Walk the
Silk Road

When to go

Spring (April–May) and autumn (September–October) are the seasons everything is planned around: 15–28°C, clear skies, and the monuments workable before the midday heat. Summer regularly passes 40°C — tours still run, with early starts and long shaded afternoons, and prices drop. Winter is cold, quiet and cheap, and the tile work under low light is its own reward.

Getting around

The Afrosiyob high-speed train is the spine of the country: Tashkent to Samarkand in about 2 hours, Samarkand to Bukhara in about 1 hour 30. Seats are released 60 days ahead and sell out in season, so dates are worth fixing early. Khiva is further west — either an overnight train, a domestic flight to Urgench, or a long drive across the Kyzylkum desert.

Money

The currency is the Uzbek som. Cards work in most hotels, larger restaurants and supermarkets in the main cities, but bazaars, workshops and taxis are cash-first. ATMs are common on our routes; bring crisp USD or EUR notes as backup.

What to wear

Uzbekistan is secular and dress is relaxed — no head covering required for women outside working mosques, where a scarf over the hair is expected. Bring shoes you can walk on uneven stone in all day, and something for the sun: the shade in these cities is architectural, not botanical.

Plov

The national dish, and the one this company is named after. Rice cooked in a wide cast-iron kazan with lamb or beef, carrots, onion and cumin, the fat carried through every grain. Every region argues for its own version — Samarkand layers the ingredients and serves them separately, Tashkent stirs them together, Bukhara adds raisins. UNESCO added palov culture to its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in December 2016, which locals will tell you settled nothing about whose is best.

It is lunch food. A plov house serves from morning until the kazan is empty, usually by two in the afternoon, and then closes.

Somsa

Pastry parcels of minced lamb, onion and fat, slapped onto the inside wall of a tandyr oven and peeled off when the bottom has blistered. Sold from street windows all day for the price of a coffee at home. The pumpkin version, in autumn, is worth going out of your way for.

Manti and dumplings

Manti are large steamed dumplings of lamb and onion, eaten with a spoon of sour cream. Chuchvara are the small boiled cousins, served in broth. Both are homemade food that restaurants do properly rather than tourist fare.

Shashlik

Skewers over charcoal — lamb, beef, chicken, minced lyulya — with raw onion and vinegar on the side to cut the fat. This is the evening meal, and the smoke drifting across a courtyard at dusk is most travellers' strongest food memory of the trip.

Soups and noodles

Shurpa is a clear lamb and vegetable soup, eaten at any hour. Lagman is hand-pulled noodles, either in broth or fried with peppers and meat — a dish that arrived with the Uighurs and stayed. Both are the reliable order on a cold day or after a long drive.

Bread, tea and what to drink

Non — round bread stamped in the middle and baked against the tandyr wall — is on every table and is never put face down. Green tea is the default with a meal and comes without asking. Uzbekistan grows and drinks its own wine, and beer is widely available; the country is Muslim-majority but relaxed about alcohol, and no one will comment either way.

Do not drink the tap water. Bottled water is on the bus on every one of our trips, and refills are not something you should be paying for.

Where it sits

Uzbekistan borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan — every one of them landlocked. That makes it one of only two doubly landlocked countries on earth, the other being Liechtenstein: you cross two international borders before you reach a coast.

Desert and steppe

Most of the country is flat, dry and low: the Kyzylkum — the "red sand" — spreads across the centre and north towards Kazakhstan. It is not dune desert for the most part but scrub and gravel steppe, grazed by sheep, and it is what you watch out of the train window between Bukhara and Khiva.

Mountains and green corners

The east and south rise into the western spurs of the Tian Shan and Pamir-Alay. The Nuratau range north of Samarkand holds walnut and apple villages where families take guests; Zaamin and Chimgan are where Uzbeks themselves go to escape the summer. The high point of the country, Khazret Sultan, is 4,643 m, on the Tajik border.

Two rivers, and the sea that was

The Amu Darya and Syr Darya are the only real rivers, and from the 1960s Soviet planners diverted most of both to irrigate cotton. The Aral Sea, which they used to feed, has lost the great majority of its volume; the eastern basin dried out completely in 2014. What is left is a salt plain with ship hulls on it, reached from Nukus — a long, sobering detour, and one we run as a three-day extension for travellers who want to see it.

A crossroads, not a destination

Nothing on the Silk Road was built because the location was pleasant. Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva grew where water met a route, and everything that passed through — Sogdian traders, Buddhist pilgrims, Persian administrators, Arab armies — left something behind. Alexander took Sogdiana in 329 BC and married a local, Roxana. Bukhara was one of the great centres of learning of the Islamic world by the tenth century; Avicenna was born near it and wrote there.

Destruction and the Timurid century

Genghis Khan sacked Bukhara and Samarkand in 1220 and the region did not recover for a century and a half. Then Timur — Tamerlane — made Samarkand his capital in the 1370s and spent thirty years dragging the craftsmen of the territories he conquered back to build it. His grandson Ulugh Beg was an astronomer of the first rank whose observatory measured the length of the year to within a minute. Most of what you photograph in Samarkand is theirs.

Khanates, then Russia

The Timurid empire broke into the khanates of Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand, which spent three centuries fighting each other and selling slaves. Russia took Tashkent in 1865, and Bukhara and Khiva became protectorates by 1873. In 1924 the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was drawn on a map, cotton became the economy, and the old towns were half-restored and half-flattened.

Independence and now

Uzbekistan became independent on 1 September 1991 and spent its first quarter century largely closed. That changed after 2016: visas went, the currency was floated, and the country is now the easiest in Central Asia to travel in. What has survived all of it is craft — silk ikat in the Fergana Valley, blue-glaze ceramics in Rishtan, paper made from mulberry bark outside Samarkand by a family that revived a method that had been dead for two centuries.

Being a guest

Hospitality here is close to an obligation, and you will be fed more than you can eat. Dress is relaxed and secular — no head covering is needed outside working mosques, where a scarf over the hair is expected, and knees and shoulders covered is the right call at religious sites for everyone. Tipping is not built into the culture the way it is in Europe or the US: round up in a restaurant, and tip a guide or driver if they were good.