22 September 2024 (Sunday) - Bukhara

Hotel to The Ark (Coach) – 2 miles

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Another bad night’s sleep – the bed was rock hard. We went down to brekkie and again I fancied a cup of coffee but it was not to be. Hotels in Uzbekistan don’t seem to have catering coffee machines. They have the sort of thing you have in your house which is all very well when you are making one cup of coffee. But taking over a minute to make one cup and a queue of dozens of people didn’t work for me.

As we breakfasted so one of our number, a particularly posh old lady, commented on my tattoos and asked if I’d been in the merchant navy.

We took a coach trip to the other side of town and walked back to the hotel slowly. As we walked we visited The Ark – a huge fort, and called in to mosques (shoes off – shoes on). Our guide Fax knew several market traders and they chatted with us in passable English, and we visited a traditional carpet shop who gave us tea whilst they gave us a mini-demonstration and talk.

As we walked Fax explained that people weren’t staring at us because we were English – they were staring at him. Being with Titan holidays (a subsidiary of Saga) our guide was holding up a huge “Titan” banner so we could see where he was. Apparently “Titan” is Uzbek for “Viagra”.

We went back to the hotel where we were left to our own devices for the afternoon. We sparked up the geocaching map to give us a guided tour and we found two caches, watched a cat jumping a stream and had three ice creams before going back to the hotel for an hour’s sleep.

There is a phrase about getting your knickers in a twist. Somehow or other “er indoors ^TM” got her bra in a knot. But with knot untangled we were on our way to a local restaurant where we had a little cooking masterclass and then the best meal of the trip so far. Plov isn’t bad really.

We walked back to the hotel. Despite it being late evening all the market stalls were still open.

We got back to the hotel where we had a quick gin and tonic, then fought with the Internet.

And having established a connection we swore at the news from home. The plan for the week was that Morgan and Bailey would stay with the first fruit of my loin for the first week, and then a friend from Dog Club would have them for the second. Having dropped the pups off, after half an hour “My Boy ^TM” got a phone call to come and collect them. Apparently Bailey had attacked their dog (seriously?) and their eight year old daughter was terrified. He’d gone back to see the eight-year-old playing with them, the husband of the family demanding that the dogs go, and the woman who’d offered to take them was nowhere to be seen.

The reason for the dogs going to a second place for the second week was that “My Boy ^TM” and Cheryl had things to do and were off on holiday themselves.

With no possibility of cutting our holiday short (there’s only two flights a week from Uzbekistan to the UK and we were four hundred miles from the airport) we frantically messaged all over the place, but Cheryl decided that it was too much stress for the pups and they cancelled their holiday, with a friend from Dog Club dog-sitting when Cheryl had a couple of appointments.