Pistalitau Ridge - a place where the sky meets the lake. Uzbekistan

Hello! This topic is about my new trip to mysterious and beautiful Uzbekistan. Today I would like to tell you about my tripto the Pistalitau ridge and Tuzkan Lake.

So, I contacted again with "Mysterious Uzbekistan" team and we went to conquer the Pistalitau ridge that borders Tuzkan Lake, which locates 250 km far from Tashkent in the Jizzakh region. We left early morning and at the beginning everyone felt quite vigorously, met each other, exchanged jokes, treated each other with all sorts of goodies and snacks, but we woke up early, long jorney in the comfortable van has had an influnce - we began to nap and soon the whole group was dozing and someone even snoring.

A couple of hours later, we drove up to the Jizzakh region. By the way, before looking at the photos, I suggest a little distraction to the toponymy of these places because it is quite interesting. Let's start with the fact that the mountain ridge that we are going to conquer is called Pistalitau. The ending "tau" in the Turkic languages ​​means "hill, mountain". Depending on the country and language, this ending may change to "too", "tag", "tog". "Pista" from Uzbek is translated as "pistachio". So, Pistalitau meand Pistachio Hills because on this ridge grows many wild pistachio bushes.

This is wild pistachio bush

This Pistalitau ridge is located in the Forish district. By the way, the name of the district - Forish is a modified name of the city of Paris. Yes, yes, that same Paris, which is the capital of France. I suppose it is necessary to explain - from the lessons of history (and from my blog too) you probably remember that in the XVth century the territory of modern Uzbekistan was a part of the empire of Tamerlane. The capital of his empire was the city of Samarkand and wanting to turn its capital into the greatest city in the world (by the way, in terms of the majesty of architecture, he was very successful in this), Tamerlane ordered to build settlements around the city, calling them after the capitals of other countries. Thus, according to Tamerlan, the rest of the capital had to be only miserable villages against the background of its capital. So in Uzbekistan appeared Paris (Forish), Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Sultania.

So, let back to our journey. On the way from Jizzakh, we met another group of tourists returning from Samarkand and deciding to visit Tuzkan. Since they had to go longer than us, they decided to stop at one of the roadside cafes and relax, but we decided to not waste a time and move further. The van drove us almost to the foot of the ridge, we unloaded and went upstairs.

The climb was very short and easy. Having climbed on it, we had a view of the beautiful Tuzkan Lake, which is part of the Arnasai system of lakes. By the way, this brackish drainless lake and its name can probably be translated into English as "salty" ("tuz" in Uzbek means "salt"). The guide said that in 1969 it was a small lake, which was very shallow in the summer, sometimes even completely dry. However, due to the large discharge of water from the Chardara reservoir (Kazakhsan): 21 billion tonns of water in 1969 and over 9 billion tonns in 1994. So, Tuzkan Lake was connected to the larger lake of the Arnasay system - Aydarkul Lake. By the way, as far as I heardit is planning to build the first Uzbek nuclear power plant near Aydarkul ... We must have time to go there before building process begins.

As our guide said, we had to walk along practically the entire ridge, climbing to its highest points. Actually, it was not so difficult - the highest point of the ridge lies at an altitude of only 560 meters above sea level. There were some areas where I had to sweat, but on the whole it was an easy and pleasant walk.

We climbed to the first point, where was a great view of the lake. We stopped and made a small stop for photographing and snacking. In the photo below I take pictures of the neighborhood ...

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Climbing up to the first hill and taking a picture, we began to descend to the lake ...

We went down to the lake and went along the coast.

And here on the way down the thousands of mosquitoes are attacked us! Just a swarm of mosquitoes - there were really thousands of them. Really - mosquitoes curtain! I read about this in the books, but I thought that it was just a turn of speech. Fortunately, it turned out to be untidy mosquitoes - some kind of meadow mosquitoes, I think. besides they are the males. But still, it was unpleasant and a bit creepy.

Halfway, near the shore, movie people built a small fortress (a few years ago they were shooting some historical movie in these places). Cinematographers left and the fortress remained, becoming a kind of local landmark. Usually tourists stop here for a rest and lunch.

By the way, with us went a wonderful and cheerful international couple: Gulya and Ahmet, who decorated the trip. Very positive people, they created a cheerful atmosphere in the group and almost to the middle of the route we occasionally had to stop in order to break through because of laughing. Why to the middle? TBecause they took a lot of food, which they treated everyone around, and a bottle (and maybe even a couple of bottles) of homemade wine. So, Gulya and Ahmet rather tired of dragging their provisions and decided to wait for the second group in this fortress, and in order not to be bored, they uncorked the wine and treated everyone around. Since most of the group decided to go further, we wisely refused from the wine,. The remaining part of our group and the second group (if you remember, we met them on the way) decided not to climbing more and stay in order to have a fun and drink some wine.

We were attracted by the highest peak of the ridge, so having rested and refreshed, we went further.

Do you see the top of hill in the background? So, we climbed on it, waving away mosquitoes that strove to get into the mouth or eyes.

Reaching the foot of the hill, we climbed up the rocky site.

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When we climbed upstairs, I saw on the stones some patterns resembling cuneiform. Apparently these are traces of some kind of algae or worms that lived here - once millions and millions of years ago the sea lapped here.

Finally, we climbed to the top. To admit, it was a rather difficult area - it was necessary to climb over the stones and some of them were razor-sharp. I even scratched my palms a couple of times. For the future, you need to buy gloves)).

But here we climbed and the view from this peak was worth all the effort!

Cool ... A pleasant breeze blown away by annoying mosquitoes, a beautiful view ... Pleasant fatigue and satisfaction from being able to climb to the top, albeit small, but the top))) It was worth it to come!

Frankly, I was a little worried - how to go down the same stones is much more difficult than to climb? But we must pay tribute to the guys from the team of "Mysterious Uzbekistan" - they think through all these moments and plan the route so that the way back (descent) is always easier than the ascent. We crossed the ridge and descended on a different, gentler slope ...

It was a great trip - uncomplicated, fun and enjoyable. In the good team, by beautiful nature - what could be better?

The day flew by. Tired but very pleased we returned home.

If you have not chosen a country for rest, then I invite you again to us in Uzbekistan. Recently, it becomes very popular among all of the world. Uzbekistan cancelled entry visas for over than 30 countries

Thank you for reading this topic to the end. The bonus will be a small video about TuzkanLake, which I found on YouTube. Water, sun, beautiful girls in swimsuit - what could be better?)

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