We drove from Dasoguz to the border crossing between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. It was a short drive but life did look a bit different and since we saw so little of Turkmenistan outside of Ashgabat, I will again include this one post of this drive. Once again, these are moving bus photos, so not award winning photographs.

In the first photo, many of the houses that we saw had gardens. The houses were, for the most part, simpler than housing that we had seen up to this point.

This was just an intersection that we passed on the drive in the second photo. Some houses don’t have green roofs and the woman in the lower right is hanging laundry out to dry.

The third photo does not show the simplest housing that we saw, but it is certainly more humble than what we had seen before this drive.

This was still farming country but the crops did not look as full as earlier places we visited. I think this land is more marginal and gets less water.

When we got to the border, there were many dozens to perhaps hundreds of people waiting around to cross the border. From what we understood, these people are locals who are just taking goods across the border for someone else or to sell themselves in Uzbekistan. It sounded like that was not legal but they would have a story that allowed them to go across the border with limited amounts of goods. At any rate, these folks were evidently last priority at the border crossing.

We crossed from Turkmenistan to Uzbekistan here but it took us two hours. Our guides said that it could take up to four hours. The longest portion of time, by far, was getting clearance from Turkmenistan to leave. The longest processing time for a person in our group was Vicky. She was the only person that they took an extended time to process, as in about forty-five minutes. The rest of us took just a few minutes each. They never said what the problem was with Vicky but something with her passport or visa didn’t come up right on their computer. Our guide and I stayed with her and there was no drama, just a very long wait. We passed through Uzbekistan’s border process very quickly and felt glad to be in Uzbekistan.