Jardinages

By -
La variété de nos Couch-Surfers nous fournit une variété d'activités: ici, dans une maison en pleine campagne, Andrew aidant à l'arrosage:




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cycling Day 13: Panjakent to Ayni

By -
Image
Sunrise over the lake, where I woke up in Panjakent After Panjakent, it started to get steep. I climbed 60 miles, as the road began to offer me extra steep grades as I rode into the mountains. So far, this was the most stunning ride of the tour, visually. The cliffs rose up over the river valley as I got deeper into the mountains, the temperature was also not so incredibly hot in the middle of the day.   A man in traditional clothes who was painting a fence I stopped at a village to eat some somsa and found a place on the side of the road in the shade to take a nap. It probably wasn’t the most appropriate place, as I woke 20 minutes later to a bunch of little kids admiring my bike and staring at me. All testing out their “Hello” like broken records all vying for a reaction. I was a bit groggy, and also a bit annoyed. They couldn’t say anything else and none of them spoke Russian. I put on some sunscreen and kept riding. Climbing higher into the mountains along the Zarafshon riv...
Read more

Cycling Day 12 - Samarqand to Panjakent

By -
Image
  I took off from Samarqand, a little sad to leave such a magical city, but my final leg of the trip was waiting for me. I had a relatively short ride today, only 40 miles. On the way, I passed the first bike tourer I had seen this entire trip, he had ridden from his hometown in China and was also headed to Dushanbe - we rode a few minutes together, but he was much slower than me and also spoke almost no English, so we said goodbye.   First bike tourer I ran into the entire trip I rode on to the Tajikistan border. Although I would rate this border quite low on the sketchiness scale - it also scored rather low on thoroughness.     Man riding close to the border wearing a traditional Uzbek/Tajik hat The Uzbek side of the border was typical - my passport and visa were scrutinized, checked several times and I got my stamp.   I walked over to the Tajik side and passed several windows, some had people in them but waved me through, others were closed. I couldn’t...
Read more

Seeing the Monuments in Samarqand and Local Adventures

By -
Image
  Samarqand is by far the most tourist-oriented place I've been on this trip. It seems pretty wild to me that I just rode through the desert of Uzbekistan and somehow happened upon this ancient capital city. Amir Temur, a central figure in ancient Uzbekistan is represented all over the city, and his mark, and the mark of the Temurid period that he started, is indelible. Amur Temur's burial site and mausoleum He believed that he was the heir apparent to the Mongolian Empire, and in the late 1300's he ran a brutal military/genocidal campaign to try and regain some of the previously-held Mongolian territory. This resulted in a large land area, covering the lucrative silk road trade routes from China, and west through modern-day Turkmenistan. Samarqand was the capital. The region itself is marked by incredibly intricate mosaic structures, whose construction were overseen by his wife. I put together a program, that I only managed to partially complete in the two days, but enough...
Read more