I walked out at around noon trying to find a taxi. While I was waiting, a white ambassador car passed by me. The driver of the car smiled at me while he saw me. He went further ahead quite a distance and reversed all the way and asked "How are you?"

I responded and got to know that he wanted to learn English, he offered to take me where I wanted to go and I was very sceptical. It turned out to be the best decision of my trip till then.

We spoke and got to know each other with the broken English he knew and the broken Uzbek I learned. His name was Rakhmat and it meant "Thank you." I then talked to his English teacher via phone who said that he's been learning for one month. Admiring the hospitality, I asked him whether he'd like to have lunch with me. He agreed immediately and took me to the most famous student cafe around the area.

I picked up the food he recommended and sat down for lunch - it was bread, some type of chicken mixed with beef and vegetables and a drink called Soki. While I got up to pay and reached the reception, the food was already paid for. When I asked him, he replied "You're in my country and you're my guest - I'm sorry but you're not paying for anything today."

I then asked him if we could meet his English teacher, we called her up and she was super excited. We picked her up and she took me to the place she worked.

She was a 4th year English student, tour guide and English teacher. Her name was Mary. I went to her institute and the children welcomed me with so much love and affection.

While I started conversing with them I started discovering their very own unique stories and dreams. A lot of these students want to go out of Uzbekistan to study and eventually return here. One of them was actually representing Uzbekistan in the International Mathematics Olympiad. He wanted to learn English because he didn't want to have difficulty cracking questions in English if he needed to while he was in England for the competition. I let them know about UWC and asked them to shoot me an email incase they had any questions.

I then went on to another institute where she taught English, the quality of these students in the second institute was not as good the first one. She explained to me that the students here were taught only using grammar rules and pronunciation while the first institute watched movies, played games and listened to music as well. The second institute was also 50% cheaper.

The weather was getting worse and Mary asked me to visit her home to meet her sisters. Her parents live and work in Russia. She takes care of her younger sister and does a work study routine. We went home and talked to her and hrr sister about the different things she wants to accomplish. I realised how beautiful life can be, stumbling upon Rakhmat and ending up in someone's home drinking orange juice seems incredible.

We stayed for about 45 minutes in her home and Rakhmat came to pick us up to visit tourist places. He didn't have his usual charm when he saw me, I was confused. Rakhmat and Mary quarreled for 15 minutes while I did not interrupt. I asked Mary is everything was okay and she replied that Rakhmat was not happy about Mary taking me to an all girl's home. He believed that people in her locality would have seen her take me and they'll speak wrong of her. I felt really bad but did not know how to react to the situation. We sorted it out eventually and it was all good.

We went to different mosques and palaces talking to various people along the way. They did not let me pay for anything. Every time I suggested I pay, they said what Rakhmat said initially - they even said it in sync one time.

We ended up going back to one of the institutes to talk to more of Mary's students. I learned more about why people learned English and what their dreams were - this group mostly wanting to trade with other countries, becoming entrepreneurs and leaving Uzbekistan. I met close to 75 kids.

Mary told me about another Chinese man we were about to meet with, Rakhmat's friend who he knew because Rakhmat's brother trades chickpeas and this Chinese person, Li, was someone who sold colour sorting machines that was useful to them.

We went to the fanciest restaurant in town for dinner and had an incredible traditional meal. Once we were done, we got onto Rakhmat's White Ambassador, played 1990's metal rock on full volume and opened the windows.

They dropped me off back at my hotel and it was such a beautiful day, all of which started with saying yes to a stranger.

Kesava

I had a pretty lazy morning, I woke up at around 9 AM and has breakfast. I figured out the payments for the hotel and left. I found a bus that went to Bukhara as well.

My conversation with my fellow passenger was about his family and how he has 6 siblings. He was 18 and worked in a shop that sold maps. The bus dropped us 25 kms from Bukhara where we had to take a car. As we were driving I met Sitora - she was in a history teacher in The National University of Tashkent. We spoke about the history of Bukhara and the people of Uzbekistan.

When we reached Uzbekistan, Sitora asked me where I was going to stay. I told her that I did not know and she said that the driver had a couple of ideas. She also said that because I was a tourist, they'd charge very high compared to regular Uzbek guests. She offered to help and said she'll go in to the hotel and speak for me.

We ended up going to three hotels and the last one we tried, it worked out. When I asked for how much I should pay the cab driver, Sitora said something similar to Rakhmat in the previous journal - except she said it with a teacher tone!

I settled into the hotel and since I didn't have lunch - I went out to get an early dinner. The lady at the hotel told me to go through a specific route - it was shady and I walked for about 5 minutes. I was shocked where it led me, a beautiful big pond surrounded by beautiful Uzbek architecture. It looked like a backpackers Street where I met a lot of foreigners, mostly from Europe.

One of the groups was going into this interesting building and I followed them. It led me to witness one of Uzbekistan's classical concerts. What was also part of this classical concert was a fashion show with dance performances. I had such a good day ending with Chicken Kebab, fried onion and bread.

I went to bed, excited to meet Jerry the next day!

Kesava

I started my day with an incredibly wholesome breakfast. I stayed in and read 'Shoe Dog' by Phil Knight till the noon(highly recommend btw) and decided to go out in the hot sun. I started walking and exploring the area because Jerry's plan was to reach our stay at 3PM.

