June 20th & 21st - Khiva (Step 3)

Khiva is 50km away from Urgench but we got lazy to ride, prefer to save Petrol and avoid riding under the burning sun !!

 

So we took a shared taxi and 20 min later, we check in a small guest house in from of the main gate.

 

Khiva is the smaller version of Bukhara. Bukhara which is the smaller version of Samarkand. So to summarize, once you saw one of these cities then you can consider you have seen enought.

Its a little bit like temples in China. Once you have been to Hangzhou you can consider you are not punish anymore and you don't need to visit more hehe...

 

But a little bit of culture, we sometimes like stories of what is happened before human created motorbike

 

Khiva is evoking slave caravans, barbaric and terrible journey across deserts and steppes infested with wild tribes men. Do you follow me ?

Today is a quiet and relax city where locals are cultivating cottons and fruits trees.  

We met few laowais (like us) Italian, Spanish and Japanese…Not much Chinese !

The funny things; when locals are guessing where are we from ?! They all say : American !. No we are not and by the way since the beginning we did not met any Americans. Anyway, it make senses Americans will not choose Central Asia for their 1st holiday`s choices.

 

We walked through the narrow old streets for 1 hours until we realized, there is not much to see anymore. Khiva was done in 1 hour. 

So it means, we will have to kill 10 hours before going to bed. So as our usual habits, we went back to hotel any get connected to the world via Wechat and Facebook and share our incredible adventure with our friends hahahah...

 

The diner was quick and efficient outside under the beautiful dark sky and shinny stars. A beer for Juju and a coke for Nico as always.

On the way back to hotel we decided to have a small digestive walk and by chance we found a gathering at the Mosque around 9am. We sat down and look at the ritual for 30min. 

 

Back to hotel, time to sleep !

 

Today we came back from Urgench, ride until the closest petrol station to fill up some crappy fuel. The afternoon was dedicated for updating the blog and surprisingly (yes i know) we went to Cinema to watch San Andreas, a Russian movie. We knew we will not get any words of Ruchiiiian, so we turn on our music while watching the movie…

 

Tomorrow will be an early ride direction Kungrad, the last city before the long awaited Aral Sea.