Day 41 - It's Dusty!!!

The room gradually awoke as more and more alarms went off. I treated myself to 5mins of lying there awake before getting up. To my surprise, Emma was not yet up so I settled down for breakfast. It was much the same as last night but without the meat. (A good thing by the way!). I enjoyed the company of my table companions despite our communication difficulties for over 45mins in the end before Emma emerged! They were joking about her sleeping in by the end, but I as I tipped back my 9th bowl of tea, I wasn't about to complain.

We walked down the pretty intense cliff to the underground mosque - over a mile and nearly 200m vertical on uneven steps. We expected to have a look inside and be on our way, but it was locked and people were slowing gathering outside. Some of the older ladies arrived breathing hard but nonetheless impressively there, and then the religious leader rocked up and before we knew it we were taking part in a prayer in one of the small rooms. It was an interesting experience even though we weren't clear on whether we should join in the motions too.

After narrowly avoiding a 3rd breakfast, exchanging numbers with someone who invited us to stay on our way through Uzbekistan and making our goodbyes to everyone who we'd got to know quite well by this point, we were on our way. Well, we were on our way for 5 mins before we stopped to do our usual morning phaff of putting on lycra, suncream, chamois cream... It was an off road haul back to the main road north and towards our next country (we have to go north to cross the border - we know where New Zealand is don't worry!). And what a route. Pancake flat, the track and nothing else all day. It alternated between bone shaking bumps, sand and dust. So much dust! Fine dust that behaved like water under the tires, and when you hit a deep section at speed, an incredible explosion that covered all front-facing surfaces on both person and bike. The sand and dust send the bike sideways and often bring you to a halt, changing tracks involves hauling the heavy bikes across ruts and the shaking is both slow and exhausting. We battled on though and made reasonable distance considering our slow start.

We hope to reach the road not too late tomorrow given we're running low on food, which is akin to running out of fuel in your car...in the middle of absolutely nowhere with no-one around...

We were very low on water too, but that was solved when we passed a one room house and a chap filled us up from his underground tank. Funnily enough he confirmed suspicions that we'd seen another set of cycling tracks as he'd very recently given water to another cyclist! Otherwise we saw one other person all day.

Of course we once again had limitless flat camping spots to choose from, although we're feeling pretty grubby after five dusty days on the bike so hopefully some kind of reset tomorrow night 😬

Food spend today: 0 euros!!!