We had about 600 km to cover in order to get to Bukhara, which isn’t a huge distance but we’ve learned now that however long it should take, add a few hours. Some of that has to do with how fast your slowest convoy partner can go, road conditions, livestock, etc… Factoring in all of that and we can’t go much faster than 60 mph, so getting anywhere fast isn’t possible.
Uzbekistan roads are weird. There are only a few real highways in the country, and they are pretty new and good road. Oddly enough though both sides of the highway are rarely used at the same time. They’ve built parallel roads like you normally would, but half of the time both you and oncoming traffic are on the same road, and from what I can tell there isn’t a reason. You putter along in the south bound side and all of a sudden you’re on the northbound side, and then both sides switch again. It’s weird. Even weirder is that the roads in the middle of nowhere are great but when we got about 50 km or so outside of Bukhara they go to hell. A running theme of the trip has been that each bad road you come across is the worst but in a new and different way. The road got wavy, dip after dip and then all of a sudden incredibly large holes. It probably took 2 hours to go 30 miles. We drove by a ton of rally teams on the side of the road, many of whom had torched some part of their suspension. Springs had torn apart, shocks bent, etc… Wicked road.
Someone found a hotel for us to stay in that night but we couldn’t find it, so instead stayed at a place we walked by in search of the other one. What’s nice is that hotels have become incredibly cheap on this side of the world. I think we had planned on camping a lot more than we have – which isn’t much at all – but when you can get a hotel room for $30 and split it 3 ways, it’s hard to turn down a real bed, air conditioning (hopefully) and a shower.
After we got settled in we all headed to a restaurant cafe thing in the city center. A bunch of teams we knew all hit the city around the same time so we had a huge dinner with 5 or 6 teams. We were ordering so much that the restaurant gave us a free bottle of vodka to celebrate. Since their currency is worth nothing our bill was a few thousand short of topping 1 million of their currency, and that was really only around $12 a person.
We closed down the restaurant and went in search for a bar, but it being another muslim country it can be difficult to find and we actually didn’t. However, a cafe owner told of us a store we could go to that is open 24 hours and sells alcohol, so we could get some wine or whatever and hang out in the courtyard of our hotel. We pulled it up on google maps but it was 30 minutes away to walk, no way. We tried flagging down a taxi with no success, so I did what anyone would do in that situation – ask a random guy if we could give him a few bucks to drive us to the place. First guy we asked said yes, and the roundtrip cost about $3, so Hendrick (Starchy and Dutch), Rich (2 Birch 1 Banger) and I hopped in the car.
He brought us to the store that we were looking for but it was closed. I don’t even know if they sold anything. A little disappointed we figured we could just go back to the hotel and go to bed, but as it has happened many places across the world the locals will go out of their way to help solve a problem. Our driver walked into the restaurant next door that was closed and asked the owner if we could buy stuff. A few minutes later we walked out with 20 beers, some fruit juice and a bottle of vodka. Our driver also told us how much his car cost, and how much it would cost on the black market. There’s that black market thing again. We were approached many times earlier that night about needing currency exchanged, the rate of which was 1:7700. The day before it was as high as 8200 per 1 usd, but it was explained that the value fluctuates day to day. It makes literally no sense so I asked the guy how the black market value changes so much and his answer was “mafia.” I still don’t know how anyone makes money, but whatever. He drove like a bat out of hell back to our hotel, and from there a few of us hung out in the courtyard with an Australian team and a few locals. The term “axis of idiots” was born that night with a dumb drinking game we invented. It wasn’t a game so much as just pouring vodka into each other’s mouths. Idiots.
Another fun night in the books.
