Rye Bread and Hagelslag

  Beautiful poppy fields of Kazakhstan     Before we head over to the second country we are visiting during our silk road trip, let's talk Uzbeks first. Neither of us had ever been to Central Asia, and for me (Bart) it was the first time visiting a mostly Muslim country, so I didn't really know what to expect. We prepared by bringing long sleeved clothes (for Mosque visits) and saying we are married, but none of this seemed necessary. Most people practice Islam, but fairly loosely, and most importantly, they take the important parts of the religion and don't linger on the stupid, little, aged details. Barely any women covered their heads in scarfs, especially in the cities, and we could enter mosques without problem. But above all, we found that people in Uzbekistan are very warm, generous and inviting, often offering food or help. They were interested in these two funny looking, white (one more than the other) tourists and even if they didn't speak Eng...

Following our adventures in the more desolate, rural parts of Uzbekistan, cut off from wifi and with it, the rest of the world, we arrived in the country's 3rd largest city, Samarkand. Immediately it became clear that in some ways, it was a mix of the two previous cities we'd visited, it had the size and more modern feel of Tashkent with its wide boulevards and green parks, but also the rich history and beautiful old monuments that you find in Bukhara. One man is solely responsible for Samarkands development and its multitude of impressive monuments and unsurprisingly you find his name all over this city (and the rest of the country) and that is Amir Timur, also known as Tamerlane. Perhaps not so well known to us clueless westerners, he managed to do in the 14th century what Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan did before him: conquer pretty much anyone he ran into. Around a century after Genghis Khan, Timur used his legendary strength and genius tactics on the battlefield to p...

After another splendid breakfast at the desert yurt camp, we continued our tour with a new driver. The previous guy was quiet but a nice guy who could speak some English and he explained all sorts of things to us, from local history to Uzbek food and customs. Unfortunately for us, the single English word we heard from the new guy was 'passport', during one of the 'checks' at one of the many roadside patrols.  Today's destination was the small village of Sentob, in the Nuratau mountains just south of the Aydar-Kul lake. Once again it was a crazy ride through the hot desert landscape, over roads that were more hole than asphalt, and accompanied by a cacophony of honks as our driver (just like everyone here) hit the honk pretty much every time we saw a car, cow or sheep on the road. Once we reached the village, the surroundings changed to a mix of rocks and dirt, with small houses built by hand with the stones from the mountains and rocky paths that were made for donk...

  Camels!   Monday morning it became time to leave our beloved Bukhara and head off north to the edge of the Kyzyl Kum desert to experience life in a nomadic yurt camp and see those iconic enablers of the ancient Silk Road - the camels. Without these funny-looking humpy creatures it would have been impossible to carry all those goods through the arid hot desert. So as touristy as it is, we wanted to experience first hand what it would be like to ride a camel in the desert. But more about that later. We first had to reach the desert and to do that we hopped in our white Chevrolet driven by our quiet guide for the next few days (or so we thought).   Traveling the Silk Road nowadays is like child's play compared to how it was in the times of Marco Polo, but from a Finnish or Dutch point of view there's still plenty of excitement on the Uzbek roads, and I don't mean it in a good way. The only rule seems to be that there are no rules, lanes are non-existent and...