Okay, today’s blog will be fairly short, picture sparse, and yea… boring.
Today was the day we embarked on the long bus ride to Bukhara, roughly an all day drive.
There were a few high points, such as when we pulled over at a high point where we could see nearby Turkmenistan, but all-in-all, a fairly boring drive through the desert.
That green area on the other side of the water… that is Turkmenistan. Now you’ve seen it too.
And in a regular pattern (maybe a mile apart) along the border, we could see Baywatch towers. Oh wait, no, those were manned border guard stations. (We wondered how bad you had to mess up to get stationed out there.)
We would note (so your imagination doesn’t go to rolling sand dunes), that much of the desert in Uzbekistan is a living desert, not a dead desert like the Sahara. In other words there are plants and scrub vegetation, varied insect and animal life, etc. that lives in them, but they are generally a barren wasteland.
Here’s a good representative picture of the desert:
And finally the road. Oh the lovely road. It was a 2-lane road, however, it was so deteriorated that you essentially had to drive in the middle of the road so as not to risk falling off the broken up edge. Unfortunately, when opposing traffic came along (which it did continually, this is the main road after all), you had to scoot over to your side so the semi coming at you didn’t smack into you.
Keep in mind, buses have a high center of gravity. Therefore, any time you hit a pothole, or even just a slight depression this caused you to sway (or rock), (or feel like you were about to flip over) (you pick your description). It was pretty unnerving for a road-guy, or someone who thinks about things like high centers of gravity.
Obviously we had expert and wonderful drivers, and we made it through without mishap. Tim went to the back window to get some shots of what the road looked like for posterity (errr to put in the blog). So with the exception of the first pic (out the front of the bus), the remainder are out the back window and what we’d just passed over.
Just to add a little depth to today’s post, here’s some scoop on our new hotel.
Our hotel is a converted 19th century residence in the Jewish quarter of Bukhara.
Keeping in mind that grand residences of that day were not necessarily small. The hotel has well over 30 rooms, with many outdoor courtyards in between areas of living space (rooms). Here is an example of one such court yard that we walked through to get to breakfast each morning.
And here were our room, an exceptionally colorful and festive room. (Note the built in unique shelving, similar to that we’ve seen in various places we’ve visited.)
Yes, we once again got a larger room, that actually had 3 beds in it.
Jay was not feeling well, and opted not to go to dinner with the group. The road we were on (it looks like an alley, but is actually Arabon Street, see the first picture) took us up to one of the Dome Markets (more on that on another day), roughly a 10-minute walk to a more active area with shops and street vendors, etc. Here are some shots taken on the walk to dinner.
And below is the more active area after passing through the Dome Market:
Okay, that’s the best we could do for today, predominantly a travel day. See you tomorrow.