A few days in Khiva. Everything seems quieter here than in Bukhara. No cars in the main streets. But tourism is also much more systematically organised : you need a card to enter the enclosure and access most of the monuments, and you need an ‘extra-ticket’ to visit the Great Minaret or the ramparts... Music groups come to play or wave their puppets before mealtimes...

From the hotel, we’ll take a tour of the desert fortresses. These are ancient abandoned fortresses that are being eroded away by erosion. Here too, you have to pay an entrance fee to visit each fortress. We had asked to visit three fortresses, which is quite enough. The journey from the hotel was a bit long and our driver was not at all talkative... For lunch we stopped at a lake with only one restaurant. A waiter shows us a menu... with no prices. We ask him and he gives us the most expensive dishes. We say no, he comes back to tell us that there are cheaper dishes, we take them... but the photos don’t match the dishes ^^. In short, it smells like a tourist scam ! There are quite a few local tourists, and we suppose they weren’t given the same price as us 🙂

Tomorrow train to Bukhara before cycling back to Muborok.

The approximate route, by car, between Khiva and the three fortresses