The petrol station room/ furnace was so hot that we both woke up sweating with headaches and had an urgent need to open the windows and doors. It soon became apparent that all of the doors in the petrol station motel (fire risk area) were locked shut. Andy resorted to dropping out of an open window on to the fire escape just to get down to the bike.
A once over of the bike revealed NO oil on the dipstick!!! Thankfully we were able to find a local motorfactors, and had to haggle in phrase book Russian for half a bottle of oil. We revived the bike and kept the bottle as our new petrol jerry can.
The next 130 miles to the Uzbekistan boarder were fantastic roads but ridiculously hot.
There was an event that Andy wishes not to enlarge upon now, but I can say that it involved a squat toilet and a pen knife!
The boarder was relatively easy. 1 hour in total. We were made to fill out the complex forms twice each (photocopier?) and had to spill the complete contents of our luggage on to the tarmac for inspection. They rifled through everything (personal ladies items included) but thankfully did not find our first aid kit drugs and hidden undeclared dollars (in the camera bag lining)!
Our first Uzbekistan experience involved being rammed by a local in a mini van (the side box bears the scars) but we escaped unharmed and Andy's riding skills proved useful.
We rode on to Namangen and stopped to buy money on the back market. Andy dissapead with a local man leaving me with the bike and all of our possessions. Within 2 minutes I was surrounded by approximately 40-50 people mainly men and boys who all wanted to speak Russian to me about the bike!! After what seemed like forever, with me standing grinning and saying 'English' a lot and pointing at the map, Andy returned with a plastic carrier bag full of local currency.
I got the impression that we were a very unusual sight in Uzbekistan and were quite a novelty to the locals.
We were supposed to stop there for the night but decided to push on to give ourselves a rest day in Tashkent the capital city.
We had 180 miles to go and were feeling good with 100 mile range left in the fuel tank.
It turned out that the 'end of Ramadan' means that all of the few petrol stations that there are, were closed (annoyingly the auto gas stations aka lpg were all open). So we soldiered on with the reality of camping in windy sandstorm desert on stony ground becoming an ever increasing reality. Luckily I spotted a garage next to a closed petrol station. The kind man there gave us a coke bottle of petrol out of sheer kindness and wanted no payment. Thankfully we were able to give him a massive jar of Kyrgyzstan honey by way of thanks. This was all good but not enough to get us to the next town, let alone Tashkent!
We have seen only two local bikers on the trip so far, and continuing on our journey I managed to spy another one through an open garage door whilst passing by on the motorway. After a striking up a brief conversation with lots of smiles, we were given at least a half of a tank of fuel out of a giant jerry can by the astonishingly generous locals, who would not accept any form of payment.
We decided to head for the next big industrial town Angren. After a stunning mountain pass and 60 miles of military patrolled road works compete with check points, sinister looking pill boxes and automatic weapons, we arrived in a very dark and closed looking town.
Thankfully we met yet more helpful locals who went out of their way to show us the only open hotel which was 5 kilometers away. We stumbled upon a grand soviet dinosaur of a hotel, built from immaculate shiny crisp white mable slabs.
After a few negotiations aided by our helpful Uzbek friends that we met 15 minutes earlier, the hotel manager insisted that we ride the motorbike up the front entrance marble steps of the reception area.
As I watched from inside I saw Andy roll up the first step fine. The second step resulted in a massive crunching noise and a broken marble step!
For the second attempt a plank of wood was used and the bike sailed in to the reception, safe for the night.
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