Hotel Asia Bukhara

... be careful taking a shower or the whole room gets wet including the toilet paper.<br><br> Gulia is to be our guide for our time in Bukhara. She is a small woman with a whole lot of energy. She tells us she just left a group of Stanford University people at the airport in Tashkent last night, hoped on the overnight train and is there for us this morning. What a gal!<br><br> We go first to the very small and ...

... Uzbekistan makes wine, you ask? Yes - or something resembling it, anyway) when the music started and the large party adjacent to us began to move to the dance floor. Before we knew what was happening, a horde of gold-toothed Tajik women dressed to the nines had pulled Lynne and me onto the floor and we found ourselves in the centre of a very animated dance circle. I would have been happy to sit back and watch them - the rhythm and their joyful movements ...

... of rather obnoxious teenage girls &#8216;befriending&#8217; the tourists and then strong-arming them to come to their shops (one of them got extremely cheeky with us when we refused to fall for their rather familiar routine). But at sunset, which is around 7:15, most of the tourists are peculiarly absent &#8211; strange, given that the lighting is optimal for photography. And by optimal, I mean spectacular. As the sun slips below the city horizon, the entire façade and dome ...

... I had thought Bukhara had a large market place (I'm not sure how I came to that conclusion, perhaps from history of famous bazaars) but to my disappointment the market area was a very orderly collection of tourist shops housed in Taqi-Saffafon Bazaar. I'm not sure if the carpet sellers could smell us coming or if we now just automatically gravitated to carpet shops but it wasn't long before we were settled into one, looking at a superb array of carpets from Afghanistan. These were ...

... but we are all agreed that the priority here is to secure a ferry crossing of the Caspian Sea to Baku in Azerbaijan. Turkmenistan is officially listed as being the second most closed police state after North Korea! If there is anything worth seeing in Turkmenistan then it will be a bonus! Hope the cynicism is unfounded...<br><br>Ah well, what could possibly go wrong....<br><br>Cheers, Rick.

... had the ability to significantly reduce the local population through regular cholera epidemics. Average age did not make it much past 32. What a fun place it must have been.<br> <br><br>The Ark was interesting to visit but the true highlight for the fortress was the local girls who insisted on having photos taken, only with the tall men, so they could (they said) annoy their husbands.<br> <br><br>Once the girls are married off in ...

... in the 9th and 10th centuries. Today it has a population of around 255,000.<br><br>The oasis city is swathed in fascinating history with magnificently preserved knock your socks off architecture. We met with our guide Behruz and explored the Ismail Samani Mausoleum, one of the oldest monuments in Bukhara and the bizarre but beautiful Emir&#8217;s Summer Palace, home of the last emir Alim Khan. The palace was a strange mixture of Russian alabaster works and local architecture. It ...

... causing a major impact on the climate and ecology of the country let alone the complete devastation of an entire fishing industry and associated cropping production, and the absolute loss of livelihoods to the Uzbekistan farming populations. The government is trying to diversify its industries from agriculture to manufacturing (for example, investing in the motor vehicle industry by buying the license to manufacture Daewoo motor vehicles) but the lack of ...

... in a while and it looks like it has gone crazy with red lines shooting in every direction. I have spent ages trying to rectify the map pins but the interent is so slow and this site is like wading in porridge so I think I will probably leave the errors and put them right when i get back to the UK or a reasonable internet connection. We got into Bukhara this afternoon after completing our journey through the Kyzylkum desert. It has been ridiculously hot. Yesterday we drove out into ...

... results for the rural population, and the Aral Sea. Tuesday 24th June Uzbekistan border - Khiva Meet our guide, who seems pretty good,speaks good English, and greases the path through customs. We only had one English language copy of the custom form, so took a long time for everyone to copy the sample. Paul flirts with trouble by being over friendly with, and patting, the border ...