Bukara

We spent 2 days exploring the small confined but spectacular city of Khiva, and from there had a long drive across yet more desert to reach Bukhara. Bukhara was bigger and the buildings were grander than Khiva. It had been the capital of almost all of Central Asia in the 14th and 15th centuries, and although almost all the buildings had been restored, it certainally seemed very impressive. Here is a photo of the main Medrassa (muslim school) in Bukhara. Unfortunately you just cant get a feel for size from the picture, it's absolutely huge! It is the only Medrassa in Bukhara that is still functioning but in the city's prime, there were over 350 medrassas.

Pete, Renee (2 crew) and Jude and I had a hilarious night out in Bukhara as we felt it had been a while since we'd been "out on the town". We ventured to Bukhara's one and only nightclub in a hotel out of town a bit. It was so slezzy and full of rich russian men with their young girlfriends. I've actually been fairly ill with food poisoning of some kind so I wasnt drinking, but it was very funny to watch the others get rapidily wasted on $4 vodka (for a bottle) and start dancing to Asian music. When the club shut at 2am, we got the name of the place to head onto next, which was way out of town. One hair-raising, music blaring taxi ride later, we pitched up in the middle of a Soviet housing estate and were escorted behind the scenes to an even more atmospheric club and another bottle of vodka. We succeeded in persuading the DJ to play western music from his computer. We got seriously lost on the way back to the hotel, driving through rubble and back yards until we gave up and walked back to our hotel, eventually rocking in at 4:30am!