Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, [Afghanistan] and Kyrgyzstan
The updates from the Silk Road continue to be challenging as the Internet continues to be very sporadic and very slooow when they exist. We have constantly been blocked from Internet sites that many of us have come to rely on in the US and Canada. Facebook has almost constantly been blocked, along with news feeds, Google, gmail, apple mail etc.
Sometimes you try for hours to connect to the Internet and ultimately give up in frustration. Skype (audio only) does work, facetime occasionally but due to the Internet speeds don’t try using video. InReach satellite text messaging works most of the time but Delorme did have a 3 day stretch where even the satellite messages were delayed up to 24 hours. So technology has challenged everyone even the techno geeks amongst us. VPN’s have been hit and miss, so sorry that the updates have not been more frequent. It has been an impossible task and getting pictures uploaded even harder to find the bandwidth to get the pictures uploaded.
We arrived in the fabled city of Bukhara, Uzbekistan on 28th May (day 26) right in time for the start of silk and spice festival. Most of the group arrived in the middle of the pedestrian Market Square thanks to our GPS routing. Everyone in the square seemed to take this in stride and pointed the many separate groups of big motorcycles in the right direction without too much fuss or muss.
Our group of 3 motorcycles stopped right in the middle of Market Square and it was the local police that just pointed us out of the pedestrian area to our hotel across the square no reprimands or concerns. We had come to the square via a maze of alleyways with sharp corners that kept getting smaller and smaller, that we found out later that the alleys were either one or two donkey carts wide. A BMW motorcycle is approximately 1 donkey cart wide, so it was just like right out of a James Bond movie racing down alleyways past hidden doorways and into dark passageways until we arrived at the square. Bukhara really became the start of the Silk Road experience with its silk and spices for many of us. There was a buzz that had not existed yet for us on the Silk Road. Instead of camels, we had our trusty GS motorcycles.
We spent the remainder of the first day in Bukhara and the next day exploring the city’s great culture and shopping bazaars. On the second day there was a huge parade to celebrate the start of the silk and spice festival with hundreds of Uzbek's parading and dancing down the street past our hotel and the market squares in many brightly coloured dresses and costumes. We visited Mosques, Madrasahs’ and several market plaza bazaars and the city had a buzz like no other city to date.
We went from Bukhara to Samarkand to visit several more opulent Mosques, Madrasahs, Minarets and Mausoleums. Then we traveled into the mountains of Tajikistan which were absolutely stunning with their beauty and views. Tajikistan’s mountain beauty is the new gold standard that no other country on the trip previous and since can match. The views and mountain passes only can be described as stunning.
We rode along the Tajik Afghan border for a couple of hundred miles with only the roaring Pyanj River separating us from Afghanistan. Security in this area was extremely tight with many police and military checkpoints along the way. We could see Afghan villages along the other side of the river. Some of the group had Afghan visas and visited a town across the river from Horog while Chris Poland and I rode to an open air market that was in no-mans area right between the two borders 80km further east along the river. The equivalent market at Horog was getting renovated and was closed for this trips visit. The market was interesting with stalls or mats set up to sell pretty much everything from scrap metal and hardware to slightly used shoes, and food products by both Afghans and Tajiks. The market was very secure with a heavy police and military presence.
The next phase of our trip took us to the Pamir Highway that proved to be a quite challenging road on parts with elephant sized potholes craters to gravel and mud sections to reasonably paved sections through the Pamir Mountains. We climbed a 4,500m pass and a 4,200m pass before entering Kyrgyzstan and then going over the 3,914m Kyzyl Art Pass where we encountered a snow storm for 60-70km before entering China. The snow was settling on the road fairly well and then we descended into China where the snow changed to rain and cleared to overcast by the time we reached the China border. We layered up, turned on the heated grips and kept thinking about the Gobi Dessert while all sorts of warning lights about snow and ice flashed at us from our motorcycles. Duh, our face shields and windshields were icing up so we knew it was cold, wet and slippery.
Accommodations on the trip have been very good until eastern Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan were we went to almost camping with no water and one outhouse for everyone, but they did have beer, so it was a relief that it was only a couple of nights of best available poorest accommodations. It was a short-lived shock before things improved dramatically in China once we got across the border.
Ken
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