in our hostels? Or was it only in our hostels?

To answer that last question, we hiked to a nearby luxury hotel and pulled up a seat in their bar (above). This, in and of itself, was a treat. This was not some modern bar with sleek stainless steel and black decor. It was old school Soviet. The menu had single cigarettes. It was dark but had a strange classiness to it. We wondered how many underhanded deals were made where we sat.

But back to more important things, the hotel had wifi and we wanted to test it. Huzzah! Both of our phones instantly connected. Confident that we had not wrecked our technology, we sipped our drinks and talked about glasnost for the rest of the night.