After two nice days in Nukus, which is the capital of Qaraqalpakstan, we were both at full strength again. Time to ride on!

Luckily for us there was a road in the desert. Our first stop of the day was in Beruni. We looked around for gas, but were unsuccessful again. No problem as I still had left. During the ride we rode over a bridge over the Amur Darya river. This is a very big river feeding the Aral See. We will trace it source as it is coming from the Panj river in Tajikistan. We rode on to Urgench, which is the capital of the Chorasm area. It seemed like a modern nice city. But again no gas was found. We saw a burger king though 🙂

At one of the stops, we noticed a screw had broken off of the rear mudguard. I took out my toolset and unscrewed the other two screws as well. While I was doing that I heard a familiar sound, GS engines!

 

Three guys road by, I waived and they stopped. It were 3 guys from the Czech Republic. I looked at their bikes and noticed they had no rear mudguards as well. Must be a common problem. I threw the mudguard away in the garbage as carrying it with me seemed useless.

We had only 30km to cover now to Khiva. In Nukus I had made a reservation in the Meros hostel which was located inside the old town or ichton qala. We arrived in the afternoon and found the hostel.

We were given a nice, spacious room with airco, a balcony and a big bathroom. The hostel was perfectly located so we could immediately start discovering the city.

The whole ichton qala is surrounded by ancient walls and you can only get in by entering one of the four gates. We were between the West and North gate. In the evening we visited the citadel which has a very nice view over the city in the evening. We spotted the 3 Czech guys again, they only stayed briefly and were heading for Bukhara in the evening.

As we were strolling around, we bumped into Sasha we had met in Nukus again. He was now with more colleagues from Unicef, so we only talked briefly.

We were told that we should try Plov in Uzbekistan. Every city gives it a different flavour, so you have Khiva plov, Bukhara plov, Samarqand plov, Tashkent plov. The more to the east, the more fattier it would be. We had a nice dish of plov and some green tea. As the old city was full with museums and ancient buildings we would continue the next day.