Miramsmeanderings: Khiva to Bukhara 13.10.13

Today we had a long day on the bus travelling through the desert along ancient trading routes so an early start. On the bus at 8am. This is a Chinese bus and the seats are too close together and poorly organized for viewing with the window posts in the wrong place for viewing. The first two or so hours the road was shocking then onto a concrete road under construction. Stopped after 21/2 hours for a toilet stop ie a dive into the desert and down a bank. Men one side, ladies the other. The first couple of hours we travelled through fairly constant habitation and small holdings, cropping etc. Lots of donkeys and carts. Uzbekistan is the world's 5th largest producer of cotton. It is all grown in small plots and was ready for picking throughout the country. This is all done by hand. Groups of people everywhere bent over in the cotton picking away. Then into the desert again, a sandy greyish yellow with a few dessicated grey plants. Not at all like Australian deserts. At 12.30pm we pulled into the only roadside stop we saw for lunch. Many other buses there. What a lunch! The long tables outside under trees looked nice and a plate of tomatoes and onions arrived first which seemed to augur well. Then greasy inedible soup with one piece of fatty meat and a piece of potato. Then an even more inedible horrible shish kebab. Couldn't tear bits of meat off it even holding it in the fingers. Thank goodness for our bags of snacks! At last we arrived in Bukhara which looked to be a pretty nice place. We went for a stroll to stretch our legs nearby the hotel and admired the buildings and shops full of lovely touristy stuff. Everyone went to Bebe's cousin's restaurant for dinner. A long long wait sitting outside in the cold but the food wasn't too bad when it arrived.

John with a handful of the local currency to pay for dinner