Armenia and Uzbekistan 2023

With our flight from Bukhara to Tashkent having arrived late last night, we only had six hours to enjoy our hotel room and get some rest before getting up for our flight to the western part of Uzbekistan.  It was. 4:15AM rise for a 5:15AM departure to Tashkent’s domestic terminal.  All went like clockwork and we were sitting at the departure area by 5:35AM.  We had another wonderful Uzbekistan Airways flight, landing early at 8:15AM.   The Yandex app does not work in western Uzbek, so we fell into the hands of the taxi touts as we exited the airport.  Eventually, we gave into one of them — a history teacher who hustles on the side as a taxi driver to make ends meet.  He drove like a madman and was very chatty in hard-to-follow English, but he did manage to get us to our hotel alive! By the time we got some breakfast at the hotel, the manager said he’d give us early access to our room.  By 11:15AM, we were in a taxi to Khiva’s Old Town, which is the ep...

This was our second of two days in Bukhara.  Yesterday, we got a good taste of Bukhara and explored its largest sites.  But today was about filling in the spaces with visits to a large number of smaller sites.   The scorching heat was definitely turned up another notch today, so there is only so much one can do in such heat and only so long one can go.  We had the Mercure’s breakfast buffet pretty much to ourselves, which was nice, and then headed out at 10:15AM.  We were back at the hotel by 2PM and just rested until we left for the airport at 7PM.  (The hotel allowed us to pay half of our previous night’s rate to extend our stay from noon until 7PM, which was well worth it — otherwise, we’d have been wandering in the extreme heat all afternoon.) Our full flight to Tashkent left on time at 9PM and arrived an hour later.  We got a Yandex cab to the same Courtyard by Marriott we stayed on our first night in Uzbekistan, so the familiarity of a repeat ho...