Dushanbe! 

Much like our other extended city stays, our time in Dushanbe has largely been a mix of watching the olympics on the high-speed wifi and (when I could drag Paddy away) trawling the bazars and shopping centres to replace lost gear. 

We also submitted our application for our final visa – Turkmenistan – we just hope we are successful.

We both came down with stomach bugs during our stay in the city but we thankfully found a really nice hostel to recouperate in and enjoyed cooking homemade lesagne and blackberry and apple crumble which – thanks to three lovely Irish lads we met – we washed down with Barry’s tea.

We visited the national museum which is fairly interesting…

We learnt A LOT about the current president Enomali Rhamon who has been in the top job since 1994 (3 years after the country declared independance from the Soviet Union) leading the ever dominant People’s Democratic Party of Tajikistan.

There is a whole room dedicated to him in the museum. Here he is holding some large melons…

And again looking presidential while pressing a button…

We took a walk along the gardens admiring the crown topped Building of Nations:

And took a visit to the second largest flag pole in the world (it was the first until a taller one was built in Saudi Arabia).

While walking over the lake I dropped the lens cap into the water so we had to enlist the help of the nice pedalo owner to get it back…

Another day we visited the very beautiful botanical gardens. It happened to be a Sunday and there were about 40 weddings going on all across the park. We enjoyed watching all the couples having extended photo shoots in and around the many wooden pagodas.

This couple held this pose for at least 5 minutes…

Afterwards we treated ourselves to another curry and washed it down with the local beverage – vodka shots.

All the ladies in Central Asia wear the same matching tunic and trouser combo and as I would be needing some looser clothing for Iran I had my own made up for me by this lovely lady in the bazaar. The fabric and the tailoring cost a total of £10!

We’ve decided that tomorrow we will leave for the Uzbekistan border despite not having heard the outcome of our Turkmenistan visa (we’ve already waited 10 days). There is a chance we will be sent a confirmation email for a visa on arrival but we have so little faith in the Turkmen visa system that we’re not holding out much hope.

If we don’t hear then we will be forced to cycle/hitch/train to Aktau in Kazakhstan where we can get a cheap air ticket to Tehran instead.