Leaving the Uzbek capital behind after relaxing a lot, I continued my adventure along the Silk Road to the Fergana valley, where a lot of silk is produced and processed. A shared taxi ride of 5 hours brings me to Kokand. The road goes over a pass and presents some quite nice mountain panoramas, somehow a preparation for what I will see in Kyrgyzstan soon. But once you come down from the pass, you enter not really a valley but some kind of plateau ... You never see the mountain ranges on both sides at the same time, so it is not really a valley I would say...
Kokand is quite nice little town, with one major sight "Khan's Palace" (again a UNESCO site... I actually have stopped counting how many I have seen on this trip ...) The palace was nice and also contained a quite cute regional museum, but compared to what I had seen before, it could not really compete... But well, this is not about a competition after all... And the rest of the modern city was also nice and quite dynamic. There were some kind of celebrations going on, with concerts and acrobatic performances in the streets. From the posters, I thought to have understood that it was related to the Uzbek independence, but I asked several people and they could not say what it was, not even the quite clever teenager, who had chatted me up when I walked around in the (quite boring "old town") and walked with me, together with his two friends (who did not say a word..) through the entire town to practice his English. And it was not the national Independence Day (from the Soviet Union in 1991), which is on 1st September. Anyway, the festive atmosphere was nice.
The next day, I continued to the city of Fergana, only a one hour and a half shared taxi drive away. As the local buses left from very close to the guesthouse, I took a bus to the shared taxi terminal. Which was next to the market, where I would have to perform my last black market money exchange. When I arrived there with all my luggage, I was however walking around for almost 20 minutes without finding any and I gave up because it was just too hot and I had still just enough to pay the transport and some food and drinks... In Fergana, I again chose a hotel with a pool, where I decided to stay two nights, to relax a bit more and to discover also the little villages around. The city of Fergana was rather uninspiring, I finally did not go for the excursions to the surrounding villages (notably the silk producing Margilan), but rather enjoyed relaxing at the hotel pool. ;-) What I however did NOT enjoy was a local samosa, which I bought on the market and which contained a little bone... And, what had to happen actually happened: I broke another tooth when I bit on that stupid bone!! This time, the tooth had not been treated with a canal root treatment and therefore started to hurt immediately as soon as something touched it... But dentists have a very bad reputation all over Central Asia (at least that is what I read and a proof is probably the thousands of people running around with a mouth of gold, even in the front ... So I did not dare going to a dentist here, but more than a week later I can say: I have no pain and hope it will stay that way and as long as it does, I will not do anything ...;-)
Photos at: https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A65ON9t3G81kIH
Kokand is quite nice little town, with one major sight "Khan's Palace" (again a UNESCO site... I actually have stopped counting how many I have seen on this trip ...) The palace was nice and also contained a quite cute regional museum, but compared to what I had seen before, it could not really compete... But well, this is not about a competition after all... And the rest of the modern city was also nice and quite dynamic. There were some kind of celebrations going on, with concerts and acrobatic performances in the streets. From the posters, I thought to have understood that it was related to the Uzbek independence, but I asked several people and they could not say what it was, not even the quite clever teenager, who had chatted me up when I walked around in the (quite boring "old town") and walked with me, together with his two friends (who did not say a word..) through the entire town to practice his English. And it was not the national Independence Day (from the Soviet Union in 1991), which is on 1st September. Anyway, the festive atmosphere was nice.
The next day, I continued to the city of Fergana, only a one hour and a half shared taxi drive away. As the local buses left from very close to the guesthouse, I took a bus to the shared taxi terminal. Which was next to the market, where I would have to perform my last black market money exchange. When I arrived there with all my luggage, I was however walking around for almost 20 minutes without finding any and I gave up because it was just too hot and I had still just enough to pay the transport and some food and drinks... In Fergana, I again chose a hotel with a pool, where I decided to stay two nights, to relax a bit more and to discover also the little villages around. The city of Fergana was rather uninspiring, I finally did not go for the excursions to the surrounding villages (notably the silk producing Margilan), but rather enjoyed relaxing at the hotel pool. ;-) What I however did NOT enjoy was a local samosa, which I bought on the market and which contained a little bone... And, what had to happen actually happened: I broke another tooth when I bit on that stupid bone!! This time, the tooth had not been treated with a canal root treatment and therefore started to hurt immediately as soon as something touched it... But dentists have a very bad reputation all over Central Asia (at least that is what I read and a proof is probably the thousands of people running around with a mouth of gold, even in the front ... So I did not dare going to a dentist here, but more than a week later I can say: I have no pain and hope it will stay that way and as long as it does, I will not do anything ...;-)
Photos at: https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A65ON9t3G81kIH
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