Khiva & Bukhara

So after a 2 hour flight in a rickety old ex-soviet plane (with propellors!!!) we arrived in Khiva from Tashkent. All the sights, hotels and Uzbek attempts at restaurants could all be found within the walls of the old city, thus meaning you could simply wander around the place all day getting lost taking in the atmosphere. Khiva was the subject of a huge restoration job by the Soviet government in the 70s and is now an official ‘museum-town’. This obviously has its pros and cons. On the upside is the simple fact that the place looks amazing. All the Mosques, Minarets and Medressas look immaculate and incredibly impressive – the restoration was done very very well. As you wander round the city, however, the downside of the restoration project is plain to see. The place seems to have had its soul sucked out of it. The only locals you come across are the ones attempting to sell you their merchandise, and it becomes very hard to imagine the place as it used to be. A real city with bustling bazarrs and people from all walks of life (Turcomen slave traders included!) going about their daily business.

A four hour drive in a shared taxi across the stiflingly hot, arid desert in a clapped out lada took us to Bukhara, a town with a similar history to Khiva. Our driver offered us his xenophobic views on his neighbours: ‘I don’t like Tajiks… they are all terrorists. Just like the Afghans’.

Bukhara shares a similar history to Khiva, containing similar Minarets and Medressas. During the restoration, the centre was not allowed to stagnate and it is still very much a ‘lived in’ city. I met a couple of English guys here and yesterday morning we went to a traditional ‘hammom’ (a kind of central asian steam room). My words cannot do justice to how good it was once you got over the locals there who literally had everything out on display. Today I took a minibus out of town for about 35 pence to visit the birthplace and tomb of Bakhautdin, the founder of the most prominent order of Sufiism in Central Asia. Needless to say the architecture was incredible. You will have to wait for me to put up some photos here, there is little point trying to describe it.

Tomorrow we will take the 4 hour journey to Samarkand by train at the cost of about a fiver!