I walked around admiring the architecture for the next one hour and decided to have lunch at a traditional Uzbek restaurant, I've been wanting to try Plov for a long time, I ordered and sat in and decided to connect to their WiFi. "Jerry 2 messages" flashed on my screen. "I'll be at the hotel at 1:30PM, I have no money so please make sure you're there." No plov for me that time either! I caught a taxi and rushed to my hotel. Jerry arrived two minutes later and we finally met physically after over 3 months of emails and WhatsApp.

We went out for lunch and weren't able to walk for more than 15 minutes in the 45 degree scorching heat. We started getting extremely concerned about biking the area and we started planning our times accordingly. We went back to our hotel and planned out the rest of trip in Uzbekistan.

Jerry said that another cyclist was also in Bukhara, we decided to meet her for dinner. We conversed about our UWC experiences, his crazy biking stories and a lot more while we toured Bukhara in the sandstorms that faced. Once we were at dinner, we meet Christina - a Swiss woman, cycling alone across the silk road all the way to China. We learned more about her experiences and had a beautiful day. Our end of the day was another surprise - we met 8 other bikers who were doing the exact same route and Jerry shared his crazy border story across Turkmenistan which all the bikers were able to relate with.

We were sound asleep the moment we were back excited to head to Samarkand the next day!

Kesava

We woke up early to catch a taxi to go to Samarkand. We found a shared taxi but ended up waiting till 1PM because we were unable to find other people to go with.

We reached Samarkand and had a quick evening snack. To our surprise, we met a Japanese world traveler. He was 25, he quit his job and decided to travel the world. We discussed about his experiences in south east Asia, central Asia and what his plans were from here. It was beautiful to hear his stories of hitchhiking, experiences with traveling budget and having as many new experiences as possible.

His name was Tatsuki and we instantly connected. We spoke and walked around till 11PM until we reached his hostel. He told us earlier that there were some bikers there, but to our surprise - there were over 20 bikers who were cycling the silk road, some of whom were also traveling the world. Most of them wanted to get out of their "Life jobs" - some of whom said that they knew what they were going to be doing 10 years from now and that scared them. Most of them were from western Europe. We met another 21 year old Japanese traveler who was also doing a world tour.

We ended up staying there till 12:30AM until I had to drag Jerry out of the hostel. We also found a wall filled with silk road traveler stories and it was magical.

The next day we decided to rent bikes and travel around Samarkand, we visited one of the biggest mosques in Uzbekistan called Bibi Honoum and did some more touristy stuff. We decided to catch a shared taxi to Tashkent that evening.

Kesava

We reached the capital of Uzbekistan, Tashkent! We noticed the stark differences that existed between Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent. Tashkent felt so much more urbanised, more like a popular city while Samarkand and Bukhara were really old middle age cities.

Nigina, Jerry's co-year from UWC Mostar and her father hosted us for a full course traditional Uzbek lunch. We were so happy to have such incredible food. I also got to finally taste plov! Our conversations with Nigina's dad were mostly about the differences between USSR and present day Uzbekistan, he believed that the Soviet union was significantly more successful and was better compared to the current system that they had. However, he was also extremely happy with the new president of Uzbekistan and the actions that he had taken(we realised this also from the easy visa process to bring in more tourists.)

Along with Nigina and her father, we went to the post office to collect our bikes. To our shock, only one our bikes had arrived and the other one was missing. We tried everything to track down the bike and eventually could not find it. We decided to execute our next plan and find a good bike in Tashkent for us to continue our journey.

We found a bike shop and headed over. The sales person at the bike shop saw Jerry and handed him a phone - to Jerry's surprise, the person on the other end of the phone was speaking in Chinese. Jerry got super excited and they conversed for the next 15 minutes. The salesperson said that our Chinese friend would give us a discount. He invited us for dinner and we had the most beautiful meal ever. It was super colourful and I fell more in love with Chinese food. His name was Mr.Ruan and he listen to our story and project- after understanding our situation, he offered us a free bike from his store as an investment into our project. We were extremely delighted and we were ready to get onto our next day of biking!

Kesava

It was time. We were going to start our next leg of the trip: Uzbekistan to China!

We got on our bikes around 7AM, I felt great--averaging about 20kms an hour we managed to get to the Uzbekistan Kazakhstan border. We had to go through the usual quick checks and we were on the other side. Our plan was to reach Shymkent and we were on-track in terms of time and physical ability.

We kept biking and maintaining our speed when we had our first obstacle of the day. We had a flat tyre. Spending almost one hour to fix it because of the bad tape we had, we got on and start pacing ahead. We started getting hungry at around 2PM and decided to cut into a village. Poof! We had another flat tyre. We stopped at a house to ask where we could find a restaurant first. They said that there was a restaurant 3kms away but they offered lunch. We sat and ate this beef soup, not being used to beef--I had a little difficult time trying to eat. Jerry along with a person from the house went to fix the tyre while I decided to sleep for a while. Jerry came back at 3 PM and he said we'll nap till 3:30. We ended up waking up at 5PM and started the rest of the trip.

At around 5:45PM, we had our fourth flat tyre on the new bike. We made a rational decision to hitchhike the rest of the way. It was fairly easy finding someone to help us out and we reached Shymkent. Talking along the way about why we were biking and the importance of sustainability.

We had an incredible shock when we were in Kazakhstan, we saw people kissing on the streets--it felt new to us, something we hadn't seen through the trip. That's when we realised how secular and more open Kazakhstan was.

We stayed at a nice hotel that night waiting to start again the next day!

Kesava