Uzbekistan. Bukhara
Bukhara – another beautiful, Unesco listed old-town on the ancient Silk Road in Uzbekistan. One more ex-capital of the ancient kingdom.
Our Uzbekistan route was targeting to see the four capitals of ancient kingdoms on the Silk Road – Kokand, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva.
Madrasah
In Bukhara, we found the usual Islamic schools and mosques, which architecture and style are somehow similar throughout Uzbekistan. To be honest, looking at the pictures afterwards, sometimes I am confused about which mosaic and which madrasah (ancient Islamic school) we visited in which city. They are all similar but each of them is breathtakingly beautiful.
The city
Bukhara, however, has in a way its own characteristic look that you don’t see in other cities: buildings look more yellowish and sandy, on roofs you often find the pattern of low yellow domes, and overall it leaves the feeling of a city that has been directly carved into the desert – which doesn’t sound so unrealistic when you wander around its streets in the terrible July heat.
Tower of Death
One of the most famous anecdotes about Bukhara regards Kalyan minaret, a brick tower originally built for Muslims to pray, that in the 18-19th century was turned into an execution place. Criminals were thrown down from the top of the tower.
Colours in the summer heat
In summer it is terribly hot. By midday, all shades disappear. For Adriano Uzbekistan was the only place where he almost enjoyed handwashing the clothes (travelling with backpacks for 6 months we had to do that a lot). It is so hot and dry that everything, even very wet jeans get dry in half an hour. And if you leave them for a long time to dry outside, you will need to “break” the jeans how much dry they will get.
Evening in Bukhara
It was surprisingly active in the evening. It seemed that not just us but the whole city was hiding inside while the sun was up. In the late evening, both the old town and the modern part of the city turned on the lights, and out of sudden, we found loads of people, families with little children, street sellers and many restaurants open.
It was in the evening when we noticed how many children live in this city. Somebody told us that it is still regular practice to marry around 16-years-old and families have 3-6 children. Of course, the trend of fewer children per family, especially in the capital and big cities is also valid in Uzbekistan.
Food
In Bukhara, unlike other cities in Uzbekistan, we didn’t find so easily those little street restaurants offering grilled shashlik or traditional plov (a dish of rice, carrots, onions and meat). Probably we were just unlucky though: we did find a couple of them, but it wasn’t time for dinner yet.
When we started turning hungry and asked for recommendations about where to eat, local people happily announced that some great new restaurants have just opened and which direction we should take. When we got there, we found out that the new restaurant was called Bella Italia, and in front of it, there was another place serving hamburgers. For sure, it was not Italian pizza or fast food what we were looking for in Uzbekistan. A bit later we found a pompous, good looking restaurant close to the centre, called Chayxana Chinar. It wasn’t one of the small local restaurants we were after, but it wasn’t expensive either, and food was very good (I had there the best shashlik of our trip).
Hotel
We have stayed in a simple but nice hotel called Rizo Boutique, close to the centre. Hotels in Uzbekistan are usually quite cheap (the average is around 25-30 EUR per room in 2018) and of good quality.
Crossing the desert to Khiva
Next morning, we have left from Bukhara to Khiva by hiring a shared car with a driver. The price was around 15 EUR per person because the car was shared and other passengers could fit in.
We arranged the car through the hotel, and we definitely don’t suggest doing the same for a shared car. If you want a private car just for you, then great, I think booking it through the hotel is a good deal (I think the price of the ride should be around 60 EUR), but if you want a shared car it’s much easier, cheaper and straightforward to go to the station yourself. What happened is that the car we arranged had only us two as passengers, and needed two more in order to depart. The driver stopped at the car station and lazily went around, without doing anything to find more passengers: we had to wait a lot of time there, and the situation got resolved only because Adriano walked around and found more passengers himself.
It was fascinating to drive in the desert and see those sandy fields with very little vegetation around.
The driver was eager to earn some more money, and he offered us to do digressions, in order to see this or that other old ruin on the way. Actually, most of the things he offered would have been interesting to see, as we found out afterwards by googling them, but we were on a budget and the heat was really too strong, so we declined his offers.
At some point, the driver offered to stop a few minutes for free, out of kindness, to show us some sort of beautiful area where the desert had golden / red colours. We agreed. In the middle of nowhere, he stopped the car and instructed us to walk straight into the desert until we see the red sand. We started to walk, I, Adriano and another Chinese tourist whom we met at the station.
I shared my little doubt about not seeing anything special in the horizon, the driver having our backpacks with all the notes and maps for the rest of our five month World Tour (there was nothing more valuable than clothes, but he could not know it). It would have been “funny” to remain there in the middle of the desert without a car and our things, and bravo to him if he kicked foreign guys just like that, and convinced them to keep walking away into the desert voluntarily”. My thought did not sound amusing to Adriano, and he returned to wait in the car. Nothing happened to us or the car, I trust that the driver was a good man, but it is also true that we continued to search for the red desert with our new Chinese friend, and after 10 min walk in terrible heat, we did not find anything new and returned to the car.
Just a funny note on this little disadventure. What Adriano was most concerned, the most valuable things we had left in our bags in the car, were the antimalaric pills and the valuable antibiotic ointment, that we would have needed later during our trip. Ironically, having those stolen was not the right thing to worry about: as we found out at our arrival in Khiva, they had been left for 8 hours in the trunk of a car exposed to 60° of heat; the antibiotic cream was literally evaporating; we put everything in the fridge of our hotel in Khiva, and crossed fingers, hoping the medicines were not irreparably damaged and would not fail us.
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