Bukhara to Dushanbe

Bukhara is another compact old town in Uzbekistan with tons of historical sites. Most of them look similar to the ones in Khiva.

Lots of interesting plates and tea sets were for sale here. I considered buying some, but figured they would get wrecked in the mail.

It was at this point I started my new game: How many of these green domes can I get in one picture? So far, four:

After two days in Bukhara it was a decent three day ride to Samarkand. It was here that I started seeing a number of cars from the Mongol rally, and I tried to say hello to most of them. One team stayed at the hotel I was at for one night, and they left early the next day, meaning they didn't really see any of Samarkand.

Like the Registan:

Or Timur’s tomb:

Or the Shakhi Zinda complex:

After going through most of Samarkand, things started to look the same again. All these buildings have been heaving restored and they charge you $3-4 dollars to enter each one, so it got quite annoying paying to enter every single place in town. However I guess it’s reasonable as this is what they look like before restoration:

After leaving Samarkand I headed south towards Sharisabz the birthplace of Amir Timur, climbing a small mountain on the way.

When I arrived in town and was looking for a hotel I was approached by an Uzbek guy who offered me a place to stay in his home, so he fed me dinner and we walked a bit around the town with him pointing out landmarks. I realized then just how much I appreciate indoor plumbing.

I made it to Guzar the next day, which was a small town where I stopped and asked if there was a hotel, to which someone replied that there wasn’t. Then I asked a second group of people who showed me a hotel about 200m from the first group of people I asked. I paid about $4.25 for a room that even had a shower, so that’s a new lowest price for me. As I was leaving to find dinner, I was stopped by three people at the hotel who offered me some of what they were cooking, and later they drove me around town to a cafe and bought me coke and ice cream. One of the guys kept asking me about where I was headed and if I was going to Afghanistan, and he revealed that he had been in the Soviet army during their invasion of Afghanistan, and he showed me a bullet hole scar in his shoulder. So that was also unexpected.

After that it was several days of riding through mostly desert scrub and the foothills of the mountains. Since they weren’t irrigating this section of Uzbekistan it was mostly sheep/goat herders with very annoying and vicious dogs.

I spent a night at the border, meeting another few Mongol Rally teams dealing with their visa problems. It took about 3 hours to cross into Tajikistan, mostly because the Uzbek side was slow.

First views of Tajik mountains:

I arrived in Dushanbe which is a city that has put money into the main street, but much of the rest of town still seems poor and unpaved.

Once I get my GBAO permit I will head into the mountains where I imagine I will spend 3-4 weeks riding to Osh.

Notes on Uzbekistan:

Many of the cities seem to pick up at night when it’s no longer 100+ degrees, with lots of people congregating in the main squares.

The hardest thing to find in Uzbekistan is a trashcan. Only the large cities have them and even then you have to hunt for them. Most of the people here just throw their trash wherever they want, and it shows.

It seems to be the custom in Uzbekistan to get your attention by whistling at you, which is incredibly annoying. Throughout the more populated areas of Uzbekistan I have been honked at, shouted at, and whistled at. Every time I stop anywhere I get asked 100 questions by half the town.

Lots of people in Uzbekistan ride bicycles, but they all ride the same old and terrible Chinese single speed:

The preferred means of transport in Uzbekistan is the shared taxi in the form of these white vans that are everywhere: