City Hotel Samarkand

Second Tour day of Tashkent – October 12, 2009

Out to the bus at 9 to see the old city of Tashkent. Tashkent apparently moved back and forth over the years as was needed for whatever political climate and population climate. Much of the old city has been torn down and remodeled. The old buildings are made of adobe and now are being purchased by richer Uzbeks and then torn down and huge houses ...

... for the Lonely Planet's accommodation recommendation, the Antica Guesthouse, and dropped our bags. The Antica was another charming old residence that had been converted into a bed and breakfast, and was another great result for us. Inside the gate there was a leafy courtyard full of fruit trees, many of which provided the raw materials for the amazing jams that littered the dining tables. We were taking to the Central Asian jams like a couple of ducks to water – they were ...

Oh Samarqand, oh Samarqand, how many mausoleums are in your midst?'

Lots, is the answer to that, lots and lots.

Started the day with our first breakfast in two weeks amongst the cherry trees (and the wasps) in the courtyard of our very pleasant hostel. After the obligatory game of Cazzio (a card game taught to Dave by a Russian truck driver called Alex on the ferry) and general faffing we headed into town, along the Registan, in the midday sun. Our first stop ...

... something else.

The obligatory visit to the Silk factory in Fergana was kind of sad. After the stunning Samarkand Silk and Carpet factory in Uzbekistan we felt we had stepped back in time to a Dickensian workhouse. This was tourist trap No 1. They had three limp silk carpets being made in a dark room with only one girl working on a single carpet. Then we were taught about making and dying silk and the process of hand weaving to deliver a style of silk fabric known as Ecat.

Fergana, Uzbekistan mikeandfi

... 35 years. Earthquakes later flattened most of the city and Bukhara took over as the capital for a while. The Russians occupied the city in the 1860s and started rebuilding. Have a look at Wiki and others for pictures of the before and after pictures of the restorations.

Once the home of over 100 palaces, only a few remain. Those that do are spectacular and truly bring a lump to your throat, but more about this later.

We drove through beautiful well ...

... as well as we were only starting to recover from our food poisoning and it was to be our longest tour on our program.

Larger than life was the lovely Lola, our guide for the day. With wild blond hair and an effervescent personality, the exotic Lola was a walking package of Ukrainian, Tajik, Uighur and Uzbek nationalities. She was an entertaining guide and like our other guides a wealth of knowledge about her home city of Samarkand. "I'm sooooo passionate about my city" she purred ...

... now but it certainly wasn't then.

On the way to Samarkand we stopped off at a ceramics workshop where we met up with a number of people who were part of two large bus tours, an English tour and oddly to us in an Islamic country, an Israeli tour. We were to find that a number of people on their tours had gone down with similar stomach problems. One of the tour guides gave Naim a name of some medicine that "only worked for Uzbekistan stomach ...

... for the beers and good luck on your trip ohh one more thing I saw a couple being 'very close' in a park - very normal you may say in Australia, but as i walked past i remembered that I hadn't seen anything like this in 6 weeks as I had been in the conservative countries of iran, turkmen and even some part of uzbek. Again just one of those small things that you take for granted in australia

Uzbek Story: It's Like That, Life At dusk, I exited the Sobir Rakhimov Metro to look for a shared ride to Samarkand: this was the place to get that ride. One man came up to me, asked if I needed a ride, then said to his buddies in Russian: "he's a foreigner, let's rip him off." "How much?" I asked. He quoted a price five times more expensive than usual; I laughed. Another man came over: "Can I ...

Hello Everyone! A lot have happened since the last time I wrote. To begin with, we celebrated Women's Day on March 8th. On that day, women receive presents from friends and family. Most families seem to exchange flowers and the women still get to cook and stuff. Not in my family!! We received many presents and the men cooked dinner (shashlik) and cleaned up afterwards! I received two scarves, a fan made out of atlas material for this ...