Alexander’s river
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When I woke up, I was greeted by heavy rain. So I went back to sleep. Two hours later, the rain had gone, only the clouds were still there:
It was very windy.
I crossed the river Syr Darya at this bridge:
Wasn’t allowed to take any pictures of the river itself and had my stuff checked at a checkpoint on the bridge, but still. Seeing a place that Alexander the Great had seen felt somehow magical:
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Once I had crossed the river, this dude handed me a fish:
It was a nice fish:
I kept walking, while the clouds kept rolling across the sky:
Once I stopped at a little shop to get some water:
The owner gave me a pen and showed me this pillar:
All kinds of travelers had signed, so I drew a little bearded face and put a date next to it:
Hello, other travelers!
I stuck to the sidewalk for most of the day (as long as there was a sidewalk):
One time I stopped at a restaurant and asked them for the menu:
They said all they had was shashlyk. By this point, I had grown tired of shashlyk and the culinary misery it represented. But what was I to do?
So I ordered some shashlyk, some onions and some bread, and I somehow got all of it in a plastic bag because the people at the restaurant had figured that I wanted it to-go:
I hated it, but I ate it.
Then I got back on the road:
And then, right when the sun was about to set behind an explosion of clouds on the horizon, I started feeling sick:
But I made it to the village of Baht, found a dude standing in his driveway and asked him if I could park the Caboose there overnight. Then I hopped in a car and went back to the hotel where I had stayed the night before.
I didn’t like doing this, but I did it anyway because I wanted to make sure that my hotel registrations were in perfect oder so my next visa application would not run into any difficulties.
Once I got to the hotel (remember, it was next to the fish market in Chinaz), the ladies who were selling fish on the roadside recognized me from the night before:
Don’t let their serious looks fool you – they were having a good laugh.
“Where are you coming from now, and what happened to your handcart?” they asked, and when they heard my story, they gave me a fish:
Lovely people everywhere.
And since I wasn’t feeling sick anymore, I went to a small restaurant next to the fish market. It had a nice, warm oven:
I ordered some fish:
And it was one of the most tasty things I had ever tried.
In my life.