Rye Bread and Hagelslag

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...

  Today less story time but a post that will be more pleasing to the eye. We now spent almost two days in the city of Bukhara, in the middle of the desert in the south of Uzbekistan. A town on the middle of the Silk Road between Rome and Beijing, it has seen visitors from all over the world for centuries and has been plundered and changed rulers for about as many times as there are minarets here. From Alexander the Great, Persians and Ghenghis Khan to the Russians, the city has seen many different people and lots of hardship. Since the 8th century the religion here has been the Islam, and no one has managed to change that. Throughout time and thanks to the bustling trading economy on the middle of the Silk Road, a few Khans and emirs have attracted all sorts of scholars and bright minds to this oasis of knowledge and religion in the desert. This is evident by the many many gorgeous mosques and Madrassas (Islamic colleges), towering over the mud colored buildings with their walls...

We knew our first two days would be tiring, but man I'm exhausted right now. Writing a first update during the hottest time of day from our airconditioned hotel room in amazing Bukhara. Snow and cold, that's how Helsinki looked like the week before we left, and that's how Moscow looked like when we arrived there after the first stage of our long travel day. We had a 5+ hour overlay at the capital of our Russian neighbors, after which our slightly delayed flight (in a Boeing 747, where we could choose from many movies and shows to watch) would bring us to Tashkent, at 3 in the morning. This is where it got a bit nerve wrecking: obtaining our Visa. Since Finland doesn't have an Uzbek embassy, we had to get it on arrival. We had all the paperwork, but the rules are not so clear, and this isn't Finland anymore, you never know. When we arrived at passport control, the 24/7 visa section was closed... Passport-checking-guy told us to wait. After everyone from the p...

Hey! After a lot of planning and arranging, our first big trip in a way too long time will soon start: our adventure on the silk road! From May 11th - June 3rd we'll be traveling to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, exploring these lesser known but incredibly intriguing countries by plane, train, marshrutka , camel and horseback! For those interested, we'll try to keep you updated a bit through this blog. It's a pretty unconventional holiday destination, but I'm sure you'll be easily convinced that there is a lot of awesome and beautiful things to be experienced on the old silk road, once you see the first pictures.. It'll depend a bit on available internet and how much time we have if the updates are frequent. Of course if people are interested, we can always show what we see and do on our vacation later, through this blog. Maria & Bart