Today we will leave Bukhara and go to our final destination in Uzbekistan, the capital city of Tashkent. But before we go Tim does a last round of the sights, it rains once again, and the city is not looking its best with the dreary grey sky.
The rain also means we have to have breakfast inside, it’s the same as the past days but soon after Tim doesn’t feel too well. We pack all our stuff so we are ready to go, but since our train won’t leave until 14.34, we visit the summer palace of the Emir, we go there by Yandex. Unfortunately there has been another power outage, so the traffic lights are not working, making a mess of the roads. We have to wait for 15 minutes at a crossing before we can continue our ride.
Meanwhile Olga starts to have the same symptoms as Tim so we suspect some light food poisoning from the breakfast. At the entrance of the palace, the ticket desk quotes us a ridiculously high price, but it seems to include an English guide. Since we are not ones for guides, we ask for the ticket price without a guide, that’s 40k instead of 190k, a no-brainer.
There is a lot of corruption with the ticket sales for museums and sights. We regularly are sold second hand tickets, some even a day old. And often official people working for the site that we visit, collect our ticket again a few meters from the ticket desk.
The palace itself could use an outside paint job, but it’s a refreshing break from all the dreary madrassas. The style is an eclectic mix of Russian, Western and Islamic decoration, no Versailles but still one of the more visually pleasing sights of the past few days.
We still don’t feel to well so we decide to go back to Giotto’s, the ice cream pizzeria with nice toilets. Cleo has a waffle (at least the children are still hungry and happy) and we drink a coke, coffee and some Jasmin tea and hope our stomachs will settle before our journey to Tashkent. Unfortunately, they don’t.
We pick up our bags at the guesthouse and take the 40 minutes ride to the station which is situated on the outskirts of the city. The train is already at the platform, and Tim already got all our luggage inside before the doors close again. We hope that the train won’t leave without us. Luckily, it does not.
It’s a four hour train ride to Tashkent. Although the train is high speed, we never top 160 km/h. The four hours seem to take forever and we are glad when we finally arrive. A taxi ride later, a bit of waiting on our Airbnb host and we finally get to enter our 1962 Soviet apartment. Time to go to bed and hopefully everybody feels 100% again.
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