The last stop & WC for the next 250km & 6 hours
After 100 km of normal street we reached the Karakum desert and the Amu-Darya river which is to a big part the border to Turkmenistan.
From there we drove several hours through the desert on roads that you can hardly call that way. For most of the distance it was a potholed strip of asphalt if we were luckily. We could see all along that the construction of a concrete highway was in progress, but it was not yet open for traffic.
Left our road, right the new road under construction
A lot of trucks were bringing material for the construction - mainly Chinese and Russian trucks. But we also saw some longhaul trucks crossing the desert which was kind of strange given the road conditions. A truck from Willi Betz international transport got stuck in a sand hill and there were also some MAN trucks on the road.
But we saw also some old fashioned commercial vehicles:
At 3 o'clock we had survived the hardest part of the road and had lunch at a road side stop. For me it was the best food of the whole trip: eating shashlik and delicious bread while sitting on a tapshen (kind of big wooden sofa with a small table) in the courtyard.
It seemed that a lot of other desert travellers also liked the place if we could make assumptions from the bottle hill behind one of the buildings.
The toilets on the way were not so nice - basically squat toilets but very dirty. So the best was still to go behind a sand dune in the desert.
After 11 hours of on the road, we arrived in the old town of Bukhara - exhausted but with another amazing desert experience.
Back to civilization
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