After spending the night at a drunk guy’s home we needed to cycle around 90 km to finally reach our target Samarqand after in total three days of cycling. The road was basically a not very frequented highway, was just like the other two days mainly flat, and had around 10-20 km of very bad surface, everything else went smooth however. As the landscape next to the road was as little inspiring as the past few days, I am not going to lose any more words on it apart from: flat and monotonous.
Samarqand
Because we started today already at 6:30 again and made good progress, we reached Samarqand already at 13:00. After checking into our B&B, we then had plenty of time to visit Samarqand. However, the past three days were tough due to the head wind and the road conditions, so we chose an easy program. First we went to a fast food place and had some French fries and a Pizza. Not really the typical Uzbek food, but we were both very happy to eat something familiar after a few days of Uzbek food on the road.
Afterwards we solved some SIM card problems so I can have Internet again for this blog and then went relaxing in the beautifully laid-out Central Park and enjoyed the spring weather. It was good not to do anything for a few hours and let our heavy legs recover a bit.
On the way back we visited the famous Gur-e Amir Complex. Even though it is a very nice building, I was a bit shocked to see that a ticket to visit this rather small building costs $8 incl. photo tax. Quite a steep price, especially given that locals pay only a few cents for exactly the same. But they obviously had some tourism advisors which told them, how much such things cost in Europe. Luckily, the back entrance of the complex was wide open so we still could have a look at the interior.
Tomorrow we will then visit more sights in Samarqand.
Detailed Track
Max elevation: 698 m
Min elevation: 465 m
Total climbing: 435 m
Total descent: -208 m
Total time: 06:13:30
