The Stans 2026

 Another transit day. And although the actual transit didn't take that long, it shaped the whole day. So a bit boring, and you can skip this post if you'd like. The pleasant bit was that we had most of the day off - because being a tourist feels like a kind of job. Checkout wasn't until midday, so we had a late breakfast and mooched about. When we eventually checked out we left our bags and walked the few minutes to the Siab Bazaar. A pretty normal kind of market. There was tourist stuff and cheap clothes, whatever, around the edge. In the middle the stalls had stacks of tea, or nuts, fruit and vegetables, everything. I will mention there are tourist stalls absolutely everywhere, around and inside every potential tourist attraction, selling the same stuff. They are you to buy stuff but in a half-hearted way and don't pursue you. The currency is a hassle; $1 USD is worth 11,600 som. So every note is thousands of som and you have to read them carefully and count the zeros...

 Another day in Samarkand. looking at the map, most of the places so far have been in a fairly small area. So old buildings and narrow lanes (usually no footpaths and deep, leg-breaking drains). So it was good to go a bit further into the suburbs, if only to see that they look much like suburbs everywhere else (often small shops and clearly not wealthy, but not dirty or rubbish-strewn either). All our stops today had a steady flow of buses, so are clearly on the standard tourist circuit. First stop was a 'tourist village' where they demonstrated silk paper-making. Something I had never known existed and so have never been interested in. The most entertaining part was that it was mostly water-powered, with water wheels and related thing. Essentially it's not silk, it's mulberry bark which is scraped into thin sheets, soaked and pounded, then pressed and dried like felt. It was a pleasant and unremarkable hour. Assorted paper things Second stop was the observatory of Ulug...

 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...

 Today was essentially another transit day - a bus trip from Bukhara to Samarkand (the second largest city in Uzbekistan). But you may (or may not) want a bit more detail than that. To start the day we were walked around the the Kalan Mosque- part of the mosque, minaret and madrassa complex Lynn and I visited in the evening a couple of days ago. It was quiet and cool in the morning, so we got in and out efficiently and then boarded the bus for the drive to Samarkand. Kalan Mosque By 11am we were at G'ijduvan. Which was inconvenient because this was our lunch spot and just happens to be located a lot closer to Bukhara than to Samarkand. We stopped at a pottery business and they gave us a demonstration of how to make bowls etc on a wheel, paint and glaze them. Then took us to the showroom where Lynn and I were the only people to resist the lure of Uzbek pottery. Then a standard lunch. They always go salad, then soup, then a meat main course. The dessert, which we'd had before, wa...