My plans have a habit of changing, a new opportunity might present itself, or just a convenience where I simply think, yeah why not. When I realised that trains and plains were booked out early, had gone on a war path to book anything that made some sense, a piece in a jigsaw I hadn’t yet studied the overall image of.

So with than in mind, I had booked an 8:30am flight from Urgench (the main city 1hr from Khiva) to Bukhara, and a fast train from Bukhara to Navoi at 3:30pm. From there it was an hour shared taxi to Nurata. However, I changed my mind the night before. Who wants to wait 5 hours at a train station? Scraping the train, I decided on a shared taxi to Navoi and another shared taxi onward to Nurata.

The flight to Bukhara only took one hour and flew comfortably over the terrible road below, so absolutely worth the airfare. After finding a taxi the plan was to head to the Karavan Bazar where the shared taxis were milling about, but then the driver offered to take to me Navoi himself. For the sake of convenience I agreed. He was actually pretty funny, speaking only a small amount of English, rocking gold teeth (which I found later he chewed tobacco, so that might explain the need for dental cosmetics), and kept point out kebab shops along the way to indicate he too was a fan of skewered meats.

As we approached Navoi, he offered to commit to the end journey and take me all the through to Nutara. The price overall wasn’t outrageous, and it was just far easier to stay with this driver. After we arrived at the Ruslan Guesthouse in Nurata, it felt we were brothers in arms departing ways after a vicious war campaign, and he went in for the hug, which I of course obliged.

With this being the final days of my Uzbekistan trip, I like to wind things down and do very little. I had found the guesthouse by searching for tours in Nurata, which lead me to their website and a link to their Booking.com page. It’s a fantastic guesthouse, with guests staying in rooms off one end of the garden court yard, and Ruslan and his family in the home at the other end.

The family was so very nice. I think it was his wife that was learning to make espresso coffee, and was glowing when I had to tell her twice how good it was (and it was, I wasn’t lying). They also offered to make lunch and dinner, at a slightly overpriced $6USD, but they didn’t hold back on bringing out salads, breads, yogurt, dumplings, stew, and sweets to finish off.

I booked the day tour out to the Kyzylkum Desert and Aydarkul Lake. This was a good 2 hours out of Nurata, with the first stop being the lake. At first it looked quite small, which didn’t match the map of it I had looked prior. Was this it? We jumped back in the car and headed over the hill and there it was, an ocean of a lake popped out blanketing the terrain in turquoise water, stretching all the way back to the pale mountains on the distant horizon.

This lake is huge, it being the largest lake in Central Asia. I couldn’t help but envision a future where the outskirts are jammed with towering resorts, commercial boat rides, and wagon loads of tourists coming here to bask in the truly glorious cool breeze from the waters. For now at least, the closest thing to a tourist stop was covered patio, with a locked hut with who knows what inside (or who inside!), and some half broken concrete steps down to a lakeside beach.

With that in mind, I enjoyed the tranquil calm and crisp breeze in the desert heat, without needing to think of tourists invading my space.

Next up we stopped at a Kazakh village, a few hundred kilometres from the Kazakhstan border. Situated in the sand dunes, the only parts of the ground solid enough to walk on were where cars tracks compacted down the sand, it was a basic settlement. The driver pointed out the hospital, barely the size of a shipping container, and in the centre of town a large mobile cell tower. I was told they were nomadic, but the houses and that mobile tower sure did look permanent.

As we drove back to Nurata, when there was someone on the side of the road walking by, such as one of the many sheperds out here, the driver would slow down and nod an acknowledgement to them, and they in return. I found this throughout Nurata too, I’d be walking down the street and a local would either nod a hello, or a slight bow with a clasp hand over the heart. There’s something very honest and pure about this and I felt like a family member while here.

The final journey of Uzbekistan would be to return to Samarkand for a flight back to Tashkent, then homeward bound.