“Fast car driving”

From Samarkand we headed to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. We arrived at the hotel in the late afternoon and happily discovered that it had a pool in which to cool off. The weather has been pretty hot (I guess it is summer) and pools are quite a luxury! We decided to treat ourselves with a cocktail at the Chelsea Arms, an English pub owned by Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club. Unfortunately it had gone downhill from last year, so we moved on to a lovely restaurant and sat in a courtyard drinking vodka and eating steak! Happy days! From there it was off to experience the cultural delights that Tashkent has to offer – the less said about that the better!

It was a very slow day the next day with some very late arrivals back home. We finally enjoyed some internet access, and our first normal sandwich for months! Imagine a club sandwich on white sliced bread! Heaven! Very few of us ventured outside of the hotel (have to say, I can’t really admit to having fully explored Tashkent…), and it was a pretty early night for everyone! The next day we headed off on a bit of an adventure. Pete and Tim had left early in the morning to drive Penelope to Fergana (in Uzbekistan) via Tajikistan as due to some political tensions, it was not possible to drive the truck over the mountain pass which connects Tashkent and Fergana as it has the capacity to carry too many people. So for the rest of us, it was into taxis (all Daewoos, Uzbekistan’s favourite car) for a 4 hour drive over the mountain pass. We were in quite a convoy with 5 cars all up, and it later transpired that the first car in the convoy contained Cheryl who was desperately trying to keep the driver from speeding. It worked for a large part of the journey, but then our driver for some reason decided that he had had enough, and he took off like a man possessed, tooting his horn at the other taxis to get them to move over. As we travelled along, our eyes nervously moved to the speedo, which peaked at 160km an hour. However the speeding was not all in vain, as we eventually stopped by the side of the road for the driver to buy apricots. Phew, and we thought he was driving like a maniac for no reason. He had been thoughtful enough to point out nice viewpoints along the way, and the scenery was amazing – massive mountains, including some snow-capped ones (hard to believe when you are sweltering in the back of the car I can promise you!). He was also kind enough to point out the tunnels that you couldn’t take photos of without risking arrest – Uzbekistan is a police state after all.

Our arrival in Fergana saw us check in to the rather luxurious Hotel Asia which was mercifully well air-conditioned and en-suited! I watched my first TV of the trip (“Equestrian World” – you can see how excited I was to find something in English) and then went down to the pool for a couple of drinks. We went down to find that the pool area had been overtaken by seemingly hundreds of 17 & 18 year old Russian kids. It was absolutely hilarious to watch the gesturing and posturing from the males and the posing and pouting from the girls. It was all in aid of the 10 year anniversary of an internet search engine apparently, but to us it was an opportunity to try to get some free food, and even a free drink. We were only marginally successful, and so headed off to dinner where I had a salad called “tenderness” (still no idea why the addition of mayonnaise to the ever-present tomato and cucumber suddenly renders a salad worthy of such a lofty and incongruous title!). We returned to the hotel to find that Pete and Tim had successfully made their 4 border crossings for the day (better them than us I say!) and made two important discoveries courtesy of Crofty (and vodka). Firstly we discovered that Uzbek money does not disintegrate on contact with water when its owner is rather unceremoniously pushed into the pool (but it does require some drying the next morning). And secondly we discovered that random dancing is a universal language, thanks to Crofty’s ever-willingness to engage with the locals…

From Fergana we headed towards the Kyrgyzstan border, but not before a stop at a famous silk factory where we were taken on a very informative and interesting tour by a man with the most unbelievable eyebrows ever seen (they were like reverse sideburns, slowly creeping down from his eyes to his cheeks). Edel had the somewhat dubious honour of being taken under her wing by one of the ladies in the first phase of silk production who decided to make Edel look more Uzbek by drawing in the traditional heavy eyebrows (stopping just short of the monobrow). While Edel managed to carry off the look, suffice it to say that there was much reaching for tweezers that night!

Edel with her new eyebrows (and check out the gold teeth in the background - a definite feature of the Stans):