With some time in Tashkent and surprisingly decent internet access (although communicating to staff is always fun with our limited Russian) we’ve managed to continue our spring cleaning and get more than a few videos up that have been lurking in the depths of our computer for ages. You can watch them by going to the video category, where we’ve put the videos on the relevant posts for each day.

Since we first arrived in the city we haven’t been out very much, rather put off by the hassle of being checked by the police every time we step out of our front door. Our main excursions have been to the markets, picking up spices like cinnamon, coriander and pepper for a snip and of course we’ve sampled a few of the Uzbek dishes on offer in the ever-humble and reasonably priced cafes. We also popped by one of the more popular hotels here, looking for a friend, and managed to end up drinking vodka with the owner well before 10am. Ouch. Check that one off our Central Asian “to do” list.

Tomorrow we’ll go to pick up our Kyrgyzstan visa and on Friday we’re going to make a beeline for the Kazakh border. We’ve heard Kazakhstan is more expensive than Uzbekistan and we still have a couple weeks left on our Uzbek visa but the hassle of always having to be registered makes wild camping more a worry than a pleasure and we just want to be relatively free again. Uzbekistan is a nice country but the bureaucracy dates from another age and it’s doing our heads in.