Tashkent and Samarkand (now with photos!)

We're now on our way from Samarkand to Bukhara. Its getting more and more desert-y and hotter and hotter as we go. Its only a four hour trip and there is plenty of space in the shared taxi, as both the other passengers are women, so it should be fairly painless.

We're travelling fairly quickly at the moment as we get to the halfway point of our trip. We were only 2 days in Tashkent and a day and a half in Samarkand. We've got another week in Uzbekistan and then have to meet our guide at the Turkmenistan border. The Turkmen government is a bit paranoid and you need to have a guide with you to enter on a tourist visa.

Tashkent was quite dull. It is a big city (apparently the 4th biggest in the USSR) but doesn't really have a centre, just lots of 6 lane highways lined with ugly modern buildings. We had to get Azeri visas, some more dollars and reading material, so that took one day. Then there are a few sights and our hotel had a pool, so that took up our other day quite nicely.

Samarkand was great and the main group of enormous intricately patterned medrassas deserves its cover-photo status on most of the 'central asia' or 'silk road' guidebooks. Any of the major mosques or mausoleums would have qualified as the number one site in Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. I won't test the limits of my descriptive prose, but instead upload some photos when I get to a computer.

Uzbekistan feels a lot more prosperous than the other countries in c. Asia, e.g. Only 50%of the car population are Ladas and there are proper petrol stations rather than big glass jars of fuel by the side of the road, and is also a bit cheaper. This seems a bit strange given that the currency is messed up and there were trade sanctions after the police massacred a bunch of protesters in 2005 or 06. Luckily, Andrew and Zarema are planning to join us for a few days in Georgia, so we'll have two genuine experts on Central Asian economics to explain it to us. It wil be great to see them - although mainly for other reasons.

T.

P.S. What is the right adjective pertaining to 'desert'? I tried 'desertified', but I'm pretty sure that refers to the process of becoming 'desert' and I wouldn't want to imply any criticism of Uzbek agricultural policy. After all, the Aral Sea thing was the Russian's fault, right? Maybe I should just have gone with 'drier', or 'deserted'....