Shortly after leaving Angren, the road began to climb gently up a spur of the Pamirs with a series of hairpin bends and we passed the spot where we saw a horrendous accident in 2018 when a truck crashed through the central reservation of the motorway and fell hundreds of feet into the valley. After passing through a long tunnel, the road descended towards Kokand (which the Uzbeks call Qoqon) through bare brown hills and then entered a flat plain with fields of wheat and small rice fields. The road goes round Andijan before striking eastwards for the Kyrghyz border and Kyrghyzstan’s second largest town of Osh.
Getting across the border was the inevitable misery, especially getting out of Uzbekistan where I was given a sheet of paper with spaces for 5-6 stamps. Getting to all the windows where the paper had to be stamped meant running the gauntlet of lorry drivers who had been waiting much longer than us and were not in the best of tempers. However they were all very friendly and helpful to us. Jennifer had a nice conversation with (as I have been told many times) a very handsome Uzbek policemen who told her his name was Timur and she told him we had been to Tamerlane’s mausoleum in Samarkand. He seemed very impressed.
It was rush hour when we got to Osh. We followed the main street to the huge Kyrgyz flagpole and turned left for Uzgen and Jalalabad. We found an abandoned garage and spent the night on its forecourt after a friendly man called Kolya confirmed that we were on the road to Jalalabad.
