I like to split up trips, especially longer ones, into different “legs”.

A few days in Almaty, Kazakhstan was leg one.

Then a week and a half exploring Kyrgyzstan and the World Nomad Games was next.

The third leg was our just finished Turkmenistan tour.

And, now, it was onto our fourth leg of the trip.

This leg will take us through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan over the next 10 days.

Despite going from city to city every couple of days, this will actually be the relaxing, wind down part of the trip.

As you saw the last couple of days in Bukhara were exactly that.

Waking up late, doing what we want, eating, exploring, and relaxing at the hostel.

I envision that’s how this leg will go with travel from city to city every couple of days thrown in.

Speaking of traveling from city to city…

Afrosiyob train to Samarkand

It was time for us to go explore another city here in Uzbekistan.

After a late breakfast and some leisurely time hanging around in the hostel’s courtyard, we headed to the train station in the early afternoon.

Our next city, Samarkand

It’s nice that after that jammed packed couple of legs of this trip that including the World Nomad Games and a Turkmenistan tour, that this leg is pretty relaxing.

There is a high speed train called the Afrosiyob that reaches speeds of 250km/h that travels between the two cities.

The tickets for it were sold out when I was booking everything a couple of months ago but people of the internet told me to come back to the website a week before because tickets are re-released then.

Sure enough, last week, I was checking the train’s website and there were now 12 tickets available.

Apparently the tickets are all gobbled up by tour groups and then when they have their actual numbers for their tours they cancel their unneeded tickets.

This was all a long way of saying that Nathan and I boarded a train at just after 3pm today on our way 275km east to Samarkand.

Currency Exchange

At just before 5pm we had arrived in our new home for the next couple of days.

Our first plan was to take a taxi to a nearby Moneygram exchange place so we could exchange some USD and our remaining currency from Kyrgyzstan that we’ve been holding onto for over a week now.

As it turns out, we didn’t need to make that trip because right there smack dab in the middle of the train station was a currency exchange booth.

Sadly they don’t exchange Kyrgyz soms but I was able to trade some of my US dollars for some cold, hard, Uzbek money.

By the way, upon further research, it may be impossible to exchange our Kyrgyz money outside of Kyrgyzstan or neighboring Kazakhstan.

Even in Canada, I don’t think they’ll take it.

Best bet for us now is to find someone who is on their way to Kyrgyzstan and sell our money to them.

Otherwise, we’ve got some nice expensive souvenirs I guess.

Dinner time

We checked into our hostel at just after 5pm and were straight back out to find some dinner at 6pm.

There are a handful of restaurants on the road nearby so we picked the one that had a big picture menu outside and a bunch of people inside.

For dinner I went for a couple chicken kebabs and a side of potatoes.

Oh, and a pitcher of watermelon juice.

Yeah, if there’s watermelon juice on the menu, I’m almost definately ordering it.

Not only does it taste amazing but it also brings back great memories of a very memorable duck dinner in Beijing where I shared a couple of $20 jugs of watermelon juice with Danielle.

9pm light show

When we checked in our host mentioned that there was a nightly light show in the nearby Registan Square so, naturally, we added that to our plans.

After dinner we headed to the square to take in the light show.

I was surprised that there were hundreds of people there sitting on the steps waiting for the show to begin.

Wow, must be an amazing show!

At 9pm Uzbek music started blaring from the speakers and different color lights began being projected onto the buildings surrounding the square.

It was…

Unspetacular.

The show lasted only 15 minutes and it just kind of ended on a whimper.

There was no stunning visual displays or choreography with the music.

It was just different colored lights shown onto buildings.

I mean, sure, it was something to do at 9pm on a Monday night but it also was kind of meh.

At least we got to hang out with hundreds of our fellow tourists for 15 minutes.

And that was it.

That was the day.

Like I said, this is going to be a very relaxing leg of the trip.

Tomorrow will be our one and only full day here in Samarkand so we’ll be out exploring the city before heading over the border to Tajikistan the following afternoon.

Don’t fret though because you know there will always be adventures along the way…