Il left the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and reached the plains of Uzbekistan to keep hitchhiking on the Silk Road. The Uzbek hospitality is incredible, I had never experienced this before: there is always a mattress available in the living room and a dining table. I was hosted by families every night and I went from surprises to surprises, listening stories of broken hearts and arranged weddings . Here you have to follow traditions and serve your parents in-laws. They spoke to me about impossible loves: in-laws asking for a divorce because the daughter-in-law was not pregnant five months after the wedding, other in-laws refusing a wedding because the lovers were not from the same city , or even a thirty years old man tired of not having found the right person who decided, after his last breakup  to marry the neighbor ... With twenty-six years old, the Uzbeks are worried about their singlehood.

My few words of Russian allowed me to understand the usual question of my hosts and my drivers: " What? You are thirty-three years old and you are not married? ". They were surprised when I talked about parity, freedom to travel without an official approval of the father, couple life without marriage, financial autonomy, education and free health ...

Uzbekistan is a backdrop for the Thousand and One Nights, with its ceramic palaces and mosques, its bluish cupolas, its caravanserais where merchants used to stop along the Silk Road. It is a country known for its UNESCO monuments rather than for its flat, dry and arid landscapes. The Aral Sea, dried up by massive cotton agriculture, has almost disappeared. I camped in the shade of abandoned wrecks, the last witnesses of the flourishing era of the Soviet fishing industry. Then my hitchhiking world tour continued in Turkmenistan .

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