The Bedouin

I learned two things from my trip to Uzbekistan last spring. Firstly, never fill your head with expectations and believes that your experience will be the same as your friend's or neighbor's. If you already have certain anticipations about the place you are travelling to, once you are there you will forget to enjoy your trip while trying to make it the way you expected it to be. You should plan it from the beginning to end but do not let yourself prior to going somewhere to expect that you are going to be tired, happy or cold. Secondly, I hate templates or general list of places tourist should go. You feel rather obliged to visit those places. Visit the famous sights but do not forget to walk around to see how local people live and what do they do, and talk to them.

I will not be able to fit my whole story here, but I will try to write briefly, about what happened. Of course, we had a list of cities and places we will visit, hotels and tickets booked, but other than that, I had no comprehension of what is ahead of me. Starting from crossing the Kazakhstan- Uzbekistan border on foot (which I only did by plane before), the trip was full of surprises. We started with the capital Tashkent, visited Samarkand, Bukhara and ended up in other side of the country in Urgench inside an old castle at midnight.

How did I end up there? Actually, I know how I ended up there we took a taxi at night from Bukhara to Urgench which was around 6-7 hours ride as I can remember, instead of waiting for our bus because some of the people from our group wanted to leave earlier (one more thing I learned is to never travel in big groups). That is why we arrived at night and turns out nobody knows where hotel is and taxi left us next to this old castle saying that hotel is inside. We went inside looking for our hotel, it was dark and scary, and there was nobody there. Fortunately, we called and found out that hotel was nearby not inside of the castle. That is how I ended up inside the old castle in the middle of the night. Following morning, I returned to that same castle and a guard was trying to make me pay in order to enter the castle, while at night, our whole group was inside and nobody was there. It was beautiful, but crowded during the daylight. I also found café inside it with wi-fi and still remember how happy I was drinking a hot cappuccino in ancient castle and updating my facebook status: “Ancient city, cold weather, hot cappuccino –in Urgench, Uzbekistan”