After having repaired our car we still managed to drive to Khiva, our planned destination. Khiva is one of the old silk road cities of Uzbekistan with a well preserved walled center in the valley of the Amu Darya (the river which has once fed the Aral lake, the water of which is now completely used to irrigate cotton and rice fields, causing the Aral lake to dry out). The buildings have been nicely restored, the only drawback is that you can hardly see any inhabitants. It looks a bit like a big museum. Khiva has an impressive number of madrassahs (Islamic colleges or universities), as well as mosques.

The city wall:

Mosques often have a brick + metal roof carried by carved wooden poles:

A lot of space in the city is used by mausoleums

In the afternoon we stopped by an apricot drying plant and bought different varieties for lunch.

Btw the rumors that you cannot buy diesel in Uzbekistan are just rumors, at least outside of the harvest season. It is true that almost all cars here use LPG as fuel, but every bigger city has at least one gas station with petrol and diesel as well. It is not as cheap as in in Russia or in Kazakhstan, but at 1EUR per liter still pretty affordable.