Uzbekistan

We say goodbye to Alex, Tiago and Martin who are heading to Tajikistan. The road is not very exciting and we have another headwind so we just push on for 90km and then sleep beside a farmhouse near Navoiy.


The following day brings more of the same, with a flat ride through pretty but repetitive farm land. We are invited to camp in the middle of a small farming village. The children are very interested in our tent and bikes and their mothers are only too happy to let us entertain them for the evening. The children here are so much fun. Boys and girls are very respectful and independent. They bring us cherries from the trees and candles to illuminate our tent while we drink tea.

A storm in the night provides an impressive light display, but comes to nothing and brings little rain. The morning dawns bright and we are on the road before seven.

We stop for a picnic in Juma, a few kilometers from Samarkand. Some children come to investigate and share our food. They enjoy playing with our camera very much and take some lovely photos of us and our bikes. All this exercise is doing a good job of reversing the ageing process!

We cycle into Samarkand at midday, past some more of the most impressive and famous silk road sights.

The Registan.

The heavily restored Shah-i-Zinda, where the cousin of the Prophet Mohammed is buried.



We are actually not that impressed by Samarkand. The buildings are undoubtedly very beautiful and dramatic but although some of them have needed little attention, most are heavily and unsympathetically restored and the whole town has the feel of a museum. The real living town is hidden away behind fences and the broad new avenues that lead tourists between the main sights have obviously been built where bustling markets and houses once stood. We are definitely back on the tourist trail and bus loads of tour groups pour into the sights. This comes as a shock after the past few months of off-season travelling. Our hotel turns out to be a very sociable place: Martin arrives on the same night we do and is followed by Nico and Sara, the two French cycle tourers that we first met in Bukhara. Another Swiss cycle touring couple are staying in a nearby hotel. We spend a few pleasant days exploring and relaxing.


We set off northeast to Tashkent with the first tail wind that we have had for weeks. It is amazing what a difference favourable meteorological conditions can make and we even start to think that we could be in Tashkent within two days.

A lovely section of hills breaks an otherwise uneventful, flat ride through the fertile plains of the Syr-Daria river, the Aral Sea's second tributary river. We camp by a farm house with an effortless 150km under our belts.

Our hopes of a two day ride are dashed when a storm brings a change of wind direction during the night and a barking dog keeps us awake all night. Ed's punctured therm-a-rest doesn't help matters!

We push on into another headwind and then opt for a long snooze under a tree at 11am. At 4pm a very big storm is brewing and we pull into a chaikhana to investigate the camping options not a moment too soon. The heavens open and we are relieved to be offered a room to sleep in. We enjoy a good meal and endless cups of tea on the veranda while the thunder rumbles and the rain bounces off the street.

We sleep well and the storm is over by the morning, having cleared some of the heat from the air too. We make fast progress to Tashkent after crossing the Syr-Daria and find a lovely hotel, after the usual stress of cycling into a big and busy capital city! Best of all, the hotel has a bath so as well as scrubbing ourselves and our clothes, it is possible to find and repair the holes in Ed's therm-a-rest. The thought of another few months of camping suddenly seems more bearable again!

Tashkent is a nice enough place and we are able to catch up on many of the tasks that we have been unable to do recently. It is also a place to sort out visas and plan the next leg of our trip.

We manage to negociate our way out of town a couple of days later and start ascending into the foothills of the Tien Shan.

A late afternoon stop for bread turns into a hard-to-refuse invitation to stay the night at the bakery. We are fed freshly-baked bread by Halim and his co-workers. They make us delicious plov (a type of Central Asia risotto) and we are taken to Halim's brother's house to eat mante (dumplings) . We have a great night socialising and go to bed stuffed!
The tandoor
Breakdancing kid!
Making bread
Making Plov
Hard at work

BreakfastWe set off after a delicious breakfast of freshly-baked bread. The road climbs gently at first and the mountains are rising up all around us. It is such a relief to see some topography after so many days cycling on the flat and we are geting excited. After 40km the real climbing begins with a 14%gradient taking us to 2200m in under 10km. The going is tough, but it is comforting to see the lorries struggling nearly as much as us!

We reach the top of the pass late in the afternoon. There are two tunnels to negotiate, and although our blood pressure rises as we think back to our previous experiences in Bosnia, they are wide and the traffic is slow. The fumes are bad but we reach the other side mentally & physically intact. Unfortunately, a rather grumpy security guard insists on deleting a large number of the photographs that we have taken since leaving Tashkent, including those of things like the Giganto Productus fossils that we found while eating lunch at a beautiful spot by the river... the military significance of these is clear to see !!??!!

The terrible road surface on the other side of the pass denies us the rapid freewheeling descent that we had been looking forward to and we realise that we will need to camp somewhere before we reach the valley floor. As is so often the case on this trip, before we even start to look, we are invited to stay by a very enthusiastic family. This, however, turns out to have been a mixed blessing.

During the evening Helen is bitten on the leg by the family's dog on her way to the loo. This is one of the most annoying things that could happen. Helen has been vaccinated against rabies, but now needs to have the booster shots to ensure cover against the illness. The risk of rabies is probably low, but since, as our guidebook informs us, the disease is "uniformly fatal" , we don't want to take any chances. The family are clearly very embarrassed and we play down the incident, but we know that Helen must visit a hospital to be treated very soon. We enjoy a lovely dinner of plov and a good chat to the family and we retire to bed and discuss the options. We are very reluctant to part with our bikes or each other because of the complications and worries that this could cause. Our phone does not work here. The only option seems to be to take transport back to Tashkent where we know that there is a very well-equipped hospital. We wake early and have breakfast then continue on our way to Qoqand, the next big town. We negotiate with a scrum of keen taxi drivers for a taxi van to take us and our bikes back to Tashkent. Three strenuous days of cycling over a pass dissolve into 4 hours of bone-rattling as we retrace our steps. We no longer have a map of the city because we gave it to a pair of French cyclists that we met going the other way two days ago. These pages of the guidebook also have the address and contact details of the hospital. We are able to use the taxi driver's phone to call the embassy who give us the number and Helen's parents text the address. We are relieved to find out that they do have the vaccination required. We had been worried. Getting the bikes to the hotel and Helen to the hospital without our map is difficult, but eventually Helen is seen to. We recover by having a cup of tea with Nico, Sara, Jill and Janos who are still there waiting for their visas.

The fun is only just beginning however: Helen must have a second injection in three days time and our visas expire the day after tomorrow...

We are able to extend our visas the following day, although it takes all day and we must purchase a flight ticket to prove the dates of departure! We have to buy a ticket to Bishkek (capital of Kyrgyzstan), but have no intention of using it. This is turning into a very expensive dog bite! That evening we learn that there have been more problems in Kyrgyzstan. There are rumours that the land borders between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are closed. The thought of getting all our kit onto a plane at this point is beyond contemplation- the luggage allowance is only 20Kg and we doubt that we would manage to get our bikes onto the plane without payment of a serious amount of extra money (official or otherwise!). We also don't fancy the long trip back to the Fergana valley only to be turned back at the border. We visit the Tajik embassy and purchase a visa without too much hassle. Next stop Tajikistan!!!!