In the 40 deg heat we processed immigration and customs at the quietest border post in the world today – we were the only people there.

So quiet that after an hour we were wondering whether they had ever stamped a passport before… Let alone seen one…

Anyway… mid process one of the guards noticed this, it’s hard to make out, but is a pretty big cut in the rear tyre, right through the steel belting that holds it together.

Not ideal.

Moving along from that rather large problem, after 3 hours at the border, we stopped in a town called Kokand, which we of course have dubbed Cockland. 

Lucky for us our ATM cards don’t work in Cockland, that’s lucky because there is a foreign currency crisis in Uzbekistan, meaning the bank will give you 3000som for 1 usd, whereas on the black market you get 6000!

So ‘officially’ everything should be costing us 2x more, but because we have all this usd on us, we’re saving lots of money.

Good right?

No bad! Because we weren’t aware of this, so we only have enough usd for Iran, which is in a similar but slightly less extreme situation…. It’s apparently virtually impossible to draw money out of ATMS here, Turkmen and Iran so we have the next 6 weeks to budget for in the small amount of US we have!

Keeping up?

Back to the tyre woes.  That tyre was supposed to get us to Turkey, (because there are no bike shops between here and turkey).  As it stands I’m not sure it will last the day out tomorrow, let alone another month.

So now what?

Now, it’s time to sleep.

xoxo