Central Asia: Uzbekistan - (Another) Yurt stay, in Kyzyl Kum Desert

Kyzyl Kum Desert, translated as 'red sand' occupies about 300,000 sq km and lies between Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers. Taking a holiday from our holiday, we did another yurt stay, this time at Kyzyl Kum Desert.

This one is vastly different from our first yurt stay. I'm saying this not in terms of geographic location (country as well as mountain versus desert) but the set up as well. This yurt is part of a camp, obviously geared towards touristy activity. Even the toilet is a sitting toilet (clean too!) complete with flushing system. There are even shower stalls and lighted up when it gets dark.

Notice the water outlet?

Complete with toilet washing brush

After we were assigned to our yurt and dropped our luggage, we were served welcoming drinks and nibbles. We made ourselves comfortable on a tapchan and laze the day away. :P

Yurts in the front

The sun wasn't shining on us when we started out...

Think these are apricot kernels... they are da best... :D

From memory we were told these are apricot kernels, they taste a little like pistachios. The shells are a little hard to open but it is part of the fun and well worth it!

Oh and you know how flies and hot weather are good friends?

And no... we didn't get food poisoning but we didn't eat much of this though

After we had laze enough, it was time for camel ride. My second time but sis' first time. We had 2 camels to keep us company while waiting for our turn.

We were the second or maybe third batch to get on the camel because there was a group who came with a tour bus. It was alright though because I think our timing was perfect. The sun was setting but not yet, so we had nice orange colour :)

Photobomb by camel

That was our shadow (with two other people)

After our short-ish camel ride, we walked up a higher sand dune area to see the sun set. Then made a dash for shower before dinner. Hehe. Umm.. this was when we were a little lost too because our tour guide didn't tell us what time was dinner. Actually he sort of left us on the sand dunes and walked away...

If you remember our other yurt stay where food was simple and smaller portion, here we had more than enough.

There was another big potato chicken dish not in picture

After dinner we were ushered to a campfire where they had a performer who travelled from a nearby village to come and sing. According to our tour guide, it is a custom to give a little money/contribution as a gesture of appreciation to the performer at the end of his performance. Umm... we did prepare some money to hand over to the performer but didn't end up giving him... because there wasn't a chance to do so..lol. It appears that the tour guide for the other group passed a token of money to the performer discreetly and he just took off... lol. I supposed we were a little slow... haha..

We have been wanting to see the stars under the Central Asia sky. Sis did get up when we were in Song Kul but the weather wasn't good. I remained in bed... because I was too lazy to move my butt. When we were in Khiva, I wanted to at least get up and peek through the windows to see if it was worth to get up. What happened was I kept on dreaming that I got up but in actual fact I have not budge from the bed... haha...

We did this time though and after all we didn't really have to wait till the middle of the night as it was dark enough before long.

My effort from squating down for a loooong time.. lol

That - was our first day at Kyzyl Kum Desert yurt stay. Of course, the experience between the two yurt stay is really different. Despite it being touristy I did enjoy myself and it was a good break from the mosques and medressa. On top of that, we get to see different and more things in Uzbekistan.

Ok, one last photo - to show how the sink was looking like when we brushed our teeth.

Side note: Got to start studying already!