Recovery in Sentob

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 donkeys rather than cars. Just as we were wondering where the fuck we ended up this time, the driver finally managed to get to our destination: guesthouse Rahima, located in the middle of the small lush, green valley that formed the core of Sentob village, fed by a little river that came down from the mountains. 

Here you can clearly see the difference of where the river turns the rocky landscape into a green garden.

 

Some cows grazing with the beautiful mountains in the background.

 

An example of a more simple, older house built with local rocks.

 

The difference was striking: dry, hot and rocky landscape suddenly changed into a beautiful, cool green place, filled with massive walnut trees, small pastures with wild onions and a grazing cow or two, and the same, hand built houses surrounded by gorgeous gardens with vegetables and fruit trees. We would stay the day and night at the house of Gulmurod and his wife Rahima, and their 5 children. Here we saw a day in the life of a rural, Uzbek family, which is a day-and-night difference with city life here, and in many ways it's like we went back in time 50 years. That also means no phone reception, let alone wifi...a real detox from modern Internet life!  

Little bridge over the river, leading to our guesthouse

    We (mostly Maria) got a good chance to see how the family went about their lives in this isolated mountain village. They were mostly self-sustained: all of the fruit and nuts and veggies came from their own yard, they built their own house, and use water from the river, heated by the sun for a warm shower. Meat they got from the local butcher, but they baked their own bread (non) in a mud-and-brick, fire burnt oven. After the fire in the oven was hot enough,they extinguish it with water, and slap the flat, round, unleavened bread to the walls and ceiling of the oven, pulling them off once it's done. Maria helped Rahima bake some non when she took a break from playing with the youngest two kids, a cute bunch.   

Rahima putting the non bread in the hot oven, by hand!

 

... And taking it out after some 15 minutes

 

The adorable girls of the guesthouse

Play time :)

    We also made a nice walk to look around the village, where we met an old man on his donkey.   

Donkey man.

A very happy Donkey with another donkey ;)

    All the fields and gardens in this green patch of Sentob, were enabled by this village's lifeline, the river. Thanks to handmade, crude  yet ingenious little canals built with mud and rocks that ran all over the place, people managed to turn quite a chunk of the dry, rocky land into a little green, fertile paradise.   

Water channel running to a garden

Cows on the village path

The walnut tree shadowing the guesthouse

  The shadow of the walnut tree in the pretty, cool garden of the family and especially the ayvan filled with pillows and carpets turned out to be the perfect place of recovery that I (Bart) needed.  Regardless of our preparation and our careful selection of what to eat (avoiding local dairy products and fresh unwashed fruit),and washing our hands every time before we eat, my belly didn't like the Uzbek cuisine and the bacterial flora that comes with it. The past day or so, most of the food exited my body again in liquid form, and in the afternoon in Sentob I had a full blown fever. Thank god we bought diarrhea pills in Bukhara, and those combined with plenty of water, 'churni' (Earl Grey tea) and rest in the ayvan in the garden, took care of the worst of the stomach bug I caught somewhere in a few hours. 

Resting in the ayvan

Later that night at dinner, when the father learned of my belly troubles, he came with the obvious solution: vodka! With salt! After I had one vodka shot saturated with salt, the three of us continued to empty most of the bottle, while talking with a mix of Russian, English and Uzbek words and our hands about our families and countries. After that, a good night of sleep and we were good to go, on to Samarkand!