Kyzylkum · Khorezm
A road that refuses to be interesting
Four hours of desert with nothing to look at, and then a wall the colour of the ground it stands on.
The taxi filled the way they always fill here, by arithmetic rather than schedule. The fourth passenger arrived, the driver sat up without being told, and the car became a plan.
There is a way of describing this landscape that makes it sound like something, and I want to avoid it. It is a flat pale plain with a road laid across it, and scrub at intervals of roughly a hundred metres.
Khiva does not announce itself. You come in through low concrete and satellite dishes, and then there is a wall, the same colour as everything around it because it is made of the same mud.