Khiva, Uzbekistan

We stayed in Khiva or as the locals call it (Hee-va) for 3 nights.

We arrived in Khiva after a long 14 hour train. Luckily it was all over night so we could get a some sleep.

We stayed just inside the wall near the red circle.

There were about 10 Mosques and 5 minarets. Unfortunately you can only climb one of them but it is also the tallest minaret in all of Uzbekistan. The two you can see here are the ones you cannot climb the left one because it is leaning and the right because it is incomplete, the other two are pretty small and insignificant.

The reason the blue minaret  on the right is incomplete is that the ruler at the time of building wanted to build the tallest minaret in the world at 80+ meters, the current tallest minaret in Jam Afghanistan is only 65 meters tall. During construction the ruler went to war with Persia and he died and the reason it's so wide is because the builders had to build 60 more meters straight up. His death meant that there was no more funds to build the minaret so unfortunately to this day it only stands at 26 meters tall.

The first day we got there at 10 am went to check in to our hotel which we had to wait another hour and dropped our bags in the room. After we went for dunch (lunch/dinner) with a bit of exploring. On the second day we took a guided tour seeing multiple sites. The third day we wandered around looking for a shop we saw on the tour to get a souvenir but we never found it.

~Thomas;)