As we had left our bikes in Tashkent for the preparation of the shipment back to Bangkok we took the train to travel between the historic cities. The train system of Uzbekistan is really great and quite efficient. I would not say that booking tickets was easy as most people working at the ticket offices do not speak any languages we do, and train timetables are certainly not as reliable as in Switzerland, but we had a fun experience traveling first class.
First we took the night train from Khiva to Bukhara. The two of us had a full cabin to ourselves with beds that were even long enough for Boris to stretch out his legs. The best thing was the radio in our cabin. It had only one channel and you could listen to a best of collection of eighties songs mixed with modern Russian techno pop. Fantastic. And it played all night full power on the corridors too.
Getting onto the train from Bukhara to Samarkand was quite difficult. Bukhara basically has two tracks running through the train station. Our train happened to stand behind another train that had arrived a bit earlier. So in order to get on our train we had to get right through the other train, which had the doors open on both sides. Easy, in theory. But Uzbek people are probably the most pushy species on Earth and they cannot, under any circumstances give way. Hence, if you have people wanting to get off a train and at the same time others trying to get on that particular train things become a little bit difficult. Especially if at the same time there are also bred and drink vendors hanging out at the train entrances as long as the train is standing in order to sell their goods. In short: total chaos. But once your rolling and the air-conditioning starts to work every thing is fine.
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