From Khiva we were headed to the next Silk road city, Bukhara. Uzbekistan has a diesel shortage at the moment and the queues in the garages are huge. We stopped en route to buy diesel on the black market. Apparently the house was full of water bottles full of the stuff! So with our diesel we had enough to get us to Bukhara.
Riots in Osh just over the border in Kyrgyzstan have led to the border we were going to use being closed which means a slight diversion for us. We will head north into Kazakhstan for 2 days and then cut into Kyrgyzstan through a northern border. This means we will miss the mountain passes of the Fergana valley but the detour shouldn't take any longer so we will be back on track. This is all based upon us getting visas into Kazakhstan which is up to Pete flying to Tashkent and joining a very long queue at the embassy. Fingers crossed all will be ok.
Anyway, on to Bukhara. We checked into our very nice hotel in the centre of this small touristy city. In Uzbekistan there are only a few meals on the western menu: plov (rice), shashlik (kebab), lahgman (soup with lots of noodles) and manti (steamed dumplings with meat and onion in the centre). All nice but not when there's little choice for lunch and tea so some of us walked to an Italian for a much needed pizza.
The following morning we went on a walking tour around some of the medrasses and mosques. They were really decorative on the outside and everything was so much bigger than Khiva. Despite the interesting facts about the buildings in was 42 degrees outside (about 10 hotter than the average) and everyone started to flag so the afternoon was spent catching up with internet in the hotel. In the evening the girls and boys decided to go out separately for dinner around a large duck pond in the centre of the city. I think a good night was had by all as the boys had beers in town whilst the girls made watermelon cocktails, even if the girls were all back in our rooms at 10pm!
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