The Stans 2026

 I think yesterday afternoon largely exhausted the tourist sites in Dushanbe itself, as this morning we went to Hisor, about 30km away. It's a village, though now more a suburb, and also the site of Hisor fort, which dates back about 2500 years. The original thing is mostly just the gates and enclosing wall now - the contents being lost over the intervening period. From the Fort walls But the whole area is pretty old. Just below the fort is a(nother) madrasa we walked around and an adjacent caravanserai. Then there was a very loud distraction as there were several weddings taking place (presumably because it's Sunday) and they seem to compete with each other.  They had drums, very long horns and at least one saxaphone. Madrasa Back in town were were taken to a Turkish restaurant for lunch. This seemed an odd choice, but the guide suggested the food is very similar. Certainly the shashlik platters were large and very good and we were happy to spend the afternoon recovering.

 A fairly full day, seeing all of the usual and compulsory sights. Fortunately the hotel has a good buffet breakfast to set us up. I didn't take that many photos. Enough for this blog I suppose, so I'm not exactly on strike. But I am questioning whether you can tell one mosque from another. Anyway, let's get started. First stop was a memorial to the 1966 earthquake. This was obviously in the soviet era, so the memorial is very much in that style. Next we went to a large plaza with a number of buildings - a mosque, a madrasa (which is now taken over by shops selling embroidery, earrings, pictures), a library which has a very old Koran, and the Centre for Islamic Civilisation. The last of these is enormous and has a world record for the biggest something. But I'm not going to show you a picture because if you have read any of my other blogs you can imagine what it'll look like. So we'll move on to the Chorsu Bazaar. A large, old market with huge piles of fruit, ve...

 Samarkand has quite a few tourists - like Bakhara. There are Russians everywhere, and quite a few Chinese here; I think it's eqasy to get to. Our first stop was was memorial and mausoleum for Timur (aka Tamerlane) who was a 14th Century local Samarkand boy made good (or bad, of you were one of the hundreds of thousands he killed). He was kind of a big deal at the time, and the last of the really big nomad emperors before things changed. So his memorial was big and impressive, and moderately crowded. From there we were bussed back to the middle of town and dropped at Registan Square. This is an iconic sight, at east within Central Asia. Essentially a very big square framed by three madrasas built over an extended period. The middle one was also a mosque at times. These are very much the equivalent of churches and cathedrals in Europe. Individually impressive but hard to distinguish from one another after you've been to a few. In the last building we had an entertaining demonstr...