The next day we took a shared taxi across five hundred kilometers of the Kyzylkum Desert, one of the handful of deserts that once made it so incredibly difficult to get things from China to the West. It was basically hundereds of miles of low shrubs and piles of red sand which were trying their best to reclaim the road we were on. To the left, an abandoned rusty shack with faded cyrillic wording peeling off. To the right, a few dirty nomad yurts and a forlorn camel with two saggy humps. The landscape changes pretty abruptly when we hit the Amu Darya (Oxus) river delta which feeds a strip of fertile land collectively known as the Khorezm region.
The Kizil Kum desert
Crossing the Amu Darya on a makeshift bridge made of old riverbarges
KHIVA
Before long we arrived in Khiva, the seat of an infamous Khanate and market for Russian slaves, among other things, in the 19th Century. Like Bokhara, the place hasn't really changed since then except perhaps for its political system and the slaves. The bazaar is still stuffed with goods from China only these days they are plastic toys and cheap shoes. Old Khiva is a dense collection of mosques, huge minarets, madressas, museums, palaces, harems and a modern population of 3000, all neatly enclosed withing a picturesque slopping wall.
Before long we arrived in Khiva, the seat of an infamous Khanate and market for Russian slaves, among other things, in the 19th Century. Like Bokhara, the place hasn't really changed since then except perhaps for its political system and the slaves. The bazaar is still stuffed with goods from China only these days they are plastic toys and cheap shoes. Old Khiva is a dense collection of mosques, huge minarets, madressas, museums, palaces, harems and a modern population of 3000, all neatly enclosed withing a picturesque slopping wall.
This unfinished minaret was going to be the tallest building in Central Asia until construction stopped when the Amir died.
Produce at the bazaar beside the city walls
Bride and groom paying respects in a Khiva shrine
Gardening
View of Khiva from the tallest minaret
Man reading Koran in Khiva
View of the city from the Amir's palace
KARAKALPAKSTAN and the FIFTY CASTLES
We took a day trip with a driver and Muhammad, a friend we'd met the day before, out to see the Elli Kala (50 Castles) district. This took us to an ark of territory between highly fertile melon and cotton producing land and the edge of the desert. It was all within the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakistan, inhabited by the Karakalpaks (Black hats), local descendants of the Mongols. We visited seven mud fortresses, which had all basically been just lying there for 1500 years or so. They looked like sand castles left out for a few days. For lunch--melon--described as "the best in Uzbekistan and the best in the world". I wouldn't doubt it.
Rich Korezm farmland gives way to barren Karakalpak desert
Ross climbing up Ayaz Kala
Eating the world's best melon for lunch at a yurt camp
Thumbs up from Muhammad
Flying from Urgench (near Khiva) to Tashkent on a Soviet-era Tupelov 145
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