One can hardly complain about being stuck for the night in Bukhara.
Among the finest cities of Central Asia, a riot of turquoise-domed mosques, intricately tiled madrassehs, or mosque schools, winding backstreets and secret courtyards, it is a traveller's dream.
Unless the traveller wants to be somewhere else, that is. Bukhara is beautiful but it may simply be the wrong place and, this being former Soviet Central Asia, getting to the right place can prove a challenge.
What could be simpler, one might think, than to go from Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, to Ashgabat, capital of the next-door republic of Turkmenistan? Surely it's just a simple matter of buying a ticket on a regular flight?
No. There's one flight a week, in the middle of the night. Anyone in a hurry needs a fall-back plan.
Here's one: fly from Tashkent to Bukhara, in southern Uzbekistan near the Turkmen border, on a 34-seater Yak-40 aircraft of Uzbekistan Airlines which, on a recent flight, carried exactly four passengers.
An overnight stop in Bukhara, and next day it's on by taxi to the border, where grim-faced Uzbek conscripts make the crossing as fraught as possible. Then a long, lonely walk, laden with luggage, through semi-desert no-man's land to Turkmenistan.
Another taxi now, crawling over a pontoon bridge across the massive span of the river Amu Darya, the Oxus of antiquity, before reaching the nearest big city, Turkmenabat, and hastening to the airport to get a flight to Ashgabat.
Bad luck. All flights for the rest of the day are full -- not surprising really, considering the unbelievably subsidized national airline charges just US$1.75 at the black market exchange rate for a ticket on the 600-km route.
So it's back to the helpful taxi driver, who of course has a cousin who has a friend whose father has a decent car. A brief discussion and a deal is struck: US$30 for the eight-hour drive to Ashgabat. Not bad, but a lot more than flying.
It's midnight by the time the car, snaking through the shifting sand of the Kara Kum desert, patrolled by Bactrian camels silhouetted in the twilight, reaches Ashgabat.
That's the best part of two days to travel between two neighboring capitals. A very Central Asian journey.
Patience needed
The five countries of ex-Soviet Central Asia, the "Stans," are huge. Kazakhstan alone is five times the size of France and between them they are larger than Western Europe. But travelling around them is tough a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed.
There are daily flights between all the capitals and Moscow, a continent away to the northwest, although even that route can be tricky: getting there in a hurry from Ashgabat after the tortuous journey from Tashkent involved flying via Istanbul. For most journeys, imagination and patience are essential.
Took a trip last year from Kazakhstan to Georgia, on the other side of the Caspian Sea.
The flight from Almaty to Atyrau, a booming city in Kazakhstan's oil belt on the northeastern Caspian coast, was delayed by several hours, with passengers waiting all night in the cramped little airport.
A train from Atyrau to Aktau, Kazakhstan's main Caspian port, took around 24 hours but, like most former Soviet sleeper services, was well maintained, clean and comfortable.
That was just the beginning. There followed a three-day wait in Aktau, as dreary a town as the former Soviet Union can boast, waiting for a ferry to make the crossing -- another 24 hours -- to Baku, capital of Azerbaijan.
When it came it was hardly luxurious. A smartly dressed ship's officer got into a fight with a passenger and punched him in the face. The food was poor, services primitive and the crossing rough.
But the journey was still a lucky one: the same ship, Mercury 2, an Azeri cargo ferry with some passenger accommodation, sank in stormy seas off Baku later in the year with the loss of over 40 lives.
The sight of Baku was welcome indeed after the crossing: all cypress trees and parks nestling among quiet squares on a dramatic hillside tumbling down towards the incomparable Baku bay.
From there the road on to Tbilisi, in Georgia, is another long, tortuous journey, and the Azeri-Georgia border crossing is no easier than that between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
But to arrive in Tbilisi, with its unique skyline of Christian churches quite unlike any found elsewhere in the world, and its balconies peering over narrow streets, is to move to a different world from Muslim Baku, dominated by an old town of mosques, fortresses and towers.
All across former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, the travelling can be hell. But the cities and towns, the seas and deserts, the mountains and monuments, are like nowhere else on earth.
And if there's no way out of Bukhara, who really minds?
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