post office reliability in Central Asia
Replies: 9 - Last Post: Feb 29, 2012 4:33 AM Last Post By: BeccaS7
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post office reliability in Central Asia
I plan to do some shopping while I travel in Central Asia... in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan... carpets, jewelery, silks, textiles. I would rather send boxes to my home in Indonesia than carry purchases with me as I travel.Has anyone had any experience mailing boxes or postcards from any of these countries? How reliable are the postal systems?
Thank you for any information.
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There are complicated regulations involved in shipping parcels from Central Asia. I worked with local travel agents, paying a small fee for their assistance in handling the forms and the packaging and the customs inspections. (I wouldn't ship anything like jewelry.)My box from Kyrgyzstan arrived wrapped in cloth and sealed with large daubs of wax. Fascinating.
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Agreed, the cloth/wax procedure is totally fun. I sent a 10KG parcel from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan regular post. It got there quite quickly. However, none of the postcards i sent to North America made it.5
No, the jewelry i kept with me on my overland trip from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan. The parcel was full of 10kg of personal hygiene products which are apparently useless to a backpacker :09
I would highly recommend the Uzbek postal serviceI posted over 24 kg of mountaineering equipment back from Tashkent in two boxes. Less than a week later one box had arrived. Using the excellent tracking service the Uzbek post has we could see that the second box had also arrived in the UK but had not been delivered. It turned out that the UK postal service was useless and had somehow sent the box back to Uzbekistan. It was months later that we were able chase it up but the Uzbeks were great, finding our parcel and with some negotiation getting the Uk post to pay for the cost of returning to the Uk we got it back!! The Uzbeks were so helpful. The parcel arrived a couple of hours before we got back home - after 9 months of overland travel from Nepal to the UK - and was sat on the doorstep waiting for us as we arrived.
We looked into DHL but the cost was $$$$ so took the risk and it paid off. It cost about $80 with Uzbek Post. We had also looked into posting in Tajikistan but the cost was similar to DHL.
All our post cards made it from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan.
Hope this helps
