Mosques, medrassas and minarets (15th-20th July)

Khiva-Following our endless train journey through the furnace that is the Uzbek desert we arrived in the city of Urgench. Here we negotiated a reasonably priced taxi over to the ancient city of Khiva. Slight altercation on arrival upon which the driver decided to triple the agreed price and was determined to hang on to our luggage until we coughed up. He underestimated Victoria's strengh and after the red mist descended sheprized our bags from his clutch and away we went to find our hostel.

The city is remarkable upon first sight- surrounded by a mud packed wall that has been standing strong since the 12th century. Incredible tile work, intricate wood carvings and pleasingly clean toilets.

But a downside to this ancient city, and one which is unfortunately shared by most of Uzbekistan's prized heritage sites, is that the buildings, whilst beatiful, have been stripped off virtually all their original functions. Hence mosques and madrassas built in the 14th century have become markets selling tourist souvenirs, or rather empty museams. in short, they seem to be viewed (and indeed are) the cash cow for tourist dollars. of course the suppression of religion under the Soviets (and perhaps to some extent the secular current authorities) has helped in this. undoubtably this impacts on the experience of visiting these sites. so having now done the big three (khiva, bukhara and samarkhand), ben and i are rather old buildinged out... The other interesting issue when visiting these sites is how much liberty has been taken with the rather substantial restoration efforts. these buildings have been restored to their former glory - back centuries ago, but of course this negates the events and the passage of time in between when they disintegrated and fell into disrepair.

Though theres much more to blog about, including our shabbat dinner in Bukhara, we are being munched on by mossies and havent eaten for too long, so we'll save it for another day.

Off to Shakrisabs tomorrow for some mountain air, then on to tajikistan at the end of the week.