Today was mostly an uneventful day of traveling to the town of Nukkus (or Nokis) from which we will (tomorrow) take a 2 day 1 night tour to the rapidly vanishing Aral Sea. We left Khiva before 9:00 am hoping to avoid some of the traffic on the road back to Urgench with its low trolley-bus wires; a strategy that was somewhat successful. There after our route took us through some more flat cotton farming areas and then into the desert for the bulk of the trip to Nukkus.
In Nukkus we had a booking at the ARZ Hotel (АРЗ in Russian) but like other cities no real idea of how or whether we could get our truck to the hotel or whether we could park there. The agent that booked our Aral Sea Tour had given us the name of the driver for the excursion and the impression that he (the driver) could help us find a parking place. So on the outskirts of Nukkus I called his cell phone - unfortunately he spoke no English and I no Russia (or Uzbek) so we had (like other cities) to try to navigate to the hotel by ourselves.
The pattern is now pretty familiar. Use the GPS to drive towards the hotel until something blocks us (low trees, low wires, "no truck" signs), then walk the remainder of the route to the hotel. Make contact with the hotel staff (if we are lucky one of them will speak some English), evaluate parking options, and find a suitable route for our truck to parking. In this case all of that was easy. One of the reception staff spoke Engish, the hotel had a large fenced parking lot, and there was an easy though not obvious route from our temporary parking place to the hotel. So all was good. The hotel turned out to be good also, nice rooms, air conditioning that worked, wifi that worked, but water that is only just warm enough to have a quick shower.
Once at the hotel we set about contacting the driver for tomorrows tour to find out what we needed to do to be ready. We got someone at reception to call the driver and was told he would be at the hotel in one hour to discuss arrangements. As you can guess 2 hours later he arrived and we discovered that the driver would provide tent and sleeping bags, that we had to provide our own food and there would be no cooking on the trip. That started an evening of Nina cooking so that we had our version of meals-ready-to-eat.