The border controls to leafe Turkmenistan were a bit chaotic, seemingly lots of tradesmen had been qaiting already rather long. We have to fill a form, to get this soldiers send us from one person to the next... In the end we get back to the first person, get the forms and after luggage and several passport scans we are allowed to leave. On the usbek side, Kalachnikows got replaced by M16 guns and the mood from tense to relaxed. For the first time in a while we don’t need to take off our panniers for xray but can directly start pedalling. Our first aim in Usbekistan is Buchara, but we decide to camp just before the city and cycle in the city in the morning. Now we notice how much the landscape had changed: Agriculure is everywhere now, cornfields, orchanrds, canals, houses, shelters and people everywhere... Thus we often camp in hidden in plantations and cover our cycles with a tarp so reduce the risk of getting spotted during the nights. One morning we wake up because of weird noise: Rustling, crackling, ... We cannot tell where it comes from and fear someone is trying to steal our bicycles. Completely wrong, when we get up we realize that the farmers started to harvest apricots. One of them is sitting in the tree and shakes the branches. The others directly catch them with a tarp. As soon as they notice we are awake, they prepare a package for us together with some fresh milk. We start cycling rather early this day.
We are quite fast and at lunchtime we already did 70 km. In the afternoon Moni starts to feel tired and dizzy, so we stop very often. After some very slow kilometres we decide to camp, accidently we end up at a construction area where the workers camp directly. We are lucky and they allow us to pitch our tent there as well. Moni directly falls asleep while Christian accepts the invitation for dinner. Unfortunately schnapps plays quite a significant role and it is not too easy to explain that he doesn’t drink. Moni doesn’t get to rest either, her stomach cramps, and she spent half night outside vomiting. In the morning she still feels bad, but the invitations to have schnapps and the burning sun make us pack our stuff and cycle on. Her revolting stomach combined with bad tarmac feel like folter...
While we neither liked landscape nor food too much in Usbekistan, we are really impressed by the ancient cities alnog the silk road. We spend two days inn Samarqand and Buchara, ditch our bikes and explore them walking and visit some museums.
Finally we cycle towards Tajikistan, and massive mountains come up. We really look forward to some lonesome days there.
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