A few days ago Friedel had the chance to talk to Chris, the host of the Amateur Traveler podcast, about our time in Iran. It was a fun hour chatting about a wonderful country and perhaps some of you would like to listen in so check on the site to download the show. Chris also has an amazing archive of over 130 shows on all parts of the world, worth adding to your “listen-to” list.

Going even further back, around Christmas we met a couple Americans, Andrea and Michael, travelling around and they did an interview with us. We haven’t seen this video yet because connection speeds are just too slow but the rest of you can enjoy it.

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.

We managed to get up before the farmers this morning to the beautiful sight of the sun breaking through some low clouds as a bright red ball in the sky. After breakfast “bread and chocolate spread with some not-so-great coffee” we set out to knock off the last few kilometres into Bukhara. It was too hard to resist having a second breakfast when we found a shop selling giant loaves of fluffy white bread, just like you’d find in Europe or Canada and the first we’ve seen for a very long time.  Soon we were rolling into the old city of Bukhara, a gorgeous place filled with ancient buildings, street markets, art galleries and leafy trees. It’s too bad we only have a month in Uzbekistan or we could happily spend quite a few days here.

In the afternoon we met Jungsun, our Korean host who’s teaching language classes. She’s kindly welcomed us into her home for a couple evenings and as we write this she’s cooking dinner. The smells are really making our mouths water!

The only small dilemma on our minds at the moment is the problem of registration in Uzbekistan. All tourists are supposed to have a docket which shows where they’ve spent the night. Normally we would get this at a hotel but obviously we don’t get anything if we use our tent or stay with friends. We’ve heard we could have troubles leaving Uzbekistan if all our nights aren’t accounted for. At the same time, we know plenty of people cycle across the country and the nature of cycle touring means you spend many nights in the middle of nowhere. There must be a solution here but we haven’t figured it out yet. What is really amazing is that no Uzbek official has told us about this requirement. We only know from Jungsun and from reading guidebooks. You’d think that something supposedly so important might be mentioned when you receive your visa or enter the country?

Postscript: On our second day in Bukhara we went to see Rakhima, Jungsun’s friend, and we watched her family making bread. Here’s the video:

It’s a long haul through the desert that covers about ninety percent of Turkmenistan. We’re just on day four of our seven-day transit visa but already we’re a bit tired of the endless sand dunes and the wind that never quite seems to blow on our backs. The barren landscape is punctuated only by the occasional cafe or small village. You have to wonder just what people do for entertainment here in these remote outposts, where there’s quite literally nothing for at least 100km in any direction. We had our morning break at the sole cafe in our day’s path, enjoying a pot of tea and a bowl of mutton soup for Friedel. It may not sound too appealing but after Iran’s lack of cuisine, hearty soups with lots of flavour and a potato or two thrown in are a real culinary highlight! Who knows if we’ll still feel so loving towards mutton after three months in Central Asia but for now we’re enjoying the change immensely. Originally we thought we’d stop for the night at a cafe in Repetek but tales from other travellers of drunk truck drivers and dirty accomodation changed our mind. Instead we managed to drag our bikes behind a sand dune and pitched our tent in a dip in the landscape.

That evening we cooked supper using a Soviet sausage that was as hard as a rock. It was like that when we bought it on our first day in Turkmenistan and hadn’t changed since. Take a look at this hammer of a sausage:

We woke up this morning to the wonders of Merv, an ancient city ruined by Ghengis Khan, on our doorstep. Merv is spread over a huge area and we managed to burn up nearly 20km by the time we were done looking around and back on the main road towards Uzbekistan. Of course we couldn’t leave the site without bumping into a few Turkmen tour groups and two women in particular very kindly insisted on pushing money into our hands; the third time in less than a week this has happened to us! Once again we tried to protest but we were fighting a losing battle. We gave our thanks and left wondering, with all these people giving us money lately, if we’d started to look more down and out than usual?

As we headed out on the road, at first we thought the wind had changed direction in our favour (the breeze has been blowing against us ever since we left Mashhad) but soon it turned to gusts, whipping across the road, creating large clouds of sand and dust. It wasn’t really ideal cycling weather so when we saw a cafe just outside the town of Zahmet we decided to call it quits for the day. One of the great surprises of Turkmenistan has been the roadside cafes where you can eat and drink cheaply and often the owner will invite you to stay for the night. We weren’t even halfway through our first beer and bowl of mutton soup when we were offered a room.

Just as we were settling in a great surprise rolled up: a Chinese cyclist who’s been on the road constantly for the past 11 years! Lee saw our bikes as he was going by and came over to say hello, telling us stories of the incredible 91 countries he’s travelled through. His panniers looked as though they’d seen half the world, with most of the zippers splitting open. He’d just come from Afghanistan, where he was hassled by the police, and now he’s on to Iran, Europe and hopefully Canada over the next year so give him a warm welcome from us if you see him on the road.

Here you can see a video of our sandstorm in Turkmenistan: