After the usual filling breakfast we were happy to see that the rain had stopped and the weather even looked brighter than we had hoped. We prepared our little backpack with some water and muesli bars and started hiking uphill into a different diretion from the day before.
Our goal was a rock face with 3.000 years old petroglyphs inside a national park. We hiked through small villages and saw how meticulously peple were maintaining their small vegetable gardens. All water was flowing in little aqueduct style excavated paths creating little streams frowing sometimes kilometers long from upstream in a steady decline of 5% downhill to each village. This was a centuries old tradition and those aqueducts have to be cleaned and repaired each year. Often water only flows in the stream until July, so until then the round stone walled cisterns of the villagers need to be filled up. For drinking water there are plastic pipes nowadays, but the old aqueduct paths are still in use today for watering the fields.
In one village we saw how fire briquets were made out of animal dung and dried on the side of the stables until they were dry enough to be collected and stored in a shed for the winter.
Old tractor tyres served as mangers, old car tyres as wheelbarrow wheels. Nothing goes to waste here. And again we were amazed at how little trash was lying around.
We hiked upstream for about seven kilometers, when we came to a strange looking display. A sign clearly indicated that this set of tools is for fire fighting. It consisted of five larger bottles filled wiyth Water, ready to be used. Two large sticks with thick felt ends seemingly to put out the fire, a shovel and two brooms. Not sure how much fire you can fight with that.
Inside the nation park, we climbed up a rocky slope. All rocks here consist of slate and that breaks easily. So scrambling up a hill without a path, we would have never found the petroglyphs without Inom. No sing posting all the way and we were the only ones here other than a few locals that we saw.
The petroglyphs were etched depictions of a man and some mufflon sheep in the rockface of a blackish sheet rock. It must have been larger at one time as some rock has cumbled around it. It is not protected in any way from tourists or the weather. The etchings were still clearly visible.
After a short rest we took a slightly different path downstream, and happened to stumble over a few large, football size white mushrooms. They looked like gigantic bovists and seemed to be very rare. Inom did not recall having ever seen something as big as those.
Heading back home for lunch, we passed a few locals on their horses, donkeys or on foot. Inom greeted everyone by shaking their hand and having a small chat. People here are very friendly as soon as they were adressed in their language.
In general when it was only Chris and me, people here seemed to smile or laugh a lot less. They are naturally reserved, maybe because our Uzbek is so rudimentary and they do not speak English well here.
After a good four hours hike we arrived back in our guest house for a last lunch, packed our bags and headed out to dive to a yurt camp for our next night, where we arrived at around five PM that afternoon. The drive was uneventful, the mountainous, greenish landscape gave way to a yellowish, deserty and flat landscape.
Our Yurt is very spaceous and sleeps four, so it’s a luxury to have so much space to ourselves. Luckily the weather is supposed to be even better tomorrow.
