The 'Stans - Bukhara (3 August 2019)

I wake up saturated. My new air con didn't help much. As soon as I lie in the bed, I begin sweating. But up I get to explore Bukhara.

Five minutes from my hostel is the Chor Minor, so I make this the first stop of the day. The Chor Minor is a tiny mosque, with sky blue tiled minarets.

As I walk around Bukhara it feels noticeably less busy that Khiva.This may be because Khiva is far more compact and all the tourists (still only 10s) are squeezed into this area. In Bukhara it feels as though the entire town is on holiday.

Of all things, I find a German bakery (Cafe Wishbone), which served a reasonable coffee. I miss nice coffee. It's been impossible to find so far. The coffee tastes like an instant coffee, but it'll have to do. Afterwards I head to the market to do some souvenir shopping. I find Bukhara bird scissors, hand forged in the many steel workshops in the market.

There is more walking and a visit to Bukhara State Architectural Art Museum. Not the best museum of the trip. At least I get a better view of the city walls.

Its get to evening time and I start chatting to a Belgian and a German guy. The German and I go for dinner and discuss every European's topic of the moment - Brexit. We walk back to the hostel taking in the now lit up Bukhara in the dusk light.

Now, let's cast our minds back to lunch yesterday. My waiter, Akhmedov, offered to take me to shisha. The time had come. We met in the Lyabi Hauz square and he asked whether i was hungry. I declined and we jumped into a cab to the shisha bar. The cab went a far way out of town, in the back head of my head I was planning how I would escape if I was going to get jumped.

We arrived at the Golden Dragon Bukhara. So far, all legit. The best was to describe it would be as half club, half sealed off shisha room. The tunes were pumping in the 'club', which consisted of solely Uzbek men sitting on sofas around the edge of the room and two Uzbek women dancing on the dance-floor. A 95:5 ratio. We went straight to the shisha area, a closed off air-conditioned room where it was just me and Akhmedov. He ordered me a beer and a fruit juice for himself and we went through an hour or two of shisha, whilst he live-streams the events to his IG following.

After a while we headed back into town. He 'ran out of money', so I paid the dollar for the cab. He suggested keeping the night going, but I called it a day.