Uzbeki Sun

Parts 1 to 4

A Blistering Summer

Wow, it's a stinker out there

It's 6.42pm and it's still 37 smackeroos.

I'm so glad I've just sat down in a cool-ish café.

That's the thing about the summer here. The only real relief you get is very very late at night, or in the early hours of the morning. And while you get a sweaty breeze while you're riding, it's still hot, and, as the day wears on, the heat just gets more and more ferocious.

Today I arrived here in the town of Fergana at about 4pm, and I was totally frizzled. I'd ridden about 80 clicks in the heat, and, while the morning ride was ok, I really got cooked later in the day.

I don't know how many litres of fluids I drank, but it was a lot, helped by the kindest man, who pulled over next to me on the road in the late morning, motioned me to a drink place, and then bought me 2 x 1L bottles of cold drinks. What a guy! Just to be hospitable. After delivering the drinks to me, he said goodbye and rode off on his electric scooter.

Both bottles were from a traditional homemade drinks stall. The first was ayron, a fermented milk that basically tastes like a liquid version of the qurut fermented cheese that you get all over Central Asia. And the second was a type of kvas, which basically tastes like a thicker version of the Kyrgyz version of kvas that I've been drinking loads of, a fermented drink made from old bread and rye flour. It's super refreshing.

Uzbeki hospitality has already shown itself to be impeccable.

Ayron

Kvas

I've got a long way to go to get to my next major destination, the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, a city of 3 million.

I left Andijon on a very colourful (and very bumpy) paved cycle path.

While I was resting three women in separate donkey carts overtook me.

I wasn't having that, so I rode off and overtook them back, bloody upstarts. I did say salom on the way through though, and they all responded politely and smiled.

The bike track came to a sudden but ceremonious end

Great town names

Another car accident at a major intersection

It took me at least an hour to get out of the built up zone.

The Fergana Valley

The Fergana Valley, despite its arid clime, is one of the main food baskets of Central Asia, and straddles three countries, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Osh in Kyrgyzstan, where I spent some time recently, also sits within the valley.

The whole area is irrigated by waters from two major rivers, the Naryn and the Kara Darya, and has been settled for millenia. My namesake Alexander the Great founded an estate in the southwestern part of the valley, where they grew grains, vegetables and fruit, including grapes.

In fact, Alexander was originally known as Alexander the Grape (Grower), and over centuries his name became bastardised, as people drank more and more grape wine and thought he was so Great to grow all those raw materials for it.

These days the cotton and textile industries are also big here, as witnessed by cute tufts of raw cotton that occasionally fly off random trucks that are speeding down the main roads trying to kill me.

The valley is also famous for a guy called Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur, otherwise known as Babur, who is one of the most influential guys in world history that you've never heard of.

Mughal Conquests

Babur is the founder of the Mughal Empire, the empire that completely conquered most of the north of India in the early 1500s, and, at its peak in about 1720, grew to eventually control pretty much all of what is now known as India (except it's very southern tip), as well as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and northern Afghanistan.

The empire was huge, and was only eventually dissolved as a unified empire by the British, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

So Babur is revered all over the place, but most particularly in Uzbekistan, where he was born. He was actually born in Andijon, where I was last night, and spent a chunk of time in Osh as a teenager, before moving on to bigger and better things, like raping and pillaging.

They were smart buggers those Mughals, much smarter than the British. Once they'd conquered new lands they often just allowed the residents to continue their religious and cultural practices, but collected taxes, which they used to  introduce civil works and administrative practices, and acquire more precious funds for their jewellery collections.

Organised infrastructure in turn generated more economic growth, which meant more taxes to collect, and therefore more jewels, bigger harems, more elaborate neverending banquets, and, of course, more magnificent palaces and mausoleums.

Just think the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Humayun's Tomb, Fatehpur Sikri, the Red Fort in Delhi, blah de blah.

In fact, it was only when one of the last Mughal rulers, Aurangzeb, started repressing Hindu religious practices that the chariot wheels really began to fall off, and there were major uprisings against them.

It was a super long super hot road today

Shady fruit stalls

Cold drinks were the order of the day, so I ordered them all day.

Eventually I made it here to the town of Fergana, which isn't as historic as some of the other great cities in Uzbekistan, but beautiful all the same. The Russians developed the area greatly in the 1900s, and made it all look nice.

Wide leafy boulevards. I wish I'd gone to the Ideal School before attending the Perfect University in Tashkent.

Whilst it's a bit confusing to start with, a non kebob is actually a kebab, rather than anything other than a kebab. It's served with non, which is bread. I saw a sign yesterday for a non shaslyk too, but it was also a real one.

The market here was a cracker. That's three out of three in Uzbekistan so far.

I would've loved to chat with this gentlewoman

More kartoschka somsa, I've been getting stuck into these.

