On the way out of Fergana we paid a short visit to Kumtepa Bazaar in Margylon before heading to Kokand. There we stopped at the Khan‘s Palace, with vast amounts of beautiful geometric tile decor. To get to Tashkent we crossed the mountains with our driver to avoid going through Tajikistan. We made it to our destination by the late afternoon, so we used the evening for a short walk around the city center.
New day - new country: before crossing the border to Uzbekistan we visited Sulayman Mountain, a world heritage pilgrimage site in the middle of Osh. Besides it’s museum and petroglyphs it also gave us a splendid view over Osh.
The border crossing then went much quicker than we had hoped for. We were even allowed to skip a part of the waiting queue despite our luggage being lighter than some other people’s fridges and TV sets.
We then spent the afternoon around Fergana in Margylon’s silk factory and a Madrasah that gives also handcraft training besides religious education.
We are in Kyrgyzstan now after a long day on the road! The route to the border led us through a little inhabited mostly arid mountain region, interrupted not only by several checkpoints with lengthy procedures but also multiple customs and immigration stations.
Thus, we only arrived at the final border post short before it opened again for the afternoon - much later than planned. After walking a kilometer to the first Kyrgyz border post, a friendly truck driver picked us up to the actual customs port.
From here, a very friendly nd caring driver picked us up to Osh, and we made our way through a much greener scenery with spectacular snow mountains...
Alright, so we got a good part of our further tour lined up. We will basically keep our schedule between Kashgar and Ashgabat with some smaller changes. For the less accessible routes we will resort to hiring drivers, for the link between bigger cities we will try to catch trains. After scaling down my luggage to something more portable, we finally spent some time at the sights of Kashgar: The beautiful and well hidden Abakh Khoja Tomb, the main bazaar and the re-built part of the ancient city.
We closed the day with a fancy dinner of typical local food. Now, my C-Trek is parked in the hotel garage, all set up and waiting for its next driver, some of my stuff is on the way to Beijing and we are ready for being picked up to Irkeshtam Pass tomorrow morning, leaving China and heading into Kyrgyzstan for maybe 24 hours.
Postings may become a bit more irregular now as we are leaving Chinas almost 100% coverage with fast mobile internet - means we now have to stick with hotel wifi connections...
Make or break - that's what we tried to figure out today. So we're sure now that it is no 'make', we have to change plans. Despite all negotiations and checking out further options we will not be able to get my C-Trek out of the country legally. At the same time, my visa runs out on Friday and we don't want to give away what we already have organized for Central Asia.
This means we will have to leave the car in Kashgar and try to make the way to Ashgabat with other means of transportation which should be feasible after consulting our travel agent and our Lonely Planet Guide. We'll now get everything lined up tomorrow and leave China on Friday to Kyrgyzstan. in the late afternoon we did a nice round to the Id Kah Mosque and walked through the bazar-like surrounding...
You may ask what happens with the car now: I'll have to figure out. There is little hope to really export the car, the best we can expect to get it out of the country for maybe six months - but only with a huge deposit. This may mean I have to drive the car elsewhere, maybe to Beijing together with somebody's help. The options then also include selling the car even though it has done great service to me in the past fourty days and before.