I think in retrospect I’d done our hotel a disservice. Having
decided that the place was “Guest House Paradiso” last night wasn’t
helped by a dreadfully hot night and having to unplug an incredibly noisy
fridge at three o’clock in the morning.
I wasn’t in the best of moods when I came down for brekkie.
The waiter asked if I would like coffee. Yes please - I would. Would I like
americano, espresso, Montevideo,
arseacheandchipso… I wanted a cup of coffee. A cup. With coffee in it. Was that
so much to ask? Clearly it was, so I contented myself with some fruit juice and
sulked.
My opinion of the hotel wasn’t helped when we got on the
coach and were asked who was it who’d paid the previous night’s drinks bill on
their Visa card; apparently it might have been anyone.
Again all twenty-seven of us piled onto the coach and after
a few minutes we were at the observatory of Ulugh Beg. We did all the touristy
things, then once we had a few minutes to ourselves I slipped off to find a geocache. Having solved the puzzle
weeks ago and having being presented with a picture of the location I saw it
was behind a wall. I hopped on to the wall and tried to look inconspicuous as I
searched. A nearby market trader came over, smiled, reached over the wall and
handed me the geocache.
I bought a T-shirt from him; I felt I owed him that much.
From here we went on to the tomb of St Daniel. According to Wikipedia
the tomb is in Iran, but the Uzbeks
would disagree. Apart from some religious chap howling, the place was
rather interesting; it was a shame that we were supposed to believe that the Pope
of the Greek Orthodox Church had resurrected a nearby tree, but there it is.
We piled back on to the coach and made our way to another museum
of dull bits of broken pots where we had a video show. And once I’d slept
through that we had a few minutes free time to get over-excited bout the dull
bits of broken pots. AS no one was watching I nipped over the road for geocachical reasons.
Pausing only briefly to visit a winery (this is a Muslim
country, you know!) we had a very good bit of dinner. Well… to be honest
the dinner was just the same as pretty much every meal we’ve had here, but the
location was rather good. A very posh ornate restaurant. Just how I always
envisioned Samarkand as being.
And with dinner scoffed we went on to Amir Timur’s mausoleum,
The Uzbeks get very over-excited about mausoleums; far too over-excited if you ask
me.
With mausoleum visited we had some free time. We went for a
little walk again guided by local geocaches. It was good to walk round seeing
the locals. One of them stopped me and pointed at my water bottle and jabbered.
I replied that I didn’t understand him. On hearing I was English he asked if I
had whisky in my water bottle, and could he please have some.
Another success for my idiot magnet.
Our dinner was in a local restaurant. Apparently a rather
posh local restaurant, but apart from the birthday cake served up for one of
our number whose birthday it was, the food really wasn’t anything special.
We came back to the hotel. With twenty-three of our number
off to bed, four of us had a little drinkie ion the bar. No gin and tonic, but
a brandy and lemonade was every bit as good. Or would have been had there been
any lemonade.
Sprite is an acceptable substitute… isn’t it?
I took a few
photos of the day as I do.
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