When we were denied boarding of our flight to Uzbekistan, we missed the Tashkent part of our tour. Now we are to complete that part with a GAP guide of our own, at the end of our time here.

We flew back to Tashkent in close to 40 degree heat, checked into our hotel and 30 minutes later we were meeting our lovely vivacious guide, Maria and heading off by taxi. The sights and monuments in Tashkent are quite spread out so our tour included taxis and the underground.

It was a little bit harder to get excited about Tashkent sights when we have had a sensory overload, of Silk Road extravagently decorated monuments and buildings in three cities already. We did however thoroughly enjoy the tour as Maria was an excellent guide, with a fun sense of humour and very interested in our travel. We learnt from Maria that most people in Tashkent speak Russian, as she does, and quite often when speaking the Uzbek language, her accent cannot be understood. Uzbekistan was hidden behind the iron curtain and under the iron rule of USSR for so long, that Russian is still now, the commonest language.  

We enjoyed a last day in Tashkent before our flight, sitting around the pool and working on our blog. At midnight we caught a cab to the airport only to be stopped with the other traffic by policemen for some time. Our driver indicated that something was happening at the airport and we saw maybe 20 police cars race in that direction. After awhile we were cleared to go, but the taxi had to drop us some distance from the airport due to it being cordoned off. We never did find out what it was about.

Our flight is taking us first back to (our not so favourite airport) Riga in Latvia for a transit wait of five hours before, we board a flight to Warsaw in Poland and onto another adventure.