This morning before leaving Bukhara we drive to the Abdulazizkhan Madrese and take some photos of our cars in the clear morning light. It doesn’t take long before we have a crowd even at 7:30 in the morning.
We leave Uzbekistan today so we drive 40 km to the border town of Farab and say farewell to our wonderful guide Zaheed who has taught us so much about glorious Uzbekistan.
It doesn’t take very long to exit Uzbekistan and we drive to the Turkmenistan border, where we meet our guide and do the usual filling in of papers and wait. When it gets to 12:30 the border officials go for a lunch break until 2pm, so we bring in our chairs & food to the waiting room and we have our lunch. The whole process of crossing the border takes us 5.5 hours, our longest crossing so far because of the 1.5 hour lunch break. After we change some money we start our 275 km drive across the desert to Mary.
The roads are full of pot holes, it’s very hot and flat terrain and our progress is slow. We have a couple of rests along the way, but there isn’t a lot around except for some camels.
Driving into Mary we start to see some agricultural activity & we get a warm welcome from the locals, although it’s not quite as enthusiastic as the Uzbekistan welcome.
We arrive at Mary 4 hours later, hot, tired and dehydrated, so it’s off to find some drinks so we can re-hydrate before going to a lovely Turkish restaurant for dinner.
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