We skipped breakfast again and left the other teams in an attempt to get through the border today. For the first hundred miles the road caried on as before. Then suddenly it stopped, and was replaced by one giant pothole with the sporadic outbursts of road surface. The roads were in a ridiculous condition and quite often it was easier to drive off-road. We made slow progress along the road for miles bouncing and scraping our way forward. The sump guard was earning its keep and taking a battering from the inverse potholes. The roads slowly improved as we approached the last city in Turkmenistan before the border.

 

We stopped for lunch in the city at a cafe which turned out to be a family home who served food. They didn't speak a word of English so we were led into the kitchen and shown a pot of something boiling on the stove - I was sure it was probably edible, so we ordered two bowls and took a seat. The boiling mixture ended up being a soup with a lump of lamb, served with a meat filled pastry. I was right it was edible and it was actually quite nice. We said good bye to the family and took a selection of random roads in an attempt to get to the border.

 

The Turkmenistan side of the border was a mess of paperwork, with desks of people wanting to see documents. Some wrote down details, while others just stamped blindly. At least it was relatively quick process and only took an hour. After the stamps came the usual vehicle search, with a different pair of varied individuals. This time the happy one had a metal stick to point at things, while the grumpy one reorganised the packing of the previous border guard.  The happy guard let me climb down into the inspection well to look at the damage the road here had done, apart from a few scratches it was fine.  The Uzbekistan border had somehow managed to streamline the process to two desks, but of course the fewer the desks the longer the wait - not because there were any other people there, but because there was more arsing around.  After filling in multiple copies of the same piece of paperwork everyone was told to go outside, everyone but me. I was told to go to a different desk, then the desk I came from, then back to the second desks, and then back to the original. I don't know if they were playing a weird came of catch with a tourist, or whether they had reached their limit of 4 forms for the day. While I stood by the desk inside, the car was searched outside. I wasn't there so feel free to assume Chris was given his complimentary cavity search outside today. Apparently the border guard had followed the lead of the Turkmen guards, and had just played with everything in the car rather than searching it. Apparently the younger guard had flicked through the music on our mp3 player and stopped at Shakira's Hips Don't Lie, smiled, and continued the search for narcotics.

 

After the guards had searched the two cars outside, the older of the two returned and took me to see his car. I resisted the urge to tell him to open the boot so I could route around. I laughed when he pointed at a dial that looked similar to one in our car and announced it was a Uzbeki Peugeot - not because it was particularly funny, but because he had a gun. With the tour of cars complete, they finally stamped my paperwork and begun painstakingly taking down all the details of both cars. When language issues were encountered he mimed what he wanted and accepted miming or pointing as an acceptable answer.

 

With a couple of pages of new documents we were allowed to enter Uzbekistan, and headed to the nearest city to find a hotel with WiFi - camping is apparently illegal in Uzbekistan, and WiFi has been blocked/heavily restricted for the last two countries. Nukus doesn't have all that much going for it, it just seems to be an average soviet era city, but at least it has a thriving black market where we traded some currency. A few dollars is equivalent to a whole stack of Uzbek notes - you need to hire an industrial skip if you're planning to pay for dinner at a fancy restaurant. Luckily we only had "one kilogram of one chickens" at a shady bar instead.