Tashkent

Feeling fully recovered I began to feel restless. I'd decided to take a side trip by public transport to Tashkent to get visas for China & Pakistan. I should add that I hoped to get them, it would be rash to assume that things will go to plan. I would return to Samarqand once I'd either received these visas or found them impossible to obtain in the time that I had.

Before heading out of town I visited the Registan, the centre of old Samarqand. It comprised of medressas on 3 sides of a square. All built by decendants of Timur from the 15C to 17C. Access to the square was by ticket & none of the medressas had been active for a long time so the only life there was related to tourism. Nevertheless it was a wonderful place, each medressa a little different & all magnificent, covered in shiny tiles.

A group of people from the B&B grouped together to go to Tashkent. Public transportation in Uzbekistan mostly comprises of taxis of different sizes. While the standard routes have standard prices, they aren't publicised nor regulated. It's necessary to know these prices & be a good haggler to get them. It made it a whole lot easier to negotiate when en-masse but I doubt whether we got the best price. In any case it wasn't expensive.

Once dropped off in Tashkent I made my way to where I way staying. I had used an Internet site hospitalityclub.org to find a free place to stay. I had used the same Internet site to get in touch with Mohammad in Mashhad. A local, an Uzbek/Kazakh called Zokir was my host. He lived, as do most residents of Tashkent, in a building erected during the big building effort after the big earthquake that devistated the city in 1966. The Soviet leaders of the day dispatched architects, engineers & builders from across the Soviet Union to rebuild Tashkent. In his case his building was constructed by a team from Kazakhstan, though to me it looked pretty similar to those in other parts of the city which were no doubt built by teams from other places.