Samarkand 16.10.13

I suffered 5 bouts of diahorrea from 3.30 am to 7am.  Took two of Judy's gastro stop tablets and no further trouble during the day.  An 8.30am start.  First a visit to the mausoleum of the great Tamerlane.  Stunning architecture, tiles, and colours, minarets etc.  Then onto the Registan.  What an amazing place!!!  Four huge Madrassas around a square.  All magnificent.  Built around the 1400s.  This is one of the wonders of the ancient world.  Then lunch at the same place we had dinner last night.  Undoubtedly the source of my tummy problem.  Salads sitting out on tables when we arrived and dubious hygiene.  Then another Mosque.  Bibi Khanum, being one of the most brilliant examples of medieval architecture in Samarkand.  Construction began in 1399, the largest Mosque in Central Asia.  It accommodated 10,000 pilgrims and takes ones breath away with it's size and beauty.  Later we went to a market and I bought things I really didn't need to. 2 silk scarves in cream sort of crochet and another large shawl in pinks and blues.  Then onto the Mausoleum Complex.  40 Mausoleums, all different, all wonderful.  Then back to the hotel about 4.30pm before the final dinner.  We went in the bus to a restaurant which was obviously for tourists.  We had "wedding plov".  Plov is a rice based dish with a few vegetables and a couple of lumps of meat in a big heap on a plate in the centre of the table that we helped ourselves to.  Glad we only had that dish once! On the way back to the hotel we passed the Mausoleum of Tamerlane all lit up.  The dome
looked as if it was floating.  Very pretty.  The Registan was also lit up to a small extent.

Bibi Khonum Mosque

The Registan

Final dinner

The Mosque of Tamerlane lit up

 

 

Registan courtyard

 

 

 

Carved doors

More exterior of the Registan

Bukhara to Samarkand 15.10.13

An 8.30am start today.  Before leaving Bukhara to drive to Samarkand we visited the Summer Palace of the last emir.  What a magnificent structure. Spectacular rooms and decorations and large gardens.   Over the centuries the road to Samarkand has been traveled by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane on their incredible journeys.  On the way we had an early lunch at a ceramics factory.  Nothing there that we felt like buying.  Fairly ordinary stuff and the lunch was also somewhat ordinary.  Cold rice!, rice and vegetable soup, boiled meat and a piece of cake (the best bit!).  Some nuts to nibble on. Suspect this lunch was the cause of a later in the day "tummy episode" Once again our snack bags were a god send.  Bill is still unwell and it was a dreadful journey to Samarkand.  The main (so called) highway was shockingly broken up and rough.  Together with our basic Chinese bus it was a rather trying trip.  There were two stops for "open air" toileting when we relieved ourselves behind trees on the  roadside.  The rural landscape is mostly cotton farming in small holdings, with donkey carts being the main form of carrying goods and doing work.  Subsistence farming. 

Views of the Summer Palace of the last emir.  This is the sort of thing we had been seeing in Uzbekistan.  Magnificent, stunning buildings.

Ceiling work

Entrance courtyard

Tombs

An unbelievably intricate magnificent ceiling

So huge that only tiny pieces can be shown

All so beautiful and ornate

Bukhara 14.10.13

Bukhara is an ancient city boasting 2,500 years of history.  It has been a centre of world learning, succumbed to Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, and after the Silk Road waned was a capital for despotic Bukhara emirs. Today a 9am start for a walking tour of all the sights around Bukhara.  Lots of palaces, Madrassas, Mosques, etc. etc. all liberally clothed in shades of blue tiles with intricate designs.  Such large buildings and spacious courtyards. So much history and so much to take in.   Quite a hot day for walking.  Lunch was in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the ancient wall, minarets etc.. There seems to be only one denomination here in their currency and to pay for anything in cash requires huge bundles of money.  Bebe carries a large  shoulder bag stuffed full of bundles of 1,000  Som.  Each note worth about 45 cents, I think.  To pay for lunch required Bebe to fork out a huge bundle.  Bukhara was lovely but the locals seem to live in rather modest accommodation.  Lots of tourist trap shops.  I bought myself a lovely silk scarf for $15.00.  So many lovely things.  We went to a carpet shop "Scherezade" to see a demonstration on the making of  and different grades of carpet etc.  Later in the day Bebe took Bill and me for a quick march through the back streets (very interesting to get out of the tourist areas) to return to this shop and another one looking for a carpet for our family room.  Eventually chose one in a traditional Bukhara Camel's foot design mostly in rich reds.  Goat's wool, 160 knots to the inch.  $3,600, and $200 for postage.  Told it would arrive in Australia in 25 days.  24 days later there it was!  And we love it.  Bill unwell again tonight.

City Wall, Bukhara

Bukhara Madrassa entrance

View from lunch restaurant over roof topos

Bukhara

Mosque

Ancient tree in Mosque courtyard

Shopping

Carpet information session

Our carpet

Views of buildings in Bukhara

From our lunch stop

A magnificent ceiling

Many thousand 1,000 Som notes to pay for lunch

From lunch stop balcony

More Bukhara

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

A stop in the desert

Picking cotton

Venue for lunch looked nice but sadly the lunch was awful.

Another desert comfort stop

Someone's dinner at Bebe's cousin's restaurant

Our room in Bukhara

More cotton fields

Local housing in the countryside

Khiva 12.10.13

Today was not a very enjoyable day.  Instead of having a day to explore Khiva at leisure we were taken on the rattley bumpy uncomfortable bus for a long ride through rather boring countryside most of the time.  The roads here are terribly broken up.  There appears to have been no maintenance for years and years!!!  We drove through the rural scene, donkey carts, crops etc. for a long time until we reached the first destination which was the ruins of an ancient fort on top of a hill that we had to walk up. There is very little left except some piles of dirt and a very few signs of buildings.  No toilets here, of course.  More diving off into the desert.  Bebe told more rambling interminable stories  of forbidden love, revenge, and murder.  They nearly all end with "and they cut off his head".  Drove on and eventually reached the remains of another "castle" on a hilltop.  Judy and I didn't fancy climbing up a steep hill along a sandy track so waited below in one of the yurts we were to have lunch in.  Or efforts to get a cup of tea were wasted.  Eventually we all got a rather poor lunch in a yurt sitting on the floor.  Pretty much a wasted day on this pointless excursion.  On our return, after 4pm, Bill and I went straight over to the Old City and bought 8 pairs of hand knitted slipper socks, a pair each for offspring and their partners, and children.  Stalls of these socks were everywhere with the women sitting knitting while waiting for customers.  In various colours and sizes.  $24 for 8 pairs.  These socks turned out to be very comfortable and useful and appreciated by the recipients.  As dinner wasn't available at the hotel because of a large tour group we took ourselves into the Old City and had a nice dinner of pizza and ice cream at a hotel there. 



Lunch in the yurt