A few photos from the desert

We’re not one for writing blogs, much prefer to make films, anyway here’s a few photos and blurb from the desert in the Stans, Kazakhstan and here in Uzbekistan, it’s an ugly harsh place to say the least, you’ll find all of our photos on the gallery section of this website, but non of them are edited yet, there’s no doubt loads of duplicates and other stuff that needs deleting, we just upload them to the site the minute we get any internet, which isn’t often.

So the photos below give you an idea of what it’s like here, it gets that hot and dry at times not even the camels can survive, as for the roads, well apart from the nice smooth one pictured below, the rest are just made from either sand or gravel with holes that deep they’d swallow a car hole!

Camping places are easy to find, but you can’t hide, saying that, there’s no one to hide from, most of the time there’s absolutely nothing around for miles and miles, no food, no water, only dust and camels.. and the only way to get any shade is to create your own.

A few days ago we were very lucky to meet a couple from Switzerland, that evening they fed and watered us, then continued on their journey.

Are we enjoying the Stans, the famous Silk Road, honest answer, NO, it’s hot, ugly and extremely boring cycling through a land of nothing for 12 hours each day, as for the historical Silk Road, apart from the typical tourist towns where the famous mosques are, that’s about it, in fact that’s all there is, the Silk Road is a piece of History, and that’s where it belongs, it’s nothing like the photos in the tourist books, showing people riding endless miles across the desert on camels carrying goods, in reality it’s full of dirty polluting trucks and cars smashing their way along the roads, just about avoiding other oncoming vehicles as they dodge the pot holes and us cyclists, the only reason we are cycling through this grim place is because for us Brit’s it’s the only way through to China. The only good thing out here are the friendly local people and the camels, but I’d choose camels to befriend any day!