Todays task or challenge was to find our hotel in Samarkand and organize to park the truck there. But of course the first step was to get out of our river valley, back to Zomin and from there find the main road to Samarkand. Now we seemed to have accomplished this and were following a rural road (which had passed through a number of desert villages and their conjested markets) and were just about to rejoin a main road when we came upon a narrow low railway underpass - no more than 10 feet high. While I was sitting there contemplating a 60 km retracement and detour Nina noticed that a local farmer was pointing us down a dusty goat track. With no really good options she convinced me to follow this advice and after about 5 miles of the dustiest trail we have yet traveled we eventually found ourselves on the main Tashkent-Samarkand road.

The Tashkent-Samarkand road is generally good, though it would not be Central Asia without periodic serious bumps, and we followed it for over 100 km until we came to a major round-about on the north east side of Samarkand. Just before the round-about we passed a sign on a hill that proclaimed that Samarkand has been here for 2750 years, that is an impressive number even for a non-history buff like me. Just after the hill we passed the MAN truck factory and a yard full of new MAN trucks just waiting for some local to drop by with the necessary 10 cubic meters of local currency.


At the now well mentioned round-about we turned south along the eastern part of the city ring-route and followed it past a very extensive truck service shop. It would have been very easy to get our truck serviced here compared to the effort it required in Dushanbe (other travelers note). After some miles on the ring route we turned west onto the road from Penjikent which according to our map would take us right into the tourist part of the city, Registron Street and the locale of our hotel. The Penjikent road did as we expected but we never ever expected the street that it became. It was like being back in Tajikistan or Mongolia, broken pavement, uncovered man-holes, piles of stones and gravel, cars and buses everywhere. But never the less it got us to where we needed to be and as we exited this street into Registon Street everything changed. Smooth pavement, nice sidewalks, nice trees and views of the famous Registan. We found a parking spot and then I went looking for the hotel. With the GPS in hand it took me 10 minutes to find the hotel and then seek out a route that would allow our truck to pass through into the hotel parking lot. As it turned out there are two entrances to the hotel area but only one with enough clearance for our truck - and that turned out to be a turn off Registon Street almost right across the road from the Registan. The parking lot is not particularly secure (no locks, fences or gates) but it is big enough. We spent the afternoon looking around, and using the hotels email and electricty (and as it would turn our this was a good thing for they would be absent for the next couple of days).