Some general comments about camping

When is came to Uzbekistan camping places were a whole new deal.

The theory (or is it the law) is that tourists must register at a hotel every 3rd night and that means staying in the hotel.

We read in some of the travel guides that in practice the requirement for registration was what ever the police officer you were talking to wanted them to be or thought they were.

We had also heard directly and indirectly from other travelers that the police where hassling tourists in vehicles about registration.

So we decided to book a few nights in hotels in each of Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Nukkus and to get a letter from Stantours that effectively registered us for the nights between hotels.

This worked. We stayed ta the hotels we booked and we stayed in the truck the other nights. We showed the letter to a lot of police officers at the regular police road checkpoints and we never had a problem.

The hotels we stayed at are detailed in the log and I am sure we could have simply parked at those hotels in Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. I am less sure about Nukkus.

Camping log download

The following links will provide downloads of our camping log for Uzbekistan in either GPX or plain text format.


Camping places for Uzbekistan - as a Garmin BaseCamp compatible GPX file

Camping places for Uzbekistan - as a plain text file

Diesel Fuel

Fuel was also a whole new deal. Uzbekistan has an amazing number of "gas stations" along the highway but almost all of them are closed. Diese fuel was very scarce (as was bezin/gasoline/petrol) - the whole place (at least cars) run on compressed gas. But we found fuel a few times and in the end never got close to being in desperate need.

We paid as little as 2800 som per liter and as high as 3500 som per liter.

The official exchange rate is about 2200 som to the US dollar but the black market rate was more like 2800-3000 to the dollar.