gerryl

After a three and a half month trip from Prague to Tashkent it was time to come home. The weather suddenly changed from hot and sunny to cold and rainy.
​​​​​ I've never liked the logistics involved in taking a bike on a plane, boxes, taxis etc. It's easy enough in your home town, you can get a box from a local bicycle shop and getting to the airport is pretty painless. However finding a box of any size is surprisingly difficult in Uzbekistan. If nothing else, Uzbeks are extremely efficient at collecting and recycling cardboard. The post office doesn't even sell boxes! After wasting a whole day looking for a box or boxes I gave up. It wasn't a difficult decision. Even though I was flying business class, it was still going to cost me $138usd for the bike, and to be honest the bike wasn't worth that much. I had the bike for over twenty years, the rear triangle was a bit out of true, and new it cost less than $500. I soon dawned on me that it made no sense in paying to transport a worthless bike. So on the day before my departure I rode the bike to the huge central market parked the bike in a conspicuous spot unlocked and walked away. When I went back to check on it the next day it was still there, tells you how desirable the bike was.😀 I wonder if it's sitting there waiting for its new owner?

wschruba

Sounds like you made the right choice. Was the airport you left from so small that none of the carriers sold bike boxes?

djb

a photo or it didnt happen!

I would have found a bike store or something to be able to give it personally to someone, but that is interesting that it was still there a day later. Shows something about the locals and respect doesnt it?

Makes me think of a market street somewhere in mid southern Mexico, a smallish city, where I was walking around trying to track down some pure alcohol for my stove, when in front of tons of stalls and narrow stores I saw a nice mountain bike just sitting in the middle with everyone walking past. It was unusual to see such a nice bike, spd pedals and all, and so I went into the teeny tiny narrow store directly in front and asked if they knew whose bike it was. The lady in the store answered "Oh yeah, it's my husbands, but he is off somewhere"--obviously everyone around there knew it was "Jorge's or Manuel's" bike and everyone kept an eye on it, as it couldnt fit into his teeny tiny store.
On my way back, he was there and we had a nice cyclist chat, he had raced a bit but with store and family now, didnt have the time, but commuted to keep fit and it being practical.

Gerry, public forum and all, but did you keep a trip journal?
And no matter yes or no, I hope the trip was a good adventure.
"Step back and look back on trip" Readers Digest short version of how it was?

jefnvk

That is why I've come to love plastic mattress bags. Can roll them up, zip tie them under my rear rack, and they are there when I need to bag it up. I'm guessing most flights out of a place like Tashkent see enough oddities in cargo that a bike in a bag instead of a box would hardly raise an eyebrow.

But yeah, I'd have tried to legitimately give it to someone over just abandoning it.

fietsbob

Not in Uzbekistan, but the LBS here at the end of the Transcontinental
+ Louis & Clark, ACA routes,
has resold tourist bikes, on consignment , sending the money back,

Rather than box and ship it back to from where they began, to home..
which is the usual choice..

alan s 

himespau 

I'd have probably tried to sell it to someone for the cost of a schawarma just to that it went home with a new owner rather than just taking up space (plus getting one last use out of it with the meal), but what you did makes sense.

rhm

Well, yeah. Giving it to someone would have made everyone feel good; this way either someone is going to feel guilty about it, or it'll get tossed in the recycle bin.

mev

Sounds like a fun trip. Given the costs/hassle involved I can seeing such choices and/or sometimes folks that post notes about bicycles for sale inexpensively after a trip.

I once left an Extrawheel trailer in Srinagar India. I had taken both a mountain bike and the Extrawheel first to Bangalore and then to Manali via Delhi, paying a good chunk for the US airline flight baggage fees. We had taken the bus to Leh and cycled from there to Manali. I wasn't looking forward to the combination of hassle/fees to get things boxed in Srinagar. So as it turned out, I found a bicycle-related business using Google Maps and when they weren't open, left behind an extrawheel trailer at their front doorstep.

I cycled to the Srinagar airport and showed up without any form of a box. The personnel from the domestic airline were surprisingly helpful in getting things sorted so I could first bring the bike through security (it was too big to fit in their luggage scanning machines and had too much metal for their people scanners; they brought someone over with what looked like a metal detector before giving up on that too). With that help and some supplied tape, the bike flew back to Bangalore without a box. After a few weeks of working in Bangalore, the bike came back with me w/o a box because Lufthansa had a policy allowing unboxed bikes.

gerryl

There are only a handful of airlines that fly out if Tashkent, none sold anything remotely resembling a box. For an international airport it's quite tiny.

djb

well, if you did or plan to do any write ups or a journal and am comfortable sharing it on the interwebs, I'm always up for reading of someone's adventure.

gerryl

I wasn't too surprised the bike was still where I left it, people were pretty honest.
No I don't keep a journal, nor am I much of a picture taker, I don't travel with a camera. I picked up a used cell phone in Poland but that was for internet access not photos.

gerryl

I love the plastic bag! This trip started in Prague where the bike did in fact arrive in a plastic bag on Air Transat from Toronto. Once I retrieved my bike from the oversized area I was out in 5 minutes.
Turkish Airlines were pretty strict about boxing the bike, I even visited their Tashkent office to plead my case, no luck. I'll be honest, I wasn't too disappointed. Besides I'd still be paying 138 bucks to transport an old beat up bike.

djb

I have to say that I find the extra work (and yes, it is work) keeping a journal and such, to be worth it for having a record of little things that one forgets. Your story is an example of how I had forgotten about that Mexican unlocked valuable mountain bike story, and then in writing about it, I then remembered about coming back the same way and chatting with the guy, made me recall the sounds and stuff on that market street, and other stuff from that day.

anyway, your trip went through a part of the world Ive never been to, nor thought of going to, and certainly seems very exotic and strange.

gerryl

Dude, I must admit that would have been a good idea! Damn I wish I had thought of that. 👍

gerryl

A few years ago I cycled up to Shimla from Delhi looked up, way up at the mountains and said to myself...maybe some other day. 😀
Yeah I figure smaller domestic airlines in some countries would be more willing to help out, I.e bend the rules. This wasn't one of those cases, my trip involved changing planes in Istanbul, so I guess the Tashkent employees aren't in much of a position to start fiddling around with airline policy.

gerryl

Why not just give it to someone? Didn't feel like it. I just went to the market got what I needed and walked home.
​​​​​​

seedsbelize 

In my small town in Yucatan, bike locks are unknown. Nice bikes are too, but very, very few here can tell the difference. I don't take my road bikes into town, but my old Giant mtb is never locked, for hours at a time.

kaos joe

A friend of mine did this with a beat up Mexican-made VW Beetle. He drove it from Peru to Ushuaia in the far south of Argentina, parked outside the airport, asked a friendly local where was a place to get lunch, and handed the man the keys.

PedalingWalrus

gerryl

In my case if the bike was actually worth something, I might have made more of an effort to find something to box it in, and I might have paid the extra airline fee to transport it. I honestly don't think the bike was worth the hassle and certainly not worth the $138 the airline wanted, so just leaving it behind wasn't much of a decision.
Couplers aren't something that I would be interested in, just too expensive for the type of bike I would consider buying.

raria

Either a criminal has it or someone with a guilty conscienious who wont enjoy it.

flyjimmy

PedalingWalrus

Tourist in MSN

I was going to say that, you beat me to it.