Tried to think of a joke about a yurt but....

Before heading to Samarkand, we took a detour north into the Kyzylkum Desert to stay the night in a yurt. We were accompanied by a french couple that we have spent a couple of days with, called Marie and Christophe (see photo).
Our taxi man had a few issues finding the yurt, not surprising really, in the middle of the desert. He stopped to ask a Kazakh guy (we were pretty near the Kazakh border), who, smiling, attempted to get into the back of the taxi with Marie, Christophe and I. Slightly problematic as he was about 6 foot 5, 18 stone and dressed in a flowing kazakh coat. After Andy had thankfully let him get in the front, we shot off across the desert on the yurt-hunt.
Eventually we arrived, to a warm welcome from the friendly Russian hostess. She had prepared us a slap up lunch of three courses. After copious amounts of chai and loads of food, a squat Russian guy came into the yurt and asked us where we were all from, using plenty of gesticulations. After establishing that we were English and French, speaking no Russian or Uzbek, he proceeded to explain something very complicated to us in extremely fast unbroken Russian. We all stared blankly until we picked up on the word "camel", at which we all nodded vigourously, repeating "camel, camel". The fact that less than an hour later the four of us were astride four miserable looking camels seems a miracle of non-verbal communication.

When we arrived back from our camel trek we were confronted by the unlikely sight of 40 Japanese and French tourists swarming over the camp. It seemed our desert yurt stay was not to be as isolated as we thought.
The japanese tour group were hilarious, and wasted no time getting stuck into the vodka which they had thoughtfully brought with them, later to be joined by the foul tasting Uzbek vodka which we were given with dinner. Their enthusiasm for the vodka was matched only by their enthusiasm for the buffet dinner, where the French (first at the table) were almost knocked flat by shouts of "Banzai!!". We wisely left them to it until we realised there may not be any food left, and were then forced to join the fray.

After dinner we all retired to the campfire - of immense proportions due to massive deforestation of the surrounding area by the japanese's Uzbek "fixer". He was evetually restrained by our russian friend. A "sing off" rapidly developed between the french and jap contigents - won by the french despite the fact that they were bloody rubbish. The japs just couldn't shut them up long enough to get a tune in. Andy and I narrowly avoided being forced to "sing Beatles, sing Beatles" by the old japanese guys....
After a lovely evening under the stars we retired to our yurt - luckily we'd brought lots of warm sleep gear as the night was absolutely Baltic. So, it was adyurt from him and adyurt from me.... (thought of one!).