Rosie made it across the finish line

… and so did Horst’s black stallion: We made it to Tashkent! Yesterday evening (12. June) we rolled into Tashkent, after a hot day of riding from the Fergana Valley over the Kamchik pass into the well-watered plain that surrounds Uzbekistan’s capital. Especially on the last stretch of our ride it was very hot and along our route people jumped into the waters of irrigation channels or reservoir lakes. Quite tempting for us to join them, but somehow we could resist, we just had an urge to reach our final destination without any road incident at the last moment.

That said Uzbeks drive like complete lunatics! With people piling up in the back of their cars, they speed along the highways where overtaking is the absolute must-do if you want to be cool. The roads of course also make it possible as they are usually wide and in good conditions with separated lanes. Our bikes were truly exotic here and so the car drivers slowed down while overtaking us and in order to have a good close-up look they sometimes came so closed that we were worried about collision. But the car passengers always loved it, giving us big smiles, the thumbs-up and waving frantically out of the windows. Many even played the game of overtake and be overtaken again by us to get the most fun out of it.

However the greatest moments of fear in street traffic ever on this trip we all had last night sitting in a taxi coming back from dinner. That guy nearly drove into to car in front of him at the red light. We have no clue why he chose to break so late because it was obviously a red light. With a mm to spare we escaped without incident and the driver took it all in as a normal event.

Anyways, back to Rosie and the other two bikes. They all made it to Tashkent without any major incident. Rosie had this ticking sound of the motor all along the way and leaked a little oil. It worried us at first, but after we made it over the Chinese border we figured it might as well be fine for the entire trip. Horst's bike had a few electric problems like the handle-bar warmers not working (a luxury that Simon and Boris enjoyed very much up in Tibet), the front lights passing out in Shangri-La, or the trip computer which met his mark in Tibet. Simon's Jolly Jumper developed a severe drinking habit and consumed a lot of oil for a while and he is the most intolerance towards Central Asian dirty fuel. These minor issues gave the boys ample of opportunities to fiddle a bit around the bikes, which they love of course. They also gave us the change to meet nice people: every time we needed the help of a mechanics we found very competent people who were happy to help us out, let us use their tools and give us addresses of their biking friends in other cities along our way.

All in all our bikes now did about 12,300 km on this journey so far – more detailed stats to come when we are back to Vientiane. The road causality count is 3. Horst rode over a chicken back in Laos and caught a bird. Reacting like a stag-hound, after he hit the chicken we could witness Horst trying to get several more chooks under his tires. These bloodthirsty attacks gave him the nickname "the chook killer" thereafter. Boris also hit one very stupid bird and Simon got away with a handful of almost-collisions with dogs and an occasional sheep. We are happy that it stayed at the stage of almost-collisions and that nothing happened as we are not sure who would have won theses battles.

Horst and Boris are now organizing the shipment of their bikes back to Bangkok, Simon is preparing for the ride on to Uri, Switzerland and I am trying to update this blog which has been neglected over the past two weeks. As our bikes have to be left with DHL several days before shipment we are planning to visit some of the famous Uzbek cities by plane and train in the coming days.