I am now in Samarkand and have an internet connection of a sort (no way to upload photos, sadly). We have travelled up from Ashgabat, across the Kara Kum desert, which took two days along a deteriorating road. On the way we stopped at Darvaza and saw a monstrous hole in the earth which had flaming gas pouring out of it. It was the result of a Soviet prospecting accident in the 1950s. It is still burning. On the way we passed various ruined cities and finished up near Knya Urgench on the Uzbek border. We then crossed into Uzbekistan after the friendliest border crossing yet (it turns out the border guards had been to Uni in England and were just coming to the end of their stint of national service). After crossing the border we bimbled into Khiva and spent a few days there. This was the first of the "Great Game" cities that we are visiting on this trip. It is an old walled city that has been pretty much rebuilt and now looks much as it did before it was destroyed by the Bolsheiviks in the 1920s. It's a little oasis town surrouned by the desert. However, after leaving Khiva we entered the flood plain of the Oxus, which is a vast river, and the land turned green, with farms everywhere. After the Oxus we crossed the Kyzyl Kum desert to Bukhara (the second great game city) and were there on one of the ten days a year in which it gets rain. Lucky us. Bukhara is less sterile than Khiva and feels quite different (people speak Tadjik on the streets for example). We saw the "Bug Pit" in which Connellu and Stoddard, two British spies, were held. It is a 7m deep pit with about 0.5m of water in the bottom. It is sealed shut and has no light entering it. They were in it for four years before they were beheaded in the registan square. From Bukhara we went north, out into the Kyzyl Kum desert again (although now the desert was green and red - coloured by grass and poppies). We spent a night in a yurt followed by one under canvas before arriving in Samarkand early this morning. We're in Samarkand for two nights and then in Tashkent for three before turning south and entering Kyrgyzstan (which, I see, has made it onto the BBC World news headlines because of demonstrations in the capital). I hope to have some new photos uploaded soon.