Why some dogs don’t have ears – Day 10

We woke up to a drizzle. It had rained all night. Low hanging clouds obscured the view. Our guest house was family run, everyone including the kids were helping to cook, serve the guests and clean up.

Our room was basic but clean. Shared showers were in the house, but the toilets outside, behind the house. But surprisingly it had a good wireless network. We hadn’t expected that. The places where we can escape completely from the digital world become far and few between it seems. The owner informed us that they had recently installed internet connection, just a year ago. However, his children swiftly became addicted to social media. Despite this, the father maintains a strict rule: they must attend to the guests whenever required.

After a typlical breakfast consisting of green tea, bread, eggs, some honey, jam and home made butter Inom proposed that we head out and see the native mufflon sheep that are being kept for a while to be studied, then the animals get exchanged for others.

We donned our rain gear and set out in company of the family dog to explore the surroundings.

Arrived at a large enclosure, we searched the hillside until we found a few mufflon females with their little ones. Knowing that the males with their big impressive horns can’t be far away we made our way to the other side. And here they were. Standing tall on a rocky outcrop was the biggest male sheep with impressive spiralled horns. The nurata mountains are the largest nature reserve and more than 10.000 mufflon sheep live here. They can only be shot in select quantities as to not endanger them.

Heading up to the larger mountains we followed a stream up into a valley. As we needed to cross it with a good amount of water we could not manage without getting soaking wet feet. To top that it started raining in earnest and as we made our way back to the guest house we got pretty wet, despite our rain jackets.

The family dog has followed us faithfully all the way. We had passed several farm houses on our way and Esther noticed that some dogs had their ears cut and tails docked, others did not. Turns out that male dogs, supposedly as they may have to fight off wolves when hearding sheep in the mountains, have their tails and ears cut off (explenation by the locals: that way the wolves are unable to bite and hold onto their ears). Female dogs are staying at home, so their tails and ears ar not cut.

Arriving back in time for lunch we enjoyed a simple lunch, always with two types of salads and some veggie rice cooked with a lot of oil.

As the weather forecast was predicting rain for the remainder of the day and with our gear already being wet, we decided to take a nap and then help a bit in the kitchen to prepare our evening meal.

On the menu were Uzbek dumplings called Manti. Dough made from water, salt and flour gets rolled out very thinly and cut into 10 cm squares. Then a small hand full of filling is placed in the middle and the corners closed a certain way to form a dumpling that looked like a little boat. The filling consisted of small chopped onions, potatoes, dill and some pieces of beef cut into small pieces. Once the boat shape was formed, they were placed in a multi rack steamer to be cooked.

It took a bit of trial and error to close the dumpling properly but we got the hang of it quite quickly.

It was a nice way to spend a rainy day and prepare ones own food. It tasted very nice when we had dinner. Inom magically produced a bottle of white wine and vodka and so we had an amusing evening chatting until late into the night. The next day the weather looked to be at least dry and so we had planned on doing our trek to the petroglyphs in the morning.