The Random Person Who Took Us Home

It was a redeye flight. When you’re flying into this country, it’s always a redeye flight. The good thing about spending all night on an airplane is… wait… there is no good thing about spending all night on an airplane. Not in economy anyway. Now, I haven’t measured, but either my legs are getting longer or the spaces between seats are getting smaller. If I were fifteen I’d chalk it up to a growth spurt. But I’m not 15, so I’m not thinking that’s a likely option. And not to brag, but I pride myself on knowing just about all the ways you can be uncomfortable while trying to sleep sitting up. Benadryl is a good traveling companion. Unless you’re part of a very small percentage of people for whom it has the opposite effect and makes you hyper. I know some people who actually experience that. This world is a crazy place.

But I digress.

It was about 5:00 AM when the plane touched down and began taxiing toward the gate. Well before the captain had turned off the seatbelt sign, the aisles filled with passengers popping open overhead compartments, and—from my vantage point at least—not a single one of them appeared to be concerned that their personal items may have shifted during the flight. Pop. Yank. Drop. Tired eyes were wiped. Phones lit up. It was time to deboard.

We were home.

This time, our entry back into the Central Asian country where we’ve lived for the past five and a half years was a piece of double chocolate cake. See, we already had our visas. No waiting for an eternity and a half outside the one and only magical visa portal of despair for a temporary visa. (OK, so that’s not an exact translation of what it says above the window, but it’s close enough.) One time Laura and I got stuck behind a group of 50 tourists from Israel—I counted them—multiple times—all waiting at the aforementioned window for their visas. There went over two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

But not this time.

Oh no. This time we already had valid visas. It was a satisfaction like few others in this life to leave the window of despair behind, hop in line, slide my passport under the glass at immigration, pull my hat off so the official could check my face (hoping my plane-hat-hair wasn’t too bad), and simply wait for the glorious shlick-shlick sound of the stamp coming down hot and heavy on any open space in the little book that makes international travel possible. Then it was on to baggage claim.

And lo and behold, out came our bag.

With luggage in tow, we made our way to the counter where we could order a taxi. “Taxi? To the city? No problem. Right this way.” The taxi service lady smiled as we talked, no doubt because of how strange it must be to hear a foreigner speaking her native language. We followed her up to the officer standing right outside the final customs checkpoint. With more confidence than Bob Ross in front of a blank canvass, we pointed to the green “No goods to declare” sign, made eye contact with the officer, and marched through the line to the sliding doors, leading to freedom.

And then something truly spectacular happened.

The job of the lady with whom I’d talked at the taxi service counter was to put me in contact with a driver for her company. We walked passed literally dozens of other taxi drivers, and when she stopped in front of one young man, I stopped behind her. “He speaks Kyrgyz,” the taxi service lady told the driver. He grinned, too, and with only a few Russian words thrown in, he said hello and asked where to. While Laura was still several steps behind me, a man with short graying hair pushed through the crowd and walked right up to me. He looked me in the eye, held up his phone, and asked, “Is this your wife?” I looked at the picture on his screen. Sure enough. It was Laura with one of the dogs.

That’s when I put on my serious face.

“I’m waiting for them,” the man said to the younger man who was supposed to be our driver. In a land where age is king, it didn’t take much more than that to convince the younger driver to step aside and let the older guy take his fare. I was still trying to make sense of the situation. Did I mention it was just after 5:00 AM? My mind returned to the previous Monday when we flew out. We had taken a taxi to the airport early in the morning that day, and to say that we had had a cheerful driver would be like saying it’s a little sandy in the Sahara. We talked a lot of the way to the airport, and he was thrilled to meet foreigners who spoke his language. Since Laura had made the reservation, he got her phone number before he dropped us off, and he said that if we needed a driver, he’d for sure come and pick us up. At this point we’re used to getting offers from people who aren’t necessarily serious about doing what they say but are just being nice, so, of course, we said, “Yeah, sure, if we need you we’ll call.” Well, we didn’t call. That didn’t seem to have dissuaded him.

But that’s when things got even more interesting.

You see, it was dark when our taxi driver to the airport the previous Monday had picked us up. We sat in the back of his car, so of course we didn’t see him that well. When we got out of the taxi and pulled our bag out of his trunk, we had been focused on where we were going more than on the driver’s face. That Sunday morning at some time past 5:00 AM, the guy holding the phone with Laura’s picture on it didn’t exactly look familiar, but then, I figured I had just forgotten. Laura told me that he didn’t look familiar either, but who else could it be, right? Well, it wasn’t until we were already in his car and a good distance down the road that the full story came out. Turns out this wasn’t the driver who had taken us to the airport the previous Monday. This guy was a friend of his. The other driver couldn’t come to the airport that morning, so he had called his friend to come and pick us up instead.

In any other context, I would have been disturbed and angry.

What if this was some sicko with plans to lock us away in his basement for the next twenty years? But not here. No way. The original driver who had cajoled his friend into picking us up that Sunday morning was almost as happy to be driving us back home as the original driver was to take us to the airport. And of course it was a great honor to him that we spoke his language. Maybe we should have taken the original driver a little more seriously with his offer to give us a ride back home when we returned. So there we were, tootling down the road en route to home at an hour that I rarely see, and the driver pulls out his phone and makes a call through WhatsApp. In a few seconds, the first driver appeared on the screen.

It was a big happy reunion at 5:30 in the morning.

The first driver apologized that he wasn’t able to be there himself. “No problem,” I said, reassuring him. After a few minutes, he signed off, and we continued down the road to our house. And that’s what it’s like to live in a country with a population one-third the size of the city we had just spent the past week in. Your taxi driver will remember you a week later, and without arranging anything with you officially, he’ll send a friend in his place to pick you up when he realizes he can’t go himself. How will the friend know whom to pick up? How many Kyrgyz-speaking white dudes could there be? And as long as he had a picture of the white dude’s wife courtesy of WhatsApp, well, finding them should be no problem as long as he was waiting outside the airport’s only exit from baggage claim. He found us alright, and he even made eleven dollars out of the deal.

While I couldn’t tell you what, I’m sure there’s some lesson to be learned here.

If you have any idea what that lesson might be, feel free to let us know in the comments below.