Vegetarian borsch, which, despite the waiter's reassurances, was about as vegetarian as your Uzbeki grandmother's chunky horse soup.

It's happened three times this evening so far. Suddenly the lights go down, really loud music starts, and all the staff parade to a particular café table in the dark, sparklered birthday cake in tow. They pop some sort of firecracker thing, glittery paper flies everywhere, they all cheer, clap faster and faster, and then suddenly move away quickly, the music stops, the lights go back on, and it's as if nothing just happened.

I love it.

People have a lot of birthdays around here.

It's a festival of meat. A carnivorl.

City moon.

Kokand (Qoqon)

It really is sizzlingly hot outside again, it's at least 40 degrees, and that's just the air temperature, let alone the extra heat radiating off the black tarmac of the road I've just been cycling on. There's not a cloud in the sky, and the heat's belting down and frying everything out there. I'm so glad I'm indoors now.

But somehow, despite the trying conditions, today's long 90km ride wasn't as much of a struggle as I'd expected it to be, because it was punctuated by the most incredible hospitality, from all directions, all day long.

Today, on the road, I've been fed and watered constantly, by the unceasingly generous local people I've met.

So far today I've been given watermelon, bread, pomegranate juice, grapes, fresh figs, somsas, more bread, green tea, beer, more grapes, soft drinks, and an ice cream.

And even though I've been riding all day I've still arrived here at my little hostel with a full belly, carrying food offerings that I haven't even eaten yet.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that my host from last night's guesthouse also gave me a full breakfast to send me off this morning, even though it wasn't included in the price of my room.

Unbelievable, these Uzbeks.

Heading off from Fergana. A real bike path. Parts of the large town remind me of parts of some towns in China. China's not too far away from here actually, and lots of Chinese do business in this region, including the Chinese government and its infrastructure companies. Maybe they built it.

I got out onto the back roads pretty quickly.

I love these grapevine-shaded footpaths, there should be more of them.

Watermelon sweeties. These friendly guys gave me lots of things.

Local stall on the side of the road, selling a range of drinks, including vodka.

Lots of grapevines around. Hidden further up was a team of women, covered from head to toe, picking grapes in amongst the vines, in the shade. It still would've been bloody hot though.

But nowhere near as hot as it was for these women.

Beautiful new mosque under construction.

These lovely guys sat me down and fed me a lunch of all sorts of things.

As I left they all said a prayer for me, wishing me a safe journey. Can you believe it? It blew my mind right into heaven.

Jeez, she's so hot!

In a temperature kinda way

Fresh juicy figs

Saw my first Uzbeki train today

Gate wallah

Check out the length of the steel rods they're loading onto that dodgy rustbucket. I wouldn't wanna be riding behind it on the road.

Shit! I am riding behind it!

Street art

After finding a tiny box to sleep in, complete with in-house freezing cold aircon, I went wandering.

My hostel's elaborate ducted aircon system

Random street scenes

The sun's been a bitch today.

Chestnuts and Uzbek flags

Rather flash looking brand new uni

Old housing, slowly being superseded

Grand function centre. There's money in this town, and lots of well-dressed people walking around in some districts.

I strolled through one of the main parks in the town. It was big and beautiful, and really well looked after.

And then I made it to the Khan's magnificent palace.

The Khans And Their Khanate

Just in case you don't remember the history lesson I delivered in one of my Kyrgyz blogs, Kokand was the capital of one of Uzbekistan's great 18th and 19th Century khanates, the Kokand Khanate, and this particular Uzbek kingdom gobbled up a large chunk of Kyrgyzstan during its heyday.

There were hundreds of mosques here in Kokand, and at least 35 medressas, which are large educational institutions, both religious and secular.

Remember that Tsarist Russia controlled this area from the mid 1800s, and it had an agreement with the Khanate to have their support on various foreign policy and other matters, whilst allowing the Khan some degree of autonomous rule.

The Khan built his incredible palace in 1873.

But after a falling out with the Tsar, Russian troops destroyed a lot of it only 3 years later.

What a bummer.

There were originally 114 rooms in the palace, but now there's a lot less. There's only six courtyards left, with their adjoining rooms.

It's still incredible though. It must've been unbelievable when it had all its bits.

Intricate ceiling designs

There was a little museum in there

This is the famous Babur that I chatted about earlier, the founder of the Mughal Empire.

Old portraits of locals

And I thought I was stuffed, after such a huge ride in the heat today.

Pomegranates in one of the courtyards.

The Khan was quite the stud, and had half of the original palace set aside for his harem's quarters. He had 43 concubines on hand, (foot and mouth, etc), but as Islam only permits 4 wives, he had a mullah on site so he could temporarily marry a different concubine every night, and then divorce her the next day.

Ha! Henry VIII was just a pretender, with his measly six.

