On this day, we drove from Khiva to Bukhara. This was a main route for merchants for centuries on the Silk Road. It didn’t feel like a camel caravan in our air-conditioned bus but it was a long driving day and we got a sense of traversing the terrain of cascading sand dunes and undulating plains. The temperature was in the 90’s and I was glad I had an automated camel.

Khiva lies west of the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus River) River. It’s between the Karakum Desert to the south and the Kyzylkum Desert to the northeast. But knowing this didn’t prepare me for the size of the Amu Darya River which you can see in the first photo. I was expecting something much smaller than this. It’s no wonder that people stopped in Khiva, coming from either direction.

Since the Khiva area has water from this broad river, they have plenty of agriculture. We saw this all over Central Asia but I just happened to get a decent photo here. The farming was on a large scale and mostly done by large tractors. But once the land was prepared and the crops planted, it seemed like most of the work was done by hoe. Our guide said that they were mostly weeding cotton and it was done by hand as you can see in the second photo.

The Kyzyl Kum (Red Sand) Desert is mostly in Uzbekistan but some of it is in Kazakhstan. It has an area of about 115,000 square miles and lies between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya Rivers. It’s a plain that slopes towards the northwest which is where the Aral Sea lies. It has a number of isolated bare mountains and several large enclosed basins. The Kyzyl Kum gets 4 – 8 inches of rain annually, mostly in winter and spring. The largest portion of the desert and sand ridges have plants growing on them which serve as pasture for sheep, horses, and camels. It has a few oasis settlements within its boundaries as well as natural gas deposits and gold.

The last three photos (bus photos) are just to give you an idea of what the Kyzyl Kum Desert looks like. It wasn’t particularly exciting, as deserts go. We saw a few birds and animals and a few wind funnel clouds of dust.