Another 10 hours by train. Uzbek women were dressed with colorful dress, and a small piece of fabric tied in their hair.

We got woken up twice: before the border by the Kazak customs, and after by the Uzbek customs. The process was similar on both sides: military walking in uniform in the wagon, checking our belongings with torch lamps, mirrors and dogs, verifying our passports and covid vaccination. We found the process a bit inefficient. The whole thing took each time 1 hour.

We crossed hundreds of kilometres with always the exact same landscape, flat and dry. The villages along this train line are living in the rythme of the train. People were jumping in and out the wagon to sell food and other stuff.

We stopped in Kungrad, 80 000 inhabitants, biggest city since we left Aktau, 1000km away. We ate our first meal of the day at 5pm, and took our first shower after 2 days on the road. Uzbekistan had been a closed country for decades, started recently to open for tourism. That led us to a couple of surprises...

Very hard to use ATM to withdraw money, and no official place to exchange money. The only place to get Usbek Som (1€ = 12000 Som) was the bazaar, through the black market.

We needed a sim card also for this country: Manloi had to deal with administrative stuff, we could not rely on WiFi connections. We failed our first attempt: we were asked to present our physical passports, which were kept by the guys of our homestay. 30 min later, I tried again with my passeport, but they then told me I was not allowed to have a sim card with my nationality, I should be either Russian or Central Asian to have one... Finally the girl I was dealing with accepted to register my sim card under her identity.