No internet but caught up on my blog just photos to sort
and upload now.
Our
thoughts of travel up to the now very small South Arel sea is
thwarted. Not enough diesel in the tank. The Arel sea used to have
cargo ships on it and they now lay on the sand. Cotton farming and
the use of chemicals during soviet era has purportedly drained the sea and
damaged a very large area. The north Aral sea is in
Kazakhstan and I think in the same condition.
We
settled to drive the road we are on in a big loop.
Driving back through the houses they had outside cooking "ovens" under the shade of the trees.
The
road seemed to be better than yesterday. Lots of water about in channels, lots of green, and a lot of square paddocks full of water.
Finally we discovered that they flood the paddock then after a period
they walk though it spreading seed. I think a grain maybe wheat, as
they consume a lot of bread.
There are quite a number of birds about, but they don't usually sit and wait for us to take a photo!
Back
into town to find diesel. I looked up Caravanistan website and found
a few GPS locations of black market diesel. We
finally found a guy to sell us some, so bought 50 liters out of 10lt, water bottles and used our new funnel-filter for the first time. He also
allowed us to fill with water. One litre 7000som about
AU$1.40
By
now the banks had reopened from their hours lunch break, so went and
got out 2 million som (US$250). Back for another 50litres diesel.
Now
south.
It takes only four Uzbekistan men to push a train carriage!
John
had a water camp picked out, but the first track we tried stopped at a
canal. We then found a track going in right direction and followed
that across to the next track and a bridge. There were some signs in
Russian and some fire fighting gear.
We
continued on the track noticing little groups of ¾ buried bottles of
water, we assume for fire control.
Arrived
at a little camp spot and saw about 20 deer race out of the water
onto an island then continued back towards the chosen spot. After a
couple of km’s finally got there. Although the track was within 200m
of the river there was no tracks to the water.
Set
up camp with some nibbles and books sat down in the shade to then be
interrupted by a vehicle and a ranger. In a biosphere park and no
camping here. Sounds like we shouldn’t even be here. The guy had
some English and was really very friendly and nice about it. He took
us back to the original spot and said we could have one night. 
All
good.
Read
for a while until a few mozzies, the dark and tiredness drove us
inside for a shower and bed.
255km
255km