It’s time to leave Istanbul behind and venture further into Asia. But before we go, Tim goes on a final trip shooting some famous places from the air.
We’ve arranged an airport transfer to reduce the hassle of travelling with all our stuff and kids. For €1 extra we could book the luxury limousine like taxi again, including a driver in a suit, a no brainer! He surprises us by being half an hour early, so we force everything into our suitcases and say goodbye to Istanbul.
Our check in is at the furthest point in the airport and so is our gate. So we’re happy to be 30 minutes prior to our schedule and this assures that we still get enough steps on this travel day. Once we’re passed all the check points, it’s time to relax, spend our last Turkish Lira and head to the gate. It’s already boarding when we arrive. It feels like the real adventure starts now when when we stand in line among only Uzbeks who seek the attention of our blond children.
We take off over the Black Sea and circle back to the city, with some great views of the strangling city along the Bosporus. We head east and cross snow covered mountains, plains and more mountains until we arrive at the Caspian Sea.
This brings back memories from Azerbaijan, a place we luckily leave behind at 800km/h. As we cross the sea and fly across Turkmenistan. It’s clear that this sea also is evaporating as the coast line is clearly visible many kilometres inland. Turkmenistan seams like an endless wasteland of rocks and sand and only when we start descending the land starts to get a little bit greener. The flight took 4,5 hours and we land in Tashkent 19.00 local time. Passport control is quick but our luggage takes for ever to arrive. This is probably due to the fact that most passengers shipped microwaves and all kind of appliances with them. The piles of suitcases and packages on the luggage trolleys are impressive.
When we leave the hall we are hounded by taxi drivers which we show our Yandex app, saying that our taxi is already on his way. Some drivers are not convinced that all our luggage will fit in the Yandex taxi and are trying to convince us of their services. When we finally spot our driver we sort of get what they were hinting at, but with some rearranging everything fits and we’re off to our apartment next to the train station. When we pay for the taxi and buy some water, the Uzbek Sum makes our brains spin, as 1 UZS equals 0.000073 Euro. Two bottles of water is 10.000 UZS. We need some more practice to understand the transactions we’re making.
The apartment is huge compared to our previous one and we’ll take advantage of our extra bedroom but only for a short night, as our train leaves in only 11 hours.
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