Kara and Nate rolled their school bus through the mud brick gate of Khiva’s old city on day 34 of the Mongol Rally, and in the first 30 minutes of driving through Uzbekistan, every single person outside, kids on bikes, adults on evening walks, watermelon sellers along the road, stopped and offered what Nate described as ‘the purest smile and wave.’ That kind of welcome matters when you have been living inside a rattling bus for over a month. It matters even more when the two weeks before it involved a stolen toolbox, a near-fatal loose wheel, 78 hours in parking lots, and a ferry crossing across the Caspian Sea that Nate called ‘whatever the worst thing you can imagine, it is actually way worse.’ Uzbekistan did not appear on anyone’s wish list coming into this rally. By the time the team crossed back out toward Tajikistan, it had quietly become the standard everything else gets measured against.
A loose wheel, a stolen jack, and a 19-year-old named Rasul
The trouble announced itself almost immediately. Within 30 seconds of crossing from Turkmenistan, the front wheel began wobbling again. The lug nuts had been hand-tightened at the previous border because the proper jack and tire iron had been among the tools stolen in Azerbaijan, the same theft that had already cost the crew their USB cables and the toolbox purchased back in Prague. No jack, no torque, no real fix. The hotel in Khiva sent out staff the next morning without being asked. A 19-year-old named Rasul spent the better part of the morning helping get the bus jacked up properly so the lug nuts could be torqued down for the first time since the robbery. A man named Rahim sorted the mandatory Uzbek auto insurance through his own debit card when the online payment system rejected every foreign card and the first physical insurance office they found looked, as Nate put it, like it had not been open in about 25 years. When Kara and Nate tried to pay Rahim back, he refused. ‘I don’t want to take your money,’ he said. ‘It’s a help by our country. I’ll make a relationship with you like a friends. In the USA we will meet you.’
Bukhara at midnight and Samarkand before the heat hits
The drive to Bukhara took eight hours and ended with the bus parked directly in front of the hotel. The city was a major oasis stop on the Silk Road and is over 2,000 years old. The Kalon minaret, 150 feet tall and built more than 900 years ago, still stands at the center of the old city because, according to local account, Genghis Khan was too impressed by it to order its destruction when he leveled nearly everything else around it. The same minaret was later nicknamed the Tower of Death for the punishment of throwing criminals from its top. The team ate samosas from a rooftop restaurant overlooking the blue domes, the puff pastry filled with pumpkin and corn and hot enough to make everyone pull back on first bite. Kara, 10 weeks and three days into a pregnancy and working around unpredictable cravings, ordered the fettuccine alfredo. It was, she noted, number one on the main dishes list.
Samarkand arrived two hours before sunset on day 35. The main square holds three buildings that look like a single planned complex but were actually built 200 years apart. A tour guide named Jasser led the crew up a secret stairwell inside one of the madrasa minarets, a passage so narrow that passing each other on the stairs required a kind of full-body negotiation. From the top, the entire square opened below them, one at a time, through a small hole in the roof. Jasser shared one line from the square’s inscriptions that stayed with the group: ‘Every human should run after the knowledge like a tiger hunting the deer.’
The road out of Samarkand toward the Tajikistan border took one hour. By that point a roadside auto parts seller had already handed Rick the exact bolt needed to reattach the driver’s side mirror, found in two seconds without a word of shared language, just a held-up part and a gesture.
The watermelon sellers who kept waving anyway
Somewhere between Khiva and Bukhara, a car with five kids kept leapfrogging the bus, speeding ahead and then slowing down so the children could watch it pass again. Eventually the driver pulled over and flagged the bus to stop. Nobody knew where they were going or why they had been following the bus for that stretch of road. The whole exchange lasted a few minutes on the shoulder before everyone said goodbye and drove on.
Kara put it plainly near the end of their time in the country: ‘I’ve never had this country on my list of places I wanted to go. I didn’t know anything about it. Didn’t really care if I ever came. And now that I’m here, this is going in like my top five. Honestly, one of the best places I’ve ever been.’
The hotel in Bukhara pressed a full pack of water bottles into the crew’s hands as they were leaving, for no reason other than that they were leaving. The bus rolled toward the Tajikistan border with a properly torqued wheel, a repaired mirror, and a muffler that had been knocked clean off after bottoming out on a mountain road, which, Nate decided, was fine, because it was just going to make the bus sound sweet.
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