Blogs from Uzbekistan, Asia - page 5

Today, it's another share taxi, this time to Urgench. The ride is 3 hours...another cheap ride too. I'm dropped at the shared taxi station to Khiva. I'm the only one here and decide 20 minutes later that it's ok, I can pay the full 2.2usd fare for the 25km ride direct to Khiva. My hotel is in the old city center. No cars here....so I do the last few hundred meters on foot. I'm the only guest at my hotel, with a driver of one of the tourist groups. This place is amazing, and still, there may be maximum 40 international tourists today in Khiva. Khiva was an old slave trading post. Trust me, you don't see much left of this around. It's more mosques, madrassahs and minarets. The place is so peacuful with nice locals ... read more

July 9 - Got up early and had breakfast. Decided to go to Shakrisabz for a day trip, by myself. I didn't think Geertje planned to come, so I sent her a message telling her I was going. I also sent a message to Richard to see if he'd been yet, since he had planned to go yesterday. I hadn't heard from either by 9:15, so I decided to head out. The share taxis leave from the supermarket near my place, so that was easy. Even better - I was the last of four, so we left when I got there. No waiting around for the car to fill up. The drive was about two hours, with a stop for gas and some other random things I could not figure out. It seems taxi drivers also ... read more

July 4 - I feel like I've never started a blog post with how much sleep I've gotten. This will be no exception. Last night I thought I would get to sleep pretty early, but in the end it was about 11:30pm when I finished reading. It's been hard for me to get sleepy earlier, despite being tired, but more importantly, it's a dorm and the light was still needed by others. Another problem is my earplugs. The pair I've been using no longer seem to work and I've got a new pair to use tonight, but that is all. I should have brought more. I hope they get me through the trip. A guy in my room got up at 4:45 to go to the bathroom, so I woke up then. It was also a ... read more

July 1 - I was still wondering how the entry to Uzbekistan would be, as there were many things that could be quite complicated - the customs, the passport, having to claim and possibly show all your money here, changing money (you get double the money on the black market, but that is not possible in the airport), getting a taxi for a good rate. But just before the flight landed, the woman across the aisle said something to me and we started talking. She is Uzbek and I asked her a few questions and then a guy in the aisle said he was also going to the same guesthouse as me. All of a sudden, things got easier. There were two guys from the states traveling together, they had just finished college, and they were ... read more

In 1966, disaster struck the Uzbek capital city of Tashkent, and a huge earthquake razed the city to its proverbial foundations, leaving its residents the unenviable task of rebuilding the city with the aid of some of its former Soviet Union citizens. Over the course of time, the task was accomplished, and in similar ways to those which characterized the re-growth of warn-torn cities the world over, Tashkent re-emerged and now stands as Central Asia's largest city, and the first in the region to be equipped with a metro system. The challenge here, after arriving from both smaller Samarkand and miniscule-by-comparison Bukhara was to see the highlights of Tashkent in the context of around a day and a half, a task made somewhat easier by use of the metro and s... read more