Keeping her fluids up

Kids were zipping around on these electric buggies, trying to emulate their dads, by learning how to screech their tyres loudly and often, cut people off, almost hit cyclists, and accelerate and brake at full tilt no matter what's actually happening in front of them.

Women's business

Wealthy socialites

Wasting the most precious commodity out here

This 3D catering advertising booth was in the weirdest place ever.

Fresh figs

I'm not sure that KFC HQ have endorsed this particular franchisee

More old school housing

Sunny Side Up

Shit. I'm fucking toast.

I've had one of the most strenuous days in my riding career, made so much more challenging by an unrelenting, blistering heat.

Today I climbed about 1600m over 75km, although the first 20km or so were relatively flat.

It was stiflingly hot even when I started at 10am, and there was no relief until about 5pm, when I was finally shaded by mountains. I got here at 6, and have been pottering around doing things, and will be horizontal soon.

I had another great sleep last night. It's one of the benefits of having all day workouts. I've been crashing out relatively early at night, ie. say, 10 or 11pm, which is rather unlike me.

I headed north out of Kokand.

Central Asia is also known as Turkestan, or Turkistan, which was traditionally a region which stretched all the way from northwest China westwards to the Caspian Sea, and included the whole nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, as well as northern Afghanistan.

More Stans than an Aussie bingo hall.

Looks tempting and dangerous at the same time, as there was pretty heavy traffic most of the time.

Protecting her melons

First glimpse of the hills, after already riding for an hour and a half

I listened, but there was no pop

First time I've seen a sign advertising alcohol since I've been in the country. It hasn't been on sale anywhere.

Beautiful rugs and fabrics for sitting on

I've seen very few dogs here, and only been chased by a handful

Just as I exited the outskirts of Kokand, there were a huge number of bread shops and snack stores, so travellers could stock up on their way to Tashkent, the capital.

These guys were delivering breads to cars, fresh out of the oven. Of course I bought one.

Loads of dried fruit stalls

The hot hot road

I stopped for lunch

I skulled a whole litre of Pepsi. You know my body's stressed when I do things like that.

The only thing on the menu was jiz. I'm not joking. I ate it, I was famished.

But left the unrecognisable bits.

Unrelenting up, unrelenting sun, unrelenting traffic, unrelenting thirst, even an unrelenting sentence.

See how close those trucks are to my exclusive cycle zone?

Just for statistical purposes I'll have you know that today I drank 4 litres of water, a litre of pear juice, a litre of Pepsi, a litre of cold fruit tea, and a pot of green tea. And that's before I arrived here.

Since I've been here I've been guzzling litres of water non stop.

It's not me, it's another Olish

Dam olish means rest, ie., damolish your tiredness

Joy bor means "there is a place." Boring. I was hoping for something more exotic.

More jizzing

The truckie in the truck carrying the bricks spent five minutes trying to convince me to hang on to a thin nylon string hanging off the side of his truck, so he could pull me up the hill.

I mean, so nice to offer, but shit man, have you not seen the other trucks around here?!? It's way too fucking dangerous, what are you thinking?

Then his friend in the water truck pulled up and tried to do the same thing.

So dangerously sweet.

Looking back

This woman is the first person I've met in the country who speaks fluent English. She was so sweet.

Looking back, again. I've pretty much had no downhills all bloody day.

I shudder to think of what happened to the driver. And the cyclist he was towing.

I eventually found a place to stay right on the side of the road. The family were so sweet, but were very apologetic because they'd already eaten, and had no food.

They let me use their cooker though

It's time to reveal a deep secret. I'm not as naturally tall as you think I am. I've fitted sticks at the bottom of my real legs so I can be taller, you can really see it in this photo. Social media has made me unhappy about how I really am. I'm pole-ish in more ways than you could imagine.

Yeah, I know it's sad, but I wasn't carrying much

Dinner #1

Right after I finished it a man turned up with Dinner #2. Amazing. He's just passing through with his family and delivered this to my door.

Unbelievable hospitality.

Built like a brick shithouse. I won't post a shot of the inside, as you'd never be able to un-see it. Suffice it to say that it was an absolute shitstorm in there.

Noisy night by the highway. But I was so trashed I didn't hear a thing.

In The Lap Of Luxury

I really didn't expect this, so that makes it so much better.

I'm sitting on a comfy bed, I've just had a long scrubby shower, I've washed my cycling clothes (well, as best I could given their state), and while I rest here with my back against some soft pillows the cook at this hotel is whipping me up some vegetarian fare.

How bloody lucky am I?

So, it was one heck of a day.

Again.

You know, I've said it before, but I'm just gonna say it again. When you're on the road like this, you can never predict what's gonna happen.

After a decent sleep I hit the road this morning and it was immediately steep up, just like most of yesterday. It takes a bit of time for the legs to warm up to that sort of thing. There was another 600m of elevation to gain before the top of the pass.

