Some reflections on our holiday… “holiday” is completely the wrong word to use. It was certainly a good time. But “holiday” implies rest, and it certainly wasn’t restful. Ten nights spent in five hotels made for a rather busy time. I enjoyed the trip immensely, and on re-reading what follows it all seems rather negative, but here’s a few things that no one told me…

 

 

 

We were very lucky with our guide – he was excellent.

 

We went as part of an organized tour. There were twenty-seven of us. Fortunately we were with a very decent group of people and everyone got on.

Had there been any squabbles it would have made for a difficult time.

 

Though I must admit that being a bad-tempered grumpy old scratter I found constantly smiling and not swearing rather difficult.

 

 

 

 

 

If you visit anywhere at all, chances are you will be expected to take your shoes off before you go in.

Get some slip-ons or take a shoe-horn.

 

 

 

 

There was no shortage of food… and the photos make it look rather good but look closely. The banquets really are a triumph of style over substance. There is little variety in what is offered and one soon sickens of a diet of raw tomatoes and raw cucumbers followed by boiled potato and carrot soup.

Some of our party brought along a supply of cereal bars and didn’t eat any of the local food.

 

 

And following on from that the toilets are feral. There’s no other word for it. Ninety per cent of the toilets are just a hole in the ground into which you deposit that which you need to unload.

On the rare occasion that you might find a proper WC you’ll not find any toilet paper, and the flush will probably be broken.

Not even daring to fart for up to ten hours was problematical.

And pretty much every public toilet has someone demanding you pay to piss in a hole in the ground. The cost isn’t much (less than twenty pence), but it’s an inconvenience you can do without, and is frankly overpiced.

 

 

 

 

The beds were rock-hard, and wi-fi was rarely found outside of a hotel’s reception area.

 

 

Your mobile phone provider may well charge a forture for you to use your phone to connect to the Internet. My provider wanted to charge a “rest of the world” rate of over four quid per megabyte.

You can get sim cards at the airport for about fifteen quid with eight gigabytes. I took an old phone and stuck an Uzbek sim into it.

However mobile data connectivity is patchy outside the major cities.  

 

A word about money…

 

It is widely reported on the Internet that the locals love American dollars. They do not. Most will flatly refuse them. The few that grudgingly accept them ask you to go into a back room to conduct transactions as they aren’t supposed to trade in dollars and don’t want to be seen doing so.

 

And bear in mind that when we went the converstio rate was 1 Uzbekian Som being equal to  0.000059 Pound sterling. Or one quid being worth 17021.69 Uzbekian Soms.

They don’t have coins. The lowest denomionation in use is 1000 soms (about six pence)

And it is very easy to get confused with the decimal points.