The switchbacks ahead look pretty daunting don't they.

A few clicks up the road I passed a long line of army trucks, and noticed another line of them heading up a side road, including tanks and armoured vehicles.

I passed them all, and then, to my complete surprise, discovered that I was heading straight for some long dark tunnels. I rode to the entrance, and an army guy motioned to me that I wasn't allowed in with my bicycle, and I'd have to go back down a few hundred metres, and take the old road, that climbs right over the top.

Oh well, you get that.

The trouble was, the side road was the one the military vehicles were going up, and an army officer down the bottom explained to me that I couldn't go up there for at least an hour and a half because they were doing military exercises up there, and told me not to worry when I heard loud explosions.

Of course I didn't even consider taking any pics of the military, that'd be dumb around here.

Ok, well what to do then? I was instructed to go back down further, below the first line of military vehicles, and I sat for a while in the shade of a warehouse.

Of course, people immediately came to see who this strange guy was.

I chatted with two young boys for awhile, with very useful translations like these

When I asked one of the boys who the other one was, he said

Eventually a lovely guy called Abdullah came and said hello, and invited me up to his little guest house/resort, to wait it out while the army was playing its little war games and practising how to attack and kill people.

Little did I know that his place was miles up the hill. As we headed up there, massive bomb explosions from the military exercises echoed through the valley. I got the weirdest sense of how loud and scary a real war must be. And that's without the actual real terror bit.

I followed Abdullah up, to the trippiest and dodgiest little resort park ever. He had these little half-built A-framed rooms that looked super dodgy, and also had, of all things, an incredible hill slide.

He ordered his son to slide down so I could see how it worked. It was super fast.

There was also the weirdest sculpture ever, of an arm shooting out of the earth, which, of course, we climbed, even though it looked incredibly dodgy to me. The whole structure was some kind of fibreglass concoction built around a flimsy rio frame, which is the metal they put in concrete to give it stability.

The hand platform was supported by what looked to me to be the thinnest rusty steel post in the history of skinny Poles.

The whole structure honestly looked as if it could come down at any time. And to add more nail biting to my already uncomfortable feeling up there, two of Abdullah's teenage sons saw us up there, and decided to run up and join us.

The view from the top.

I could hardly look.

The very thin walls of the death tower.

Well, I'm alive to tell the tale, so I guess it didn't collapse.

But it will one day, you can bet your bottom som.

I couldn't resist getting back down via the rainbow slide. Halfway down I spun around somehow and ended up going backwards, which was scary and fun at the same time.

Eventually the explosions stopped and the army cleared out, so I strolled back down the hill to my bike, and then rode up to the pass on this side road, which was actually quite a reasonable tarmac road, with virtually no traffic whatsoever. It was really beautiful up there, with magnificent views, and the most beautiful silence.

More tunnels in the distance.

Snow fences at the top of the valleys

It was a tough steep climb though, and eventually I made it to Qamchiq Pass, at a height of about 2300m.

It was a long long cruise down, although it wasn't down all the way.

The scenery was pretty spectacular at times.

Landslides

When I hit the highway again I fitted some new brake pads, for the descent. My back brakes were starting to sound scrapey.

I stopped at an eating house, and they served pretty much one thing.

You've gotta be kidding. Now this is getting ridiculous.

Old bridge

Stunning rock formations all over the place.

Suddenly the weirdest thing happened, completely unexpectedly.

These strange drops of water started falling out of the sky.

Because I hadn't experienced this phenomenon for such a long time, it took me a while to realise what was happening.

It was actually raining!

Yes! I couldn't believe it. After this blistering hot weather, cool raindrops were falling from the heavens.

Hallelujah!

It lasted about 30 seconds.

Bummer.

Better than nothing though.

These guys were trotting along the highway, and skedaddled just before I reached them.

The trippiest restaurant entrance ever. Don't ask me what the young couple is doing by the teapot. I turned away, I wanted to give them a bit of privacy.

They dammed the Ohangaron River

Not a good place for two calves to hang out

Looking back

This girl was a bit unsure about me, but eventually trusted me enough to pass by

"Protecting Nature Is Protecting Us. It Is Our Duty."

Hear hear.

This is the main hallway of my hotel. Pretty flashy huh, especially compared to where I've been lately. But, as usual, my room was nothing like the lobby.

To The Capital

Well, now I'm only one long day's ride from Uzbekistan's capital, Tashkent.

Awesome! Another city to get excited about, and to explore.

My plan is to check out the city for a couple of days, and get some serious resting done, after all this hill climbing leg killing rubbish.

Then I wanna head to one of the most famous Silk Road cities of them all - the ancient and glorious city of Samarkand.

I've always wanted to see the famous mosques and medressas there, the photos of them are well known iconic images of Central Asia.

I've noticed that the Silk Road appears to be rather long❤️

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